Charles Firth

Charles Firth was a British historian whose scholarship centred on seventeenth-century England, especially the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the political world surrounding Oliver Cromwell. Notes on the Diplomatic Relations of England and France 1603-1688 was prepared with Sophia Crawford Lomas and published in 1906. The study assembles evidence about official contacts between the two kingdoms and includes lists of ambassadors in both directions. Firth studied at Oxford and later served as Regius Professor of Modern History there, following a career shaped by archival research and documentary editing. He edited major collections connected with the period, including the Clarke Papers and Edmund Ludlow’s memoirs, and completed Samuel Rawson Gardiner’s history of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Notes on the Diplomatic Relations of England and France 1603-1688 reflects the same documentary method. Its attention to appointments, envoys, and chronology makes diplomatic administration visible behind larger narratives of dynastic rivalry, religion, war, and alliance.