The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won

We have always preferred the glamour of the battle to the dog-work of a siege. We hear the rumble of the cavalry charge and the first dry rattle of new-drawn steel more keenly than the sound of digging and guard duty. We imagine the king’s battle standard rescued at Edgehill and the royalist horse reduced to “stubble” by Cromwell’s troops at the battle of Marston Moor, but a half-starved garrison negotiating terms of surrender is rarely part of the picture.

Yet the Civil War was not only won on Marston Moor, nor even at the battle Naseby when Charles I lost his artillery and a large part of his officer corps in June 1645. It was won three months later, at Bristol, when his nephew Prince Rupert yielded England’s second city and, with it, his command of the royalist army. It was won when further strongholds were taken and destroyed, securing parliament’s supply lines and, ultimately, giving the king nowhere to hide.

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From Hull, where arguably the war began in July 1642, to Harlech, where the last royalist garrison surrendered in March 1647, the first Civil War was predominantly fought around walled towns, medieval castles and fortified manor houses. Each side had areas of dominance, but this was not a regional conflict in the sense, say, of the American Civil War, with a geographically defined North and South.

Once it became clear that the war between king and parliament would not be decided by one big battle, it mushroomed into hundreds of local contests for resources, supply lines and communications. In Ireland, too, the fighting was characterised by batteries and blockades, skirmishes and storms. “We make war more like foxes than like lions,” wrote Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, “and you will have 20 sieges for one battle.”

Civil War: neighbourhoods become frontlines

This all matters because the nature of the Civil War helps to explain the pity of it, the scope of it, and its consequences – not least for the king. The causes of the war were by no means clear-cut, but the execution of Charles I was the result of enough people in power believing that only a ruthless tyrant could renew hostilities, as Charles had done in 1648 (again suffering defeat), after so much slaughter.

Charles, the army leaders decided, was a “man of blood” against whom the Lord had witnessed and by whom an account must be made “for that blood he had shed and mischief he had done”.

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We hardly have to look back to the 17th century to know that when neighbourhoods become frontlines, civilians pay the price. Sieges terrorised local communities, spread disease and sucked the produce from the land. Houses were destroyed to provide field of fire, “contribution money” was collected by both sides, and farms were stripped bare.

The almsfolk at the hospital of St Mary Magdalen near Winchester lost 36 sheep to the royalists over Christmas 1643. They didn’t complain at the time, but the following March they were forced to petition General Ralph Hopton after royalists broke in and took all their seed barley and every bit of wood – the gates, doors, wainscot, tables, cupboards, even the pews in their chapel. “Your poor petitioners,” they wrote, “being very aged and impotent persons [are] thereby made destitute of the means of having either temporal or spiritual food.” Hopton signed a protection order, but by then there wasn’t even a stable door left to close.

Why was Basing House important?

A series of sieges at Basing House, 20 miles north-east of Winchester, illustrates the hard lessons parliament had to learn before it could win the war. Basing House was the mist-shrouded mansion of John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester. Said to be “the greatest of any subject’s house in England”, it was encircled by a deep ditch and thick, earth lined walls.

Situated 40 miles south of the king’s headquarters in Oxford, and 50 miles south-west of parliamentarian London, it disrupted military and commercial traffic between the capital and the west and channelled resources and intelligence up to Oxford.

Symbolically, too, Basing House – a refuge for prominent royalist families and their treasure chests – was vital. It came to be viewed from London as a microcosm of Stuart degeneracy. The marquess was Catholic – a “papist” to use the contemporary slur – while his wife, Honora, was half-Irish.

Their beleaguered guests included actors, artists, writers and the architect Inigo Jones who helped with the fortifications. To Puritans, Basing House was “a limb of Babylon”, “a nest of the vilest vermin in all the kingdom”. It was here, announced one preacher, that “religion and laws and liberties and the very being of our English nation lie at stake”.

The first assault on Basing House

It took parliament more than two years to figure out how to take it. The first major assault on Basing House – after a failed local attack in July – was commanded by William “the Conqueror” Waller, a Puritan general who detested “this war without an enemy”, but was nevertheless certain that God would help him win it. He set down before Basing House on 6 November 1643 with around 6,000 men. The garrison comprised 400 defenders. It was, Waller was told, “but a slight piece”.

The marquess refused Waller’s summons to surrender and presented stiff resistance the following day. A sortie led by the apothecary Thomas Johnson resulted in the farm outhouses being set alight and Waller’s men either burned to death or in flight.

The following week, Waller decided to have “another fling at Basing”. Again, his ratio was good, but almost half his force was made up of Londoners who were not keen on service beyond the capital. Everything that could go wrong for Waller went wrong on 12 November 1643.

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The Londoners’ lack of morale and discipline was exposed when they were blasted with case shot (canisters filled with musket balls) and refused to drive on. Another unit forgot their musket drills, so that the second ranks fired before the first had time to turn away and the “third ranks fired upon them, and so, consequently, the rear fired upon their own front and slew and wounded many of their own men”.

Waller fared better on the house’s east front, but his scaling ladders were too short, his petard (a bell-shaped bomb) was clamped to the wrong place and, again, the resistance was epic. A sniper inside the house picked off charging assailants, while women threw down bricks and stones from the roof. “Come up Roundheads if ye dare!” they screamed. At four in the afternoon, darkness and driving rain forced Waller to withdraw.

One soldier, left behind with a shattered leg, cried out for help. What, shouted the defenders of the house, had the king ever done to him to make him rebel? At which question, one royalist newsbook reported, “this desperate wretch pulled out his knife and cut his own throat”.

