Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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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. 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. The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer.

Defiantly unrepentant, the new republican regime’s leaders in London were now about to declare war on their fellow Protestant republicans, the Dutch, in the first of a series of seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch wars fought over trade routes and colonial expansion. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.In emphasising themes of confusion, distrust and trepidation, rather than confidence, buoyancy and assurance, Devil-Land’s is a self-consciously subjective argument. This is a refreshing take on a well-worn theme - England in the seventeenth century (well, most of it, plus the stub of the sixteenth). To foreign observers, seventeenth-century England frequently appeared infuriating: its political infrastructure was weak, its inhabitants capricious and its intentions impossible to fathom. Devil-land’ Britain may have been to some, but given what was happening across the Channel in the Thirty Years’ War, and the many other wars of the 17th century, the reigns of the Stuarts, for all their failings, do not compare too badly.

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. The events of Jackson’s chosen century have long been the stuff of historical mythologies, from the greatness of Gloriana’s England to the lamentable failures of the early Stuarts, from the radicalism of the Interregnum and the corruption of Charles II to the alleged blow for freedom that was 1688. Clare Jackson’s dazzling account of English history’s most radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. Accompanying the British vision of the new Stuart line was, moreover, a cosmopolitan range of dynastic, diplomatic and cultural attachments to the Continent. In the 1630s, a Venetian envoy was informed by his Spanish counterpart, the count of Oñate, that ‘there was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English.

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. 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. Bewilderment at the doings of the English may be the kindest way to describe their response to what they observed - certainly then, maybe still. 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.