Clare Jackson

I am torn in rating this book, as it is insightful and makes unexpected connections. However, even as a general reader who has already read half a dozen histories of similar or shorter periods during this broadly seventeenth century period, I found this book hard going at times, as so many names are bandied about. I suspect that it is a specialist book dressed up as a general history.

Jackson sets herself the unenviable task of providing sufficient general historical background (with which readers about the period are probably already aware), before providing the impressions of external courtiers, ambassadors, clerics and businessmen into primarily English politics.
Following an introductory chapter foreshadowing the alleged incomprehension with which English politics was viewed by foreign ambassadors and visitors in the period from 1588 to 1688, the first chapter discusses the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 after nineteen years’ imprisonment in England. This is described as the first regicide by royalty, with Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I both being granddaughters of Henry VII, and Mary being a Scottish queen and widow of a French king, but considered ineligible to succeed to the English throne as she was Roman Catholic. I also had not taken on board (or remembered) that the king of Scotland, James VI, was Mary’s son (but Protestant) and that it had been agreed that he was to succeed Elizabeth upon her death (which he did in 1603). Elizabeth was reviled abroad as “an immoral, heretic bastard, responsible for Mary’s death.”

I would consider Devil-Land a supplementary book about this hundred year period, as it necessarily only offers brief insights from a foreign perspective into the major events, with which I have a little familiarity, as I have read several histories of the period recently. Devil -Land was interesting, but not essential.

However, because it looks at English history from a foreign viewpoint I did find that some of the observations recorded were surprising or unexpected. For example, I found the discussion of the German Palatinate [based in Heidelberg, where Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of James I of England) had married Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate] very interesting in explaining how early Stuart England/Great Britain was viewed from the European perspective. Also due to political concern to ensure Catholic Spain and France did not unite against the Protestant Protectorate, England entered into an alliance with Catholic France rather than fellow Protestant Netherlands (United Provinces).… (más)