The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story. JessieChilds. London: The Bodley Head, 2022. xvii + 318 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9781847923721. $28.95 (cloth)

As its title suggests, this is a story about a place, Basing House, also known as Loyalty House, and its dramatic role in the first English Civil War of 1642-46. Located in Hampshire, on the banks of the river Loddon, the house was the seat of the Catholic marquess of Winchester whose personal motto, “Aimez Loyauté,” lent this private mansion, reputedly the largest and richest in all of England, its romantic sounding name. The house's strategic importance, located some forty miles south of Oxford and on the main road between London and Exeter, was compounded by its symbolic power. Basing House loomed large in the mid-century English imagination: a reviled den of popery and licentiousness to some and a haven of refuge and safety to others. As it withstood assault after assault, the house came to transcend the realities of wartime history and enter the blurrier realm of myth: “People began to wonder if it would ever fall; if, indeed, God might not want it to fall” (4). Jessie Childs wants to persuade her readers to feel the force of this providential thinking, even as she documents its hellish human cost. Under her narrative direction, the Civil Wars—their geographical plotting, military maneuvering, fanatical preaching, rabid reporting, and relentless politicking—converge inexorably on this one place, Basing House, where, for a time at least, everything seemed capable of being won or lost. The house's royalist defenders included not only the marquess of Winchester and his second wife Honora, half-sister to the earl of Essex, Lord General of the parliamentary army, but Marmaduke Rawdon, a wealthy Protestant merchant and owner of a plantation in Barbados; Thomas Johnson, an apothecary and botanist, who published a new edition of John Gerard's celebrated Herball in 1633; and Robert Peake, a seller of fine prints and exquisitely illustrated Bibles. They were joined by two of Peake's apprentices, the engraver William Faithorne and Thomas Rowlett; Rowlett's scrivener brother, Isaac; and the wine merchant, Robert Amery. Childs dubs them a “garrison of all of the talents” (4), and there is a Spielbergian, band-of-brothers quality to the ensemble. Aside from Winchester and Rawdon, the commanding officers of Basing House who spent much of their time battling each other, the men all came from the same London streets: before the war, they had paraded together at the Artillery Garden near Bishopsgate and lived as neighbors on Snow Hill, close to Newgate Prison and Smithfield Market just outside the city's western walls. The first part of the book traces their paths to Basing House, while also tracing the nation's path to war. Parts 2, 3, and 4 bring us within the house's walls. There we stay with those other camp followers—wives, children, elderly dependants, refugees, and prisoners of war—through the long stretches of waiting, fortifying, scouting, conscripting, and provisioning and the sudden, chaotic onslaughts of violence. Occasionally, we are taken out to the encircling armies, but it is the besieged about whom we care. When the house finally falls, we feel the magnitude of their loss. Childs's narrative is structured around a sequence of tightly-plotted episodes, drawn largely from first-person accounts of the fighting. It begins with the garrison's repulse of Richard Norton's parliamentary troopers on 31 July 1643 and of the repeated assaults launched by William Waller in November of the same year. Supposed to be over in a matter of days, the conquest of Basing House would take a further two years. The kinetic excitement of these early encounters, which happen against a backdrop of royalist gains in the field, is followed by the grinding tedium of a twenty-four-week siege, from June to November 1644, a slow turning of the screw. Blockaded in Basing House by Norton's men, the starving garrison is saved by the rescue mission of Henry Gage in a nerveless, nighttime march from Oxford that breaks through the parliamentarian lines. Still, the end was coming. In August 1645, after the royalist sacking of Leicester and the New Model Army's slaughter of the king's camp followers at the battle of Naseby had taken cruelty to new and horrifying extremes, John Dalbier's regiment arrived before the walls of Basing House and renewed the bombardment, now with the use of chemical weapons. More Sulphure for Basing was the title of a sermon preached by the army minister William Beech to Dalbier's soldiers; its text was Revelation 14.11: “And the smoke of their torment shall ascend evermore, and they shall have no rest day nor night which worship the beast and his image” (203). In early October, Dalbier's troopers were joined by Oliver Cromwell's New Model soldiers. Less than a week later, the house was taken—its priests executed, its treasures plundered, its civilians stripped to their smocks. An untold number of royalists, hiding in vaults and chambers underneath the house, died in the fire that followed. By foregrounding the struggle for survival in impossible circumstances, Childs solicits the empathy of her readers, challenging them to fill in the action with their imaginary forces. Hers is a chronicle from below, focusing not on military leaders and the larger objectives of campaigning, but on the men who put their lives on the line and the family members who endured alongside them or prayed for their return. One chapter opens with the letter of Susan Rodway, wife to Robert, a tallow chandler and foot soldier in the Westminster Liberty Trained Band who took part in Waller's assault on Basing House in the foul and freezing weather of November 1643. “My king love, remember unto you,” writes Susan affectionately (95). Later, we learn that her letter was intercepted and printed in the royalist newsletter, Mercurius Aulicus, where it was sneered at for its bad spelling (113). This violation of the couple's privacy anticipates, and in an important sense replaces, the scandalous publication of Charles's personal letters to his wife, Henrietta Maria, two years later in The Kings Cabinet Opened. Childs does pull back from Basing House from