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John Adamson: The noble revolt

26.02.07 Neill Denny

Tall, cultivated and with the historian's knack of answering a question with a finely constructed paragraph, John Adamson is the epitome of the understated English don. He will need all that urbanity in the rumpus that will surely follow The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March), his new book on the origins of the English Civil War. In it, he systematically debunks almost every theory about this controversial period, and shows that many of the accepted facts are just plain wrong.

His key finding is that in the run-up to the Civil War, between 1640 and 1642, a small group of nobles came to dominate parliament, the state and to some extent the monarch. "There is not a moment in English history where executive power over a key set of portfolios has been so closely consolidated by one single network. This group is ideologically motivated and they have effectively got control of the English state."

To support his case--that the catalyst of the war is a group of ambitious nobles, abetted by like-minded MPs and clerics--Adamson has uncovered a wealth of new sources. One is the private papers of Charles I's whipping boy, Will Morray. In a Lincolnshire farmhouse owned by Morray's descendants, Adamson became the first historian to see the archive of one of Charles' closest confidantes. "At the top of a pile of papers, I saw two pages in a handwriting I immediately recognised--the handwriting of Charles I himself. A new royal document--it is extraordinarily rare." It turned out to be the king's notes on a critically important meeting with Scottish grandees in October 1641, when Charles was contemplating assassinating two of his rivals.

Adamson has also tracked down the diaries of three MPs who were in the chamber when John Pym moved the impeachment of the king's chief henchman, the Earl of Strafford, in November 1640. But Pym never made the speech. Victorian historian S R Gardiner erroneously attributed the impeachment to Pym, and the mistake has been perpetuated ever since.

There are three basic schools of history concerning the origins of the Civil War: Marxist (class struggle); Whig (the inevitable culmination of a long process of political development), and revisionist (could have happened at any time, but a series of random factors, principally the awfulness of Charles I, precipitated it).

Which school does Adamson belong to? "I repudiate them all," he says. The only revisionism he is interested in is that driven by the discovery of new evidence, allowing "a radically different interpretation". Perhaps he is a neo-revisionist.

Particularly important in Adamson's book are the new dramatis personae. The Earls of Warwick, Bedford and Essex are prime discoveries: key movers pursuing a broadly similar path from 1639. "Warwick appears in none of the existing accounts," Adamson says, "but £350,000 goes through his household accounts to pay the Scottish army in the north. It's never been noticed before."

By 1641, a group of nobles--all first cousins and grandsons of the first Earl of Essex--control most of the key military posts. The Civil War starts primarily because others are fearful of a noble oligopoly: the argument "is about the system of government", not about religion.

Chronology is also significant. In the old model, trust irretrievably breaks down in 1642, when Charles tries to arrest five MPs. But Adamson argues that the breakdown began two years earlier.

A second book is planned, covering the actual fighting from 1642 onwards--but in the meantime, Adamson's 600-page opus, 10 years in the writing, will stir up plenty of debate.

Authors John Adamson

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