The front cover of David Horspool's book consists of a bloody daubing of the St George's Cross. On the back is a laudatory quote from the Conservative thinker Ferdinand Mount. It is this apparent contradiction which Horspool explores in his energetic, 400-page canter through 1,000 years of English radical history.

Sometimes, the book's frenetic pace (if it's chapter eight it must be Perkin Warbeck) makes it feel a bit like EP Thompson-lite. Nonetheless, The English Rebel fulfills its main stated purpose, as an effective counterblast to the comforting Whig narrative of a stately, unbroken progress from the fields of Runnymede to the palace of Westminster. What it isn't is an unambiguous celebration of English insurgency. Acknowledging that his definition of "rebel" - a political opponent who takes "serious risks, of losing life, limb or liberty" - embraces more than a few xenophobes, religious bigots and megalomaniacs, Horspool takes a fairly jaundiced view of many of his subjects, from ambitious medieval barons to aggrandising Enlightenment reformers, from Simon de Montfort via Bonnie Prince Charlie and John Wilkes to Oswald Mosley. This cynical streak is one reason why the book might appeal to conservatives; another is that - unlike the story told by Edward Vallance in his recent A Radical History of Britain - it appears to be a pretty unremitting catalogue of failure. As Mount puts it, Horspool has written "a superb losers' history of England".

This is partly because one of his themes is the way that rebellion has so often looked longingly backwards, to a lost utopia: following the (surprisingly lengthy) resistance to the Norman invasion, many rebels campaigned to turn the clock back to 1065. But Horspool's pessimism seems much less justified when he looks forward. Seen over time, many of his heroic failures look more like anticipated successes. If most demands of the peasants' revolt were eventually met, why is it "difficult to argue that the revolt had much to do with it"? Aren't Robert Kett's utopian experiments in 16th-century Norfolk more important for their influence on the 17th-century revolution than for their "incidental and largely reactionary" impact in their own time? Weren't all but one of the Chartists' major demands eventually granted (the exception being annual parliaments)? Didn't the suffragettes win?

Horspool's defeatism becomes even starker when he approaches the present day. Damning 60s rebelliousness as, ultimately, "just another way of marketing products", he writes off the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Greenham Common women's peace camp as examples of failed causes on the political fringe. Well, sure, the Reagan/Gorbachev arms reduction accords might not have been directly influenced "by a peace camp in Berkshire", but they wouldn't have happened without the worldwide protests of which Greenham was a part. More fundamentally, 60s cultural rebelliousness gave birth to - and the Greenham Common women reinvented - one of the two most successful political movements of the late 20th century. The other, environmentalism, draws on the spirit of the English rural rebel, going back via the 17th-century Diggers and Kett's Norfolk utopians all the way to the "silvatici" partisans who mounted their guerrilla campaign against William the Conqueror from the English woodlands. And, talking of contemporary political movements, does the empire and its racial legacy really play so little part in English radicalism? If the Angry Brigade and Arthur Scargill are there, why not Rock Against Racism and the Grunwick strike?

All of that said, the length of Horspool's reach reveals much, not least about what his disparate dissidents have in common. Not only are political techniques handed down from generation to generation, but later uprisings consciously evoke earlier ones. The north has a particular place in the history of English rebellion: from William the Conqueror's harrying of his northern opponents to Henry VIII's suppression of the Catholic restorationist Pilgrimage of Grace. Horspool observes how failed rebellions leave considerable legislative and even architectural traces, from the Normans' network of defensive castles to the 1715 Riot Act. Although spurning any "Marxist, class-based" interpretation of British history (perish the thought), Horspool notes an unsurprisingly consistent correlation between arbitrary acts of government and rebellion. And he cautions against a too-rigorous division between violent and non-violent movements: the Chartists and the suffragettes turned to force only when persuasion failed.

Primarily, the long view reveals the danger of seeing what happened as inevitable. The fate of the Norman invasion was not settled at the battle of Hastings. Following the untimely death of the Protestant Edward VI, the romance of the 16-year-old Queen Jane's nine-day reign obscures the fact that Queen Mary's accession on day 10 was by no means a foregone conclusion. Neither the Cromwellian revolution nor the Stuart restoration were generally expected, though they were wished for. As Horspool argues, "rebellions reveal the alternative histories contemporaries wanted to write". At the time, what happened was but one of several alternative prospects on offer.

