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Richard Cust was an undergraduate at Queen Mary College University of London, and a postgraduate at Bedford College, University of London. There he was supervised by Professor Conrad Russell and produced a 1984 PhD thesis on ‘The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626-1628.’ He was appointed to a lectureship in the Modern History Department at Birmingham in 1978 and has worked there ever since.

Richard Cust has supervised a wide range of doctoral dissertations topics relating to English political, religious and cultural history in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The topics he has recently supervised include:

‘Images of the Royal Court under Queen Elizabeth’
'The Lieutenancy and Elizabethan Warfare 1585-1603’
‘Urban gentility in Stratford upon Avon 1560-1640’
‘Thomas Hall and his Library: a Puritan Minister in the English Revolution'

Richard Cust’s research interests range across late Tudor and early Stuart politics and political culture. He is currently writing a book on ‘Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642’, investigating the ways in which the king sought to bolster the position of the aristocracy within English society and mobilise their support in the political crises that he faced from 1639 onwards. It draws extensively on work carried out with Dr Andrew Hopper on an AHRC funded research project on ‘ ’ and research on the political history of Charles I’s reign for his 2005 book, Charles I. A Political Life (Longman/Pearson).

Along with Dr Andrew Hopper of the University of Leicester, Richard Cust has developed the Court of Chivalry web site www.birmingham.ac.uk/court-of-chivalry  which provides calendared, electronically searchable, transcripts of proceedings for over 700 cases heard in court between 1634 and 1640.

He is also (with Dr Stephen Roberts of the History of Parliament), editor of the journal Midland History.