Basing House
Basing House is very much the forgotten Newark of Southern England, a fortified manor house, larger than Hampton Court that came under threat four times during the First Civil War. A site replete with cameos from many of the country’s most colourful historical characters and party to some of the most dramatic events of the Great Civil War, it is a shame that Basing remains forgotten amongst the major turning points of the 17th century.
Settlement on the site has occurred since the Iron Age, with the North Weald pottery industry and smelting kilns being sited at this site and nearby Cowdery’s Down (Basingstoke Common), an Iron Age roundhouse being situated on the far side of the house, being situated within the remains of the hornwork on the far side of the present re-enactment battlefield. On 22nd January 871, Alfred and his brother King Æthelred, defeated the Danes camped at Daneshill (on the far side of Basingstoke) returning from the siege of Reading, on Basingstoke Common.
A fortified manor house has rested on the site since the Norman Conquest, previously a motte and bailey castle, since 1086, the motte resting on the present site of the old house, while the outer palisade follows the present route of the defended earthen esplanade still visible today, Basing being the only house to retain its license for crenulations.
However the House’s heyday came with its conversion into a Renaissance pleasure palace in 1531 as glad payment to the catholic chancellor’s of the Tudor Dynasty, the Paulet family, the Marquis’s of Winchester, allowing the house to be extended into the New House, extant remains of which stand to the left of the Old House. However continued royal progresses (or denegrations to bankrupt the family), including the honeymoon of Bloody Mary and Phillip II of Spain, Elizabeth I (who visited four times, one of which included an initial playing of an early Twelfth Night by Shakespeare on the site of the main gate house, now the flint lined bridge into the Old House) and James I, meant that any semblance of the opulence was destroyed and by the 1630’s Basing was almost derelict.
The house gradually came to prominence again, due to the sympathies of John Paulet, the 5th Marquis of Winchester, Catholic and firm supporter of Charles I, despite surrounding Hampshire and Berkshire being fervently Parliamentarian. With Basing House sitting squarely on the main road from Portsmouth to London (the M3), Basing had the potential to intercept supply convoys and bodies of troops travelling throughout Southern England. Its strategic role had obviously been realised as early as August 1641, with the stockpiling of arms for 1500 men, this further reinforced by a company of shot under Marmaduke Rawdon. Before these men had arrived though, the house had been invested in November 1642 by two troops of horse and dragoons under Col. Richard Norton (a cousin of Oliver Cromwell) and despite the house being initially held by six musketeers, he was repulsed twice, before being forced to retire to Farnham, upon relief by Rawdon.
It was now that a series of some of the best preserved earthworks in Britain, were built around the House, designed by the likes of Inigo Jones, the architect and Wenceslas Hollar, the engraver. These consist to the front of the house at the garrison gate of a glacis (now forming the ramp into the house) for the deflection of cannon shot, a rampier or gun ramp to the rear and a series of interconnecting horn works, trenches and sconces on what is now the re-enactment battlefield. Inside the Old House, the drum towers flanking the main bridge were filled in to serve as artillery platforms. However many of these presumed earthworks cannot be vilified, many upon further archaeological survey being revealed as being the spoil heaps left over from Lord Bolton’s antiquarian excavations of the site in the 1880’s, coupled with expansion of the Basingstoke Canal at the same time.
It was not until 6th November 1643, that further siege operations were commenced by Sir William Waller, at the head of 7000 men and horse, including mutinous regiments of the Westminster, Tower Hamlets and Green London Trained Bands, but no train of artillery, having been lost after Roundway Down. The high point of the siege was marked by an assault through the Grange buildings to assault troops, using the Old Barn, on the far side of the road, as an outpost, but this was clearly repulsed. Troops cries of “Home! Home! Home!” breaking down morale, coupled with atrocious weather, meant that the siege was broken up on the 12th November.
During early 1644, a major scandal occurred when Sir Richard Grenville defected to the Royalist cause, revealing Charles Paulet, the Marquis brother and the household priest were discovered to be in talks with parliament, to open the gates secretly, allowing them to take the house. Although Paulet was pardoned by the King, the priest was hung for his crimes.
The House was reinvested by Norton in June 1644 by a force numbering just over 1000, with horse, foot and two
culverins, further forces being placed in outlying Odiham, Greywell, Lychpit and Basingstoke to blockade any supplies from entering the vicinity of the house. Major earthworks were set up, with a gun position being erected outside the church, where they also scattered the remains of the Marquis family across the nave, melting down the coffins for shot. Meanwhile a 30m stretch of trench and raised palisade has been discovered via geophysical survey on the periphery of the common. It is even possible, though previously unexplored, that Oliver’s Battery, a presumed Iron Age fort outside the village cricket club, may well have been converted into a sconce, as evidenced by the magazine shaped depression in the greens centre.
