Anna Keay – The Restless Republic: Britain without a Crown

SOLD OUT – please email boxoffice@lichfieldfestival.org to be added to our returns list and we will contact you if tickets become available

In 1649, Britain was in the midst of revolution. One bleak January afternoon, King Charles I was executed for treason. The English monarchy was quickly abolished, the House of Lords discarded and the future of the land firmly in the hands of its people. The Restless Republic is the story of the extraordinary, experimental decade that followed. It charts the lives of a cast of trembling visionaries and banished royalists, dextrous mandarins and bewildered bystanders, from Anna Trapnel, the young prophet whose visions transfixed the nation to William Petty, the precocious academic whose audacious enterprise to map Ireland led to the dispossession of tens of thousands. 

‘an exceptional feat of imagination.  Never have the kingless years been made so vivid, and never has vividness contributed so much to the understanding of them.” – TLS

“the remarkable thing about Keay’s narrative is how colourful it is…from her account Cromwell’s Britain emerges as a chaotic, dynamic, uproarious place, a world of coffee houses and opera recitals, bustling quaysides and clattering printing presses…her narrative brims with life, colour, humour and humanity… a dazzling achievement, and I loved it”.  – Sunday Times

“Keay conjures up with nuance and panache the single most fascinating decade in the history of Britain and Ireland, revealing it to be at once weirdly ancient and strangely modern” – The Times

ANNA KEAY is a historian, writer and curator. She is currently Director of the Landmark Trust, and previously worked in senior curatorial roles for English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces.