Diane Purkiss
John Adamson is a competent historian and his book is well
written and extensively researched. The Noble Revolt has been described as
"a work of great style and imagination as well as scholarship... As with a
great 19th-century novel, the story and the characters will become your friends
for life."[1]
Adamson's books on the English revolution are part of what
has become the 'post-revisionist' school of history writing. The main
characteristic of this school is the rejection of both Marxist and Whig historiography.
Before the Post-Revisionist we had just the revisionists. These historians were
also characterised by a rejection of Marxist historiography.
As Sarah Mortimer describes, even the word revolution was
taboo "revolution is a very un-English activity and in the 1980s' revisionist,'
historians doubted whether England ever really had one. Instead, they argued
that the English Civil War of the 1640s was something of an accident. Charles I's
realm was beset with structural problems (including a rickety financial system
and three entirely different kingdoms) that would have taxed even the most
astute politician. And Charles was far from being that: his blend of
self-righteousness and inability to compromise left England vulnerable to the
sparks of rebellion. That spark came from Scotland, which in 1639 rose up against Charles' heavy-handed religious policies. Two
years later the Irish rebelled; the changing situation in Britain had brought
the latent religious and ethnic pressures there to boiling point. The English
Civil War was, therefore, part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, with England
the last to take up arms against its king. This interpretation was set out in
Conrad Russell's The Causes of the English Civil War (Clarendon Press,1990),
but two decades later the picture no longer seems so clear and historians have
begun to wonder whether England was quite so unrevolutionary as the
revisionists suggested."[2]
The book is beautifully illustrated with full-colour photos,
helpful maps and plans. You get the feeling that a lot of money was spent on
this book. Which is a little strange as it appeals to such a small audience.
The chronological dates of the book are May 1640 and January
10, 1642, when the king departed London. The layer studied by Adamson composed
a minuscule part of the English ruling elite in the early 1640s. There nothing
wrong in studying this layer but they have to place within the context of the
revolution.
Not all historians have been enamoured with Adamson's book The
historian R C Richardson has called the book title and subtitle" both
highly misleading. The events documented in this book did not lead to the
overthrow of Charles I. As Adamson himself now concedes, what happened in the
1640s "was no mere barons' war" and the "baronial context"
was one of several that coalesced at the time. "Nor was it a revolt of the
nobility, or even the major part of the nobility, acting alone".[3]
A better book would have recognised that these two years
covered by Adamson were extremely crucial not only because of the rebellion by
a minority of the Nobility as Adamson suggests but they set the scene for the
future course of the war. The tendency amongst post-revisionist historians to
concentrate on limited political aspects covering only the ruling elite and a
small majority for that matter is detrimental to a fuller and more multi-dimensional
understanding of the war.
The Noble Revolt is very much a by-product of the "revisionists
revolt". The book took Adamson nearly 15 years to research and write. It is
a formidable read with close to two hundred pages of notes. The central
theoretical premise of the book is that the war was a coup d' état by a group
of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the king.
According to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were "driven
by their code of honour, and they acted to protect themselves and the nation.
Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and Warwick move from the sidelines to
occupy centre stage, as do their counterparts among Scottish peers. It was they
and not the ignorant masses who plucked a king from his throne. Oliver
Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of their lesser lackeys". [4]
For such a long book, it is light on analysis and Adamson's
theory is not that original and appears to be a rehash of some previous
revisionist historians. It is also noticeable in the majority of Adamson's work
"ordinary people" rarely get a mention.
Adamson is politically conservative, and this reflects in
his historiography. Robert Boynton describes the early days of this group in an
article "Ferguson calls this his "punk Tory" period, a phase
when he and Sullivan listened to the Sex Pistols and vied to see who could most
effectively rankle the left-liberal majority. He treasures an invitation he
received from friends at Balliol in the early eighties, to a cocktail party to
celebrate the deployment of U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. The
invitations were illustrated with champagne bottles emitting mushroom clouds.