With both food and supplies running low within the house, coupled with an outbreak of typhus, evidence through the close association of the latrines with the well in the Old House, a series of sallies were launched. The largest of these was a raid on North Warnborough Mill (now The Mill House Inn, Odiham). They were stiffly defeated, retreated across the Greywell flats, the last of the sally party being massacred in the remains of Odiham Castle (which was subsequently slighted). In another, the party were swiftly pushed back, before the surrounding town was put to the flame. Bringing up a counter sally to take advantage of the vacuum, Norton had a petard placed against the garrison gate, but with its reinforcing glacis behind, the petardiers assistant was blown to bits.
With the garrison in a dire state and with continued entreaties to surrender, it was decided that Col. Henry Gage would lead with Col. Stephen Hawkins a relief mission to Basing. Arriving on 11th September at 7am in the morning, Norton was pushed out of his position on Cowdery’s Down. It was during this sally that Thomas Johnson, Rawdon’s second-in-command and editor of Gerard’s Herbal, was killed, and now buried in the Walled Garden. This was not to last long, as Waller immediately reinvested his positions once Gage left, only for them to again retreat into winter quarters.
Despite the continuing chaos around them, firstly with the major defeats at Alton and Cheriton, barely 14 miles away, followed by the complete collapse of the King’s field army at Naseby, with minor mopping up being undertaken, Basing now stood with Newark as the final outposts of Royalist influence.
In the interim, with treachery from the Marquis brother still at the forefront of his mind, the Marquis decided that he could not trust his protestant compatriots and so Rawdon and his unit were forced to leave the garrison, effectively halving the defensive manpower the house could bring to bear.
Invested by the New Model Army in August 1645 under Col. John Dalbier (Parliamentarian Engineer general), he brought before Basing 5 cannons (32 pounders), a mortar and a cannon-royal (64 pound), the battery site next to the Grange barn. Despite a 5 day bombardment, the house continued to stand. It was now Dalbier tried one of the more ingenious pieces of chemical engineering of the period. Creating a fire, he put lots of straw onto it to create lots of smoke, some dung to create a terrible stink and then arsenic, the thinking being this would act as poison gas, thus forcing the defenders out. What he had not counted on was the wind blowing across his positions, rather than towards the house and as a result, his forces were rushed from their lines.
Cromwell arrived on 8th October and the days of the house had become numbered. By the 13th, two breeches had been opened, one to the left of the new house, represented through a break in the bank, a second in the wall of the old house, while the New House outlying wall had collapsed, making it untenable, moving the entire garrison into the net of the Old House, Parliaments outlying positions just a matter of yards outside.
During a night time surveying of his Pickets, Col. Charles Fleetwood was captured by the garrison. Impeaching them to give up his officer and surrender the house, the garrison flatly refused. Raising the black flag, the sign that no quarter was to be given and with Hugh Peters, the armies and Cromwell’s personal chaplain at their head the New Model was unleashed on the house, the storm lasting barely an hour, before a mass of enraged rape, loot and murder ensued.
In all, somewhere in the region of £200,000 of loot was collected, although a myth that the marquis had his riches melted down into two golden calves and hidden is unsubstantiated. Six of the ten priests in the household were hung and the rest of the household staff corralled into a cellar. Consequently the house burnt to the ground, but the continued lack of finding human remains, argues that this story is merely apocryphal, and borrowed from similar incidents at Hopton Castle.
The House was never to reach its former grandeur again, turning into a romantic ruin, or robbed out to rebuild the
village buildings again. A further house was built on a smaller scale (the war virtually bankrupted the family) on the Grange Green in the 1670’s, although this swiftly burnt down as well.
Basing remains the forgotten second Newark for the Great Civil War, a site worthy of continued remembrance, certainly personified as one of the founding sites for The Sealed Knot. Its importance is only clarified by the fact that as a picture it adorns the walls separating the House of Commons from the Lords. Now merely a re-enactment site and archaeological research project, the continued halo of the Basingstoke AA building requires a well aimed shot from the Saker to be fired upon it.
Bibliography
Allen, Dave and Anderson, Sue, Basing House, Hampshire. Excavations 1978-1991, Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society Monograph Series (Basingstoke, 1999)
Emberton, Wilf, Love Loyalty-The perilous close and siege of Basing House 1643-5 (Basingstoke, 1994)
Godwin, Rev. G. N. The Civil War in Hampshire 1642-45 (Southampton, 1904)
Moorhouse, Stephen, “Finds from Basing House, Hampshire (c.1540-1645)” Post-medieval archaeology : the journal of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology 18, (London, 1984)
