The plot thickens

John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt asserts the crucial role of political ideas in the coming cataclysm of the English civil war. His focus is close: the 18 months before the final breach between Charles I and Parliament, but it is as scholarly in depth as it is cinematic in scope. Here is a dramatic retelling of a story we thought we knew well. The old Marxist interpretation of class struggle is put to rest and so is the revisionist view that the civil war was brought about by unfortunate conjunctions of personalities and events. Instead we discover how a small group of ideologically motivated noblemen came to dominate the state and attempted to reduced Charles I to a puppet king.

Many of the noblemen in Adamson’s ‘Puritan Junto’ were related to Queen Elizabeth’s last favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the late Earl’s ghost is ever present behind the story. Essex was executed in 1601 after leading a revolt whose aim was to force Elizabeth to name the Stuart King James of Scots her heir. There had already been almost half a century of struggle over the succession. Elizabeth had been queen for 43 of them, and her failure to secure the future of the Protestant elite by marrying or nominating an heir had encouraged the development of a conservative form of republicanism. This was not consciously anti-monarchical but a theory of good citizenship inspired by the classical republican traditions of the ancient world. There was a new sense of duty to the nation beyond the reign of a single monarch, and Essex was the self-appointed champion of the Protestant ‘military men’ and the ideal of ‘noble virtue’: the duty to act for the good of the commonwealth. That meant protecting liberties as well as religion, and there is evidence that Essex intended to offer James the throne with ‘conditions’.