His maternal grandfather Reginald Chenevix Trench, who died in the Great War, had a sister Cesca, a Sinn Féin supporter who was at the General Post Office, Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916.
[citation needed] On leaving school, he read history from 1959 at Merton College, Oxford,[5][6] where he was a contemporary of R. I. Moore.
[4] He decided to teach history as a career, and spent three years doing so at King's College School, before becoming a lecturer at the University of Sheffield.
[7] J. P. Kenyon called Fletcher's The Outbreak of the English Civil War "easily the most important book on the Great Rebellion in the past 20 years".
[8] Fletcher's festschrift was published in 2007 by the Cambridge University Press (The Family in Early Modern England, edited by H Berry and E Foyster).