House where the metropolitan elite threw stones to hold off Oliver Cromwell’s army
DIANE PURKISS HISTORY
The Siege Of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story
Jessie Childs
Bodley Head £25 ★★★★★
Basing House today is a semi-circle of grassy lumps and an enigmatic and shabby brick wall. Yet its neglected tale is well worth telling, as Jessie Childs shows in her compellingly readable book. Basing House – or Loyalty House, as it became known – was one of the largest and longest-lasting strongholds held for the King and his allies against the armies of Parliament during the English Civil War. To it fled actors, printmakers, astrologers, writers, artists, musicians – a metropolitan elite, if you will – who had served the court and could imagine no other life. They managed, with armed help, to hold off two major assaults.
If these are just words to you, reading this book will help them come alive. As well as the strongly Catholic lord of this particular manor, accustomed to playing chess with the King, we meet a wide range of people who simply wanted to live their lives. They are an engaging crew, who found themselves besieged by a fanatical and unrepresentative minority who shouted loudest.
If the Parliamentarians look a bit repulsive here, the more romantic Royalists look amateurish and incompetent. No plans had been made on the Royalist side for the slow torment of defeat. The Royalists had confidently expected to destroy the New Model Army in the field, not because God was on the side of the Anglicans, but because it was assumed that the army was staffed entirely by scum. However, the scum were motivated, fanatical and organised.
Childs does not explain just how extraordinarily they were organised, but the main factor was probably promotion on merit rather than the previous system of giving the job of command to the person of highest social rank. Who knew that such a thing could work?
It worked a treat at the Battle of Naseby in 1645, and the result was an enormous defeat for the Royalist army. Survivors trickled into Basing House in Hampshire. The attempt to turn it into a stronghold to be held not just for the King himself – who never went there – but for his fleeing supporters as the siege lines around Oxford, the Royalist capital, collapsed was haphazard and belated. The more people arrived, the more difficult supplies became. Non-combatants ate the food, and disheartened and discouraged the soldiers. Against Oliver Cromwell’s cannonade, women and children threw stones or dropped melted pitch from the walls. Cromwell’s men had been spurred on by the promise of supplies and plunder, and also by the relentless demonisation of the defenders.
To 21st Century readers, the defenders – a collection of colourful characters – don’t look especially demonic. They are a little like the Wild Wood dwellers in The Wind In The Willows: fierce outsiders, understanding the rule of loyalty rather than law. Among them was the governor of the garrison, Marmaduke Rawdon, who adopted a stoat as his personal badge. Stoats are ferocious predators but it was also believed that a stoat would rather die than besmirch its beautiful white fur.
Then there was the owner of the house, the Marquess of Winchester and his second wife, Honora, who had initially wanted to marry the attractive-sounding Randal MacDonnell, a handsome man with red hair who was the grandson of the Irish rebel Tyrone. At 19, she had been written off as a failure on the marriage market, even though she was beautiful, and the granddaughter of Francis Walsingham, the great spymaster of Elizabethan England. Her mother had briefly been married to the poet Sir Philip Sidney, and after that, to the Earl of Essex, favourite of Elizabeth I, so Honora knew all about the power of Monarchy on the private lives of the aristocracy.
She also knew about the price of religious allegiance. Her mother converted to Catholicism, inspiring bitter laughter among the Catholics persecuted by Walsingham.
How could people withstand the experience of living inside such a brutal conflict, beginning to starve and fall prey to disease as the cannons fired again and again? Childs admits that we cannot always know, but she does a splendid job of portraying the trauma of being forced together into a tiny space that is all that’s left of a life. When the house fell, the furious besiegers attacked the remaining defenders. The artist Inigo Jones was stripped to the skin, and those without any transferable wealth were slaughtered.
It makes for harrowing reading. Perhaps that is why this part of British history is less well known to most than it deserves to be. This beautifully written and lucid account of a single extraordinary episode sets out to change that.