What did this change mean for the people of England, winners and losers in the civil war? Using a series of contemporary men and women as vantage points, The Restless Republic charts extraordinary story of the republic of Britain. Ranging from the corridors of Westminster to the common fields of England, from the radicals in power to the banished royalists and from the dexterous mandarins to the trembling religious visionaries the book will illuminate a world in which a new ideology struggled to take root in a scarred landscape. It is the story of what happened when a conservative people tried revolution. None of these things involved a political union. They were just two countries that happened to share a sovereign. That’s the reason why, of course, although England and Scotland have been part of Great Britain as a political union since 1707, it was never a complete one. The legal systems have always been completely separate, completely distinct, the education systems, much else besides.

KEAY: I’m all for abolishing the House of Lords myself, personally. I think it’s totally past its sell-by date as an institution. The fact that we still have nearly a hundred members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers, who are, by definition, all men, I find extraordinary. Viscerally compelling. The Last Royal Rebel is the very best sort of historical work. It is based on the meticulous use of an eclectic array of primary sources, and represents substantial painstaking and well-documented research. The action, intrigue, romance, and suspense drive the reader relentlessly toward the stirring conclusion. KEAY: Well, they produced new ones because the old ones had been melted down. It was a bit more of a necessity than a desire for novelty. There wasn’t any desire for novelty. If they could have had the old ones, they would have had them. When the new ones were made in the 1660s — which is the collection that we now have — the instructions were they should be exact replicas of the things that were destroyed. KEAY: One of the things that’s really interesting about Great Britain is, if you ever have one of those maps that you can get, which show the geology of the place that you live in, the country or the state you live in. It shows the stripes or the bands of different kinds of geology, whether it’s limestone or granite or chalk or whatever.

a b "The Landmark Trust > Staff > Dr Anna Keay, Director". The Landmark Trust. Archived from the original on 17 October 2017 . Retrieved 7 April 2017. She was educated at Oban High School in Argyll and Bedales School. She then read history at Magdalen College in Oxford. [1] [2] This is before the advent of the written word. There seems to be an almost anthropological universality of the idea that doing something special on your head is a way of setting you apart. This is very, very clearly monarchs doing it because their predecessors do it. We see it in the Middle Ages. Henry III, who was a great, long-lived, and successful medieval monarch, really lionized his predecessor by several generations, Edward the Confessor, who’d been canonized by the Catholic Church — there was a saint. And the graves were opened of previous monarchs. Crowns which had been buried with them were got out, and so on.

KEAY: I’m trying to save an amazing building outside Edinburgh, a house called Mavisbank, which was built in the 1720s for a man who was one of our great renaissance figures, the great pioneer of the Scottish Enlightenment. It’s the most beautiful, beautiful house. It’s derelict, just walls standing, but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in, and it’s clinging onto life by its fingernails. My great hope for what I’m doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse. Robert Boyle had been brought up — he was the son of an Irish nobleman — in great comfort and grandeur in Ireland. Silver spoon in his mouth and silks to wear. William Petty had been born the son of a very poor clothier in a town on the southeast coast of England. They met both in Oxford and in Ireland in the mid-17th century. KEAY: Well, it’s an interesting point because, of course, there’s no actual practical job that a crown does. It doesn’t — The crown was made for Charles II in 1661. It is named after a much earlier version that belonged to the Anglo-Saxon king and saint, Edward the Confessor. He was depicted wearing a crown in the famous 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. KEAY: Well, you don’t miss something that’s not there. I think it’d be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren church wasn’t worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. There are things which are clearly of much less interest or were poorly built, which are not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. To me, it’s all about assessing what matters, what we care about.

Keay married fellow historian Simon Thurley in 2008. The couple have fraternal twins, Arthur and Maude, born in 2009. [2] [4] They live in London and Norfolk. [8] Awards and honours [ edit ] It was there for a long time — 300 years, whatever it was, or is — but of course, what happened was that a sovereign acceded to two kingdoms. This happens quite often historically. It happened quite often with other kingdoms or countries in British history. William III was the king of Great Britain and Ireland, but he was also the overlord of what’s now the Netherlands. George I was the elector of Hanover. He adds, “There will be about 2,000 guests instead of the 8,000 there were at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. I don’t think hereditary peers will be there, but I’m sure there will be a representative group of peers and they will probably wear parliamentary robes. Read More Related Articles Robert Boyle learned from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the 1650s, which was utterly revolutionary, really, which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation.

the Imperial State Crown, made for the coronation of George VI in 1937. It’s uncertain what the King will wear in the procession to the Abbey, but in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II wore the Diamond Diadem, which had been made for the coronation of George IV.

COWEN: Which are the old buildings that we have too many of in Britain? There’s a lot of Christopher Wren churches. I think there’s over 20.

It’s incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. We look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished — wonderful country houses, we’ve mentioned. It’s fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world, built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the ’60s, regretted forever since.

Putting on a crown – a custom seen in diverse cultures from antiquity – has always been a useful way of asserting that it was you, not someone else, who was in charge in a period before these things were automatically long settled by primogeniture, notes Morris. KEAY: I think it is a self-selecting group of people. The nature of our buildings — I think you are right, which is that, on the whole, people go to them because they’re really interested in that kind of thing, and so it would be a counterintuitive thing then to trash it. We occasionally have people who make a bit of a mess, but it’s pretty rare. Next, the Archbishop placed the Coronation Ring – which represents “kingly dignity” – on the fourth finger of the Queen’s right hand. Presenter Richard Dimbleby described it thus, “The ring wherein is set a sapphire and a ruby cross and which is often called the Wedding Ring of England.” She appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity in October 2014. Her hypothetical donation to this fictional museum was the St Edward's Crown, part of the British Crown Jewels. [10] She co-presented The Buildings That Made Britain on Channel 5. [8]