The Siege of Loyalty House

Author Jessie Childs
Narrator Miranda Raison
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 19 May 2022
Run Time 9 hours and 50 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Civil wars, European history, Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions, Social and cultural history, True war and combat stories.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The Civil War was the most traumatic conflict in British history, pitting friends and family members against each other and 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 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.

© Jessie Childs 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

Atmospheric, unflinching and…exquisitely witty

Guardian, *Books of the Year*

This is war as it should be, passionate, brutal, bloody and chaotic, all described in luscious, evocative prose

The Times, *Books of the Year*

Jessie Childs is one of the finest historians working today; her illuminating, deeply researched, and beautifully written books are never anything short of superlative, and here she does it again. This is a vivid, thrilling story, rendered in delicious prose and brilliant with gems dug from the archives

Suzannah Lipscomb

A gripping account of the agony at Basing… Characters step off the page… The prose sparkles… Childs’s book conveys the raw emotion of events, especially the trauma of the siege itself… In her aim ‘to recover the shock of that experience and to look upon the face of the war’ Childs could be describing the trenches of Ypres or Bakhmut or the sieges of Leningrad or Mariupol

London Review of Books

Compelling… Childs reveals brilliantly the world of the Civil War in the grain of sand that is Basing House. She captures the horror, the courage, the sheer humanity of those, both besiegers and besieged, who endured the long, desperate lulls punctuated by intense episodes of visceral violence

Daily Telegraph

The Siege of Loyalty House… enriches the packed civil war bookshelf with this elegantly written, close-focus history of a place whose ordeals epitomised the pain of a struggle that tore homes, clans, trades, and souls apart

Financial Times

A spectacular work of scholarship, this is epic, vital history, sweeping from the great trends and ideas of the time to the individual details of vividly lived lives. This brilliant book takes you into the heart of the Civil War, the brutal struggle for the sympathies of a country, the men who fought, women who tried to survive; this is blood, desire and struggle on the page, taking you deep into the seventeenth century world; you can feel its beating heart

Kate Williams

Compellingly readable… [a] beautifully written and lucid account

Mail on Sunday

A thrilling account of Basing House, a royalist stronghold during the English Civil War nicknamed ‘Loyalty’ and the sieges it withstood until its fall to Oliver Cromwell in 1645

New York Times

Riveting… The breaking of such lives and communities makes poignant reading… [Childs’s] focus is local and English, but the story is human and timeless

Economist

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