Underdown contended that arable settlements were more likely to be traditional and royalist, while those in pastoral areas tended to be radicals who supported parliament. Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (1973) was followed by Revel, Riot and Rebellion (1985), a groundbreaking study of popular culture and political activism. These qualities were evident in Pride's Purge, a meticulous study of the ideological ferment of the English parliament that shocked the world when it convicted and executed its king.įor his later works, Underdown returned to his roots in the West Country. His first book, Royalist Conspiracies in England (1960), anticipated by decades what is now considered one of the richest seams of early modern history, and demonstrated his ability to consider the English revolution from a multitude of viewpoints. Underdown combined a prose style of enviable clarity with a complete mastery of the archive. He returned to Yale in 1986, becoming the George Burton Adams professor of history, and retiring as emeritus professor in 1996. He gained an MA in American history at Yale, then took up positions at the University of the South, Tennessee (1953-62), the University of Virginia (1962-68) and Brown University, Rhode Island (1968-86), where he became the Munro-Goodwin Wilkinson professor of European history. He began a doctorate at Oxford but, unusually for the time, abandoned it to build an academic career in the US. His undergraduate studies were interrupted by wartime service in the RAF. Though broadly sympathetic to the parliamentarian cause, Underdown never embraced Marxism and wrote about royalists and clubmen with insight and understanding.
He was born in Somerset and educated at Wells grammar school and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied under the Marxist historian of 17th-century England, Christopher Hill. Underdown went on to pioneer the study of local history, popular politics, gender and sport. Almost four decades on, the book remains a fixture of undergraduate reading lists. His most famous study, Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (1971), is a narrative of the tangle of events that took place in England during the late 1640s and led to the purge of the Long Parliament and the execution of King Charles I. The historian David Underdown, who has died aged 84, was one of the most original of the scholars of early modern England born between the wars.
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