*WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2022* A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 AS CHOSEN BY THE TIMES NEW
STATESMAN TELEGRAPH AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A big historical advance. Ours it turns
out is a very un-insular Island Story. And its 17th-century chapter will never look quite the
same again' John Adamson Sunday Times A ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century
in English history 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.
