Title: Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660
Speaker: Prof Alice Hunt

Alice Hunt talks about her critically acclaimed ‘biography’ of the 1650s, when England was – for the first and only time in its history – a republic, led by the soldier-statesman, Oliver Cromwell. After the public execution of Charles I, ‘dangerous’ monarchy was abolished and the House of Lords dismissed. These revolutionary acts sent shock waves across the kingdom and the continent. The next decade was a time of unprecedented change and instability. But amid the tumult came innovation and opportunity. Previously unthinkable ideas about sovereignty and liberty were debated and implemented. Alternative forms of art and religion flourished. Satirists mocked MPs and the first English opera was staged. In coffee houses men and women devoured newsbooks and, in Oxford, a group of experimental scientists scrutinised the world in wholly new ways; they later became the Royal Society. England’s distinctive republican experiment may have been short-lived, but it reshaped the British Isles, reset the compact between the monarch and the people and refashioned the story the British told – and continue to tell – about themselves.

Prof Alice Hunt is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton. She is the author of a book about coronations and has written previously about the Tudors and James I. She reviews regularly for The Times and the London Review of Books and often appears in the media discussing monarchy. Her book Republic was published by Faber in 2024; it was selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph and The Times.