Review of THE RESTLESS REPUBLIC: Britain Without a Crown
Brilliant scholarly romp through England's intense Civil War
I am having a very hard time getting out of the 17th century. Am I finding comfort in all its parallels to today or is the century a Game of Thrones adventure gone live, with footnotes? Regardless of my recent obsession, reading Anna Keay’s history of the English Civil War and the Puritan interregnum that followed, the only period since 1066 that England was not headed by a monarch, is as compelling a romp through history as you are likely to find. It is told through different points of view from actual participants both famous and not. It ultimately revolves around the complex, troubling but very much larger than life character of Oliver Cromwell. Her treatment of him lifts him away from the more tabloid simplifications we all have grown up with, He is simply the nucleus of a spinning effort by many to create a “new” England. It was the Sixties in America with a lot of God, swords, cults, and lords. There is so much that will speak to you as relevant to our times now. Fox News is all over this revolution as is the first glimmerings of communist idealism. The book puts paid to the myth of England as the stable isle of reason amidst her crazy continental neighbors. Her history was always, like every other people’s, a dance with chaos. Keay provides the lyrics and the music for this dance in a wonderfully written, refreshingly compact history that combines deep scholarship with a gift for telling a good story.
The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
Anna Keay
2022 343 pages