Further comment on Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

I am grateful for this comment although, alas, I do not think it is right. After his discussion of the dissolution of the Short Parliament, John Adamson did not proceed directly to a discussion of the Petition of the 12 peers but analysed the attitudes of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and his allies towards the Caroline regime in the 1630s and the evidence for collusion in the summer of 1640 between the members of the aristocratic Junto and the Scottish Covenanters.

He identified Maurice Thompson, John Venn and Richard Shute (Noble revolt, page 79) as the bearers of the petition from London supporting the peers' petition: Thompson and Venn had had links with Warwick through their interests in colonization since the late-1620s and in the 1630s, so his point is valid.

There is, in fact, a mass of material in The Noble Revolt on the importance of popular pressures on the proceedings of the two Houses in 1640-1642: if you do not believe me, please read Pages 285-288 on the end of Strafford's life or Pages 468-477 on tumults in the capital. He was and is interested in the impact of demonstrations and the threat of violence in London in this and succeeding periods.

Fortunately, a lot is known about how these demonstrations, etc., were organised from the works of Valerie Pearl, Robert Ashton, Keith Lindley and others. (See Clarendon Ms.20, fol.129 for Venn's role in coordinating such demonstrations.)It is, in any event, for John Adamson to develop his arguments as he wishes rather than meeting old-fashioned Marxist prescriptions.

(This post was forwarded to me by Chris Thompson. It was left anonymously on his blog. I am publishing because while not agreeing with every point it does have something to add to the debate. Chris Thompson’s remarks are also included)

Anonymous

It seems to me that most of the valid intellectual work Adamson's narrative accomplishes was better done by your own work on the "middle group. “Then there are the problems. The valid nugget in Livesey's discontent, I think, is that Adamson has little patience for or interest in what might be called popular mobilization, even though this was what gave aristocratic politics its bite. And his treatment of the events of 1640--the only moment concerning which I have sufficient expertise to comment--is riddled with significant omissions and errors (example omission: he skips directly from the dissolution of the Short Parliament to the Lords' Petition, without offering to explain the summer's agitation; example error: he claims the London Petition was carried by clients of Warwick). While errors are an unavoidable part of the scholarly process, these seem more like errors of opportunity to me, opportunities to affirm the centrality of the figures in his study to the politics of that year.

For me, the main value of Adamson's work is to reopen the problem of the politics of the early 1640s. Which is a legitimate accomplishment. But I understand Livesey's uneasiness.

CT Reply

Christopher Thompson commented Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

I am afraid, Keith, that this is not a convincing argument. It is factually incorrect to claim that all historiography before the 1970s offered some kind of explanation founded on a relationship between the 'base' of English society and its 'superstructure' as a reading of Hume, Mackintosh, Hallam, Macaulay and Trevelyan will show.

It is a matter of debate when the heyday of British capitalism occurred but no one has yet shown how this shaped Whig historiography or made it more convincing. In any case, the origins of 'revisionism' lie not in the 1970s, whether early or late, but in the late-1960s when it was increasingly obvious that the kind of deterministic explanations offered by Tawney, Hill, Stone and others were unsustainable because they were at variance with the surviving evidence.

By 1973, the work of 'revision' as Ted Rabb would describe it and the reaction against the kind of history being written by Stone and Hill wa s well under way. This was long before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reached the front rank of politics on either side of the Atlantic and long before John Adamson began his work on the 1640s.

 No so -called revisionist poured scorn on Marxist theory nor has Adamson downplayed the role of Oliver Cromwell. You should read the latter's essay on 'Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament' in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Longman. 1990) as penance. However one defines the political preferences of those you regard as 'revisionists', they were not predominantly or even obliquely right-wing.

Tristram Hunt and Simon Schama are, moreover, hardly specialists in seventeenth-century English history. I ought to add that Kishlansky's attacks on Adamson in and after 1990 had a great deal more to do with academic politics than your account allows. 