The conservative Cambridge historian John Adamson remembers dining with
Ferguson the night Thatcher resigned. "We both sensed it was the end of an
era," Adamson said. [5]
Adamson has a sympathy for Charles 1st as can be
seen in this quote "from the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles
caught a glimpse of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the
boat turned westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St
Stephen's Chapel – the Commons' chamber, and the scene of his most recent
political debacle. It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again".[6]
Adamson seems the revel in the idea that the leading players
in the revolution were reacting blindly to events. One reviewer of Adamson's
book said "Unlike hind sighted historians, they stumbled forward, seeking
peace if possible and war if necessary. Like Oliver Cromwell, in 1640 an
obscure farmer on the fringes of Warwick's circle, once said, 'no one travels
so high as he who knows not where he is going'.[7]
The book is a door stopper with over two hundred pages footnotes
and has been suggested that this was in response to criticism of his work by
historian Mark Kishlansky who alleged that Adamson in the past was "deliberately
abusing and misreading sources". What started as a small dispute soon
snowballed into a much bigger historical debate.
Both sides of the debate took the pages of various academic
journals. Well established historians such as Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone
and Hugh Trevor-Roper all weighted into the dispute.
This dispute tended to confirm Lawrence Stone argument when
he said of the study of the 17th-century revolution as 'a battleground which
has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes operated
by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way."
The book also contains significant omissions which include
the major role played by the Earl of Essex as Parliamentary commander after the
outbreak of civil war, the creation of the Royalist party, the significance of
the New Model Army, the military defeat and eventual elimination of the king,
and the abolition of the House of Lords.
Another significant omission is the fact that Adamson does
not touch upon any of the controversies over the war. According to one blog
review Nick Poyntz "There is no coverage of other historians from a wide
range of theoretical or argumentative backgrounds. This extends through the
book's epilogue, where Adamson is keen to debunk Whigs and revisionists alike
by finding a third way to explaining the origins of the war – but can coverage
of only 1640-1642 cover enough of the origins of the war to adequately explain
them? I do not believe it can."[8]
Adamson tends to try and rule out the revolutionary nature
of the civil war. His Noble Revolt essentially put forwards a consistent view
used by numerous right-wing historians, commentators and one prime minister
that Britain does not make violent revolutions Adamson says "Unlike our
Continental neighbours, British revolutions have tended to be relatively polite
and orderly affairs. Not for us the tumbrels and tanks in the streets, the
giddy cycles of massacre".[9]
This theory is not new as Ann Talbot explains "The
sense that in Britain things were done differently and without continental
excess is not entirely new. Burke had expressed it in his Reflections on the
French Revolution, but there were plenty of voices to gainsay him and the
social disturbances in the years of economic upheaval that followed the
Napoleonic wars were a testimony to the contrary. Luddism, anti-corn law
agitation, the anti-poor law movement, strikes and most of all, Chartism
demonstrated that Britain was not an island of social peace. Nonetheless, the
Whig interpretation of history had deep roots in the consciousness of the
British political class. The visitor to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can
still see in the great entrance hall a fireplace inscribed with the legend "1688
The year of our liberty." It refers to the "Glorious Revolution"
when James II quit his throne and his kingdom overnight, and William of Orange
was installed as king. This was the kind of palace revolution that the British
ruling class increasingly preferred to look back on rather than the revolution
in the 1640s when they had executed the king, conveniently overlooking the fact
that James would not have run if he had not remembered the fate of his
father—Charles I".[10]
Like many of his revisionist friends, he has accused Marxist
historians of relying too much on large abstract forces and felt that this "economic
determinist" viewpoint did not explain too much. Adamson echoes the
prevailing academic orthodoxy that there was no bourgeois revolution mainly
because he felt there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social
classes can be found on either side of the struggle.
To conclude, according to Adamson, the war was caused by
Charles the 1st and his inexperience and vanity. There is no doubting Adamson's
work rate or ability to carry out prodigious research, but his inability to
present a multidimensional history is a weakness. I am not sure it is a "significant
contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War".
[1]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664846/How-Charles-I-lost-his-head.html
[2]
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/civil-wars
[3]
Not the main act but a prelude to drama 20 July 2007 Roger Richardson-Times
Higher Education- https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/not-the-main-act-but-a-prelude-to-drama/209736.article
[4]
https://www.ft.com/content/617713ea-0e56-11dc-8219-000b5df10621
[5]
https://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=50
[6]
https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/the-noble-revolt/
[7]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664846/How-Charles-I-lost-his-head.html
[8]
https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/the-noble-revolt/
[9]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1280580/Clegg-Cameron-Torvill-Dean-Lenin-Trotsky-make-mistake-revolution.html
[10]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
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