The Siege of Loyalty House
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  • Published: 19 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529195675
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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The Siege of Loyalty House

A new history of the English Civil War

Formats & editions
Audiobook
19 May 2022
Paperback
18 Jun 2023
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A dramatic, immersive and thrillingly original account of a defining episode in the English Civil War

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.
  • Published: 19 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529195675
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Jessie Childs

Jessie Childs was born in London in 1976 and read history at Brasenose College, Oxford, where she took a first. Her first book Henry VIII’s Last Victim won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Her second book God’s Traitors was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book Prize, and won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, 2015.
Jessie frequently appears on TV and radio, and has written and reviewed for many publications, including the Telegraph, the Guardian, Literary Review, Standpoint and the Times Literary Supplement. She is one of the judges for the 2016 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History.
She lives in Hammersmith, London, with her husband and two daughters.
www.jessiechilds.com

Also by Jessie Childs

God’s Traitors
Henry VIII's Last Victim
See all

Praise for The Siege of Loyalty House

Brilliant. Original. Gripping.

Antonia Fraser

Extraordinary. Exhaustively researched and beautifully (and wittily) written, a thrilling and immersive tale that offers the reader a rare window into the terrifying events of the English Civil War when religion and ambition divided families, friends and neighbours. One of the finest books I've read for years, a stunning achievement

Saul David

Extraordinary: meticulously researched, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly relevant. I urge you to read it

Helen Castor

She is a gifted narrative historian, eloquent, graceful and witty; the stories she tells are the ones we all should know

Hilary Mantel

In this stunning feat of historical reconstruction, Jessie Childs brings England's brutal civil conflict to life, illuminating the human experience, and human cost, of this devastating war. A work of deep scholarship, The Siege of Loyalty House is gripping, moving, unputdownable

Thomas Penn

Perhaps just because the history is so painful, and to some almost incomprehensible, the Civil War has never really registered in British history as powerfully as it should. That will change with Jessie Childs' extraordinary Siege of Loyalty House: a thrilling, immersive read, especially searing in our own tormented and besieged times. Her beautiful writing drops the reader deep in the war, sees it through a cast of extraordinary characters from both sides of the terrible conflict, but most of all, shines with a compassionate understanding of human courage, folly, obstinacy and frailty, at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power

Simon Schama

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