Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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Inspiration for Devil-Land’s arguments came from five television films I made for the BBC entitled The Stuarts and The Stuarts in Exile in 2014-15. To foreign observers, seventeenth-century England frequently appeared infuriating: its political infrastructure was weak, its inhabitants capricious and its intentions impossible to fathom.

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. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada 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.

The people who reacted with outrage to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 were frequently very different in outlook from those who condemned the upheavals of civil war or the execution of Charles I. Devil-Land ’s title derives from the nickname ‘Duyvel-Landt’, coined by an anonymous Dutch pamphleteer in 1652. 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’. A new British coinage bore images of roses and thistles and a new flag design became known, eponymously, as the ‘Union Jack’.

Commissioned in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the films revisited the Stuart rulers of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales through the prism of their multiple monarchy inheritance.

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. Nonetheless, it is also arguably a problem that this book is so heavily reliant on foreign observers and their opinions. 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.

With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. 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. Accompanying the British vision of the new Stuart line was, moreover, a cosmopolitan range of dynastic, diplomatic and cultural attachments to the Continent. 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 only thing I was left wondering at the end was why, if England was seen as such a rogue state / European pariah, its enemies were too disorganised to unite temporarily and arrange an uninvited, proper invasion.

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. 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. Charles II's reign of often stereotyped as a national party, but in fact we see here that it was a turbulent time.