Clare Jackson's Devil Land

Clare Jackson is a Cambridge historian probably best known for her BBC documentaries on the rule of the Stuarts in the British Isles between 1603 and 1714. The publication of her book, Devil Land: England Under Siege 1588-1688, this summer marks the completion of an enterprise foreshadowed two years ago at the Chalke Valley History Festival. Now that it has been completed, she has given an interview to Ellie Cawthorne summarised in the November issue of the BBC History Magazine and available in a fuller form on the History Extra website.

Her focus, Clare Jackson explained, had been on the insecurities faced by England in the century after 1588, insecurities, for example, over the succession to Queen Elizabeth or over uncertainties about the religious settlement and the possibility of a return to Catholicism. Foreign invasions via Ireland or Scotland or England's coastal ports were a recurrent anxiety for rulers and ruled alike. On the continent, Protestantism was in retreat under pressure from the Counter Reformation and Catholic powers like Spain and France. The fact that successive monarchs - James VI and I, Charles I and Charles II, and James VII and II - had Catholic wives fuelled fears about the future of England, fears made worse by the recurrence of Catholic plots late in Elizabeth's reign and early in that of James VI and I, by the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and the Popish Plot of 1679-1681. Alliance with the Dutch, another Protestant state, was a problem in the seventeenth century because Holland was England's major commercial rival. When England itself succumbed to Civil War in the 1640s, it was easy to explain this in terms of a wider confessional conflict. Without comparable fiscal and financial resources of the kind available to the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs, Stuart rulers were faced with intractable domestic and foreign policy options until the 1690s. Given the growing thirst for news and the propensity for ideological disputes over this period, political conflicts, religious disputes and the spread of radical ideas became increasingly common.

Much of this analysis is unexceptional and widely shared. Nonetheless, there are aspects that will raise questions in many academic readers' minds even though these interviews were designed almost certainly to appeal to prospective readers of her book and to promote its sale. Take the issue of the Elizabethan religious settlement. When Elizabeth came to the throne in November, 1558, England's population was undoubtedly largely Catholic in its religious sympathies: by 1580, these sympathies were predominantly Protestant: by March, 1603 when she died, England was an overwhelmingly Protestant nation with only one to one and a half per cent of its people of a Catholic religious persuasion as John Hayward's research has shown. On the continent, Elizabeth had successfully aided the Dutch in resisting Habsburg and Catholic reconquest: in France, the Huguenots with English help had survived efforts by the Catholic League and its Habsburg patrons to extirpate Protestantism. (It was after 1618 that continental Protestantism went into serious retreat.) For all the strain on the Crown's finances, England had met the major challenges of the second half of the sixteenth century: the throne passed peacefully to James VI of Scotland followed thereafter by an end, temporary though it was, to continental conflicts. The fear of a war of succession to which Clare Jackson alludes was never realistic or realised. King James, whom she apparently regards as a relatively successful ruler, was certainly a "foreign ruler" in her terms who weakened royal finances and prestige, who failed to give effective leadership to the Protestant cause after the outbreak of the Thirty Years' war in 1618, and who  left a politically impoverished and religiously disputed inheritance to his second but surviving son, Charles I. The latter intensified the retreat from government by consent that his father had initiated and exacerbated conflicts in each of his three kingdoms. (That all three came to revolt against his rule was less of a surprise than revisionist historians might have thought thirty or more years ago.) Ironically, the same authoritarian approach was true of the victorious Parliamentary, Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes that emerged from the Civil Wars and the aftermath of the King's execution. After the Restoration in 1660, Charles II was tempted periodically to emulate the authoritarian regime of his cousin, Louis XIV of France, but was sufficiently astute and constrained enough not to do so before he died: his brother and successor, James II was not only tempted but attempted the venture of entrenching arbitrary rule and a return to Catholicism, hence the Dutch invasion of 1688 and the post-1689 constitutional settlement. 

The recurrent fears and uncertainties underlying Clare Jackson's argument in her interviews do not, therefore, seem entirely convincing. Were the insecurities she identified uppermost in the daily minds of the inhabitants of Orsett in Essex or of Ossett in Yorkshire or of any other place in England or Wales between 1588 and 1688? It is unlikely. Continental claimants to the English throne were never plausible - not even the Palatine ones before the 1640s - before 1688-1689 nor were fears of Catholic encirclement ever realised in the Civil War period.  Popish plots, the alleged intrigues of foreign princesses and disaffected recusants, above all the large-scale persecution of continental Protestants by Catholic powers, reinforced English Protestantism throughout the seventeenth century. There were enough English (and Scottish) professional soldiers experienced in European conflicts to make the prospect of a successful invasion of England before 1688 unlikely even if troops could have been conveyed across the Channel or the North sea in the face of English (or Dutch) naval forces. What made the period exciting was less the external threats England faced or the possibility, however remote, of a return to Catholicism: it was not even the horrified reaction to Charles I's execution in 1649: it was the commercial and financial development of England, the rise and eventual triumph of aristocratic constitutionalism, the growth of political parties in a recognisable sense, the legal protection of the subject's rights, the influence of the press and the efflorescence of the state that made its history so intriguing. On the stimulus that gives to the study of England, Clare Jackson and I may be in agreement.