Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

Product Information

England under Siege 1588-1688 (2021) has been named as a ‘Book of the Year’ by The Times, the TLS, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman.

They were also not always very discerning: the Dutch theologian who classed the British Civil Wars of the 1640s alongside revolt in Catalonia and an earthquake in North Africa was painting a picture that was vivid but not especially coherent. Reviewing Devil-Land for The Sunday Times, John Adamson explained that ‘the reason for much of that century’s devilry, Jackson contends, comes from a single source: the question of England’s proper relation with Europe’. England was Anglican, Scotland was Calvinist and Ireland was Catholic, in a time when they shared a king who was supposed to be appointed by God.As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. She has presented a number of highly successful programmes on the Stuart dynasty for the BBC and is the author of Charles II in the Penguin Monarchs series. This dazzling, original and hugely engaging book tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. Take, for example, the Spanish Jesuit whose history of England painted it as ‘a nest of vipers, a den of thieves, a ditch and cesspit of poisons and noxious vapours’. Indeed, just as the Williamite-Jacobite war in the aftermath of 1688 was one aspect of the wider 9 Years' War, the final episode was the Hanoverian-Jacobite war of 1745 which was a British dimension to the wider War of the Austrian Succession of 1740-1748.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The way in which decisions in London were shaped, and often determined, by events in France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, among others, is clearly driven home here, to good effect. In the case of early modern England, the knife usually falls around 1603, between the flamboyance of the Tudor era and the dysfunction and disaster of the Stuarts.

Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada’s descent in 1588 and concluding with a not-so ‘Glorious Revolution’ a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England’s vexed and enthralling past. Other primary witness archives provide more first-hand testimony, and this is a very vivid portrayal of the period. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome. This work encompasses the political and religious conflicts of the period, and emphasizes the interconnection between Spain, France, the Netherlands, Central Europe, and Britain.

Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. During the two years spent making the BBC films, the seeds of Devil-Land’s arguments were sown when reappraising the impact of Stuart rule in locations ranging from a windswept Aberdeenshire beach that once hosted an invading Jacobite force, to Derry’s city walls, Breda’s cobbled streets, Madrid’s monumental Plaza Mayor, Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors and the Vatican City tomb of the Jacobite ‘Old Pretender’.Often this period is portrayed as being a conflict between catholic and protestant, but there was more than one way to be a protestant, and differing views on the shape of the reformation could also lead to conflict. The problem is that each of these caricatures belongs to a slightly different type of historical mythology and it is hard to overthrow them all at the same time.

Charles II's reign of often stereotyped as a national party, but in fact we see here that it was a turbulent time. This already confounds our expectations, but Jackson goes further, suggesting that the unifying features of this epoch were not the emergence of the modern British state and the beginning of Britain’s role on the world stage (as some might like to claim) but misadventure and calamity. The story of the rise and fall of the Stuart dynasty in England, as seen through the eyes of our often confused European neighbours . The scholarship is sometimes worn a little too heavily on its sleeve, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed at times by the torrent of names of the many ambassadors, diplomats etc.If you are looking for an update on the political and military history of seventeenth century England / Britain, this book is not for you. Instead the book gives a new view with which to consider England (and Scotland) under the Stuarts (and briefly during the republic led by Cromwell) through the eyes of other countries.