Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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H istory tends not to come with serving suggestions, but it does make a lot of difference where you choose to slice it. They were also not always very discerning: the Dutch theologian who classed the British Civil Wars of the 1640s alongside revolt in Catalonia and an earthquake in North Africa was painting a picture that was vivid but not especially coherent. Given the scope of the subject matter, there was a lot to fit into circa 500 pages, but there is a good balance between depth of coverage and narrative pace.

She sees England in this period as essentially a ‘failed state’, profoundly unstable and lurching from one disaster to the next, from near invasion to the Gunpowder Plot, from the Civil Wars and Charles I’s execution to the Great Fire of London. With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1.

Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. The importance of religion in everyone's life in Europe at the time was such that religion pervaded all politics.

A history of contemporary Britain written on the basis of articles in Le Monde, De Telegraaf and El País, interwoven with excerpts of what they are really saying about us in Brussels and Strasbourg, would undoubtedly be very interesting, but as a picture of events on this side of the Channel it would have its limitations. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome.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.

Bewilderment at the doings of the English may be the kindest way to describe their response to what they observed - certainly then, maybe still.It seems timely to point out that there were some lighter moments between 1588 and 1688 alongside all this tragedy. A book to be savoured by students, history aficionados, and anyone who enjoys seeing a scholar at the top of her game diving into stories we think we know well, only to emerge with all manner of surprises. 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.

United in condemnation they may have been, but Spanish disapproval could be far removed from Dutch criticism, and the differences in these people’s identities and political agendas is at times rather lost to sight as the litany of disasters unfolds. 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. More recently, ‘seeing ourselves as others see us’ formed the theme of an episode of Andrew Marr’s Start the Week Radio 4 programme last October, where parallels were drawn between Devil-Land’s arguments and Fintan O’Toole’s insightful history of Ireland since 1958, resonantly entitled We Don’t Know Ourselves. For her part, James’s Danish wife, Queen Anna, wrote in seven languages and after abandoning Lutheranism for Catholicism, became one of a succession of Catholic queens consort – Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena – who all brought separate networks of political patronage, confessional attachments and foreign entanglements. The author, Clare Dawson, has built this book on the basis of a very thorough study of primary sources - the notes and sources lists take up well over 100 pages attesting to the scholarship involved.Devil-Land ’s title derives from the nickname ‘Duyvel-Landt’, coined by an anonymous Dutch pamphleteer in 1652. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We can see the perspective of contemporaries who could not know that the English republic would be relatively short-lived. If foreign observers found 17th-century Britain infuriating, ‘its political infrastructure weak, its inhabitants capricious and its intentions impossible to fathom’, it was at least in part because they did not really know what they were talking about.