Noble Revolt

John Adamson's book traces the careers and fortunes of the small group of English noblemen who risked their lives and fortunes to challenge the king's attempt to create an authoritarian monarchy in the Stuart kingdoms during the 1630s. Beginning with a core of little more than a dozen, this aristocratic leadership exploited a contemporary insurrection in Scotland to stage a revolt against Charles's rule in England. Successfully forcing the king to summon a Parliament against his will, they embarked, together with their English and Scottish allies, on the creation an entirely new religious and political order - one, moreover, which came to have strongly republican overtones - in mainland Britain. What was achieved in that 'year of wonders', 1641, astonished - and alarmed - contemporaries: the trial and execution of the king's most powerful minister; a new, and sometimes violent, phase of religious reformation; the drastic curbing of the powers of the Crown; the planning of a major Anglo-Scottish military intervention in the Thirty Years' War. And in England, as in Scotland, the control of government and the armed forces came to be monopolized by a small cartel of noblemen, answerable to Parliament for their stewardship, with the monarch's status henceforth reduced - as Charles himself complained - to that of a 'Doge of Venice'. Yet throughout this process of 'reformation', the threat of war was rarely absent. As these twin aristocratic 'Juntos' in London and Edinburgh began to assert their newly-won authority in the summer of 1641, their ambition and radicalism triggered a series of reactions - initially in Ireland, but eventually in England and Scotland as well - that made the resort to armed force come to seem a viable, perhaps even the only, means of resolving the conflicts within the Stuart realms.