Clare Jackson teaches history at Cambridge. Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688 won the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. Her Life of James VI and I, The Mirror of Great Britain, came out in 2025.
In a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest...
Above all, Jackson presents James as a ‘king of words’. No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His ‘manual on kingcraft’, Basilikon...
England was certainly an oddity to her friends and enemies on the Continent. ‘There was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English,’ the Spanish envoy Íñigo...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.