With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. 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. I finished the manuscript in the week after the UK’s final departure from the EU, following expiry of the ‘transition period’ on 31 December 2020. Since dynastic, diplomatic and economic decisions were invariably inflected by confessional choices, ‘get that wrong, and the nation would literally go to the Devil’. 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.

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. 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’. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Dissecting a nation’s endemic fears, anxieties and insecurities, Devil-Land’s account is bookended by two foreign invasion attempts. 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.

Other primary witness archives provide more first-hand testimony, and this is a very vivid portrayal of the period.

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. 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. 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. 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. Nonetheless, it is also arguably a problem that this book is so heavily reliant on foreign observers and their opinions.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. after reading Devil-Land 'this sceptered isle' and 'demi-paradise' is unlikely to look quite the same ever again.

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. A new British coinage bore images of roses and thistles and a new flag design became known, eponymously, as the ‘Union Jack’. These may include creased cover, inscriptions or small amounts of writing, fanned edge, ripped or tatty dustjacket, and other signs of being read. 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.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. We can see the perspective of contemporaries who could not know that the English republic would be relatively short-lived. 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.