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

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

Beautifully written and gripping from first page to last. A sparkling book by one of the UK's finest historians

Peter Frankopan

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

The Siege of Loyalty House is not only deeply researched. Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic

Leanda de Lisle, The Times

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

This heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. Childs handles a remarkable amount of source material with masterly skill...Thrilling

Linda Porter, Literary Review

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

Jessie Childs tackles this rolling tragedy with confidence and a clear eye ... There are wonderful character portraits throughout ... successfully brings the ghastliness of the period to life, dramatically, vividly and with pathos

Charles Spencer, Spectator

Compellingly readable... [a] beautifully written and lucid account

Mail on Sunday

Enthralling ... the sort of coup de théâtre that only the most brilliant archival research can pull off ... Few books on the Civil War convey so powerfully the human cost ... All this is done with such clarity and economy that her book doubles as a fine introduction to 1640s England as a whole, quite apart from the engrossing story of Basing House ... A magnificent achievement. Rarely has such fine-grained focus on a single event been used so effectively to open up wider perspectives on that fractious age. And as an account of what it was like to live through the bloodiest and most traumatic decade in England's history, it has few rivals

John Adamson, Catholic Herald

Gripping ... The accumulation and deployment of facts is impressive. The understanding of what they signify is profound. The elegance, wit and brio of the writing is sheer delight

Allan Mallinson, Country Life

Childs...has a good eye for evocative detail... [The Siege of Loyalty House is a] highly readable account [of the civil war]

Times Literary Supplement

[Childs's] great strength is her ability to deliver first-rate scholarship in really luscious prose, [and she] uses Basing as a microcosm through which to view the civil war in all its fog and mess

Guardian

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

The Siege of Loyalty House is exciting and scholarly, vivid and accessible. It is a perfectly-crafted triumph of narrative history...one of the most pulsating books on seventeenth-century England I have read for many years

Critic

In Jessie Childs [Basing House] finds at last a writer able to bring out in full its excitement, pathos, glory and tragedy, with a deep political, military and social context. As so many of the defenders of the house were transplanted Londoners, it is a tale that links the heart of Hampshire to the heart of the capital. Local Civil War history does not get better than this.

Professor Ronald Hutton

A perfectly crafted triumph of narrative history... One of the most pulsating books on seventeenth-century England I have read for many years

Jonathan Healey, The Critic

Childs brilliantly shows us the world of the civil war

Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2022*

Enthralling... This is history as rip-roaring narrative. ... Both her previous books won awards, and I would be amazed if this does not make it a hat-trick

Art Newspaper

Fantastically well written

Sunday Times

A masterpiece

Monty Don

Jessie Child's The Siege of Loyalty House turns an English Civil War stand-off into a fable of murderous polarisation: gripping, timely history

Spectator, *Best Books of 2022 I*

The Siege of Loyalty House ... tingles with a discerning historical imagination

Spectator, *Best Books of 2022 II*

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

The Times, *Books of the Year*

Atmospheric, unflinching and...exquisitely witty

Guardian, *Books of the Year*

[A] thrilling tale of war

Mail on Sunday

[A] gripping tale of a royalist house standing its grown against the Roundheads ... Atmospheric, unflinching, and at times extraordinarily witty

UK Daily News, *Best History and Politics Books of 2022*

[A] poignant book... the story is timeless

Economist, *Books of the Year*

Compelling

Spectator, *Books of the Year 2022*

Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, [The Siege of Loyalty House] tells the story of the epic two-year siege of Basing House, a royalist mansion finally captured by Oliver Cromwell in 1645.

Daily Express, *Books of the Year 2022*

When you are as good a writer as Jessie Childs, and as assuredly immersed in the archives, the pages zing with the technicolour of celluloid. ... [A] masterpiece.

Critic, *Non-fiction books of the year 2022*

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

Childs writes an engrossing, spellbinding narrative while laying out a clear and comprehendible history

New York Journal of Books

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens to people during civil war: how quickly and imperceptibly order becomes chaos and decency yields to cruelty. In other words, how close to inhumanity humanity always is. The focus is on an episode in the English civil war, but the story is timeless

Economist

Underpinned by meticulous research, this finely crafted narrative unfolds in evocative and often poetic language, transporting readers back to a 'terrifying, electrifying time' and breathing fresh life into the men and women who endured it.

Wall Street Journal

A gripping account of the agony at Basing, The Siege of Loyalty House is also a potted social history of the civil wars and how they started. Jessie Childs, [is] a gifted storyteller

London Review of Books

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

Malcolm Gaskill, London Review of Books