The Times - UK (2022-04-30)

14 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times

Winchester detested each other and

Catholics and Anglicans worshipped sepa-

rately, in mutual distaste, while being

tarred by their enemies with the same

accusations of “popery”. Among up to 400

hundred or so combatants, and almost as

many “useless mouths”, there were

resentful conscripts and hidden traitors:

one may have been Winchester’s youngest

brother, known as “hangman Paulet” after

he was obliged to act as the executioner of

his co-conspirators.

Such cruelty was not uncommon in the

Civil War, as people became hardened by

its horrors. At Basing House the boredoms

and bickering were relieved only by the

terror of an attack.

The first assault of the house came in

November 1643. “The fog was thick and

enveloped the house. A lone trumpeter

emerged with a summons,” Childs tells us.

The Parliamentarian general William

Waller was warning Winchester that he

could surrender or see his house sacked

and no quarter given. Winchester rejected

the summons.

“At 1pm, the sun finally punched

through the fog and Waller’s army was

revealed like a peacock in the park,” Childs

writes. There were 16 troops of horse, eight

companies of dragoons and 36 foot com-

panies, including the Greencoats from

Farnham and a blue-coated company

carrying firelock muskets. Above Major

General Waller, who was “little in person”,

fluttered a taffeta flag depicting a walnut

tree, three gold fleurs-de-lys and the

motto “the fruit of virtue”.

After an attack came the reckoning.

Bitter fruit for some. One man was found

in a field, a hand half off, hideous slashes to

his face and torso, his life saved only by the

maggots eating at his putrefying flesh. A

sergeant was “shot in the members”. The

suffering of the Parliamentarians burnt in

a fire in the grain store was so dreadful the

surgeons allowed them to die rather than

prolong their agony.

The next attack came hard on the first.

Ladders were put against the wall. An

informer guided the besiegers as they

climbed under a hail of bricks hurled by the

women on the roof. The enraged women

cried: “Come up, Roundheads if ye dare!”

The Roundheads swore in turn that they

would not only take the treasure “that doth

lie buried in the ground”, they would also

take that which lay between “the sheets”.

Rain and the dark saved the Royalists

that night, and among the dead was

Waller’s informant. Wounded Round-

heads lay in no man’s land near the house.

One, his leg shattered, cried out “piteous-

ly”, before talking a knife and cutting his

throat. And so, on and off, with periods in

which lost troops could be replaced and

food gathered, the siege continued. There

were outbreaks of smallpox, periods when

salt ran out, the meat went rancid and

people died of food poisoning. With staples

such as flour and corn scarce, they sur-

vived on peas and oats, and often had “only

puddly and bad water” to drink.

In September 1645 a German merce-

nary was employed to use a crude form of

chemical warfare in which shells capable

of releasing an arsenic-laced gas would

be fired into the house. This, according

to one contemporary, “annoyed” the be-

sieged and made them “gnash their teeth

for indignation”, but it didn’t defeat them.

The end came only with the arrival of

Cromwell in October 1645. Rawden had by

then left Basing House, with many of his

men, after a final falling out with Winches-

ter. They were replaced by teenage con-

scripts. Nevertheless, Winchester refused

Cromwell’s summons. Cromwell declared

that Basing House deserved no mercy and

the final attack began. It was reported that

the defenders showed “incredible bold-

ness” and “fought it out to the last”, know-

ing the end would be brutal — as it was.

Robbins who had mocked the Round-

heads from the ramparts, was “slain as he

was turning and acting like a player”. Two

Catholic priests were killed on the spot and

two were kept alive for public execution.

An Anglican clergyman was saved by his

daughter who was killed in his place.

Other women were stripped and “enter-

tained by the common soldiers”, as the

chaplain of Cromwell’s army sneered.

Jones was carried out of Basing House

wrapped in a blanket as another fire began.

