Richard Bruce Wernham, FBA (11 October 1906 – 17 April 1999) was an English historian of Elizabethan England.
He was educated at St Bartholomew's Grammar School before going to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1925, where he achieved a first in modern history in 1927.
[1][2] In 1930 he was appointed a temporary assistant at the Public Record Office as part of a scheme designed to help young scholars achieve archival knowledge and editorial experience in preparation for a career in academia.
[1][5] During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force at the photographic interpretation unit at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, where his main duty was identifying appropriate landing sites for Special Operations Executive agents.
[12] Wernham delivered the Una Lectures at Berkeley, California in 1975 and these were published as The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy (1980).