Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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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.

Commissioned in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the films revisited the Stuart rulers of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales through the prism of their multiple monarchy inheritance. 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. With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. But amid bitter confessional sectarianism across Continental Europe, the geopolitical stakes were high: between 1590 and 1690, the territorial extent of Protestantism was reduced from one-half to one-fifth of Europe’s landmass.I finished the manuscript in the week after the UK’s final departure from the EU, following expiry of the ‘transition period’ on 31 December 2020. 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.

All of the Stuarts had long periods when they were not at war, when government functioned as well as governments ever do and when their subjects were able to carry on as normal, fostering trade and industry, building houses, raising families, writing plays and so forth.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. It might also be said that, as an objective account of this period of British history (and after 1603 it is Britain, not England, that we need to consider), the book is somewhat lacking in nuance.