The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
by John Adamson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson ₤25, 576 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤19.99

The result of more than 15 years of scholarly labour, The Noble Revolt reshapes the English civil war as a matter of exquisite and intellectual nobles, of secret and midnight conclaves, of honour and intellectual fever.

John Adamson, a historian at Cambridge university, contends that the English civil war was instigated not by ordinary people but by a tiny group of aristocrats dissatisfied with the king’s absolutism. Disliking the king’s views on religion, they conspired to encourage the more satisfyingly puritan Scots to invade. Driven by their code of honour, 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 rude masses who plucked a king from his throne. Oliver Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of their lesser lackeys.

This thesis is already well-known to civil war specialists because Adamson himself published it some 15 years ago. This triggered a vehement confrontation with his fellow historian Mark Kishlansky, who alleged that Adamson was deliberately abusing and misreading sources. This doubtless explains why Adamson’s book comes with so many footnotes. It may also explain its atmosphere of almost childlike isolation from the readership it presumably wishes to attract. It is as if the book was written in and for the same tiny and exclusive circle whose activities it describes: well-educated men who have an affinity with heroes of a grander past and a longing to emulate them.

The junto sounds progressively more like the Peterhouse senior common room as the story unfolds: eminences grises, moving the political levers unobtrusively, unappreciated save by those as clever as themselves.

Doubtless this was a not uncommon fantasy in the 17th century too. And Adamson convincingly shows us that for a small group of men and their followers, the war was a noble revolt indeed. But what he has not shown is that the war was like this for most people. He is right to suggest that his juntos existed, and his book does document their treasonable plotting. It follows that he has impressively uncovered a neglected aspect of the mentalite of the age. It does not follow that the juntos were the cause of the war or that the war was what they thought it was.

It will take some time for historians to evaluate Adamson’s work fully, but some limits are already apparent. Adamson is not always capable of distinguishing between rhetoric and motivation, and assumes that his aristos’ talk of honour really means that they are motivated by it. It is remarkably convenient for a certain kind of historian of the right for the guarantors of English democracy to be a group of classically educated peers - so convenient that it seems very unlikely to be true.

Adamson is also inclined to overestimate the importance of the particular aspect of it that has become his focus. It is difficult, and at times impossible, to connect the plotting Adamson documents with events outside London, or even outside the palace of Westminster. Adamson’s readers would never know that Charles was frightened by the apprentices rioting in the street in the Christmas of 1641. One would never know that the same things were being said in Stepney church as in the House of Commons. One would never know that it mattered that there was anyone in England at all except Adamson’s admired junto; it may be that they were important, but they can hardly have been sufficient. What made the war happen, in the end, was the willingness of ordinary men to take up arms against their king. The honourable junto does not altogether explain this, unless we are to conclude that most of parliament’s supporters were simply dupes of good PR.

Shorn of its too-grandiose claims to explain everything, Adamson’s book has much to offer. Where he is well worth reading is on Strafford’s impeachment, trial and weak-kneed abandonment by his master Charles; it is a theatrical story, and the author makes the most of the scheming in corners, the plot and counterplot. More than anyone else, he succeeds in situating this story of betrayal and misunderstanding in the midst of events. His juntos, too, are fascinating in their deliberations and in their drunken duels, perhaps most interesting of all in their ability to think in vehemently humanist terms. If he and his publishers made more modest claims for this book, we might be able to appreciate the riches it has to offer more willingly.

Diane Purkiss is author of ”The English Civil War: A People’s History” (HarperCollins).