Bookended by two foreign seaborn invasion attempts, Devil-Land opens with Philip II of Spain’s failed Armada in 1588 and concludes with William of Orange, as Dutch Stadtholder, successfully landing at Torbay in Devon a century later, with 500 ships and 15,000 soldiers and prompting his Catholic uncle and father-in-law, King James VII & II, to flee to Louis XIV’s France. In Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688, foreign diplomats occupy centre stage, supplying vividly detailed commentaries on the most turbulent century in English history. Three days after the regicide, the dazed Spanish Ambassador in London, Alonso de Cárdenas, reported to Philip IV’s court that “we are here in utter chaos, living without religion, king or law, subject entirely to the power of the sword.” In January 1649, they had sent shockwaves through Continental Europe by putting their divinely ordained king, Charles I, on trial for high treason and executing him in public. Reversing familiar Latin puns, whereby the English (‘Angli’) were to be cherished as cherubic angels (‘angeli’), the English appeared, rather, as diabolically dreadful king-killers. In 1652, England was nicknamed ‘Devil-Land’, or ‘Duyvel-Landt’, by an anonymous Dutch pamphleteer. Dr Clare Jackson, Senior Tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, offers a riveting insight into foreign diplomats’ perceptions of seventeenth-century Englandįew seventeenth-century diplomats relished the prospect of London as their next posting.
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