RESTLESS REPUBLIC EB
About this book
THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022
WINNER OF THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
Eleven years when Britain had no king.
In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution.
On a raw January afternoon, the Stuart king, Charles I, was executed for treason. Within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the 'useless and dangerous' House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What this meant, and where it would lead, no one knew.
The Restless Republic is the story of the extraordinary decade that followed. It takes as its guides the people who lived through those years. Among them is Anna Trapnel, the daughter of a Deptford shipwright whose visions transfixed the nation. John Bradshaw, the Cheshire lawyer who found himself trying the King. Marchamont Nedham, the irrepressible newspaper man and puppet master of propaganda. Gerrard Winstanley, who strove for a Utopia of common ownership where no one went hungry. William Petty, the precocious scientist whose mapping of Ireland prefaced the dispossession of tens of thousands. And the indomitable Countess of Derby who defended to the last the final Royalist stronghold on the Isle of Man.
The Restless Republic ranges from London to Leith, Cornwall to Connacht, from the corridors of power to the common fields and hillsides. Gathering her cast of trembling visionaries and banished royalists, dextrous mandarins and bewildered bystanders, Anna Keay brings to vivid life the most extraordinary and experimental decade in Britain's history. It is the story of how these tempestuous years set the British Isles on a new course, and of what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.
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Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Maps
- Foreword
- 1. The Forced Revolution
- 2. A New England
- 3. Utopia
- 4. The Ebbing Tide
- 5. Counter-Revolution
- 6. Virago
- 7. The Infamous Castle of Misery
- 8. Mercurius Politicus
- 9. Tongues Like Angels
- 10 Cornhell in the West
- 11. Plough and Go to Market
- 12. Decimation
- 13. Ingenious Friends
- 14. The End of Ireland
- 15. A Life in Fire
- 16. On the Watch Tower
- 17. This Lyon Rouzed
- 18. Mars and Minerva
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Family Trees
- Timeline
- Notes on Sources
- Notes
- List of Illustrations
- Picture Section
- Bibliography
- Index
- Also by Anna Keay
- About the Author
- About the Publisher
