The Siege of Loyalty House: A new history of the English Civil War

Product Information

One can imagine the mood of the gardener who stopped writing about tulips in his notebook and began a new section headed: ‘The Postures of the Musket’. This heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. In March, Royalist hopes of regaining control of London were dashed at the Battle of Cheriton, after which the defeated commander headed north to Basing House, where he and what was left of his straggling army licked their wounds. Childs's approach of using various characters to illustrate these tumultuous years and the impact they had on everyone from the King to the most humble individuals is novel and gives the story an emotional weight and relevance. But, above all else, it is the kind of book that immerses the reader in an alien world, making the raw experience of life in troubling and violent times feel completely real.

The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story [PDF] [EPUB] The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story

And at Edgehill, number 149: ‘To plague the heathen, and correct the people with their hands: To bind their stately Kings in chains their Lords in iron bands. Childs addresses the problem of how to realise the horrors of such an old war, muted by costume drama recreations of ‘wrong but wromantic’ Cavaliers and warts-and-all Roundheads. Her mother converted to Catholicism, inspiring bitter laughter among the Catholics persecuted by Walsingham.At the beginning of the Civil Wars, Hopton reached out to his old comrade, asking if they could meet, but Waller, with infinite regret, declined. The attempt to turn it into a stronghold to be held not just for the King himself – who never went there – but for his fleeing supporters as the siege lines around Oxford, the Royalist capital, collapsed was haphazard and belated. 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.

The Siege of Loyalty House - Penguin Books Australia The Siege of Loyalty House - Penguin Books Australia

A gripping account of the agony at Basing … Characters step off the page… The prose sparkles … Childs is close to her sources – and shows them when she needs to – but most of the hard work is hidden, like complex wiring behind a well plastered wall … 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. Ms Childs focuses on Thomas Johnson, a Yorkshire-born apothecary and herbalist, who had once hoped to locate and label every indigenous plant in England and Wales. Yet its neglected tale is well worth telling, as Jessie Childs shows in her compellingly readable book.but Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House , which tingles with a discerning historical imagination . Survivors were knocked from their scaling ladders by women hurling bricks and abuse: ‘Come up Roundheads if ye dare!

The Siege of Loyalty House | Book by Jessie Childs | Official The Siege of Loyalty House | Book by Jessie Childs | Official

Gage’s men embarked on a gallant rescue mission, succeeded in driving back the Parliamentarian siege and gained access to Basing House to deliver much needed ammunition and gunpowder. The author likes people even more, so many of the pieces here are really about the things that people do.The uncommon situation of it may be compared to the palm of a man's hand, flat in the middle, and covered with rising ground around it, and so near to it, that the enemy in a two year's siege, were never able to raise a battery against it so as to make a breach in the wall practicable to enter the house by way of storm. The Royalists launched several successful sorties to disrupt Parliamentary efforts to set up batteries. Highlights include the pro who robbed banks between tournaments, the astronaut who played golf on the Moon, the man on his third heart who nearly won the US Open, the player who hugged the fan who cost him victory, the 18 most unforgettable holes in the world, golf in PoW camps, and how Tiger Woods is allergic to grass. What was it like to conduct a siege, sleeping on frosty fields, receiving news of sick children at home from desperate wives?