Paul Seaward was Director of the History of Parliament between 2001 and 2017, and 2020 to 2023, responsible for one of the foremost and longest-running projects in British political history. In 2017 to 2019 he held a British Academy / Wolfson Foundation Research Professorship for a on the history of Parliament as an institution over five hundred years, Reformation to Referendum. The project takes a thematic approach, based around concepts of time, space, memory, cultures and leadership. Before joining the History of Parliament he was a clerk in the House of Commons for thirteen years, including stints as clerk of the Public Service, Public Administration and Employment Committees, and periods in the Public Bill and Journal Offices. In 1984-88 he was the A.H. Lloyd Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Publications include: The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (Cambridge, 1989); The Restoration, 1660-1688 (Macmillan, 1990); The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (co-editor, with Mark Goldie and Tim Harris, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990); an edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth, for the Clarendon edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2010), and Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon: the History of the Rebellion, a New Selection, for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 2010). He has written many articles on seventeenth-century politics and political thought, and on the history of Parliament ranging from the late sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Apart from the project on parliamentary history, he is also engaged on a biography of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and is joint editor, with Martin Dzelzainis, of the Oxford edition of the works of Clarendon. In 2024 he gave the Carlyle Lectures on the History of Political Thought in the University of Oxford on ‘Clarendon and the Practice of Politics’.
Paul Seaward is a fellow (and former Vice-President) of the Royal Historical Society, a Trustee of the County History Trust, and has been a Council Member of the Hansard Society. He is a Vice-President of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI), and also collaborates with European colleagues through the European network for Parliamentary history, EuParl.net.
Reformation to Referendum: Writing a New History of Parliament 