Albert Pollard

Albert Frederick Pollard (16 December 1869 – 3 August 1948) was a British historian who specialized in the Tudor period.

Pollard was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight and educated at Felsted School and Jesus College, Oxford where he achieved a first class honours in Modern History in 1891. He became Assistant Editor of and a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1893. His main academic post was that of Professor of Constitutional History at University College London which he held from 1903 to 1931. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and founder of the Historical Association, 1906. He edited History, 1916-1922, and the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1923-1939. He published 500 articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, and many other books and papers concerning history. Later in his career, he was a major force in establishing history as an academic subject in Britain. The Evolution of Parliament, one of his most influential textbooks, was published in 1920.

Albert Pollard studied and wrote about the history of the Tudors from a political viewpoint. Pollard's arguments are nowadays generally discredited by the revisionist school of history led by academics such as Christopher Haigh. For example, he put forward the thesis that English foreign policy from 1514 to 1529 was motivated by Thomas Wolsey's desire to become Pope. This was attacked by modern historians, and today he is identified with the traditionalist school of history, along with his student, J. E. Neale, who put forward the thesis of the Puritan choir in Elizabeth's parliament, which seems ungrounded in any real evidence.

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