Dan Snow's History Hit - The Siege of Loyalty House

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

The Civil War was the most traumatic conflict in British history, pitting friends and family members against each other, tearing down the old order.Award-winning historian Jessie Childs plunges the reader into the shock of the struggle through one of its most dramatic episodes: the siege of Basing House. To the parliamentarian Roundheads, the Hampshire mansion was a bastion of royalism, popery and excess. Its owner was both a Catholic and a staunch supporter of Charles I. His motto Love Loyalty was etched into the windows. He refused all terms of surrender.As royalist strongholds crumbled, Loyalty House, as it became known, stood firm. Over two years, the men, women and children inside were battered, bombarded, starved and gassed. Their resistance became legendary. Inigo Jones designed the fortifications and the women hurled bricks from the roof. But in October 1645, Oliver Cromwell rolled in the heavy guns and the defenders prepared for a last stand.Drawing on exciting new sources, Childs uncovers the face of the war through a cast of unforgettable characters: the fanatical Puritan preacher who returns from Salem to take on the king; the plant-hunting apothecary who learns to kill as well as heal; the London merchant and colonist who clashes with Basing's aristocratic lord; and Cromwell himself who feels the hand of God on his sword. And we hear too the voices of dozens of ordinary men and women caught in the crossfire.The Siege of Loyalty House is a thrilling tale of war and peace, terror and faith, friendship and betrayal - and of a world turned upside down.

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get your parts. An age characterised by populism, climate change, a polarising media and morality crusades. No, not the 21st century, but the 17th. And yet for some reason, the British civil wars of the mid 17th century, which ended with the execution of a king, have fallen behind the Tudors in their grasp on the public imagination. I think today's podcast will make you rethink that. Today we're talking about one moment that gives a way into the realities of the Civil War. Basinghouse near Basingstoke was the grandest, largest non-royal house in England. The family motto was Love Loyalty, and this mansion, owned by the Marquess of Winchester, whose loyalty was to the king, was nicknamed Loyalty House. It was strategically and symbolically important

to both the royalists and the parliamentarians, and so its fate was to be besieged and blockaded. But, against all expectations, it didn't roll over. The hell that was the battle over Basing House is the Civil War in a nutshell. Friend turned against friend, brother against brother, starvation, survival, awful warfare, and extraordinary innovation innovation and the beginning of popular caustic journalism this wonderful terrible story has been unearthed by jesse charles jesse is one of the finest historians working today her first book henry the eighth's last

victim about the life of henry howard earlrey, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Her second book, God's Traitors, Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, won the Penn-Hessel-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Her new book is The Siege of Loyalty House. new book is The Siege of Loyalty House. It is always an event when Jesse Charles produces a new book. Jesse, in your writing career to date, you have been delivering these brilliant books, each one biting off part of the early modern period in sort of roughly 50-year chunks. So we've got Henry VIII's Last Victim set in the 1540s, and then God's traitors with the Elizabethans,

and now the Civil War. And each time you found a small story of an individual or a family or something that illuminates the wider context. So I guess where I want to start with talking about your exciting new book is what drew you to this story and more generally what draws you to this approach this kind of micro historical approach that you have that's a really good question I am happier in the archives I'm happier sort of drilling down in the nitty-gritty and I think through you pick the right story, you can illuminate so much of the age, especially with God's Traitors. It was about, as you say, an Elizabethan recusant family. But through them, I felt I could sort of explore the politics and the religion and the military

history of the whole of that period, and also get a sense through the individual lives of what it is actually like to live through it. I think that's what interests me more than anything. How did these people actually live? So I suppose there's sort of anthropological element there. And yes, with this one, The Siege of Basing House, I called the book The Siege of Loyalty House. Loyalty House was its nickname after the motto of the owner, love loyalty. And I wasn't sure for a while, actually, if it would fly as a book because I loved the story. I've always remembered and had in my head this image of Inigo Jones, the great architect of the age. He was 72 years old at the time of the stormy,

amazing house. And he was stripped of his clothes and carried out wrapped in a blanket. And I've always remembered that image, but I wasn't sure if there would be enough characters and people. And what I wanted to do was tell the story of really the whole Civil War, explain the Civil War and the impact of the war and the before, the during and the after through various individual lives without confusing the reader too, too much. And actually, the more I researched and the more I dug down into the archives, I just got completely excited and thrilled because there are some characters, and I keep saying characters as if it's a novel, but they felt like that. They felt very, very vivid to me. There was a merchant, an apothecary, and an actor, and a vintner, and all these people, sort of Londoners, most of them. And through their lives, I realised I could

sort of tell the story of the build-up to war and then everything else that goes on. So it was kind of thrilling. But I hope it's not, I mean, it's certainly not just military history. It's social history and religious history and European history and political and everything. So yes, start with the small and hopefully it sort of blossoms out. And I have so much I want to ask you about your characters and about all sorts of things you've touched on. One more general question before we get into some of the detail. But you are trying in this, as you've just said, to tell the story of the Civil War more generally.

