È opinione diffusa fra gli storici che il 1641 costituisca un anno cruciale nella storia dell’Inghilterra. Non è invece una conclusione scontata che le richieste di riforme fatte dai Pari a Carlo I Stuart fossero destinate a portare al conflitto che sconvolse il paese, contrapponendo da una parte re, anglicani inglesi, presbiteriani scozzesi, alta borghesia e aristocrazia, dall’altra parlamento, piccola e media borghesia, protestanti, piccola nobiltà terriera e proletariato.
Questo è quanto emerge dal saggio di John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles, dal quale risulta evidente come l’andamento degli eventi fu a lungo incerto: in definitiva, fu l’esito del processo a Thomas Wentworth, Conte di Strafford, a dare il via alla guerra civile.
The year 1641 is one of English history’s great turning-points. A bold group of disaffected peers has just petitioned King Charles for significant constitutional change [...]. They’re also calling for fundamental religious reform, for a restoration of the purity of the church [...].
But the rebels’ first step is to eliminate the king’s “evil counsellor”, the Earl of Strafford. By the time the prosecution brings its case against Strafford in March 1641, it seems as though the future of the nation depends on the trial’s outcome. [...] England is held on a knife-edge by a massive network of tensions pulling equally in countless directions, with the slightest advantage to one player potentially able to tip the balance into, at worst, full-scale civil war.
John Adamson’s excellent book takes all the time it needs to set up the vastly complex web of influences. Quotations help to colour in the details of the picture, and provide a kind of immediacy - filled with rumour and doubt - that fixes us in the moment. [...]. The upheaval in Britain’s power structures in these 20 remarkable months was far from inevitable.
Adamson is particularly good at the tiny moments of sudden shift, when we seem to know where we’re going but then some tiny tactical stumble throws events off-balance and in an instant history jumps the tracks. The moment, say, when a crucial question is asked in Parliament, and an honest answer given, but the answer is too quiet so the house mishears it and everything changes... Inevitably the Strafford “Theatre of Judgment” is another of these crossroads; if acquitted, he’ll hurry north to take command of the army, rout the Scots and return to wreak vengeful punishment on the rebellious English Lords, but if he’s found guilty the king will lose his closest counsellor and receive a major symbolic dent to his power, one that will set a critical precedent for Parliament-monarch power relations.
There’s more to the story than the intricacies of haphazard moments, and Adamson is also insistent on a broad view, with little developments seen as part of larger swelling changes. The assault on prerogative power isn’t random, but linked to the beginnings of a radical shift in the way in which people thought about institutions such as the monarchy. Adamson’s title - A Noble Revolt - refers to the fact that the revolt against the king’s personal rule was led by the English nobility rather than commoners; but it’s a nod, too, to the nobility of their purpose - to a sympathy the author seems to feel, if not always for their methods, at least for the discontents that provoked them. It’s a tribute to the thoroughness of his exegesis that he never lapses into partisanship. As rigorously close-up historical narrative, this is exemplary stuff.
John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, pp. 576, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25. | |