Soon the house was no more. Peake had

survived, as had Winchester. The “Catho-

lic oligarch” nearly died of hunger as a pris-

oner, but was released from the Tower of

London after the execution of Charles I.

The ruins of his lost home remain, for

Childs, a “numinous place” that captures

what GM Trevelyan called “the poetry of

history”.

The Siege of Loyalty House is not only

deeply researched. Childs has composed a

wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a

touch of the gothic. The story ends with

Winchester’s son, Charles, who built a

lodge overlooking the ruins, boozing his

nights away under the reign of the restored

Charles II and running hounds in torchlit

hunts over the “bone-riddled ground”.

I

n the ruins of Basing House in Hamp-
shire, burnt by Oliver Cromwell’s army
in 1645, drinking glasses from Venice
and a Yoruba ivory cup from west
Africa have been found, but little else
of its fabled buried treasure. Many more
modest items have been discovered — the
leather sole of a child’s shoe, lead shot, the
severed skull of a young man — poignant
and grim reminders of the two-year siege
of the Royalist stronghold during the
English Civil War.
The treasure had belonged to Basing
House’s owner, the fabulously rich John
Paulet, Marquess of Winchester. It was
known as Loyalty House after his motto,
Aimez Loyauté (“Love Loyalty”), although
Parliamentarians had other names for it.
Winchester was a Catholic, his house a
“limb of Babylon” and an “enchanted
castle”. It was said to be impregnable, with
walls “as thick as those of Pluto’s Court”.
The kind of place that “once guarded
giants”, but now held golden calves and a
“nest of vermin”.
In the early chapters of The Siege of
Loyalty House, Jessie Childs introduces us
to what the people who lived in this ver-
min’s nest during the siege were up to in
1642, the year the war began. The actor
and comedian William Robbins was
performing at the Cockpit Theatre in
Drury Lane. Robert Peake, grandson of
the artist who had painted the Jacobean
court, was an art dealer. The dapper
60-year-old London merchant Marma-
duke Rawden was building his fortune in
the Caribbean. His favourite saying was
“win gold to wear gold”.
These men were not Catholic, but Raw-
den had a cousin who was a Church of
England bishop and the Parliamentarians
were no friends to bishops, even Protestant
ones. They did not care for the theatre
either and Robbins had been a player with
the Queen’s Men employed by that
“Popish brat of France”, Henrietta Maria,
wife of Charles I. As for Peake: he sold
illustrated Bibles under the counter,
religious pictures being anathema to
Protestant iconoclasts.
None of this made them enthusiastic
Royalists. Like most people they had no
wish to fight and hoped the war would be
over by Christmas. Rawden had even led a
petition to parliament for peace. It proved,
however, to be no time for moderate men.
Rawden became the military governor
of Basing House, although the Marquess
was still very much in situ and determined
to rule his home and its garrison of several
hundred soldiers and “useless mouths”.
There were Protestant clergymen and
Catholic priests, the very young and the
very old, the elderly architect and set de-
signer Inigo Jones among them. There
were also women, who weren’t that use-
less. They washed, cooked, and made bul-
lets from the lead off the roof.
Childs, whose books include God’s Trai-
tors and Henry VIII’s Last Victim, is very
good at conjuring the claustrophobia of a
siege: the hell of other people. Rawden and

gruesome end The Roundheads attack Basing House in this 19th-century painting by Charles West Cope

Battle loyal: the Royalists’ last stand

There’s poetry in this

vivid account of the

long, savage siege

of Basing House,

says Leanda de Lisle

Women on

the roof

hurled a hail

of bricks,

crying:

‘Come up,

Roundheads

if ye dare!’

The Siege of

Loyalty House

A Civil War Story

by Jessie Childs

Bodley Head, 318pp; £25

BASING HOUSE DEFENDED BY THE CAVALIERS MURAL BY CHARLES WEST COPE © PARLIAMENTARY ART COLLECTION WOA 2897

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