Given that it's such a dramatic epoch-mating event, why has it failed to capture the public imagination thus far? Your book may change things, I hope. Thus far, exactly. I think there are various reasons. You could argue that because of the Restoration, because the Republic ultimately failed and we had a king again, it wasn't quite the revolution in the same way that you can talk about the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. And that would be right. I think you could also say that civil war wasn't so impactful and so contemporary in terms of relevance as, say, the American Civil War. I mean, you only have to look at the

Gettysburg National Park and compare it to Naseby Battlefield to see, you know, the different impacts they have on the national consciousness. And that would be right too, but it doesn't really fully explain it because the Civil War did loom large with the Victorians. And it's only really quite recently that we've stopped talking about it. And as you say, I think that will change. But I think a lot of it is to do with the people who are in charge with what we study, whether it's the national curriculum at school, whether it's TV programs, whether it's movies, even. I mean, there certainly used to be a bit of a sort of reticence about taking on the Civil War. A Civil War doesn't sell, you know, we've all been told. And actually, when we did a big

documentary on it, presented by Lisa Hilton, based largely on Leander Dallal's White King, it did really, really well. So I think a bit like Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. I think especially now the civil war really, really matters because it is a time again of war in Europe and populism and puritanism and a polarizing new media and culture change, of course, climate change as well. The mid 17th century was the most intense phase of the Little Ice Age. So I think now is the time to have a look again at how all these movements can really cause global crisis. So we've come to know the two sides of the Civil War as the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. Can we start with that language? Where do these terms come from? They came from the streets of London in the build up to war at the end of 1641. So Cavalier was a word that had been used before Chevalier as a sort of sort of chivalric term, quite complementary.

Either that or it was sometimes used in terms of sort of aristocratic rakehells, a bit like the Earl of Surrey, the poet Earl of Surrey in the Tudor period. But cavalier as a political term and as a pejorative political term comes right out from the violence that is in London, just before Charles I tries to arrest the five members and just before he leaves London and then the war starts. And there are two separate groups and factions. The roundheads, it's thought to be because they were largely apprentices. I mean, this is a generalization, but because their haircuts were cropped short, so they were the roundheads.

And the cavaliers were seen as the sort of more establishment, long-haired, dashing, but cruel followers of the king. And they started calling each other these terms right in the sort of December days of 1641, when the streets of London did descend into some violence, but it was quite controlled violence. But there was a lot of petitioning, and there was a lot of protests, and there was a lot of posturing. And I want to think about what those December tumults were about, but also sort of generally what this is about. One of your characteristically lovely phrases, you say that royalism was a complicated fidgety beast. And the reasons that people chose each side were therefore

complex. But I wonder if you can kind of unpack them a bit for us, because of course, it's so important why people chose these sides and that they did indeed. Yeah, it is a complicated beast. You also have people changing sides as well. I hate making analogies to Brexit because it sounds like a very bad piece of journalism. But in some ways it is because it is different things for different people. For some people, it is long term and quite abstract things like liberty or law, or they just say religion. They often didn't explain themselves beyond that. So liberty, for example, they want the freedom to be able to worship how they want, especially the Puritans who really think that Charles I is intruding on their pathway to salvation. They think he's throwing sort of popish obstacles in the way,

and they really want to have this personal relationship with God and the word of God. And so they think that Charles and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Lord, by doing things like putting up altar rails around the communion table, it seems very Catholic to them and very interfering. And that's a big problem because they see the Pope as Antichrist and they see the Pope's followers as vassals of Antichrist. They're sort of thinking in terms of an existential apocalyptic war. So for some people, it's huge like that. For other people, it was initially a tax just levied on coastal regions in time of war. And then it became a tax levied on everyone

in times of peace. So it seemed very much like a regular tax and this concerned a lot of people. For other people, you might oppose the king just because someone in your family or someone at work is incredibly influential and persuasive. So there were all sorts of different reasons, but ultimately, it comes down, it sort of boils down in the long parliament, which is the parliament that comes into being in November 1640 after 11 years of Charles trying to get it alone and rule without parliament. So there's this simmering cauldron of resentment. And throughout the long Parliament, Charles actually concedes quite a lot. He allows

triennial Parliaments to happen. He gets rid of some of his favourites. He says that Parliament doesn't have to be dissolved until Parliament decides. So he's given up quite a lot of powers. But ultimately, it boils down to, has he given up enough powers? And one group in the Lords, in the Commons, very influential, sometimes called the Junto, you know, wanted to take more power from him, especially his power to executive and military appointments. of followers who sort of come back and think, well, actually, everyone really wanted this parliament and they had grievances to address. But a lot of them were beginning to think that actually Charles had conceded enough and they tended to be the royalists. And they thought, no, the king does need to have some prerogative powers and some authority here. So in a way, it's a sort of battle over sovereignty. And when Charles is executed, he famously said that a subject and a sovereign are clean, different things. And that was his view.

And yet, there's also very much a sense, as you've alluded to in part there, that this is a question of both sides thinking that God is with them. And I was really struck by the way that you talk in the early pages of your book about parishioners in Essex trying to tear the rags of Rome off their vicar or the surpluses in Hillingdon being cut up to make menstrual cloths, this kind of public zeal for attacking pictures and vestments and stained glass and books and that sort of thing, rather like the pulling down the statues. Why do you think there was such sort of aggression towards things? And do you think that that kind of fundamental religious difference is really at the heart of it as well

as this question about sovereignty? Yes, I think religion is huge. And going back to your earlier question, I think that possibly is one reason why people are put off as well, because they'd rather have soap operas and sex, let's face it. But actually, and I hope I show in the book, religion is incredibly interesting and galvanizing. And certainly when it comes to war, the militant sermons are absolutely terrifying. They get your heart racing. I think it's very hard for us to put ourselves back in their shoes. This is a time when nearly everyone believed in

the afterlife and thought that that mattered more to a lot of them. And it is existential. It is apocalyptic for some of these people, for the Puritans, the hot Protestants. They see what's going on in Europe. They see the 30 Years' War. They see things like the sack of Magdeburg, which was an appalling Catholic atrocity, when pretty much most of the town of Magdeburg was destroyed and the people were killed and raped and burnt. They see the horrors that are happening in Ireland in October 1641. And they see England as the last bastion, you know, the last defense against the Antichrist. So that sense of urgency and fervor comes from real fear, real panic, that things like the altar rails and the vestments and the stained glass are impeding. We're not only impeding their path to salvation,

