Clare Jackson Devil-Land : England Under Siege, 1588-1688 Paperback Book

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2022A 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 uninsular "Island Story". And its 17thcentury chapter will never look quite the same again John Adamson, Sunday Times A groundbreaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history Among foreign observers, seventeenthcentury England was known as DevilLand 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. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreignleaning 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. DevilLand 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... | Clare Jackson Devil-Land : England Under Siege, 1588-1688 Paperback Book