1. King Charles I had been executed. A quarter of a million had died. Two hundred great houses stood in ruins, and hundreds of villages and towns left shattered and broken. The civil war had been won and within weeks both the monarchy and the House of Lords would be abolished and parliament declared sovereign. What next? This is the story of the only decade in history in which England - and then the entire British Isles - were governed as a republic.

In the midst of unprecedented tumult, what was life like for the people who lived through those years - both the winners and the losers? Historian Anna Keay explores the decade and its political, cultural and social upheavals, through the experience of nine contemporaries, from John Bradshaw, the Cheshire lawyer who tried Charles I, to the royalist Countess of Derby who defended the Stuarts’ last territorial outpost, from Oliver Cromwell at the heart of events, to the young London prophet Anna Trapnel whose visions transfixed the political nation. Telling a rich and vivid history in matching style, this is a brilliant new take on the most extraordinary decade in British history, and what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.