W. A. Speck

William Arthur Speck (11 January 1938, Bradford – 15 February 2017, Carlisle) was a British historian who specialised in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.

He was born in Bradford and was the son of a bookbinder. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School before winning a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil. in 1966.

He began his career in 1962, with a tutorial fellowship at the University of Exeter, before he moved to a lectureship in history at Newcastle University the following year. In 1974, he was promoted to a readership. Speck was also chairman of the Carlisle branch of the RSPCA.

Works (co-authored with Geoffrey Holmes), Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England, 1694–1716 (1967). Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies 1701–1715 (Macmillan, 1970). Stability and Strife: England, 1714-60 (Edward Arnold, 1977). The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the 45 (Blackwell, 1981; second edition, 2013). ‘Whigs and Tories dim their glories: English political parties under the first two Georges’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian Britain (Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 51–70. The Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford University Press, 1988). The Birth of Britain: A New Nation, 1700–1715 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 1680–1820: Ideology, Politics and Culture (Longman, 1998). Cassell's Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cassell, 2002). James II (Longman, 2002). Colonial America: From Jamestown to Yorktown (Palgrave, 2002). A Concise History of Britain: 1707–1975 (1993). Robert Southey. Entire Man of Letters (2006). Dictionary of British America, 1584–1783 (Palgrave, 2007). A Political Biography of Thomas Paine (Routledge, 2016).