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. As one of these observers notes, James VI came to the throne ‘as quietly as could possibly be desired’. 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. It seems timely to point out that there were some lighter moments between 1588 and 1688 alongside all this tragedy.

Accompanying the British vision of the new Stuart line was, moreover, a cosmopolitan range of dynastic, diplomatic and cultural attachments to the Continent.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. As I concluded, to many of their seventeenth-century English subjects, the Stuarts appeared an alien, imported dynasty that could not be securely relied upon to promote the national interest. Defiantly unrepentant, the new republican regime’s leaders in London were now about to declare war on their fellow Protestant republicans, the Dutch, in the first of a series of seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch wars fought over trade routes and colonial expansion. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

We can see the perspective of contemporaries who could not know that the English republic would be relatively short-lived.Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1. England was Anglican, Scotland was Calvinist and Ireland was Catholic, in a time when they shared a king who was supposed to be appointed by God. Devil-Land is an entertaining read and it makes some important points, but Jackson has not given 17th-century Englishmen and women much right of reply to these disparaging foreigners. If it all sounds a bit bleak, that is because Jackson has chosen to view this era in large part through the eyes of commentators elsewhere in Europe who reacted with (sometimes pleasurable) horror at the succession of catastrophes to afflict England. Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.