Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688

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As an unmarried, childless heretic, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In the 1630s, a Venetian envoy was informed by his Spanish counterpart, the count of Oñate, that ‘there was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English. Elizabeth did defeat the Spanish Armada and, after some time and effort, the uprising in Ireland too. 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.

She has presented a number of highly successful programmes on the Stuart dynasty for the BBC and is the author of Charles II in the Penguin Monarchs series. 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. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?It is always good to see a historical myth interrogated and common assumptions challenged, and Jackson sets about this with some verve.

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. The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer. For her part, James’s Danish wife, Queen Anna, wrote in seven languages and after abandoning Lutheranism for Catholicism, became one of a succession of Catholic queens consort – Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena – who all brought separate networks of political patronage, confessional attachments and foreign entanglements.Their utterances are undeniably fascinating, but the individuals concerned were also highly partisan, often ill-informed and generally shaped their comments to fit a particular agenda at home. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back.