Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 AS CHOSEN BY THE TIMES NEW STATESMAN TELEGRAPH AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT A big historical advance. Ours it turns out is a very un-insular "Island Story". And its 17th-century chapter will never look quite the same again John Adamson Sunday Times A ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history 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. Clare Jacksons dazzling original account of English historys most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. 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. The traumatic civil wars regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother James II before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed. Devil-Land reveals England as in many ways a failed state: endemically unstable and rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armadas descent in 1588 and concluding with a not-so Glorious Revolution a hundred years later Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of Englands vexed and enthralling past.