Above all, Horspool's book contributes to a growing literature which attempts to reclaim Englishness for radicalism. The sheer weight of example confirms the worth of his ambition, while denying his unnecessarily gloomy conclusions. "If there is such a thing as an English 'national character,'" he writes, "it might seem self-evident (particularly, I hope, after reading this book) that rebelliousness is a part of it". His conclusion really doesn't need to be that tentative.

 David Edgar's How Plays Work is published by Nick Hern Books.

In terms of temperament, Thomas à Becket, Arthur Scargill and the Duke of Monmouth do not have much in common. But they are legitimately united in The English Rebel, a splendid account of what the author calls "one thousand years of troublemaking". This subtitle does the subject less than justice. Troublemakers are fractious children at the back of the classroom and neighbours who spread discreditable stories about the family next door. The rebels about whom David Horspool writes  not excluding Arthur Scargill  were revolutionaries. Their motives differed, but whether they were inspired by ambition, religious fervour or hatred of injustice, their objective was to overthrow the government or radically change its policy.

Very often, the "great causes" that the history books identify were supported by complaints against reductions in real disposable income. The first clause of Magna Carta asserts the freedom of the church. But the next 12 are about money. Even the uprising against Henry VIII, romantically known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, included in its list of objections to the dissolution of the monasteries the fear that "within a short space of years there should be no money nor treasure" in the north of England. And the last rebellion that Horspool chronicles was against the poll tax. The English Rebel ruthlessly explodes the myths which surrounded so many English rebellions.

The poll tax, Horspool explains, has been a "byword for injustice for 600 years", illustrating the continuity of England's rebellious impulse. Margaret Thatcher's insistence that it must be known as the community charge confirms the claim that "governments' attempts to dress up new burdens on the people in friendly terms have a long pedigree". A decree raising a new tax in 1525 was called the "amicable grant".

Robin Hood  who, Horspool tells us, is an invention  is, in our collected imagination, "pictured with his hood up, glowering at the camera with all the implied menace of a teenage thug". His land had been confiscated, "forcing him into the forest", beginning the tradition of the dispossessed outlaw which now includes hooded and equally menacing teenagers who are forced to congregate on street corners because their youth club has been closed down. If you think the comparison far-fetched, accept it as the inevitable result of the bravura style which is one of The English Rebel's many delights. To Horspool's more serious credit, he rarely overstates either the vices and virtues of his characters. All the heroes are flawed and most of the villains have something to be said in their favour. In an act of extraordinary historical generosity, he describes Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as displaying "a somewhat free interpretation of his orders".

The Peasants' Revolt is revered by all true radicals because of John Ball's couplet. But "When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman?" reveals only part of the insurgents' attitude to the society they wanted to change. They slaughtered the Flemish workers who were thought to be taking their jobs. And Wat Tyler struck the first blow before the mayor of London stabbed him in the neck and created an early working-class martyr. Although Walworth still qualifies for the description of "thug", the sequence of events changes our opinion of Tyler.

When Horspool moves on 250 years, he is properly sympathetic towards the Levellers. Who could react in any other way to Colonel Rainsborough's declaration that "the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he" and that, in consequence, every man  no matter how elevated  is subject to the rule of law? But Cromwell and Fairfax are rightly commended for allowing the Putney Debates to take place. Open discussion is not usually a feature of military dictatorships.

Oswald Mosley's inclusion in the pantheon is presumably justified on the assumption that, given the chance, he would, like Franco, have usurped the legitimate government. That makes him the only English rebel to be endorsed by the Daily Mail. But controversial opinions are to be expected in a book which zips along with as much zest as this one does. It is full of fun, and the entertainment is leavened with education.

The rebels who succeeded the barons of Runnymede learnt from the struggle that ended with the Magna Carta that "resisting a king did not mean backing an alternative. It could also mean presenting a case to compel your rulers to do their job better." The significance of that statement is immense. After the Great Civil War, the English became remarkably indulgent towards their monarchs. The revolution of 1688 was "Glorious" because little blood was shed. And, unlike most of continental Europe, in 1848 we did not have a revolution. Somebody ought to write a book which speculates on whether that was a cause for congratulation or regret.

 Roy Hattersley's most recent book is Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars (Abacus)