There was no requirement on Adamson to preface his study of the political role of the peerage in the 1640s with an analysis of the class composition of the gentry or of its relationship with the Stuart Crown: that would have meant giving up his priorities in research and writing to address a long obsolete Marxist agenda. It was for him to write as he chose and to investigate the issues he wanted to examine. That is the right and duty of every historian. But do not suppose that he is or has been unaware of the connections between the members of the Junto in 1640-1642 and of the grandees later in the decade with the worlds of London mercantile and artisan politics.

The novelty of his work lies in the revelations he has already made about such links and that he will make in subsequent publications. He has reshaped the historiography of the period already and will continue to do so because his work rests on secure evidential foundations, not on a political approach to the past.      

Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground”

The primary purpose of this article is to answer Nick Poyntz claim that john Adamson's work "breaks new ground". It will do so within the context of Adamson's revisionist historiography.

For the uninitiated Adamson's primary work has been the book the Noble Revolt.  Its basic premise is that a small Junto made up of nobles led a revolt which caused the overthrow of Charles 1st.

Adamson's book is well written and researched as you would expect from a Cambridge University-based historian while the book contains new material that is not enough to say that the book breaks new ground.

In order to break new ground or create new historiography, he would have to at least absorb the two most crucial historiography that of Whig and Marxist in order to create a new synthesis. Not doing this means he has not created new historiography but continues with post revisionist historiography. 

As Mary Fulbrook perceptively writes"The empirical inductivism of revisionists, and their somewhat strident anti- orthodoxy, have failed to provide adequate positive theses to fill the vacuum left by their negative critiques. The over-emphasis on the politics of patronage, apart from being inadequately established historically, suffers from theoretical and metatheoretical shortcomings.40 Theoretically, it can really only tell us something about the medium of politics; it is an empirically open question whether or not there is any ideological content to the formation and struggles of different political factions. Metatheoretically, such exaggerated stress on patron-client relationships is at least as philosophically degrading as any other form of downplaying the autonomy of human action - such as seeing men merely as agents of historical forces - and should, therefore, be rejected by revisionists on their arguments.”

In my opinion, for a piece of work to break new ground has to be more than a well-reasoned argument or a rather large amount of text or have high colour pictures. It must be able to define itself. Revisionism and post revisionism is nothing more than a mishmash of theories that lead the study of the English revolution into a dead end.

Noble Revolt

Whether or not as John Morrill said that the revisionism that developed in the early part of the 1970s was a movement, it had one defining characteristic; it was hostile to Marxism.

This hostility to Marxism was not so much from a historical standpoint but more to do with politics. It is no accident that the growth of a revisionist movement coincided with the rise of a right-wing political movement spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This movement gained ground with the final collapse of the USSR, which led to numerous theories that the fall of Communism meant that the socialist project had failed. The most pessimistic expression of these principles came with the End of History by Francis Fukuyama. The English Civil War was not the only subject that had a noticeable revisionist trend during this time. From the 1970s Studies of the into the Russian Revolution and French revolution provoked a similar revisionist backlash.

Historians and their historiography do indeed go out of fashion. However, historiographies that were fashionable two hundred years ago still can contribute to our understanding of the war, despite the protestations of Christopher Thompson.

Adamson refers to the English gentry but does not go into any extensive detail as to the class composition of the gentry. What was its economic position towards the king? Adamson is a skilled historian, but a more detailed description of the class struggle involving his Cabal would have made the Noble Revolt far more precise and concrete.

Adamson's work has previously come under ferocious attack from the historian Mark Kishlansky.

I am not saying that Adamson is a left-wing historian by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been modus operandi of right-wing historians to attack other historians in order to push them and their study of history to the right. You only have to look at the"Storm Over The Gentry" Debate to see this.

Kishlansky is first essay Saye What challenged Adamson’s historiography. In reality, this essay was nothing more than a catalogue of Adamson’s errors. Kishlansky’s critique of Adamson does seem to border on academic bullying. In all probability, Adamson made some errors but who has not.

