Clare Jackson

Clare Jackson is a British historian specialising in seventeenth-century Britain, particularly the Stuart monarchy and Britain’s political, religious and diplomatic relationships with continental Europe. She is Honorary Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Walter Grant Scott Fellow in History at Trinity Hall. Her work is especially concerned with how contemporaries understood the instability of the Stuart kingdoms, rather than viewing the English Civil Wars and Revolution only through later constitutional interpretations. Jackson has also brought Stuart history to a wider audience through BBC television programmes including The Stuarts and The Stuarts in Exile.

Her best-known book, Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588–1688, examines a century of English and British upheaval from the perspective of European observers, encompassing the later reign of Elizabeth I, James VI and I, Charles I, the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Restoration and Glorious Revolution. The book won the Wolfson History Prize in 2022. Jackson has also written Charles II for the Penguin Monarchs series and, in 2025, published The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I, a major reassessment of the first Stuart monarch to rule both Scotland and England. That biography won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in June 2026.