The Nobles Are Revolting Too!
So I’ve finally finished reading John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt (2007). Mercurius Politicus has already posted a review of the book, having read it twice. That’s quite an achievement as it’s huge: an extremely detailed narrative of English and Scottish politics from May 1640 to January 1642. The main text alone is over 500 pages, and there are nearly 200 pages of endnotes after that! Fortunately Adamson’s style is very readable, making the story atmospheric and exciting, and the outstanding colour plates provide some much needed eye-candy as well as adding to the atmosphere. Whether or not Adamson’s argument stands up, this is a very nice book to own (and I’m not normally into book porn!), and since it’s the most recent major contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War, it can’t be ignored.
What makes it slightly frustrating for me is that the narrative stops with Charles I’s attempt to arrest the five members in January 1642. The period I’m trying to write about - summer and autumn of 1642 - will be covered by the next volume, to be published in 2009. I’m going to have to submit my article long before then, so I won’t know exactly what Adamson is going to say about the outbreak of war in England in 1642 (he’s also bringing out a new synthesis on the origins of the civil wars in May next year, but that’s also likely to be too late). Because of this chronological scope, the choosing of sides in 1642 isn’t covered, beyond the habitual classification of peers and MPs as future royalists or parliamentarians (those boxes again). However, The Noble Revolt makes some highly relevant points and at least hints at Adamson’s position on the causes of the war.
The most important thing is that he directly addresses the question of how many people (and to a lesser extent what sort of people) it took to start a civil war. Arguing against both Marxist ideas of class war and John Morrill’s idea of a war of religion, Adamson suggests that in order to start a civil war it wasn’t necessary for the whole nation to be polarised, or for factions to exist in the provinces. “At its most minimal, all that a civil war needed were two rival parties of fellow Englishmen, each with recourse to a substantial force of armed men, and each with the willingness to resort to violence in order to achieve their political ends” (p. 79). Therefore, Adamson points out, civil war could have broken out in England much earlier than it did. He identifies several points in 1640 and 1641 when this almost happened. This is directly opposed to Conrad Russell’s view that war was impossible before 1642, and that even then it was resorted to slowly and reluctantly. Adamson’s detailed examination of the evidence finds some major errors in Russell’s version of events and undermines his argument that England was united against the king in 1640.
The Noble Revolt leaves little doubt that there were rival parties who were prepared to fight each other throughout the period covered by the book. Furthermore, they could call on the Scottish Covenanter army and the royal army raised to fight the Covenanters, until both were disbanded in 1641. This could suggest that it was more difficult to start a war in 1642, when there were fewer forces available, but we’ll have to wait until 2009 to see where Adamson stands on that. He ends The Noble Revolt with the suggestion that war was almost unavoidable by January 1642. While he presents a convincing case that the king’s army in the north turned against parliament and would have been prepared to fight for the king, I’m not so convinced that dissident peers could have raised an army from the English trained bands. Would they have automatically obeyed their Lord Lieutenant? Adamson is very strong on high politics, but tends to be a bit vague about anything outside Westminster. In some ways this works quite well, because it powerfully suggests that although the peers needed wider support, the masses were an unknown quantity to them. However, it doesn’t lead to a satisfactory explanation of the interaction between elite and popular politics. Adamson shows how crowd action played a crucial role but doesn’t really explain how it came about. He says that the peers needed to appeal to the public sphere (using vaguely Habermasian terminology), but doesn’t explain exactly what he means by this. Who was in this public sphere? What did they want? How could they be won over? These aren’t questions which The Noble Revolt attempts to answer. It works very well as a microhistory of a small group of peers and MPs, but if it’s intended to be a general statement about the causes of the English Civil War it’s too narrow. If the next volume has a similar scope, it isn’t likely to explain how civil war broke out the way it did, only why the elite wanted to fight.
- John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