but they're almost sort of a fifth column. Anyone who encourages those kinds of things are fifth columnists of Antichrist. And they very much see that England is the new Israel. That's how they see it. They think the last battle will be in England. So for them, it is really important. The other thing is you have Puritan preachers

in the pulpits. And they are, I mean, I suppose you could call them sort of populist preachers. They're very, very good at drawing on people's worst fears. And so everything is portrayed in terms of darkness and light. And there's one chap in the book called Hugh Peter. And I have to be quite careful because I try not to be too pro-royalist or pro-parliamentarian. I'm just trying to tell the story as I see it. But he really is quite a despicable character. He sort of makes rape jokes. And he says things like,

the cavaliers are coming. This is the Londoners. The cavaliers are going to come and they're going to break through into London. And they're going to sack London like they sack Magdeburg in Germany. And they're going to rape all your wives and they're going to rape all your daughters. And then he sort of says, oh, unless you've got ugly wives and daughters and then you'll be all right. And he sort of makes people laugh, but also uses, yeah, just really horrific imagery. And so people come out of church and they've got these violent images in their head. And again, that sort of galvanises them and frightens them. Absolutely. And I suppose it's also galvanising people to violence. If you can imagine these violent acts, then you can do them. And we'll come back and talk about that in a bit as well, because I really want to talk about the brutality of the war.

I noted when I was reading it how fair and even-handed you were to both sides, actually. It's one of my little scrawled comments. The other thing I want to say is that you write so beautifully. And I noticed that Simon Sharma had described your prose as being like Tolstoy's, which is actually, I think, the highest praise that anyone could apply to it, and certainly that Simon could apply to it. And one of the things in that is that you do have these characters, and you introduce us in the book to a group of royalists, including Thomas Johnson and Marmaduke Rawdon. What a name. Can you introduce some of them to us now? I certainly can. And that was very kind. I definitely did a little dance.

I think it is the people. Again, going back to the people, Marmaduke Rawdon was quite hard to research because even though it is quite an extraordinary name, his son was called Marmaduke Rawdon and his nephew was called Marmaduke Rawdon. As you know, Susie, they're not very original in what they call their children.

Thomas Johnson was tricky too because he was Thomas Johnson. There were a lot of them about starting with Johnson, actually. So he was an apothecary. And he was the first man that we know about to sell bananas in London. And I love that. And not only that, he drew them. If he'd survived, he probably would have been in the Royal Society. He drew them and he described them as well as he could. And he said that they looked like little boats and they tasted like melon. And he wasn't just an apothecary, he was a plant hunter. So anytime he had any free time, he and his apothecary mates would get on a boat and they would go off to various places in the country and they would try and find plants.

They were botanists effectively, and then they would write them down in their notebooks. And some of Johnson's notebooks we have, and they're in Latin. And the verb he always uses is festinare, to hurry. And you get that sense so much when you're reading his stuff that he just, he's fizzing, you know, he's going from here to there and he just, he doesn't want to miss a thing. So even one night when his mates will get drunk and they're lolling in a wagon to get to the next spot, Johnson doesn't. He goes on foot and he goes along the riverbanks and he wants to find more plants. So there's this wonderful sense of meeting plants and you just feel his evangelism and his love of life, really. There's that wonderful line in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, right at the end of it. There are two characters, a husband and wife, and they're in

a forest. And they've been through hell, everything. They've seen so much brutality, and the whole book is incredibly brutal. And Grossman himself had been at Stalingrad, and he'd been in Berlin after the German surrender. And yet he always retained the sense of faith in the spirit of man and what he calls the modest peculiarities of the individual. And I love that. You don't have to be extraordinary. You don't have to be a hero. You just have to keep hold of your modest peculiarities and your individualism. Anyway, so he ends in the forest, and this couple listen to the silence. And in that silence, he writes, you could hear both the lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself. And I feel very much when I read

bits of Thomas Johnson, the apothecary, that I get that sense of the furious joy of life itself, fizzing around 17th century London, selling bananas and finding plants. And his great dream was to write a botany, a flora of England and Wales, a comprehensive catalogue. And he'd herberised, to use another nice verb, through 25 English and Welsh counties and was well on his way to achieving it. And then the war came. And so there was a world turned upside down. And then Marmaduke Rawdon is a very different fish, but they come together and they end up being officers in the same regiment. And it was called the London Regiment. What I found in my research is that all these guys knew each other before the

war. Most of them were peace petitioners. They didn't want war at all. Rawdon, I think, is like Johnson, actually. He was born in Yorkshire, but he lived in London. He was a merchant, a wine merchant. I think of him as a sort of peaky blinder type, actually. He was a cartel leader. He was a big man in his livery company, the Clothworkers. He was a big man in the customs house. You can imagine him sort of striding along the Thames path. He was a colonist as well. He was one of the first planters of Barbados. So he's quite a hard man. And what's interesting is when he comes to Basing House, he's the military governor there. But the owner of Basing House is an aristocrat. And I have in my book, the two portraits of them next to each other. And I do love the juxtaposition because the Marquess is

Catholic and aristocratic and very soft features, laughter lines, and a frilly lace collar. And Marmaduke Rawdon is very stern, piercing grey eyes, sharp cheekbones, and a very stiff lawn collar. And yeah, they're not going to get on. You actually mentioned there another character, as it were, in the book, Basinghouse itself, known as you've told us as Loyalty House after the family motto. Can you describe the house to us and tell us its history? Yeah, sure. It was the grandest house in England. It was said to be the largest non-royal palace in England. It was owned by John Paul V, Marquess of Winchester. And well, there were two parts of it. There was an old house,

which was a sort of 13th century castle built on top of an old Norman ring work. And that was linked by two bridges to the more modern bit, the new house, which was a sort of Tudor pleasure palace. And that had been built by William Paulet, the first Marquess of Winchester. And he is a really interesting character. Winchester. And he is a really interesting character. He's one of those Tudor survivors who manages to work his way through every reign and every swing of the religious pendulum. And he ends up being Lord Treasurer to Edward VI. And then he's fine in Mary's reign as well. Mary and Philip of Spain have their honeymoon at Basing House. And then he's a great favourite of Elizabeth I. and she visits Basing

