Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007
pages 12-14 | 4319 words
Godly Mafia
Blair Worden
- BuyThe Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson
Weidenfeld, 742 pp, £25.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 297 84262 0
Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete. He was dissatisfied with his typescript, which became a famously unpublished book. It has only recently surfaced in his archive, and Adamson can have known nothing of its content. Yet there are uncanny correspondences between the two works, both of which centre on the brief but congested time, perhaps the most controversial period of English history, between the breakdown of Charles I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas Trevor-Roper’s narrative went beyond the beginning of the war in August, Adamson’s halts with the king’s attempted arrest of five members of the Commons for treason in January, the event that drove Charles from London and marked the irreparable divide between Crown and Parliament). Trevor-Roper was 47 when he completed his text; Adamson must have been at, or very close to, the same age when he completed his. Trevor-Roper’s book, though eventually reduced by a quarter, was planned to be about 300,000 words long, which is the length of Adamson’s text, too. The two accounts stand above all that has been written on the prelude to the Civil War in the intervening half-century. Between their approaches and arguments there are instructive resemblances, and no less instructive contrasts.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 29 No. 13 · 5 July 2007
From Richard Strier
Blair Worden’s review of John Adamson’s book on the overthrow of Charles I is contradictory, or apparently so, on one important matter, and seriously underplays the radicalism of the parliamentary actions and proposals of 1640-42 (LRB, 24 May). The apparent contradiction is between Worden’s affirmation of the view that religion and politics in the period were ‘inseparable’, and his later, much more polemical assertion that the radicalism of the opposition in this period was entirely in the religious sphere and that there was no ‘parallel radicalisation in political thought’. In order to state the latter, Worden has to discount the apparent radicalism of Parliament in the period. He tries to get round the Triennial Act (‘compatible with medieval notions of mixed monarchy’) and the act against proroguing Parliament without its own consent (‘it made no stipulation about future Parliaments’), but misrepresents the most important statement issued by Parliament in the period, the document of November 1641 that has come to be known as the Grand Remonstrance. Worden says that this document was ‘an indictment solely of the misgovernment of Charles I’, and had no constitutional implications. This is simply false. It ignores much of the text, especially its second half. Certainly the Remonstrance is not a republican text in the sense that it imagines abolishing kingship; but Charles was right to see it as a ‘Venetianising’ text, as, in other words, a strong assertion of parliamentary sovereignty. The text celebrates Parliament’s power and institutional reforms; it sees the articles that provide for regular meetings of Parliament and forbid dissolution by the king not only as securing a ‘remedy’ for the present crisis but as ‘a perpetual spring of remedies for the future’. The Parliament sees its actions as transformative and world-historical; it sees itself as so thoroughly reforming the political abuses of Charles’s reign, especially ‘the immoderate power of the Council Table’, that such abuses ‘will appear in future times but only in stories’. The Remonstrance ends with a list of items ‘for the perfecting of the work begun’, which the king is ‘humbly’ asked to ‘be pleased to grant’. These include virtually complete parliamentary control over the king’s selection of ‘counsellors, ambassadors and other ministers’. The Grand Remonstrance has, in other words, quite a clear picture of the revolution in political structure that it is in the process of creating.
Richard Strier
University of Chicago
