Edmund Ludlow - Reputation and Writings

Reputation and Writings

A monument raised to Ludlow's memory by his widow is in the church of St Martin in Vevey. Over the door of the house in which he lived was placed the inscription "omne solum forti patria, quia patris". This is a Christianized version of a line by Ovid meaning "to the brave man every land is a fatherland because God his father made it". Ludlow married Elizabeth, daughter of William Thomas, of Wenvoe, Glamorganshire, but left no children.

During his exile Ludlow wrote an autobiography entitled A voyce from the watch tower. After his death his manuscript was obtained by Slingsby Bethel, who had visited him in Switzerland. Part of it, covering the years 1660–77, was discovered at Warwick Castle in 1970 and is now in the Bodleian Library. A heavily rewritten and shortened version of A voyce appeared as The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow in 1698–9 in three volumes. The historian Blair Worden has surmised that the editor was the deist John Toland. The Memoirs were part of a range of late seventeenth-century publications printed by John Darby, including the Discourses of Algernon Sidney and the works of John Milton and James Harrington. In the Memoirs Ludlow's puritanism is virtually written out, and his views changed to make him a Whig-like secular republican. Until the 1970s the Memoirs were generally assumed to be authentic - there were editions in 1720-22, 1751, and 1771, with a scholarly edition by C.H. Firth in 1895. As a result the Memoirs have been used until very recently as a major source for historians of the seventeenth century, with only the rediscovery of Ludlow's original manuscript prompting a reassessment.

In 1691–3 four pamphlets were published in Ludlow's name. Like the Memoirs after them, they a were contribution to the Whig cause. Contemporaries variously attributed them to Slingsby Bethel, John Phillips (Milton's nephew), Thomas Percival, and John Toland.