Ellie Cawthorne:\u00a0Devil-Land <\/i>looks at England from 1588 to 1688. Why do you think this is such a fascinating 100-year period of English history?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Dr Clare Jackson:<\/strong>\u00a0Partly because so much happened: you get a feeling that events were unfolding at a dizzying speed that even contemporaries had difficulty getting their heads around. Throughout the book I tried to put myself in their position \u2013 to imagine how it would feel to not know who might be on the throne this time next year, or what sort of religious settlement might be in place. So much was precarious in the 17th century and so much was up for grabs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As the period opened, England was a country whose dynastic future was uncertain, to put it mildly. Elizabeth I<\/a> made discussion of her successor a capital crime. That was a moment of great anxiety because there were lots of potential contenders, all of whom came with their own dynastic and religious baggage. There were at least 10 claimants who brought with them the opportunity \u2013 or horror, depending on your viewpoint \u2013 of England being re-Catholicised. At any point in the 1580s, from the Armada onwards, there was always a fear that England might be plunged immediately into a big continental war of succession.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The geopolitical landscape was fast-changing. The counter-reformation was making large gains on the continent, and in the first half of the 17th century, Europe was convulsed by the Thirty Years\u2019 War. In the 1640s, England itself was plunged into bloody revolution, leading to the public execution of its monarch, Charles I<\/a>, and the only 11 years in the country\u2019s history when it\u2019s been a republic. Although today we look back on \u201cthe interregnum\u201d as an anomaly bookmarked between two periods of monarchy, it wouldn\u2019t have seemed as reassuringly temporary as that to contemporaries. They didn\u2019t know it wasn\u2019t to last. And the period ended with the Glorious Revolution<\/a> \u2013 a foreign invasion, backed by armed support from the Netherlands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To me, it\u2019s both a fascinating but also quite a terrifying 100 years in England\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Clare Jackson will be talking about\u00a0Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688<\/b>\u00a0in a virtual HistoryExtra LIVE event on Thursday 4 October, at 7pm GMT.\u00a0<\/p>\n Find out more and book tickets<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> You describe this as an intensely insecure time. What were the most gnawing anxieties of the age?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Throughout this period, there was a sense of England being a very young Protestant nation, which many people would regard as only half-reformed. Its religious destiny wasn\u2019t clear, and there were plenty of Puritan elements who wished to pursue the Reformation more fully. But there were also entrenched remnants of the Catholic church. The country\u2019s religious identity was seen as under constant threat, whether from its own rulers with their suspect Catholic proclivities and their Catholic spouses, an internal fifth column, or an aggressive neighbour like France\u2019s Louis XIV.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There was a very identifiable fear of popish encirclement or a popish plot. At the start of the period, Mary, Queen of Scots<\/a> was executed by Elizabeth I for fomenting Catholic conspiracies<\/a>. A whole series of popish plots followed, into which contemporaries could very readily read recurrent manifestations \u2013 from Guy Fawkes\u2019 gunpowder plot<\/a>, to the Irish rebellion in 1641 and the \u201cpopish plot\u201d in the 1670s. And if one thinks about a period like the mid-1660s, there was plentiful scope for paranoia and fear. London experienced a huge plague and then one of the largest fires in its history. Immediately, blame for that fire was laid at the door of foreign Catholics, to which Charles II<\/a> responded: \u201cNo, it\u2019s the wind, it\u2019s been a hot, dry summer.\u201d But what\u2019s striking is the readiness of contemporaries to fit everyday disasters into a larger narrative of either providential deliverance or near-Catholic takeover.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another of the recurrent fears was of imminent foreign invasion. The fear that the Isle of Wight, Margate or any coastal port might one day become a landing site for an invasion was very palpable. And that fear didn\u2019t go away with the defeat of the Spanish Armada<\/a>. There were smaller Armadas in the 1590s, and a constant anxiety about continental Europe only being half-a-day\u2019s sail away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The fear of Catholic encirclement wasn\u2019t a threat posed only by central Europe \u2013 it could also come through the \u201cside door\u201d, Ireland, or the \u201cback door\u201d, Scotland, which traditionally had an alliance with France. Intensifying these concerns, England didn\u2019t have a standing army. It relied on local militias and other forms of defence. So England being able to defend its interests was something that couldn\u2019t be taken for granted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Did these anxieties also trickle down to ordinary people?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the most interesting themes of this period is the rise of news. It\u2019s the time in which printed newspapers as we would recognise them make their way into Britain. It\u2019s also the heyday of polemical pamphlet publishing. Some of this was clearly \u201cfake news\u201d, rumour and speculation, but some was real and accurate. This was still a world in which news often arrived with certain delays. People were always itching after what was new, but this emerging interest in news also encouraged a sense of paranoia and uncertainty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n London at this time was one of the biggest cities in Europe, with a highly literate populace. Something that foreign diplomats often mention is that this was a city in which everybody wanted to talk politics. The watermen that rowed you across the Thames had their own views on political crises of the day. And out in the \u201cprovinces\u201d it was anything but parochial. Political information was disseminated from the pulpit, local assizes or market crosses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The book is called Devil-land<\/i> \u2013 where does that name come from?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDuyvel-landt\u201d is what the Dutch called England in the mid-17th century. It partly draws on a medieval folk concept belief that Englishmen had tails. This idea had been dispelled by the mid-17th century, but there were many abroad who nonetheless believed that the English had indeed become devils. \u201cDuyvel-landt\u201d was playing on a Latin pun Angli<\/em>, that the English could be seen as angelic. But by the mid-17th century they had become Diaboli<\/em> \u2013 regicidal rebels who\u2019d overthrown their monarchy and publicly executed their king. They were seen as a pariah state with aggressive foreign ambitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You draw on foreign perspectives throughout the book. What can we learn about 17th-century England from looking at how it was viewed by foreign powers?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n When I was working on BBC documentaries on the Stuarts, it brought home the extent to which the Stuarts were really a foreign, imported dynasty \u2013 they were Scottish. Each Stuart monarch had a foreign consort, whether it was Anna of Denmark<\/a>, Henrietta Maria<\/a>, or Catherine of Braganza, all of whom had their own confessional Catholic ties or foreign dynastic links. There was a lot about the Stuart century that doesn\u2019t seem traditionally English \u2013 whether that\u2019s the continental baroque d\u00e9cor in Whitehall\u2019s Banqueting House, or the fact that Charles I spent six months as prince of Wales wooing the infanta at the Spanish court in Madrid. I was interested in the ways in which the English increasingly began to suspect the Stuart dynasty could not always be trusted to act in the country\u2019s national interests.<\/p>\n Listen: Dr Clare Jackson discusses her new book\u00a0Devil-Land<\/em>, which examines the insecurities and anxieties that plagued England between 1588 and 1688, on this episode of the HistoryExtra<\/em> podcast:<\/strong><\/p>\n![\""VL_Clare\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2021\/11\/VL_Clare-Jackson-FB-ad-600x600-2940329.jpg?quality=45&resize=556,556"\" "\\"\"VL_Clare\\"\/")
<\/div><\/div> <\/div> <\/section>![\""King\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2021\/11\/GettyImages-113438070-cmyk-4a6474f-e1635871635519.jpg?quality=90&resize=557%2C413"\" "\\"\"King\\"")
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