Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson — parallels with the present

The English had a habit of regicide. First, they drenched their “scaffolds with Mary Stuart’s blood,” as one Venetian envoy wrote in 1649. Then, they plunged their “hands into the blood of this queen’s grandson” by decapitating Charles I. A few years later, a German playwright depicted a chorus of England’s “assassinated kings” before the figure of Revenge, beseeching him to punish the country. He makes them a promise: “England shall become Hell.”

This was to be expected from a fallen people, from king-killers riven by confessional strife. Things got so bad that, after the execution of Charles, foreign observers even begun to wonder whether the English were in league with the Devil. Hence the Dutch pamphleteer who, in 1652, suggested that the Latin pun linking Anglorum to Angelorum (English/angelic) should, in a demonic reverse baptism, see England renamed “Devil-Land”.

And according to the Cambridge historian Clare Jackson, most Europeans agreed: 17th-century England was a synonym for “rebellion, religious extremism and regime change.” In fact, England was a “failed state”.

Europeans, their ambassadors and envoys in particular, found the English both baffling and infuriating

From 1588 to 1688, the country staggered from an heirless monarch through the Gunpowder Plot, the civil war, and a foreign takeover. Much of this chaos, Jackson argues, came from England’s quarrelsome relationship with Europe — from the frequently reneged trade agreements to the merry-go-round of foreign alliances. Devil-Land works as a history of English foreign policy in the 17th-century. But, really, it is about how Europeans, their ambassadors and envoys in particular, found the English both baffling and infuriating.

Insular and inclined to “adore their own opinions” (as one French envoy noted), the English became obsessed with continental interference. The book is bracketed by the Spanish Armada of 1588 and Dutch invasion of 1688 (essentially a coup by nobles eager to keep a protestant on the throne), yet England, contrary to the book’s subtitle, was never really “under siege.” There was no foreign involvement in the plot to blow up James I in 1605, for example. The Cromwellian Protectorate that emerged out of the civil war actually found many friends on the continent, including, Catholic powers such as Spain and France. It fell apart thanks to internal contradictions and the death of Oliver, whose capabilities his son and apparent heir, Richard (“Tumbledown Dick” to his foes), could never emulate.

Rather, Devil-Land is a history of a siege mentality. Jackson portrays England as a country ill at ease with the idea of foreign influence, yet simultaneously blind to the very limited nature of that influence. As such, it was obsessed with conspiracies and Popish plots, traitors and telltales. At a time when English was a peripheral language in Europe, the Stuart establishment was populated by multilingual, worldly cosmopolitans. Their wives were all foreign Catholics. And of course they would want to “vassalize us to a foreign nation,” declared Cromwell during the civil war.

Parallels with the present are obvious. But Jackson deploys them wittily and insightfully. There are even passages recounting the frustrations that many felt for the lockdown imposed during the plague of 1665 (another manifestation of diabolical Albion), when tavern-goers protested curfews and playhouses were shut.

Devil-Land is a briskly paced, action-packed book. But it sometimes reads like a history of English exceptionalism, even though the intention is clearly to characterise the English as exceptionally dysfunctional.

Can Jackson really agree with her European sources who saw England as a “failed state”? What about the rest of Europe? In 1610, Henri IV of France was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic, which threatened to reignite the French Wars of Religion. Then there were the princelings of the Holy Roman Empire, who spent the first half of the 17th-century knocking seven bells out of their neighbours for being the wrong kind of Christian in the Thirty Years War. The English civil war seems relatively brief and bloodless by comparison.

Today, as diplomatic relations with Europe become endemically dysfunctional, the English look as foreign to continental audiences — tiresomely eccentric, fixated by their own internal spats — as they did in the 17th century. Continental readers may wonder if they, too, have another Devil-Land on their doorstep.

Devil-Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson, Allen Lane £35, 704 pages

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