House several times. And according to one account, he died at the age of 97. And Elizabeth was supposed to have said that if he was a younger man, she would have married him above all the men in England. And he had this wonderful motto, which was a sort of poem that was attributed to him. He said, a poem that was attributed to him. He said, late supping I forbear, wine and women I forswear, my neck and feet I keep from cold. No wonder then though I be old, I am a willow, not an oak. I chide, but never hurt with stroke. And I think that sums him up. He could bend and he wasn't too intolerant. So he was sort of the great man of the dynasty. By the time you get to the fifth Marcus of Winchester,

he's less of a, who's the defender of Basing House, he's less of a public character. He still has a strong sense of honour, the family motto, love, loyalty, aim, loyalt. But I get the sense always with him that ideally he would have preferred to have been a private man. Aris the Crass, of course, are the natural leaders of society in this age, and that was never going

to happen. And if you have a big house like Basing House, and people were daunted by it, I mean, they said it was as big as the Tower of London. You have to lead not only your county, but your country at times like this. A big house is a weapon in war, whether you like it or not. like this. A big house is a weapon in war, whether you like it or not. And so I think, you know, he steps up, but he is not naturally a fighter. His wife, on the other hand, Honorer, his second wife, Marchioness of Winchester, is a wonderful character. She was the granddaughter of Sir Francis Wilsium, which is quite fun for someone whose last book was about recusants, because Honor ends up being Catholic. And Francis Walsion, of course, was the great persecutor of Catholics. We won't go into whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, or whether he was justified or not.

But yes, so Honor's mother, Frances with an E, was the spymaster's daughter. And she had been with him and his wife in Paris during the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. She was only about five, honour his mother. So that's quite something. Then as a teenager, she married the great Protestant hero, Philip Sidney, and was very soon widowed when he died in battle. And then after that, she married the second Earl of Essex, the rebel Earl of Essex, and was actually with him when there was the Great Denouement after his rebellion against Elizabeth I, and they had to stack up books against the windows of Essex House to stop the bullets coming in. So she had this incredible life. And after Essex was executed, she finally got to marry who she wanted to marry, who was her Anglo-Irish lover, Richard Burke, Clanricard. And so the product of that

marriage was Honora. So in fact, Honora Martianess of Winchester, her half-brother, was the third Earl of Essex who will lead the Parliamentarian army. He's the Lord General of the Parliamentarian army, and honour, of course, in defence of a key royalist stronghold. So it's just another example of thousands of families that were torn apart by this violent conflict. Yes, your book really powerfully gives us that sense of the fundamental dynamic of civil war, which is that you get neighbour turned against neighbor and brother killed brothers, cousins, cousins, and friends, they're friends, as you say. Let's think a bit about warfare

because you're very good at describing warfare. You give a very vivid description, for example, of the first battle of the Civil War, Edge Hill. And perhaps you can tell us a bit about the stuff of warfare in the 17th century, you know, muskets and granados and halberds and all the rest of it. Yeah, I love the words actually. Granados comes from the Spanish for pomegranate. And they sort of look like supersized cartoon bombs almost. They're

great big round shells. And inside them, they were put gunpowder, but also all sorts of other nasties, them, they were put gunpowder, but also all sorts of other nasties, nails and stones and combustible things. And they would be shot out of these mortar guns that were sort of squashed and they would shoot them. So this is different from cannons. They would shoot them very short, very high. The angle would go very high and the difference between cannon which would have a stronger impact but from more of a distance at a lower angle the granados could fly over the wall so they're aerial i mean just like bombs are now and so they and they powdered basing house quite a lot and the thing about them was even if they didn't often do the damage um that was intended they shredded nerves and they shredded morale because you never know when it's going to

come and how it's going to come and if you're ever going to be safe so granados were and of course grenade comes from it to the smaller version they were very frightening in the artillery train then you have the more standard cannon and culver and all sorts of different types of heavy artillery, including quite small ones called, they'd be known as drakes, and they would shoot out three pound balls, six pound balls, quite small. But they could also shoot out something called case shot, which was effectively canister shells filled with musket balls. And they were very effective, very nasty anti-personnel advice. And they could strafe attackers as they ran in to attack the house. Then you have petards. The besiegers

would sometimes use petards to try and blow up walls and gates. And the thing with that is, you'd sort of, it was like a bell shaped bomb and the petardier would have to clamp it onto the door and then light the fuse and then run for it as quickly as possible. And if he wasn't quick enough, it would go off and he would go off with it. Hence the phrase hoist with your own petard. And then the other great phrase from this period is flash in the pan. And that comes from the muskets, which were the guns of the time, very heavy. And again, you had to put priming powder, very fine priming powder. You had to open your bandolier, which was a little

charge of powder, and you would tap that in and you'd have to put your bullet in and rod it in. And there are handbooks that have honestly about sort of 50 illustrations for each step. But in the end, you have to glow your match, which is a long cord. And then you would pop that into the pan and quite often it would flash and the flash would not go through into the barrel and therefore it would not send off, ignite the charge. And then the bullet wouldn't fly out. So if that happened, it would be a flash in the pan. The other great and important weapon at the time was the pike, which were very long, very heavy, again, ash, usually ash poles, the spike at the end. And they were very good in battle because they would surround the musketeers, almost like a hedgehog,

and give them protection also against cavalry charges. And often on the field, it's almost like a sort of rugby scrum, gaining ground until they get very close, and then it gets a bit more tooth and nail. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And I suppose in the case of Basing House, we have this example of a house that loves loyalty to the king and is therefore having to prepare and fortify itself against an attack from the parliamentarian side, the roundhead side. How could they do that? How could they protect themselves against things like cannon and granados? Walls, in a word. It's so different from medieval times when it was the high towers that would give you protection. But in the 17th century, the artillery gets a lot more powerful.