What lies behind Kishlansky's attack is his opposition to Adamson, concluding the facts. In this quote from Conrad Russell, he appears to back Kishlansky's attack on Adamson saying“What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable".

Kishlansky accuses Adamson of “tendentious interpretation”. Well, you could blame every single historian that has written on the English Civil War of this. Historians have the right to interpret the facts or sources the way they feel fit without fear.

This dispute with Kishlansky clearly bothered Adamson so much so that his book does contain a large number of footnotes 191 to be precise maybe this was a defensive reaction to Kishlansky's critique. Kishlansky alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and misreading sources

As  Nick points out "the unfortunate thing about the debate was that it tended to damn the rest of Adamson's much wider thesis; unfairly, in my view”.

History as Costume Drama: Allan Massie’s The Royal Stuarts and the Ideology of Dynastic Narrative

Allan Massie’s The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain presents itself as a sweeping chronicle of a dynasty whose fortunes intersected with some of the most turbulent centuries in British history. Tracing the Stewart line from its medieval origins to Cardinal York’s death in 1807, Massie gives readers a brisk, accessible account of monarchs, marriages, feuds, betrayals, and the long Jacobite aftermath. Reviewers have praised the book’s wit, pace, and readability, and one American publisher even aimed it at audiences drawn to the early modern period through television costume drama rather than archival scholarship. That marketing choice matters: it reveals the kind of book Massie has written—and the kind of history it pushes aside.

The Dynastic Frame as Ideological Device

The three centuries Massie surveys — from the Wars of Independence and the Union of the Crowns to the civil wars, Charles I’s execution, the Cromwellian republic, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the Jacobite risings — were more than vivid episodes in a royal family saga. They were the battleground on which Britain’s shift from feudal-absolutist monarchy to capitalist state took shape: a period of revolutionary rupture, class conflict, and constitutional transformation.

Massie’s structure—one chapter per monarch—reduces this complex historical process to a series of individual lives. Personalities, loyalties, rivalries, and temperaments bear the explanatory weight that a materialist account would instead place on the struggle among an entrenched landed aristocracy, an emerging mercantile bourgeoisie, and the popular forces drawn, unevenly and often tragically, into both camps.

This is more than a matter of style; it is the ideological work of dynastic biography. By casting the Stuarts as the story’s driving force, the genre shifts historical causation from social structures to individual character. Charles I’s execution becomes a family tragedy instead of the political expression of a revolutionary crisis involving crown, Parliament, and the classes each imperfectly represented. Likewise, the Glorious Revolution appears as a courteous transfer of power rather than the consolidation of a new bourgeois order. The promotional language — “backstabbing, betrayal, and ambition gone awry” — makes the substitution explicit. Three centuries of social transformation are repackaged as the plot of a prestige drama.

Massie’s book is not isolated from its cultural moment. It belongs to a culture industry that has taught audiences to consume history as melodrama. Series such as The Tudors, The Borgias, Versailles, and Outlander have popularised a model in which the past becomes courtly spectacle, sexual intrigue, dynastic rivalry, and moralised character drama. Massie writes for that expectation. The genre shapes the book, but the market shapes it as well, offering the emotional grammar of television rather than the analytical grammar of historical explanation. That is why the book’s readability is inseparable from its weakness: it reads like entertainment, and entertainment cannot explain revolution.

The Stuart Mythos and Conservative Nostalgia

The Stuarts have long been fertile ground for conservative romanticisation. Walter Scott’s Jacobite novels, Victorian medievalism, the cult of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” and the modern tourist economy of Highland nostalgia all participate in a cultural project that rehabilitates monarchy as a site of emotional identification rather than political domination.

Massie’s Scottish background and literary formation place his sympathies firmly within this tradition. His Jacobites are tragic, his exiled monarchs dignified, and his villains neatly assigned. The result is a narrative that softens Jacobite reaction into sentimental longing, allowing the emotional fate of a family to obscure the structural forces behind the Revolution.