The following morning, Waller wanted to resume the assault. But, having slept out in the cold and sodden fields, and hearing that a royalist relief force was on its way, the Londoners chanted “Home! Home!” and Waller was forced to relent. His report made clear that, although God had chastised them with this beating, parliament should have supplied better men.

The second assault on Basing House

The second attempt on Basing House was a summer blockade imposed by the local Roundhead, Richard “Idle Dick” Norton. It lasted for 24 weeks and was hell for both sides.

Smallpox, starvation, heavy shelling and internal tensions brought the royalists to the brink of collapse, but the garrison commander, a gnarly merchant called Marmaduke Rawdon, promised the marquess that his men would never surrender for as long as there was “a horse in the house, dog, cat or rat, or anything that is eatable”. He asked only for some wine and good tobacco from the marquess’s stores.

By autumn, the defenders looked more like “prisoners of the grave than the keepers of a castle”. But marshland in front of the house ensured that it was never fully surrounded and, sometime over the summer, the Marchioness of Winchester slipped out to Oxford where she implored her fellow Catholic, Henry Gage, to save them.

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Anyone who thinks that 17th-century soldiering was primitive work should study this exceptional operation. At 10pm on 9 September 1644, Gage led a royalist relief force on two night-marches through enemy-held territory. Each man was disguised with an orange-tawny scarf – parliament’s colours – and the troopers shared their horses with the footsore infantry. Gage was the first to do this, inspiring the rest.

On the outskirts of Basing House, having swapped their orange scarves for white ribbons, they fought a skirmish with the besiegers – as fierce as any battle for those involved – and managed to cut through the lines and into the house. After raiding Basingstoke on market day, Gage provisioned the garrison, stayed for the night and then, having conducted a disinformation campaign to make the parliamentarians think he would be sticking around for longer, quietly slipped away.

He took a different route back to Oxford, swimming the horses over the river Kennet (the troopers took the musketeers up on their saddles) and evading every high-alert patrol. It was, thought one royalist, “the most soldier-like piece these wars have ever yet afforded”.

The road to victory at Basing House

A month later, parliament’s southern armies converged around Basing House. They totalled 19,000 men and comprised Waller’s force, Lord General Essex’s main field army and the formidable Eastern Association commanded by the Earl of Manchester and his cavalry officer, Oliver Cromwell. Their scouts told them to expect the king on 21 October, and they drew up in battle array.

The following day, though, upon hearing that Charles had wheeled about towards Newbury, they took the road after him. There was no trust between the parliamentarian generals at this point and the resulting second battle of Newbury on 27 October failed to deliver a killer blow to the royalist cause.

After a hard reckoning and the introduction of a Self-Denying Ordinance (passed later, in April 1645) that required all peers and MPs to resign their military offices, parliament formed the New Model Army. It had a new commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas “Black Tom” Fairfax, and stricter discipline. Fairfax ensured that the men were paid centrally and regularly. Fornicators were whipped, and plunderers were shot. In its first year of campaigning, the New Model Army fought two major battles and a dozen sieges and storms.

The siege of Basing House

Cromwell, now lieutenant general of the cavalry, took a detachment to Basing House on 8 October 1645. Heavy bombardment produced two effective breaches in the house’s walls. On the 14th they stormed the house and took it in the better part of an hour.

Whereas the garrison had been divided by religion and had lost its Protestant regiments, the New Model Army was united by an intense religious fervour. Cromwell prayed the night before the storm to the drumbeat of Psalm 115, reflecting on the lines decrying idols: “They that make them are like unto them, so is every one that trusteth them.”

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Confidence stemmed, too, from numerical advantage (about 6,000 besiegers to 300 defenders), heavy artillery and the knowledge that no outside force could now save Basing House. The local royalist garrisons had fallen, and New Model discipline won local support. The fighting was savage and about half the defenders were slain. Some Jesuit priests were executed in cold blood and one woman, the daughter of a clergyman, was killed trying to save her father. However, the attackers showed restraint in some quarters. More than 100 prisoners were taken, including 15 “Irish rebels”.

The New Model Army’s combination of numbers, guns, motivation, morale and controlled ruthlessness proved a winning formula. “God exceedingly abounds in His goodness to us,” wrote Cromwell that night as a fire took hold of the house. He recommended that it be demolished, “utterly slighted” – a policy that helped ensure strongholds could not be retaken.

Acts of courage and atrocity

The news of the fall of Basing House was received in Oxford with a cry of anguish “as if they had lost their gods”. In London, the bells rang out in celebration. Babylon had fallen. It was not the end of the war, but it helps explain how it was won.

There is another reason why we should set more store upon walls than weapons. The length and intensity of a siege brings the face of war into sharp relief. Wonderful things happened at Basing House: acts of courage, creation, love, even a wedding. But it also witnessed desertions, betrayals and atrocities including a rudimentary form of chemical warfare: the parliamentarians set fire to hay bales saturated in sulphur and arsenic, and directed the fumes towards the house.

For the royalist clergyman Humfrey Peake, a siege was mental as well as physical torture. He was tormented by the “sad spectacle” of death, the “intolerable stench” of it and the “hideous shapes” of death’s soldiers mustering against him. His nerves were shredded by the “panic terrors” of others, their “shrieks and cries and noise and tumult”, and the “sad unrest” that shows people “what they are”.

Of the many ways in which men try to ruin one another, Peake concluded, “this of a siege is the sharpest and the saddest”. More than a flash of courage or cowardice on the battlefield, a siege drills deep down into the human condition and draws out the best and worst of humanity.

This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine