Thanks for downloading the NRTIME podcast. For more details about NRTIME and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, before the French Revolution, before the American Declaration of Independence, before Rousseau, Thomas Payne and Marx, there was the English Revolution.

In 1649, England executed its king, Charles Stewart, and declared itself a republic.

But was republicanism a reaction to the fact of the dead absolutist king, a pragmatic response to an absence of ruler as many historians have thought?

Or was there a republicanism already embedded as a sentiment deep within the culture of England? And where is it now?

One of my guests, Dr. Sarah Barber, has challenged some of the received opinions on English republicanism by arguing for an established English republican tradition in her book Regicide and republicanism.

Also, with me to discuss the place of republicanism in the history of England, is the historian Andrew Roberts, whose latest book is a massive and successful biography of Lord Salisbury.

So he told him about the 17th century, the mid-70th century, those two civil wars, kicking off on those four years of a republic, 1649 to 53, followed by the Crumwellian Protectorate, and then back came Charles II.

Sarah Barber, why do you think that republican ideas were embedded, were deep in the British people thinking when they seem to have erupted mid-late forties, 1640s?

They erupted in the mid-1640s because of the context of the English Civil War, and I think it's impossible not to suggest that both Regicide and republicanism emerge from a context in which suddenly there's the freeing up of the licensing.

And people have got an opportunity to speak freely about things. But the whole point about republican ideas is that they are believed to be indigenous.

So the circumstances of the Civil War produce a situation in which people are left trying to find a solution to their political problems, which makes them self-reliant.

Between 1642 and 1646, while the war is actually on, they're living in what is effectively a republican system. They have already isolated the king from the process.

And when it comes around to trying to work out a new constitution that will guarantee English liberties, it proves impossible to work the king back into that process.

I can see it in the 1640s. I can see it in 1642 onwards. I can see the propaganda or good words spread, whichever way I look at it, in the army and so on.

Much before then though, if you're saying embedded, you mean sort of the early 17th century, back in the 16th century, where do we say identity at all though?

Well, as a history of people being educated and knowing about a republican tradition, it wasn't that it was a completely alien notion.

You're talking about a republican classical tradition, aren't you, on the House saying the republican tradition in ancient Greece and Rome, that sort of tradition not as applied to English, let's say, English politics.

But then you may as well say that every political idea can be traced back to the classical origins of it, because that's its first statement.

Well, I'm hurrying you and I'll come back to you. But I would like to ask that question again about, if we're talking about tradition of republicanism to the 1640s, where's the evidence for it? What's your view on this under robber?

Well, my view is that the very problems that the Commonwealth had in finding a republican ideology, which didn't go back to the classics,

...