I am amazed that this wonderful book has not yet been reviewed on Amazon so will offer my humble contribution.
This book deals with the history of England from the Spanish Armada to the Glorious Revolution, as well as looking at the preliminaries (the execution of Mary Stuart just before 1588) and the immediate aftermath of William and Mary's ultimately successful coup (the Battle of the Boyne etc).
The approach taken in this book is very much focussed on international relations, and England appears rather like a planet, moving in relation to others, the key players being France, Spain and the Dutch Republic, along with Scotland and Ireland closer to home, and other players such as Denmark and the Papacy. It is a history of England so Scotland remains a foreign player in spite of the fact it shared a monarch after 1603.
The author has mined the diplomatic correspondence adroitly and takes us to the heart of the action, as seen through the eyes of these sophisticated players. She shows England as something of a rogue state during the Commonwealth, as well as being a potentially or actually failing state for much of the 17th century. Other primary witness archives provide more first-hand testimony, and this is a very vivid portrayal of the period.
We can see the perspective of contemporaries who could not know that the English republic would be relatively short-lived. Charles II's reign of often stereotyped as a national party, but in fact we see here that it was a turbulent time.
The importance of religion in everyone's life in Europe at the time was such that religion pervaded all politics. Another key theme is religious diversity in the three kingdoms of the Stuarts. 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. This was a recipe for turbulence, domestic conflict and foreign interference (an activity of which of course England itself guilty). 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.
This is a turbulent period during which the English executed two crowned monarchs, one of them not even their own (and they executed the second without much reference to his subjects in his other kingdoms), lived without a monarch for over a decade and then finally deposed one king on little obvious legal precedent other than a dislike of his religion.
The final part of the book deals with the so-called Glorious Revolution and the author gives due prominence to the fact that there was a strong military aspect to this event, as William arrived with foreign soldiers, Dutch mainly but his army at the Boyne included other foreigners from protestant powers, while James has his catholic foreign allies.
This counters the more common presentation of the event as a peaceful transition of power, where the focus is on the constitutional aspects which limited the monarch's power rather than on the subsequent wars in Ireland and Scotland as well as the accession of the three kingdoms (and a place actually called "Britain" after 1707) into an international alliance system which embroiled the country in a series of major European wars of which the Nine Years' War of 1688-1697 was just the first.
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.
Anyway, a digression from the period 1588 to 1688 but that's history, it never ends.
The author's style is highly readable and readers should not be deterred by the length. Given the scope of the subject matter, there was a lot to fit into circa 500 pages, but there is a good balance between depth of coverage and narrative pace.
Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688
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