Alice Hunt is the author of Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60.
For Mendoza, the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more...
The English republic isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled Christmas and banned the theatre. To royalists and conservatives it will for ever...
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