What the Genre Cannot Explain

The dynastic-biography form cannot explain why the monarchy was abolished in 1649, restored in 1660, overthrown again in 1688, or why the British state that emerged differed fundamentally from the one the Stuarts inherited. It fails because it cannot account for class, structure, or material forces; it can only interpret history through character, temperament, and family drama. For all its craft, Massie’s book therefore becomes less an explanation of the period than a way of avoiding one.

Even sympathetic reviewers have pointed to the book’s uneven evidentiary base: a blend of archival material, literary sources, plays, novels, and earlier histories. That mixture makes the narrative readable but less reliable. Sharper critics have also noted Massie’s tendency to cast some figures as heroes and others as villains without the analytical support serious scholarship demands. These are not incidental defects, but symptoms of a genre that values narrative satisfaction over historical explanation.

Popular dynastic history sells because it offers readers what academic history cannot—and should not—provide: the comforting illusion that great upheavals are ultimately family stories on a grand scale. It makes the past feel emotionally accessible, morally clear, and narratively ordered. The strategy is effective, but deeply distorting. A reader may finish The Royal Stuarts knowing which monarch quarrelled with which sibling, yet still not understand why a social order was overturned, briefly abolished, and restored on fundamentally altered terms.

The Royal Stuarts is a well‑crafted, briskly paced example of a genre built to entertain rather than explain. It succeeds brilliantly on those terms — hence the enthusiastic notices from readers approaching the Stuarts as costume drama rather than as a chapter in the history of the English Revolution.

But readers seeking to understand why the Stuart story cannot be separated from civil war, regicide, and the revolutionary transformation of crown, Parliament, and the emerging capitalist order will need to look elsewhere: to the structural, class-based history this genre works to obscure. Massie has written a family saga. Britain’s history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was not a family saga. It was a revolution.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. London: HMSO, various editions.
• Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1603–1714. London: Public Record Office.
• Clarendon, Edward Hyde. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, various editions.
• Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches. Edited by Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.
• Milton, John. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).
• The Memoirs of James II. Edited by J.S. Clarke. London: Rivington, 1816.
• Stuart Royal Correspondence, British Library Manuscripts, various collections.

Secondary Sources: Stuart History and the English Revolution

• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Routledge, 1961.
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1970.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
• Manning, Brian. Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. London: Pluto Press, 1996.
• Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.
• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Harris, Tim. Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720. London: Penguin, 2006.
• Harris, Tim. Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
• Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714. London: Longman, 1980.

Jacobitism and the Stuart Afterlife

• Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.
• Pittock, Murray. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
• Pittock, Murray. Jacobitism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
• Szechi, Daniel. The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Popular History, Culture Industry, and Historical Representation

• Hobsbawm, Eric. On History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
• Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
• Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (orig. 1944).
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999.
• Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Allen Lane, 2001.
• Schama, Simon. A History of Britain. London: BBC Books, 2000–2002 (for contrast with dynastic narrative).

Historiography and Marxist Approaches

• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I.
• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. London: Pluto Press, various editions.
• Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1946.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso, 1999.
• Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958.
• Morton, A.L. A People’s History of England. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938.

Works on the Stuart Dynasty and Royal Biography

• Massie, Allan. The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.
• Fraser, Antonia. King Charles II. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.
• Fraser, Antonia. The Gunpowder Plot. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
• Weir, Alison. Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy. London: Bodley Head, 1989.
• Somerset, Anne. Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion. London: HarperCollins, 2012.

Suggested Further Reading for a Materialist Interpretation of the Stuart Period

• Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Road to Socialism. London: Bookmarks, 1983.
• Callinicos, Alex. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
• Hill, Christopher. Economic Problems of the Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
• Manning, Brian. 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1992.
• Holmes, Clive. Why Was Charles I Executed? London: Hambledon, 2006.