Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688

Professor Clare Jackson

Clare Jackson is Honorary Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Walter Grant Scott Fellow in History at Trinity Hall. Fascinated by the rich and complex history of Stuart Britain and its Continental neighbours and global diaspora, Clare is the author of Charles II: The Star King (Allen Lane, 2016) in the ‘Penguin Monarchs’ series and of Devil-Land. England under Siege 1588-1688 (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2021). Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2022, Devil-Land was selected as a ‘Book of the Year’ by The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman and The Sydney Morning Herald. Clare has also presented a number of highly successful television programmes for the BBC, including The Stuarts (2014) and The Stuarts in Exile (2015). Her next book will be a life of James VI & I, to be published by Allen Lane/Penguin in autumn 2025, in the 400^th anniversary year of James’s death.

About the event

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.

Venues

Click on the three markers with an "X" to get directions to that venue from Google. Further information about Augustine House can be found on our University Maps and Travel pages. There is also an interactive map of Augustine House