Devilland England Under Siege 15881688 Clare Jackson by Clare Jackson 9780241285817, 024128581X instant download after payment.

Winner of Wolfson History Prize 2022     
Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as 'Devil-Land'- a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism & royal collapse. Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's most turbulent & 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 & Charles I, were seen as impecunious & incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland & Ireland. The traumatic civil wars, regicide & a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreign-leaning rule of Charles II & his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army & a new order was imposed.                          
Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a 'failed state'- endemically unstable & rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, & Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada's descent in 1588 & concluding with a not-so 'Glorious Revolution' a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England's vexed & enthralling past.         
Clare Jackson is the Senior Tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. She has presented a number of highly successful programmes on the Stuart dynasty for the BBC & is the author of Charles II in the Penguin Monarchs series.