In The Critic, Miranda Malins reviews a new history of the period between the execution of Charles I and the Stuart restoration of Charles II, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown by Anna Keay:
This evasion is not for the historian Anna Keay. Faced with these collective shortcomings (“This book was born of ignorance,” she explains in opening), she explores this most dynamic of decades, looking it squarely in the face. With her, we roam around the period, the broad chronological narrative softened through a selection of nine interwoven biographies ranging from the irrepressible newspaperman Marchamont Nedham, to the indomitable royalist Countess of Derby, from the brilliant scientist William Petty to the dreaming Digger Gerrard Winstanley.
This structure achieves a broad perspective and rare realism, giving the reader the sense of dipping and diving through the restless waves of the republic and taking them to all corners of the new Britain forged in the fire of three Civil Wars. As expected, we travel from the trial and execution of Charles I to the Restoration of his son, but Keay’s achievement is to make the shape-shifting years of the kingless Commonwealth and Protectorate that lie between more thrilling than either royal bookend, demonstrating how far from inevitable the return of the Stuarts was. There is no “high road to Restoration” here, but rather a snaking maze of paths striking off in new directions and looping back: an uncharted landscape for Keay’s characters to navigate where every choice counted.
The result is a panoramic and pulsating drama every bit as restless as the republic it captures so well. Indeed the “Restless” adjective of the title perfectly conjures the progressive spirit of Britain without a crown: unstable and dangerous, yes, but as a result, experimental and unafraid. As Keay puts it: “The 1650s was a time of extraordinarily ambitious political, social, economic and intellectual innovation, and it was not a foregone conclusion that the British republic would fail.”
This portrait will be, for many, a revelation. Far from the dour, militaristic regimes of popular imagination, life under the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate emerges as innovative and exciting: the effect of the hitherto unimaginable act of abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords after years of transformative conflict being to unleash an energetic spirit of ambitious experimentation and industry.
We feel this bold energy in the meetings of the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club (which would become the Royal Society in 1660) and its young member William Petty managing to survey the whole of Ireland in record time despite having no cartographical experience; in failed cloth trader Gerrard Winstanley’s determination to dig the new Jerusalem that had come to him on an autumn ramble; in Marchamont Nedham escaping Newgate prison and picking his way through several dangerous changes of side, pen in hand, always managing to land cat-like on his feet through sheer commercial nous and audacity.
