The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
By John Adamson,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

Students of history who study the English Civil War or the English Revolution of the 17th century — call it what you will — have one great stroke of good fortune. Some of the masters of the historian’s craft who wrote in English made this their special field of interest — R.H.Tawney, Christopher Hill, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lawrence Stone. John Adamson, in this magnificent tome, pays tribute and draws on their work. To comprehend Adamson’s achievement, it is necessary to note that writing on the English Civil War has taken a major turn since Hill et al .

The historiography that came in the trail of Tawney’s path-breaking essay on “The Rise of the Gentry” had one common theme despite major differences between the historians. This was the recognition that the mid-17th-century crisis in Britain grew out of an ineluctable contradiction within British polity and society. This contradiction was to do with the institution of monarchy and all that it stood for in the society and the economy. A powerful group of people within and without parliament believed that their interests and aspirations — and those of Britain — could no longer be served by the monarchy. Power had to lie with those who were represented in parliament and with those who were making wealth in the burgeoning economy. The identification of this group varied from historian to historian. For Tawney and Stone, it was sections of the gentry; for Trevor-Roper, it was a faction in the court which was out of favour; for Hill, it was the middling sort of people who had different class interests from those of the monarchy and the high nobility.

This picture began to be redrawn through the work of historians like the late Conrad Russell and John Morrill. They refused to see the Civil War as the outcome of profound causes and of fundamental contradictions. Adamson sums up the view thus: “The English war of 1642 stemmed from the unhappy conjunction of a weak if dutiful monarch and powerful contingent events, not from any fundamental conflict of ideas about the nature of institutions or about monarchical government itself.”

Adamson is not too comfortable with this view. His book makes a detailed study of a small group of noblemen who took it upon themselves to oppose Charles I’s assertion of monarchical absolutism. These men were “passionately concerned with the remaking of political and religious institutions through the three kingdoms”. They wanted to redefine the powers of the monarchy so that subjects’ liberties were guaranteed. What were these liberties? They consisted, most importantly, of having their voices heard in government. This was achieved through a campaign against the royal authority. It was a campaign carried out in both Houses — Lords and the Commons. There was the realization that the issue would be resolved through a military encounter. But no one in the early 1640s quite conceived of a kingless, republican realm. “Almost all Parliamentarians,” Adamson says, “regarded the retention of kingship as axiomatic.”

It would appear that Adamson is pushing us away from the chance-driven historiography of Conrad Russell. He is going back to the older historiography by emphasizing deep fault lines that divided monarchy and society. But, unlike Hill, he is not willing to see the end result as being predictable or even pre-determined by the forces of history. The conflict, Adamson suggests, was inevitable. The result was not.