time to time, putting events there in a larger historical perspective. Her grander cast of characters includes the astrologer William Lilly, the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, and the preacher Hugh Peter, whose rhetoric rains down as hard and unceasingly as any cannon. The narrative is further enlivened by a parade of distinguished visitors to Basing House, an unlikely royalist Who's Who that includes the “portly” army chaplain Thomas Fuller, busily taking notes for his dictionary of national biography, The History of the Worthies of England (135); an octogenarian Inigo Jones who may have helped with the house's fortifications; and the stage-actor William Robbins, who “reportedly bait[ed] the Roundheads with clownish sketches from the ramparts” (197). He weathered Virgilian storms and vertiginous mountains to take cuttings of interesting plants. He wrote about cudweed and catsfoot, marsh-mallow and chalice moss, great burdock, hedgehog parsley and the very small red wild campion. He wrote about giant throatwort and petty spurge, Coventry bells and ivy bells, lady's slipper, freshwater soldier, and a sea urchin “so delicate and fragile that it could scarcely be handled.” He wrote about sea thistle and musk thistle, spear thistle, and milk thistle, woolly-headed thistle, and thistle-upon-thistle. He found “knotberry and cloudberry on the tops of the high mountains both in the North and in Wales,” and “red wortle or hurtle berries in the wild moors of Northumberland.” . . . And he described the grass “with which we in London do usually adorn our chimneys in summer time; we commonly call the bundle of it handsomely made up for our use by the name of bents.” (26) Perhaps, like Falstaff, he babbled of green fields. Perhaps, in his delirium, those old lists streamed through his head: the “red wortle or hurtle berries in the wild moors of Northumberland,” the bent grass “with which we in London do usually adorn our chimneys in summer time,” Canterbury bells, ivy bells, the bells of Basing sounding the alarm, the bells of Old Bailey ferrying the dead, Snow Hill, Mount Snowdon, cloudberry, his picnic in the clouds . . . . (171) In this extraordinary prose elegy, we watch the skein of a man's life unravel as the long bloody months of the siege recede, replaced by what might be salvaged, remembered, and held dear. Plant names and place names run together in his mind; the shape of a flower turns into the sound of dreaded yet familiar bells. Geography is loosened and becomes unfixed, moving upward from the “bent grass” or dried stalks adorning London chimneys (a barely heard allusion to Isaiah 40.6) to the Welsh mountain heights and into the clouds. The dauntless apothecary-soldier is as close as this book comes to allowing itself a hero, and Childs writes him a death scene of Falstaffian grandeur and pathos. Such flights of (Anglican) sentiment are not, perhaps, for everyone. But there is also rigor behind Childs's rhetorical amplitude, as when she sets out to teach us a technical vocabulary of artillery and ammunitions—muskets, drakes, culverins and demi-culverins, case shot, round shot, granadoes, shells, petards, crossbars, and fireballs—a world of weaponry and of weapons-making at once cruelly efficient and dangerously mercurial. Her prose is eager to convey the sonic idea of war: the parliamentarian guns are described as “rowelling the ears of all inside” (97). A rowel is a wheel-shaped piece of iron attached to the end of a spur or whip for the scourging of human flesh. Tellingly, the horizon of violence extends beyond the human: we are told how the rain “flayed the streets” (24) and the sun “punched through the fog” to reveal the besieging army, “like a peacock in the park” (96), its regimental tailfeathers, blue, yellow, red, and green, fanned out below. Not every moment is so brilliantly imagined and occasionally the jokes fall flat or seem tonally off key. When the London trained bands hold the line at Turnham Green, Childs describes how zealous parishioners donated their Sunday dinners to the capital's defense, provisioning the volunteers with “one hundred cartloads of roast meat and ‘pies piping hot’.” “There were no meals on wheels for the royalists,” she deadpans before turning her skeptical eye upon the figure of Marmaduke Rawdon, who may or may not have been present on that November day, “scoffing hot pies” for a cause and a city he was about to forsake (53). But what of John Milton, as readers of this journal might ask? Where is he to be found in all of this? Like the preacher, the witch-hunter, and the astrologer, the poet remains a peripheral figure. He appears first as an anti-prelatical pamphleteer, denouncing ceremonial rituals as “the gaudy allurements of a whore” (14; Complete Prose Works 3: 25); then as a callow lyricist ineptly eulogizing the marquess of Winchester's first wife: “The elegy improves, as did the poet,” quips Childs parenthetically, after quoting its labored opening couplet (83). Drawing on the work of Timothy Raylor, who notes Milton's name on a subscription list for an engine of war devised by Edmond Felton and promoted by Samuel Hartlib in November 1643, Childs connects Milton, if only speculatively and tangentially, to godly experiments in chemical warfare, including the packing of sulphur and arsenic into the granado shells that firebombed Basing House during its last, desperate weeks of resistance (198). Childs refrains from referencing Milton's representation of Satan's discovery of gunpowder in the War in Heaven, but she does describe Paradise Lost, memorably and not altogether admiringly, as “the longest and most sublime scream in the English language” (228). In her book's Introduction, Childs puts us in the company of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, “the future second and third presidents of the United States,” who in 1786, after touring the site of the 1651 battle of Worcester, lament how little hold the Civil Wars appear to have on the national imagination: “Do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where Liberty was fought for?” Adams asks (1). Liberty or Loyalty? The answer depends on whether you're inside the house looking out or outside the house looking in.

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