You have the so-called military revolution. And so you need walls that can absorb great big boulders. And at Basing House, they were very good at that. They built a perimeter of low, thick urban walls. And actually, it was very helpful that the subsoil was clay. So that made it a hell of a hard work for the diggers to get those walls put up. But it did mean that it was very good at swallowing these cannibals. And one engineer, one military engineer called Bathsar Gerbier called clay a graveyard for cannibals.

So Basing's walls were really formidable and they actually really frightened the besiegers. In the end, they would sort of be likened to the walls of Jericho and people would pray that they would fall down. Other things also, Basing House had some very good snipers in the house. Some were foreign, they'd fought in Europe. And there's a lot of chatter from the besiegers lines about these expert snipers. So they always knew that if concentration lapsed just for a second, they'd be punished. You could have your head shot off. Also the house, I think, again,

this goes back to the London Regiment knowing each other beforehand. They were a very good unit, the London Regiment, led by Marmaduke Rawdon. A lot of them had been in the Honourable Artillery Company, which was a sort of voluntary military company that they would go north of the wall in London and they would drill and they would shoot their muskets and they would practice. They would dress up in their military uniforms. And afterwards they would go and hear a sermon. And you very much get the impression that they would have a very good dinner as well. And it wasn't just Mars they were toasting, it was Bacchus as well. Good fun.

Anyway, this company tended to train up all the officers from the train bands of London, came from this company, the Honourable Artillery Company. And the train bands of London are the closest thing London had to a police force. They didn't have a police force, but they had these guys who would be called up from their various wards, and they would quell rebellions and riots and things like that, try and maintain peace. So a lot of these chaps were very well drilled. They had a good commander. And Rawdon's sort of 60 years old also. And so they are an effective unit within the house.

They're very good at strategy and tactics. And they're very brave, some of them. They sally out from the house and, again, catch the besiegers on their lines and do sort of short, sharp attacks and take away their food or some of their horses or just kill a few of them. And it makes the besiegers very war weary, especially after there are sort of three phases of the siege. One is a very violent attack that was led by a chap called William Waller, William the Conqueror Waller. And everyone thought that Basinghouse would roll over and he would win it easily. He called it a

slight peace and it didn't happen. But then after that, there was a very long summer siege, more what you would think of as a classic siege. Siege comes from the Latin sedera, to sit down. They sat down and they blockaded the house, cut off food and drink and all of that. And that went on for about 24 weeks. But during that time, yes, these sallies from the house really disrupted the lines. And then the last phase is the storming by Cromwell.

But just to go back to the first attack by William the Conqueror Waller, again, the snipers were very good then. There were also women on the roof. So the women got stuck in and they threw down rocks at the besiegers. And the Marchioness of Winchester and her ladies would strip the roof of the lead on the roof and they would use that to make more musket balls. So it was very much a concerted effort and really quite heroic. How did it come to this? How did Basing House become such a symbol of royalist power?

You're right. It was a symbol. It was strategically important. It was about 40 miles south of the King's headquarters in Oxford. It was about 50 miles southwest of Parliamentary London. So it's in a good spot strategically. It also commands the road to the west so it can disrupt Parliamentary trade and traffic. So it's important strategically. It also commands the road to the West so it can disrupt parliamentarian trade and traffic. So it's important strategically. But yeah, your word, symbol, it is a symbol. It's a symbol of royalist defiance. I think that mainly comes about after the defeat of William the Conqueror Waller there, because they did, they'd been taking bets in London. They really thought it was a sure thing. And when he does two great big attacks and both fail, in one of them, his men, a lot of them are burnt to death. They take the

outhouses. And then Thomas Johnson, our gentle apothecary, leads an incredibly brave Sally into the outhouses and he fires the corn stores and the barn sets alight. And so a lot of them burnt to death. And in the second attack of Wall Wallers, what also happens, as well as the women throwing down their stones, you have a really bad instance of effectively friendly fire. You have one unit, they were from London too, but they were quite raw. They'd never fought outside London and they'd only really volunteered to man the defences around London. So this unit of parliamentarians, the second rank shot at the first rank of musketeers before they'd had time to move away. And so the third rank shot on the second and you had the whole unit collapsing and it was said to be a lamentable spectacle. And on top of that,

you have the Drake cannon, the three and six pounders shooting case shot the canisters at the parliamentarians as well which was a horrific spectacle so i think after that happened people started to talk about basinghouse in a different way it wasn't a slight piece anymore it was sort of does god want us to take this and even more so is the devil somehow protecting it? So it gains an aura, I suppose you'd say. Yes, people talk about it as Jericho and Babylon very much. There's always this chat that it's a limb of Babylon, you know, that ancient, decadent, corrupt city. And also because of the people who are there. corrupt city. And also because of the people who are there. So for example, Inigo Jones,

who you can almost sort of, you could tell the whole story of the build up to war through the life of Inigo Jones, because he, from being a craftsman in Smithfield, who was born in 1573, a sort of enfant terrible in a way, he ends up being a regulator and at the very heart of the establishment. And there's almost no one apart from maybe the Archbishop of Canterbury who more encapsulates and personifies the Stuart court at that time. He's sort of... This is history's heroes, people with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. He turned Charles I's imperial ambitions into this intoxicating imperial aesthetic with his buildings, and not just with his buildings, also with the masks, the sort of musical theatre, the plays that were put on at court, which very much exalted the king. So he is a symbol of Stuart degeneracy, in a way, to the besiegers. And there were also Church of England clergymen there as well. There was a print seller called Robert Peake, who was the grandson of the great Jacobean artist, again, very much seen as part of the establishment. So there is this sense that they

