James Heath can easily lay claim to the title of most notorious of all Cromwell's biographers. As an historian, he has had the disadvantage that his prejudices are so transparent. He was a writer with a grudge. The son of a London cutler, he had as a student been ejected from Christ Church, Oxford in 1648 in the purge organized by the parliamentarian visitors. He therefore had good grounds to feel that Parliament had prevented him from completing his education. The main source for what happened next are some details recorded by Anthony Wood. According to Wood, Heath ‘lived afterwards upon his patrimony, and adhered to king Charles II in his exile till it was almost spent, and then married, which hindred his restoration to his student's place in 1660’. Most of this however cannot be substantiated. What can be checked, the date of his marriage, implies that any period of exile, if there was one, must have been rather brief, for Heath married his wife, Priscilla Southwood, in London in 1651. More convincing is the claim made by Wood and echoed by John Aubrey that poverty forced Heath to become a full-time writer after the Restoration. His earliest confirmed publications, two poems marking the first anniversary of the king's return and the death of that other royalist historian, Thomas Fuller, date from 1661.