Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

Product Information

This dazzling, original and hugely engaging book tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. 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. 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.

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’. The book looks at England from the perspective of its continental enemies (and sometime allies, depending on the geopolitical shifts).

When James VI acceded to the English throne, one French observer appeared disappointed at the absence of the ‘most horrible and bloody tragedies’ that he was expecting. 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.

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).This work encompasses the political and religious conflicts of the period, and emphasizes the interconnection between Spain, France, the Netherlands, Central Europe, and Britain. It was a Dutch pamphleteer who suggested in 1652 that England, according to the fable the land of angels, should instead be christened ‘Devil-land’. Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as ‘Devil-Land’: a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. 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. Dissecting a nation’s endemic fears, anxieties and insecurities, Devil-Land’s account is bookended by two foreign invasion attempts.

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. 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. 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. 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.This book deals with the history of England from the Spanish Armada to the Glorious Revolution, as well as looking at the preliminaries (the execution of Mary Stuart just before 1588) and the immediate aftermath of William and Mary's ultimately successful coup (the Battle of the Boyne etc). She shows England as something of a rogue state during the Commonwealth, as well as being a potentially or actually failing state for much of the 17th century. This is a turbulent period during which the English executed two crowned monarchs, one of them not even their own (and they executed the second without much reference to his subjects in his other kingdoms), lived without a monarch for over a decade and then finally deposed one king on little obvious legal precedent other than a dislike of his religion. However, I mainly bought Devil-Land for the chapters covering the Civil War and its aftermath, and it is this part of the book that I found most rewarding.

The negative tone of the book as a whole is heavily influenced by the fact that such judgements tended to be of the more gloomy variety. More recently, ‘seeing ourselves as others see us’ formed the theme of an episode of Andrew Marr’s Start the Week Radio 4 programme last October, where parallels were drawn between Devil-Land’s arguments and Fintan O’Toole’s insightful history of Ireland since 1958, resonantly entitled We Don’t Know Ourselves. England under Siege 1588-1688 in the week that followed the referendum held on 23 June 2016 in which a majority of the United Kingdom’s electorate voted to leave the European Union.

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. Viewing our troubled archipelago through the eyes of foreigners in this way is one of the great strengths of the book. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts – many penned by stupefied foreigners – to dramatize her great story. It is a history of England so Scotland remains a foreign player in spite of the fact it shared a monarch after 1603.