With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. after reading Devil-Land 'this sceptered isle' and 'demi-paradise' is unlikely to look quite the same ever again. Coincidentally, this Start the Week discussion occurred weeks after a new entente discordiale had been reached in Franco-British relations, following Australia’s announcement of Aukus: a new three-way strategic defence alliance with the United States and Britain that required Australia to abandon a multi-billion dollar contract to purchase French submarines. Often this period is portrayed as being a conflict between catholic and protestant, but there was more than one way to be a protestant, and differing views on the shape of the reformation could also lead to conflict.

It is a history of England so Scotland remains a foreign player in spite of the fact it shared a monarch after 1603. We can see the perspective of contemporaries who could not know that the English republic would be relatively short-lived.

The story of the rise and fall of the Stuart dynasty in England, as seen through the eyes of our often confused European neighbours . 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.

As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and VI of Scotland and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, just as the Williamite-Jacobite war in the aftermath of 1688 was one aspect of the wider 9 Years' War, the final episode was the Hanoverian-Jacobite war of 1745 which was a British dimension to the wider War of the Austrian Succession of 1740-1748. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts – many penned by stupefied foreigners – to dramatize her great story. While it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of everything going on because of the sheer number of events, this history is very illuminating and engaging. More recently, ‘seeing ourselves as others see us’ formed the theme of an episode of Andrew Marr’s Start the Week Radio 4 programme last October, where parallels were drawn between Devil-Land’s arguments and Fintan O’Toole’s insightful history of Ireland since 1958, resonantly entitled We Don’t Know Ourselves.

The author, Clare Dawson, has built this book on the basis of a very thorough study of primary sources - the notes and sources lists take up well over 100 pages attesting to the scholarship involved. 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. England under Siege 1588-1688 (2021) has been named as a ‘Book of the Year’ by The Times, the TLS, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. 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.