THE NOBLE REVOLT: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson

Weidenfeld £25 pp742

After years of drift and decline, England is presented with a youthful, charismatic leader, promising a new era of hope. During an extended honeymoon period it seems that things can only get better. But following his enthusiastic backing for a series of unpopular wars, and apparent contempt for parliamentary process and civil liberties, the increasingly distant leader is undermined and eventually overthrown by the disaffected political elite that surround him. This is not, in fact, a description of Tony Blair’s fall from political grace, but John Adamson’s explanation in The Noble Revolt for the complex manoeuvrings that led to the overthrow of Charles I in 1642 and that, after seven years of intermittent civil war, saw him executed in 1649.

Any attempt to offer a new interpretation of Charles’s fall, and the causes of the English civil wars, needs to step carefully through decades of competing ideologies and labyrinthine academic debates. Adamson’s contribution is no exception; weighing in at more than 500 pages of closely argued prose and nearly 200 pages of footnotes, his book vigorously refutes more than a century of debate on the reasons for Charles’s downfall. Gone are the old Marxist interpretations of the long-term structural tensions leading up to the civil wars; gone, too, are the revisionist accounts that have replaced them (which, according to Adamson, suggested “a largely accidental civil war”), and more recent studies of religious conflict in the previously neglected realms of Ireland and in particular Scotland, where Charles’s disastrous attempt to impose episcopacy led to a series of militarily humiliating confrontations with a reinvigorated Scottish Presbyterian Church.

Focusing instead on just 18 months, from the summer of 1641 to January 1642 when Charles finally abandoned London and raised his military standard against parliament, Adamson painstakingly chronicles the growing political influence of what he calls a Junto, a disparate group of disaffected nobles who set out to challenge what they saw as Charles’s erosion of the kingdom’s political and religious liberties. The group was spearheaded by two of the most powerful men in England: Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, an urbane member of Charles’s court, and his even more powerful ally Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford. Both were committed Puritans, and both were convinced that Charles was squandering the political and religious inheritance of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.

In May 1640, when the king dissolved the Short parliament for its failure to provide financial backing for his military campaign against the Presbyterians in Scotland, Warwick and Bedford exploited parliamentary disaffection to assemble a group of nobles intent on dismantling the king’s increasingly arbitrary powers, initially via political change but, as Charles’s intransigence grew, through recourse to armed struggle. The two nobles gathered together some of the king’s most vociferous critics, from Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, to viscounts Saye, Mandeville and Brooke, and two of Charles’s thorniest opponents in parliament, Oliver St John and John Pym. Adamson carefully reconstructs how this Junto skilfully encouraged the Scottish Presbyterian covenanters in their opposition to Charles, and pushed through the Remonstrance of 1640 that began the erosion of the king’s powers.

The new parliament of October 1640 backed the Junto’s calls for political reform, passing the Triennial Act that effectively stripped the king of his legislative authority, and bringing down Charles’s ablest adviser, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who was executed in May 1641. In response, Charles tried but failed to woo the Scottish Covenanters, and was finally reduced in the winter of 1642 to plotting a coup d’état against the leading members of the Junto. Its failure propelled him into exile from his own capital and on the road to civil war.

For Adamson, the noble revolt against Charles was a “breathtakingly successful campaign against the royal prerogative”. The Junto’s aim was to create a “godly commonwealth” that manipulated a hitherto unacknowledged public sphere of political awareness, couched in the surprisingly frank language of republicanism. It is a compelling argument, but one that is not as novel as Adamson might have us believe. Despite his attempt to revise the revisionists, Adamson ends up offering a good, old-fashioned political history that grinds out day-to-day parliamentary realpolitik with little or no concession to narrative drive, characterisation, period detail or the reality of popular discontent beyond the walls of Whitehall. In the end, we are left wondering why it really matters which aristocratic faction triumphed in what was, after all, one of the decisive moments in English history.

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