Kenneth Harold Dobson Haley, FBA (19 April 1920 – 2 July 1997) was a British historian who specialised in seventeenth century British and Dutch history.^[1]

Haley was born in Southport, Lancashire (now Merseyside). He attended Huddersfield College before winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a First in history.^[1] He taught at the University of Sheffield's history department from 1947 to 1982, spending the last 20 years as Professor of Modern History.^[1] In 1968 the Oxford University Press published his magnum opus, a biography of the leader of the first Whigs, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury.^[1] He was awarded a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1987.^[1]

He was a Methodist and in 1948 he married Iris Houghton.^[1]

Works

• William of Orange and the English Opposition 1672-1674 (1953).
• The First Earl of Shaftesbury (1968).
• The British and the Dutch: Political and Cultural Relations Through the Ages (1968).
• The Dutch in the Seventeenth Century (1972).
• An English Diplomat in the Low Countries: Sir William Temple and John De Witt 1655-1672 (1986).

Notes

Further reading

• Bob Moore, 'Ken Haley: An Appreciation', in Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. xvii-xxi.