Along the way we learn a great deal about England's relationships with its European neighbours; Scotland, which remained a separate country albeit with a shared monarch for most of the 100 year period, France, Spain and the Netherlands - with whom England intermittently fought wars, shared alliances, plotted and schemed. As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and VI of Scotland and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. 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. The Devil Land of the title was of course England - as it was perceived by the ambassadors and diplomats posted to England or who worked with England's representatives overseas.

Coincidentally, this Start the Week discussion occurred weeks after a new entente discordiale had been reached in Franco-British relations, following Australia’s announcement of Aukus: a new three-way strategic defence alliance with the United States and Britain that required Australia to abandon a multi-billion dollar contract to purchase French submarines. The approach taken in this book is very much focussed on international relations, and England appears rather like a planet, moving in relation to others, the key players being France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, along with Scotland and Ireland closer to home, and other players such as Denmark and the Papacy. 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’. 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.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. Their utterances are undeniably fascinating, but the individuals concerned were also highly partisan, often ill-informed and generally shaped their comments to fit a particular agenda at home. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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 calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. To many foreigner observers, 17th-century England was 'Devil-Land': a country riven by political faction, religious difference, financial ruin and royal collapse.The author has mined the diplomatic correspondence adroitly and takes us to the heart of the action, as seen through the eyes of these sophisticated players. The book looks at England from the perspective of its continental enemies (and sometime allies, depending on the geopolitical shifts). 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.

As an unmarried, childless heretic, 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. one of those perception-changing books of British history which only come along now and then, every few decades , and this is really one of the big ones.It opens in the late years of Elizabeth I’s reign which saw a vast Spanish fleet, comprising over 130 ships, 7,000 sailors, 17,000 soldiers and around 1,300 officials enter the English Channel in August 1588, hoping to rendezvous with Philip II of Spain’s nephew, Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, who would bring an invasion force of 27,000 Habsburg soldiers across from Flanders to land in Kent. Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. It seems timely to point out that there were some lighter moments between 1588 and 1688 alongside all this tragedy. 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.

Written in the shadow of Brexit speculation and debate, Devil-Land’s focus on the contingent mutability of seventeenth-century England’s relations with its Continental neighbours provides perspective, if scant comfort, for its readers.If it all sounds a bit bleak, that is because Jackson has chosen to view this era in large part through the eyes of commentators elsewhere in Europe who reacted with (sometimes pleasurable) horror at the succession of catastrophes to afflict England. This was a recipe for turbulence, domestic conflict and foreign interference (an activity of which of course England itself guilty). Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts – many penned by stupefied foreigners – to dramatize her great story.