are pals of the king. And also this fear that they are protected by the devil. The Marcus of Winchester is Catholic. Honorer, Marchioness of Winchester is not only Catholic, but half Irish. So that puts her really beyond the pale in terms of the parliamentarians. And it comes to be seen as a popish stronghold, as they would put it. It was never entirely Catholic. Right at the end, there were Church of England clergymen in it, but it did gain that reputation. And back to Marmaduke Rawdon, our peaky, blinder Protestant governor, he and the Marquess of Winchester end up clashing so badly after the long summer blockade in 1644 that in the end, Rawdon is booted out. He and Winchester can't get on and his regiment are on the verge of mutiny at this point. And so both of them sort of hasten to Charles I and sort

of say, pick me, pick me. And Charles I is hopelessly weak and vacillating. And it took him about six months to make a decision. But in the end, Rawdon got the boot. And after that, in 1645, and this coincides with the sort of final phase, then it becomes far more a Catholic garrison. That mention of Inigo Jones reminds me of how it emerges in your book that war brings this kind of elision of art and engineering, and that there are these innovations, so many innovations actually of the Civil War that I hadn't realised, you know, whether it's medical advances or popular journalism or income tax. Tell us a bit about all of the ways in which war is being, you know, the sort of mother of invention.

Yeah, I think creation comes with destruction, inevitably. And it's sort of one of the ironies that you get these sort of electric moments of creative sparking going on. And it can be used for good or for ill. There was a chap called Samuel Hartlip, who was a Puritan intellectual in London. And he had a sort of network, very much part of the Republic of Letters, this Europe-wide network of letter writers. And they would exchange ideas. And it's wonderfully electric. It's like a sort of great big circuit that lights up with all these ideas and they're bouncing off each other. But the sort of grisly side of that is he and another chap called Cheney Culpeper were coming up with ideas. This is after Waller's

first failed assault. They were coming up with ideas about what they could do next and how they could take down Basing House. And one of their ideas, which wasn't in the end fulfilled in the way that they wanted it to, but was to fill those Granado shells, those super-sized bombs with arsenic and toxic gases and to shoot them over the walls and into Basing House. That didn't happen. But what did happen later was that hay bales were saturated with arsenic and sulfur. And so they tried to smoke them out. And they didn't succeed. But there are accounts of the garrisons of gnashing their teeth in indignation, whatever that means. You know, I think pretty horrendous. And you have that sense that if something is existential and apocalyptic, then anything goes in war.

On the plus side, what you see more and more. And as I say, with Thomas Johnson drawing his bananas, that was before the war. So this isn't just the war, but I think war was a catalyst. What you get in this period is people wanting to describe things more accurately. So whether that is in terms of maps or intelligence, or even sort of, you know, the dimensions of a cannon and the right angle that you should set it at. All these things are a matter of life and death. Scouts reports, all of that stuff. And I think what you get, again, an interesting chap at Basing House,

he was the ensign, he was called William Faithorn, he was an engraver. And what you find, he survives the siege of Basing House, and he ends up engraving a lot of stuff for the Royal Society, a lot of scientific equipment. He's a great influence on Robert Hooke, who wrote Micrographia. And you can see the influence of engraving in the work of the Royal Society, how absolutely crucial it is to be accurate. You also see it again. This is what I loved about this book, because all these people, you can tell so much through them and look at other vistas. Faithel's brother-in-law was a man called John Grant. I think he was the first tradesman to become a member of the Royal Society.

And he wrote a really important book about statistics. He's sort of seen as the founding father of statistics based on the bills of mortality. So I think war accelerated that very much in terms of wanting a clearer picture. And yes, you're right. Taxation, again, born of necessity. Parliament ended up taxing the people more than the king ever did. And you see it, yes, with the military revolution so-called. Inigo Jones was a military engineer. He was an architect. He was a poet. He was a playwright. He was so many things. And people sort of find it extraordinary that he might have been involved in the defences at Basing House. There's only one account that says he helped with the military fortifications, and it was a parliamentarian account. But I don't really see any reason to doubt it. account, but I don't really see any reason to doubt it. But I remember reading Catherine Fletcher's The Beauty and the Terror about the Renaissance, and she has a wonderful bit in it about, well, she explains that Michelangelo, of course, in the previous century had been in charge of the fortifications of Florence. But also Leonardo at one point submits a 10-point CV to

the ruler of Milan. And the first nine points are all about how he can help him win his wars. So he can help with bridges and tunnels and weapons and prototype tanks and all this kind of stuff. And then in the last and final point, he sort of says, oh, by the way, I can also sculpt and paint. And I love that the kind of the priorities of this period are laid bare there. You said that one of your aims in writing this book was to try and press into people's experience. And let us come to what you've called the sort of cruel experiment on the human condition that is a siege. What was it like? What was it like to be in that nightmare scenario of being besieged? Who was in there? What do we know? What evidence do we have? Yeah, I think it is like an experiment. If you think about it, you take away food and drink,

you cut off communications, you throw in smallpox, you throw in a few betrayals and infighting, and you play with people's hopes and fears till they are really reduced to the bare bones there. And some people, perhaps the natural leaders of society, do not soar in the way that you think they would. And others really do. And that's, I think, why a siege is being picked up by novelists so much. I saw it very much in one of my favorite books of all time, which is J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. Of course, I couldn't get anywhere close to what a novelist can do. But what I did have in terms of sources was one completely different sources. One was a siege diary written by an anonymous royalist inside the house.

