William Arthur Speck is a British historian specialising in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history.

He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and The Queen's College

The Queen's College, Oxford

The Queen's College, founded 1341, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Queen's is centrally situated on the High Street, and is renowned for its 18th-century architecture...

, Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

, gaining a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil in 1966. He is Emeritus Professor of history at the University of Leeds and a Special Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham where he co-convenes an Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar.

Works

• 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).
• ‘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).
• Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 1680-1820: Ideology, Politics and Culture (1998).
• James II (Longman, 2002).
• Robert Southey. Entire Man of Letters (2006).