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, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. 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''s descent 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.