It's not quite day by day, but it's pretty much. And it says things like two of ours died today. One of ours ran to them. Three deserters. One was shot. Oh, our beer was stinking and we had to throw it over the walls. We ran out of wheat today, like that. Very dispassionate, very matter of fact. Actually, it's quite interesting that the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who we know as the blockbuster author of Sapiens and all those books, was by training

an early modern military historian. And he argued that you don't really get emotional, what he calls flesh witness accounts until about the mid 18th century. So before that you have eyewitness accounts and people saying what they saw, but not so much describing how they felt. And I very much felt that when I was reading the Siege Diary, you're like, oh, come on, give me a shred of emotion, man. And also in letters, you know, there were so many times and memoirs where they sort of say, oh, he was here, but that's too heavy to relate, or I can't talk about that now. Or even more annoyingly, I'll tell you when I see you, but I can't write it down. Things like that. And you're just like, yeah, you'll empathize, Susie.

Every day you have these sort of disappointments I was just I was just trying to think about with that there was a siege in Sancerre I'm sure you know well in the 1570s and there was a an account by a Huguenot minister and I was just trying to think is there any feeling in that but I could have to go back and check it to find out but it's a really interesting point that what exactly what you want them to say they're not blooming saying. They're just telling you that, you know, great to have the facts, but you want to know the experience. Yes, exactly.

You want to drill down and you have to read against the grain a lot of the time. But, but occasionally things work out. And I came across this book. It's a completely unassuming book. It's called Meditations Upon a Siege. It's a completely unassuming book. It's called Meditations Upon a Siege. And it is written by a chap called Humphrey Peake,

who was a Church of England clergyman. And he died very soon after the stormy, amazing house. And it's been about three people have mentioned it, as far as I can see. And only one person, and I can't remember his name, which is terrible, but in an MA thesis has written about it at length. The other two were throwaway remarks. And people see it and they think it's either a book of meditations or it's a book of sermons and it's written by an Anglican vicar. So it's religious. And that's true. It does

have homilies in it. But what it really is, is an account of what it's like to live and experience a civil war siege. And he doesn't ever name the sieges that he's experienced or that he's describing. Clearly, there is personal experience there and trauma. And I think, and I can't entirely prove it, but I think 90% or so for reasons I go into in the book, but I think he was at the siege of Basing House, both from the internal evidence, which just shadows what happened at Basing House so much sometimes, and also external evidence. I did a lot of prosopographical research into kinship networks and all that, looking at long chancery documents, and then sort of on the bottom of the third page, you find a connection to someone who was at Basing House. But also most obviously,

because the print seller that I was telling you about was called Robert Peake, and he was definitely related to this chap Humphrey. But anyway, in this book, when I first read it, I just sort of couldn't believe it because it really does go down deep and dark into the bowels of a Civil War siege. And he describes sort of death becomes personified. So he describes the lamentable spectacle of death, the intolerable stench of death. Then he talks about death in hideous shapes, mustard all around him and tormenting his dreams. He talks about hideous cries of everyone else being crammed into rooms with all these other people. He talks about not being able to breathe, not being able to pray, not being able to concentrate, probably more than

anything, in fact, that he's cut off from the outside world. And so he can't hear from loved ones. And he says that that's sort of like a purgatory. They're mutually dead to each other in that point. He talks about the engines of war as well and laments how creative we are to try to destroy each other. It's a really moving piece of work. And I think that really does give you a sense of trauma and emotion in a way of no other source I can think of that I've read for that period. So that was really illuminating. Although there are examples of kindness, this does feel like a very cruel war perhaps there's no such thing as an uncruel war but it feels like there's an extraordinary amount

of violence and brutality on both sides is that what you felt as you were reading about it yes i did and i think that also comes as a reaction from what i certainly had assumed which was that it was a very gentlemanly war and that it was very chivalric. And because people knew each other, they would sort of overlook things or do each other favors. And, you know, the idea with the siege that you would send a summons to surrender. And if you accepted the summons, you would be allowed to march out with your flags flying and with all your weapons. And that is true. But most people didn't accept the summons to surrender. And if they did, they tended to be court-martialed for cowardice. I think a lot of work has been done lately in

terms of the trauma that people have suffered from these wars. And I think it makes it very clear, and not just in terms of, yes, emotional scars, but also the physical scars, which are brutal, that this was not a particularly gentlemanly war. William the Conqueror Waller, who I mentioned earlier, who led the first great attack on Basing House, he wrote this letter to his counterpart, Ralph Hopton, his royalist counterpart. They were both the generals in the South West, really. And they'd known each other before the war. They'd been very, very good friends. And they had helped Elizabeth of Bohemia escape from Prague from the Battle of White Mountain. And she'd actually ridden on the back of Ralph Hopton's horse. And they'd ridden through

snowstorms, and they got away from Cossacks. And it's a very romantic, amazing story. And they were both Puritans, or Protestants at least. And they both had this great respect and friendship. And Waller wrote this letter to Hopton early in the war, saying how much he detested what he called this war without an enemy, and how he hoped that their friendship would not be affected and how they should fight this war without rancor and with honour. And it's often quoted, and it is beautiful. And it is a noble sentiment. But that was quite early on in the war. I wonder whether he would have written something like that in 1645 to Ralph Hopton after the battles they'd been through together. I doubt it. Having said that, there are, as there always are with war, there were moments of incredible

compassion and humanity. And again, going back to the apothecary Thomas Johnson, I assume, although we don't have any definite record that he was one of the war doctors within the garrison although we do have a book gerald's herbal a herbal that he edited before the war and that was definitely used during the war we have annotations on it and there are accounts saying that he was a good a fighter as a herbalist and he was very popular within the garrison for both. So I assume he was one of the physicians, one of the doctors. And they several times treated and looked after enemy prisoners and then sent them back to their own lines. And one time was even after the very long blockade when they had seen people die of starvation and smallpox and really reduced to skeletons. So I think that's an

