The Noble Revolt

In THE NOBLE REVOLT John Adamson traces the careers andfortunes of the small group of noblemen who risked their lives and fortunes to challenge Charles I's attempt to refashion his three kingdoms as an authoritarian monarchy. Beginning with a core of little more than a dozen, this aristocratic leadership exploited a contemporary rebellion against Charles's rule in Scotland to create an entirely new political order in England: an essentially republican state in which executive power was monopolized by a small cartel of noblemen, answerable to Parliament, and where the monarch was permanently reduced to the status of a figurehead king. What was achieved in the'year of wonders', 1641, astonished - and alarmed - contemporary Europe: the public trial and execution of the king's greatest minister; the monarch himself stripped of most of his sources of revenue; the transference of executive power to a new'godly'noble-dominated cartel; and a new, sometimes violent, phase of reformation in the English Church. Far from this being a slow, almost accidental build-up to the outbreak of armed hostilities between the king and Parliament in 1642, Adamson argues that the noblemen opposed to Charles I had made contingency plans for, and publicly justified, armed resistance to the king even before the Parliament had first met in 1640. Indeed, during the creation of England's'monarchical republic', the threat of civil war had rarely been absent. And as the new oligarchic regime began to assert its newly won authority in the summer of 1641, its ambition and radicalism triggered a series of reactions that made the resort to hostilities seem - on both sides - a viable, perhaps even attractive, means of resolving the conflict.