Alice Hunt for Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade
Wednesday 23rd October 2024
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
Professor Alice Hunt joins us in the bookshop with a dazzling new history of the interregnum, a turbulent decade of republican rule. Come along to find out more about Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660, which Suzannah Lipscomb has termed 'a magisterial, compelling and eye-opening biography of Britain's great and extraordinary experiment'.
Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660
Events moved with giddying speed in the 1650s. After the execution of Charles I, 'dangerous' monarchy was abolished and the House of Lords was dismissed, sending shock waves across the kingdom. These revolutionary acts set in motion a decade of bewildering change and instability, under the leadership of the soldier-statesman Oliver Cromwell.
England's unique and distinctive republican experiment may have been short-lived, but it changed the course of British history. It transformed the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland, reset the compact between the monarch and the people, and re-fashioned the story the British told - and continue to tell - about themselves.
Republic is a richly engrossing year-by-year account of this exhilarating and daring period. It tells the story of what Britain's republic was really like: why it failed, but also, what it got right.
About Alice Hunt
Alice Hunt is Professor of Early modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton. She is the author of The Drama of Coronation (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of The Rough Guide to the Royals. She often appears in the media discussing monarchy and the royal family.