incredible moment of compassion. And there's also a doctor, he was called Stephen Fawcett, he was in Royalist Oxford. And it's his compounding papers. So after the war, after the Royalists have lost, the Royalists could compound for their estates, which basically means pay a percentage fine, and then they get them back. And on his, there was a sort of mitigating note written saying, again, he looked after and treated at his own cost, enemy prisoners. So I think there are moments of beauty and wonder here too, and self-sacrifice and honour, but definitely not at other times. And I think you don't really need to look

at the 17th century to see that when neighbourhoods become war zones, it's actually the local communities and the local population who really pay the price. And they would find their farms scorched, the grass taken, the wood taken, all the food taken, the harvest ruined, all that money taken by both sides. So I think it was a ravaging war. And one example actually that has terrible modern resonances and is a demonstration of the way that you have put women back into history in this, that you're not leaving them out of this warfare, is with the creation of the New Model Army, their success of the Battle of Naseby, and then their violence towards the Royalist women, which you describe, given that

Hugh Peter has said it's going to be the other way around. Why do you think we see such savagery towards the female camp followers? It's a really harrowing episode. The New Model Army is famed for its discipline and they had very strong sinews. They were paid well. They didn't pillage as much as quite a lot of royalist armies. And there weren't any indictments, I don't think, for rape. However, yes, this incident,

Mark Stoyle's written a really good article about it called The Road to Farnham Field. It was after Naseby and the parliamentarians, the victorious high on victory, possibly hoping that they'd have a longer battle as well. They were sort of all geared up and they find these female camp followers rushing away, trying to get away. And they slaughter quite a few of them. And the ones that they don't kill, they slash in the face with what they call the's mark. And Stoyle's article is really excellent on this. There's a lot of buildup in the press, as you say.

I mean, going back a century, there is a dehumanizing chatter about anyone who is papist. So they were seen as papist bitches, leaguer bitches. This is all written after the massacre of Farnerfield. The news books, the parliamentary news books say this is what we did to them. And they describe them as Irish sluts. There was a rumor that they were all Irish. They probably weren't. Some were Welsh, but then there's this sort of Celtic sort of prejudice there. There's also a lot of chatter about witches. This is a supernatural age. And there'd been talk about Newbury, witches flying

over the battlefield of Newbury. There was talk even after the first battle of Edge Hill of almost sort of white walkers, the battle being fought again in the skies. It's a very supernatural age. So there's this sort of buildup and this frenzy, I think, in the parliamentarian soldiers after Naseby of thinking that they are Irish, they're witches, they're papists. And the other important factor is cross-dressers as well. You know, women who shouldn't be carrying arms, women who shouldn't be getting involved in these wars. The other very important factor is revenge. in these wars. The other very important factor is revenge. The royalists were no saints, and they had committed particular atrocities against the parliamentarian prisoners after they'd lost at Los Withiel and Cornwall. And there were some pretty graphic accounts there.

So, and perpetrated by the royalist camp followers in some accounts, it was said. So, there was a sense of revenge there too. And it is all stirred up into this frenzy. And that's the only way I can explain it, that they didn't see them as women. They didn't see them as mothers or daughters or sisters. They saw them as whores and witches and sluts and leaguer bitches, as they put it. Now, we shan't give away too much of your ending,

except to say that it involves Oliver Cromwell himself at Basing. But I do want to ask you one more question before we finish. This is obviously not only a work of military history. It is a work that touches on religious history and social history and political history. But it is also a work of military history. And the popular perception of military history is that men read it and write it and women don't. What does your experience of writing this book make you think about that? I think it's a real shame.

I think women write very good military history. And not just because they have more compassion or any of those sort of cliches. I mean, there's absolutely no reason why they shouldn't. Most male military historians haven't fought in wars either. Some have, and some have had training at Sandhurst, but I think it shouldn't be an either or, should it? I think the more people who come to it, the better. There is, I think, yes, there's this sort of dismissiveness. I remember reading the historian John Lynn saying that someone once said to him that military history was to history what military music is to music, which is incredibly rude and quite funny, but very rude and very wrong.

But there is a dismissiveness, especially, dare I say it, in academia about military history. And they think it's just sort of men dressing up and reenacting or wanting to read sort of war porn on the airplane. And maybe there is a bit of that, but I think we can go a lot, lot deeper. I mean, I think really, truly two things, I suppose. We're both early modern historians, and it's absolutely impossible to avoid war in this period, and nor should we. It is part of everything. And the other thing is, I think, I suppose it goes back to the talk of sort of drilling down deep into the human condition. I think there's something about war, particularly civil war, and most especially the conditions of a siege, in a way, that brings out the best and worst in people, in humanity. That's really what I'm interested in and what I'm trying to get at, how people tick, how they cope under stress. And also, if we can throw in a warning about escalated violence, that's not bad either. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me again, Jessie. I want to say to anyone listening that The Siege of Loyalty House is

out now, and it is going to be one of the best history books you've read this year, if not in many years. The thing about Jessie Charles is that she is the real deal. Occasionally one hears other historians crowing about a tiny piece of evidence they found, and the thing about Jessie is that she just does all this vast, deep archival research, as you've probably gathered during the course of this podcast, and just quietly puts it in there,

and it enlightens her book so much that it really is this kind of beacon of light. And I want to thank you, Jessie, for coming on. And I want to say, read it, folks. Wow. Well, that's just lovely of you. And I owe you several pints for that, Susie. Thank you. It's always a joy to be on this show. I love this show. So thank you. This is History's Heroes people with purpose brave ideas and the courage to stand alone including a pioneering surgeon

who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War You know he would look at these men and he would say don't worry Sonny you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.