Robert Walter Dudley Edwards, known to his friends as Robin and his students as 'Dudley'[1][2] was born in Dublin.
His father was Walter Dudley Edwards, an English journalist who came to Ireland with his wife, Bridget Teresa MacInerney from Clare, and became a civil servant.
In his final exams he failed French and Irish but gained first place in Ireland in History.
[2] He carried out postgraduate work at the University of London and earned his PhD in 1933, published in 1935 as Church and State in Tudor Ireland.
The introduction to David Edwards's book Age of Atrocity records how the leading Irish history journal, Irish Historical Studies (edited by Dudley Edwards and T. W. Moody), for the first half-century and more of its existence, systematically avoided the theme of violence, killing and atrocity during the 16th and 17th centuries.