English Civil War revised
From The Times
April 7, 2007
Ed Smith
THE NOBLE REVOLT The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson
THE BEST HISTORICAL subjects — like the French Revolution or the English Civil War — can be victims of their own success. These great stories, and the big ideas surrounding them, become so popular that historians find themselves jostling for original space within increasingly cramped intellectual territory. With so much competition for the choice patches of research, the danger is that the best minds retreat into ever more rarefied corners of obscurity. The historiography, in other words, becomes almost a burden rather than a source of illumination.
Short of a Stalinist edict — “Quit your meddling: you shall write no more about the Civil War” — not much can be done about this. Except to wait, pause for breath, and when academic passions have cooled a little, return to what made the subject so attractive in the first place: the power of the story. That is what John Adamson has done in The Noble Revolt, his dazzling new narrative on the fall of Charles I.
The Civil War has perhaps the richest intellectual context of any period in English history. To the great Whig historians, it was a monumental staging post in the grand progression towards British parliamentary democracy and empire. In the Marxist mind-set, the “English Revolution” anticipated the more famous class struggles of future centuries. The “revisionists” of the 1970s and 1980s checked these romantic notions with caution and contingency — perhaps the war was an accident of circumstance rather than a battle of ideas? Given this multi-layered historiography, it is little wonder that no one has attempted a full narrative of the story itself since S. R. Gardiner’s masterly interpretation in the 19th century.
Instead of beginning with a potted history of what other historians have said, Adamson narrates a bold new version of events. He brings three central reevaluations. First, this is a war about ideas. The constitutional crises of 1640-41 arose principally out of divisions within the ruling elite about the nature of government. Charles’s aristocratic enemies didn’t merely want a different king, they wanted a different monarchy — a Venetian-style doge, almost a royal puppet, with real power residing in the high offices of state. The Civil War was a conflict born of aristocratic discontent — not only a high-minded revolt, then, but also literally a noble one.
Secondly, if ideas mattered more than historians have recently argued, religion counted for rather less. The nature of Anglicanism, with its broad church of contradictions, was always open to manipulation by rival factions. To Charles’s enemies, he indulged a worryingly popish faction.
Conversely, to those unfavoured by the “Puritan Junto”, the realm was being taken over by a godly oligarchy. But in 1641, the key players were prepared to compromise about religion, in typical English style, so long as they got the constitution they wanted. Religion might have been a constant destabilising influence, but wasn’t the primary cause of war. Focusing on the personalities of the aristocratic elite — in particular the powerfully connected Earl of Warwick, too often downgraded by historians as a bit-part player — is the third of Adamson’s revisions.
By the end of 1641, by which point Warwick’s junto had replaced Charles’s “personal rule” with an aristocratic republic in all but name, they had also given themselves all the best jobs. What was so good about limited monarchy, the forgotten old elites of Scotland and England wondered, if they were to be frozen out by a new Puritan oligarchy made up of Warwick’s first cousins? The war, when it came, was fired by a disgruntled royalist counter-revolution.
But the story’s literary and psychological appeal exerts just as strong a grip as the intellectual argument. Adamson is at his best in describing the trial of the Earl of Strafford. Strafford, Charles’s much feared Lord Lieutenant, had already subdued Ireland with devastating effectiveness. How could Charles’s enemies manufacture Strafford’s downfall? First they tried impeachment, then an act of attainder.
Adamson brilliantly recreates how Charles’s enemies manipulated the trial as a means of political propaganda. The presence of the Commons, invited for the first time to sit behind the Lords as they considered the case, emphasised that Charles’s tyrannical favourite was being tried in front of the entire body politic.
Charles, on the other hand, was forbidden from appearing publicly at the trial. While the Throne remained the focal point of the tableau, the King himself suffered the indignity of having to watch from the back, peeking out of a lattice-covered box. Adamson concludes: “Here was Leviathan: the state as the abstract composite of the many . . . in which the king has become a constitutional nonperson, represented by an empty chair” — a telling metaphor for the way in which Warwick’s faction viewed monarchy.
What of Strafford? I wonder how the shrewd, witty and utterly ruthless Lord Lieutenant would have fared had he served a stronger king? As Charles asked for advice about his latest shambles, we might imagine Strafford thinking: “Well, my lord, you could be more like me.” Strafford’s clinical sense of dispatch — and terror — might have sorted out the entire constitutional mess in a matter of weeks. But Charles, though he would regret it for the rest of his life, signed the death warrant and Strafford went to the block. Strafford’s hubris and nemesis, told here with great sympathy, is a poignant story: pity the fearsome agent who serves a wobbly master. But the stakes, both sides now knew, had become infinitely higher. The days of compromise were numbered.
The Noble Revolt is a work of great style and imagination as well as scholarship. For all its lucidity, it is also an undeniably complex and detailed book — the reader, in return for not being talked down to, has to do some thinking and remembering. But it is worth doing so. As with a great 19th-century novel, the story and the characters will become your friends for life.