Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

In Clare Jackson's Devil-Land, 17th-century England is portrayed as a nation in a state of near-continual crisis, characterized by civil wars, regicide, and a republican Commonwealth. The book reveals England as a failed state, but also as a place where creativity flourished amidst tragedy.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 704 pages
Publication date: 29 September 2022
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2022
A Book of the Year 2021, as chosen by The Times, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and The Times Literary Supplement.
A Major Historical Advance.
Ours, it turns out, is a very un-insular Island Story.
And its 17th-century chapter will never look quite the same again.
John Adamson, Sunday Times
A Ground-Breaking Portrait of the Most Turbulent Century in English History
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.
Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's 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, foreign-leaning 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.
Devil-Land 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 great story.
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.

Weight: 508g
Dimension: 128 x 198 x 47 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780141984575