Sunday, 29 May 2022
Friday, 27 May 2022
Tuesday, 24 May 2022
The Siege of Loyalty House
'Extraordinary, thrilling, immersive... at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power' Simon Schama
It was a time of climate change and colonialism, puritans and populism, witch hunts and war.
A greater proportion of the British population died in the civil wars of the seventeenth century than in the world wars of the twentieth. Jessie Childs recovers the shock of this conflict by plunging us into one of its most extraordinary episodes: the siege of Basing House. To the parliamentarians, the royalist stronghold was the devil's seat. Its defenders called it Loyalty House.
We follow artists, apothecaries, merchants and their families from the revolutionary streets of London to the Marquess of Winchester's mist-shrouded mansion. Over two years, they are battered, bombarded, starved and gassed. From within they face smallpox, spies and mutiny. Their resistance becomes legendary, but in October 1645, Oliver Cromwell rolls in the heavy guns and they prepare for a last stand.
Drawing on unpublished manuscripts and the voices of dozens of men, women and children caught in the crossfire, Childs weaves a thrilling tale of war and peace, terror and faith, savagery and civilisation.
The Siege of Loyalty House is an immersive and electrifying account of a defining episode in a war that would turn Britain - and the world - upside down.
'Brilliant. Original. Gripping.' - Antonia Fraser
Imprint: Bodley Head
Published: 19/05/2022
ISBN: 9781847923721
Length: 336 Pages
Dimensions: 242mm x 31mm x 163mm
Weight: 672g
RRP: £25.00
Devereux's at Bath Abbey in 1985
Andy James is compiling a history of roundhead reenactment group Nicholas Devereux's regiment to be completed in 2024 in time for the 50th anniversary with events and people from the regiment's history. Here they are doing Monmouth period Somerset Militia in Bath in 1985.
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