“Even his enemies conceded he was tremendous company, and those who became fond of him liked him though they knew him to be unreliable and unpredictable... He was no the first nor the last person to develop an enduring friendship with those who ought to have despised him, in large part because he made them laugh.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“There appeared before her eyes the figure of Oliver Cromwell, in the guise of the Old Testament military leader Gideon, going into the Commons Chamber and demanding the resignation of the Speaker and the end of the assembly: 'I saw suddenly a departure of them, though they were very loath thereunto.' When, four days later, news reached the Hillingdon vicarage that exactly these events had just occurred in London, Anna's friends were thunderstruck. She was not mad. God himself was speaking through her.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“Furthermore, reformed religious thinking made it possible for women, who were treated as inferior and subservient in almost all spheres of seventeenth-century life, to be taken seriously.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“A sense of liberation from the restrictions and oppressions of their sex, and a feeling of sisterhood, seems to have been a common experience.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“... she had foreseen the New Model Army's occupation of London in the tense weeks before Charles I was tried. Two years after that she had experienced a further trance and this time saw an army on the battlefield, led by a figure of valour and courage, God indicating that 'Oliver Cromwell, then Lord General, was that Gideon'. Cromwell's defeat of the Scots at the battle of Dunbar soon afterwards offered Anna confirmation of the truth of her visions.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“... it was easy to dismiss her as a fraud until you actually met her -- when the possibility became much more real that she might indeed by God's handmaiden.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“... he relived the day he had been ushered into a London house to see an exotic 'great fowle' -- nothing less than a live dodo, one of the very last to be seen in Europe.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“She had a wicked and downright dirty sense of humour, and enjoyed nothing more than sharing funny stories and bawdy jokes. She was practical and unpretentious...”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“In his will he said nothing of war or injustice or personal achievements, but spoke of gratitude, peace and acceptance. He gave thanks for his long life -- the 'great measure of daies' with which God 'had filled my glass of time' -- and for the love and companionship of 'that life of my life my dearest wife'.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
“As soon as the edifice of the knowledge of the ancients had been shaken in the minds of the most inquisitive, questions upon questions arose which now demanded technology, including -- crucially -- the invention of the telescope and the microscope, enabling a generation of scholars to see clearly things which had been absolutely invisible to their forefathers. It was a thrilling, and dangerous, time to be alive.”
Source: The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown