How and why did England collapse into civil war? The early Stuart crisis of government, with its regicidal consequences, remains a dominant question in English history. We still live with the consequences both of the breakdown and of the restoration of 1660. It is parliament, rather than "people", that enjoys "sovereignty" in Britain - a country whose monarchy in cultural terms retains much of the ancient charisma of kingly rule. What else might explain the debate about whether a young prince of the blood royal should bear arms in a foreign country? And if Harry's dilemma appeared only a question for him and his CO, this summer's crises in devolved Scotland and Wales show a bigger hangover from 1660 and all that.
The tightly unitary British state that eventually emerged after the rebellion against Charles I was formed to avoid a regress to the anarchy of the 1640s and the military rule that followed a decade later. Its necessary reform into a devolved condition has revealed the persistence of old problems. A 2006 settlement in Ireland, squabbling in Cardiff over coalition partners, displacement of Labour unionism in Edinburgh: all show how the issues created by the existence of three kingdoms - and one principality - have returned to shape the political map of "Britain".
The issues surrounding these 17th- century controversies were so huge that they generated an appetite for overarching explanations. "Whig" historians were Anglocentric and wrote under the shadow of Gladstonian liberal democracy: titans such as SR Gardiner emphasised the role of a parliamentary opposition supposedly dominated by figures such as Pym and Hampden. Scholars formed by the 1930s saw class conflict at work. Revisionists from the 1970s onwards stressed how orderly England was on the eve of war, and the importance of more fortuitous, short-term triggers. Isolate all these from the equation and we are left with a governing class agreed on the desirability of parliamentary rule by a combination of king, lords and commons.
Into these debates there now arrives a massive book - and to an equally weighty effect. Not since Gardiner have the sources been quarried to such effect as in John Adamson's The Noble Revolt. Some half a million words lay bare the aristocratic politics that surrounded the king in 1640-41. The fact that Adamson sees the "English revolution" starting with a rebellion led by a noble faction shows the influence of the revisionists who emphasise the breakdown within the elite. Only much later did proto-democratic ideas emerge among a minority of radicalised soldiers.
But Adamson's explanation goes deeper. This is the first book to show that it was aristocratic republicanism driving events - a belief that owed nothing to democratic ideas but could be used to defend noble power. Figures such as Robert Rich, earl of Warwick, and Algernon Percy, Earl of Northumberland, were at the centre of the "junto" that despaired of the king but needed to defend estates and influence.
Looking abroad, they could see how kings of Poland and doges of Venice were elected by those states' nobilities. The rebellion once seen as an insular affair - and whose effects confirmed the country's un-European development - turns out to have its origins in a very continental creed: the aristocratic notion of liberty inspired by Rome's republic, and whose patrician prerogatives overrode the powers of a king.
Like all great works of history, this work shows the contours of a recognisable past because of its affinities with the present. Government by cabal and indifference to parliament surely remain the two most persistent features of political life in early 21st-century Britain.
