Cicely Veronica Wedgwood
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Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood OM DBE |
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|---|---|
| Born |
20 July 1910 , UK |
| Died | 9 March 1997 (aged 86) London |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford |
| Period | 1935–1987 |
| Subject | Seventeenth-century Europe |
| Partner | Jacqueline Hope-Wallace |
| Relatives |
Sir Ralph Wedgwood (father)
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Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood OM, DBE, FBA, FRHistS (20 July 1910 – 9 March 1997) was an English historian who published under the name C. V. Wedgwood. Specializing in the history of 17th-century England and Continental Europe, her biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works.
Wedgwood was born in , Northumberland, on 20 July 1910. She was the only daughter of Sir Ralph Wedgwood, a railway executive, and his wife Iris Veronica Pawson, a novelist and travel writer. She had a brother, Sir John Wedgwood. She was a great-great-great granddaughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood.
She was educated at home and then at Norland Place School. She earned a First in Classics and Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where A.L. Rowse said she was "my first outstanding pupil".
Wedgwood published her first biography, Strafford, at the age of 25 and The Thirty Years War, "her big book ... covering a large canvas", according to Rowse, just three years later, a work Patrick Leigh Fermor called "[b]y far the best and most exciting book on the whole period".
She specialised in European history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her work in continental European history included the major study The Thirty Years War (1938) and biographies of William the Silent and Cardinal Richelieu. She devoted the greater part of her research to English history, especially in the English Civil War. Her major works included a biography of Oliver Cromwell and two volumes of a planned trilogy, The Great Rebellion, which included The King's Peace (1955) and The King's War (1958). She continued the story with The Trial of Charles I (1964). She was known to walk battlefields and experience the same weather and field conditions as the subjects of her histories, mindful that Cromwell had no military experience and most participants in the English Civil War were "talented amateurs" when it came to military manoeuvres. The subject was one of great controversy and rival schools of historical interpretations, but she held herself apart, "probably put off by the sheer scholasticism into which the treatment of the subject had degenerated, the rudeness with which academics treated each other over it, when she herself was always courteous and lady-like." Instead, "what was remarkable about Wedgwood's view of the Civil War was the way in which she depicted the sheer confusion of it all, the impossibility of co-ordinating events in three countries, once order from the centre had broken down.
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