Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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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. 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. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

Devil-Land is an entertaining read and it makes some important points, but Jackson has not given 17th-century Englishmen and women much right of reply to these disparaging foreigners. 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. As one of these observers notes, James VI came to the throne ‘as quietly as could possibly be desired’.

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.

Yet if you’re not particularly au fait with the period, it can be quite a difficult text in parts, written more for the academic than the general reader in my view.As I concluded, to many of their seventeenth-century English subjects, the Stuarts appeared an alien, imported dynasty that could not be securely relied upon to promote the national interest. 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’. 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).

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. 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.

It seems timely to point out that there were some lighter moments between 1588 and 1688 alongside all this tragedy. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. 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. This Stuart-centred view from across the Channel of the years 1588-1688 offers a fresh, provocative and highly readable take on one of the most formative centuries of English history.

It is always good to see a historical myth interrogated and common assumptions challenged, and Jackson sets about this with some verve. 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.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’. H istory tends not to come with serving suggestions, but it does make a lot of difference where you choose to slice it. 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. In emphasising themes of confusion, distrust and trepidation, rather than confidence, buoyancy and assurance, Devil-Land’s is a self-consciously subjective argument.