ABSTRACT
James Heath can easily lay claim to the title of most notorious of all Cromwell’s biographers. As an historian, he has had the disadvantage that his prejudices are so transparent. He was a writer with a grudge.1 e son of a London cutler, he had as a student been ejected from Christ Church, Oxford in 1648 in the purge organized by the parliamentarian visitors.2 He therefore had good grounds to feel that Parliament had prevented him from completing his education. e main source for what happened next are some details recorded by Anthony Wood. According to Wood, Heath ‘lived a erwards upon his patrimony, and adhered to king Charles II in his exile till it was almost spent, and then married, which hindred his restoration to his student’s place in 1660’.3 Most of this however cannot be substantiated. What can be checked, the date of his marriage, implies that any period of exile, if there was one, must have been rather brief, for Heath married his wife, Priscilla Southwood, in London in 1651.4 More convincing is the claim made by Wood and echoed by John Aubrey that poverty forced Heath to become a full-time writer a er the Restoration.5 His earliest con rmed publications, two poems marking the rst anniversary of the king’s return and the death of that other royalist historian, omas Fuller, date from 1661.6 By 1664 he was living in the parish of St Bartholomew the Less, conveniently close to many of the London bookshops and printers.7 He may also have joined the Stationers’ Company.8 His struggle to earn a living was real enough.
