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Reconstruction of the Great Gate House of the Old House at Basing: House: Siege of Basing House 1642 to 1645 during the English Civil War. See here Siege of Basing House |
The ruins of Basing House are situated on a modest salient just outside the village of Basing (Near Basingstoke). Basing House, like Beeston Castle was initially conceived as a Norman motte and bailey fortification, but the environs of Basing House are no scenic match for the high rise epic landscape of Beeston Castle. Basing House, however, compensated for its relatively low relief landscape by reaching social heights that Beeston's functional garrison castle couldn't hope for. During the 16th century the courteous social climber and owner of Basing House, Sir William Paulet, spent a fortune rebuilding the Norman site and ended up with what was arguably the grandest mansion in all England, although it is now largely reduced to its foundations. The guide book tells us.....
It is [now] hard to imagine that it was once "the greatest of any subjects house in England, yea larger than most of the King's palaces"
Paulet became Earl of Wiltshire and Lord Treasurer of England in 1550 and a year later the Marquess of Winchester. Such was his social climbing success that the guide book can quote Francis Alen the Earl of Shrewsbury who in 1560 said:
"The Queen [Elizabeth] so liked the house of the Lord Treasurer at Basing and her entertainment there that she openly and meryly bemoaned him to be so olde, for else by my trouthe (sayeth she) if my Lord Treasurer were a young man I could fynde in my harte to have him to husbande, bifour any man in Englande".
Even the much younger Lord Leicester of the fashionable and elegant Kenilworth castle who openly tried to court Elisabeth failed to get a similar compliment. Born in the 1470s Paulet died in 1572 which means he must have been in his nineties, a remarkable age for that era.
The original foot print of the castle wasn't big enough for the ambitious Paulet and he extended his property by building the New House which was appended to the the original Norman Motte and Baily site. The New House can be seen at the top of my photograph of this model of Basing House....
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| Model of Basing house depicting how it looked before its destruction |
After Paulet's death the site went into decline, but at the start of the civil war in 1642 it was refortified as a royalist garrison because of its strategic location on the main route to the west country. In 1643 it came under parliamentary siege. Although primarily a house and mansion rather than a castle it was a surprisingly difficult nut to crack and the parliamentarians made several attempts under different commanders to capture it. Finally under the command of Colonel John Dalbert and none other than Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, the House fell with the New House proving to be its Achilles heel. See below for an artist's picture of the siege...
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| The siege of Basing House: The first mansion is on the left; its curtain wall follow the circular mound of the Motte. The New House can be seen on the right. |
After the siege the house was offered as a quarry for the inhabitants of Basing to help rebuild their devasted town. It is no surprise then that little of the original house remains, although the large scale of the still intact Great Barn gives a feel for the red brick glory of the original mansion....
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| The Basing House Great Barn: I've never seen an old barn this big: It almost felt aircraft hanger size. |
All that is left of Basing's grand dinning hall is its wine cellar. The dinning hall was no doubt the scene of many an aristocratic banquet. Those banquets would be the setting for a mixture of social climbing, connection building, gossipy intrigue and discussions about the latest affairs of state. It was a place to keep your social masks on but those attending probably felt pleased knowing that their presence proved they were on the top rungs of society's status ladder.
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| All that is left of the great banqueting hall; the wine cellar underneath. |
In the nearby oven rooms & kitchens the hoi polloi worked very hard to keep their snobbish betters pleased by serving up lavish vittles. The oven room where they worked would have been a very hot and unpleasant environment; a nearby interpretation board tells us that a Spanish visitor in 1554 described Basing's kitchens as "...veritable Hells such is the stir and bustle in them".
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| What remains of Basing House's kitchen ovens |
Reflection
As I stood on the edge of the open cellar which is now all that is left of the Great Hall and looked at the nearby ovens I became aware of the meaning and apt symbolism of this now ruin of devastation along with its departed culture. It harked back to a day when a privileged upper ruling class, the aristocrats, was taken for granted to be part of the natural order of things. Today, needless to say, high privilege is looked at askance as perhaps an unjust anomaly in what should be the moral natural order of things. How has that change come about? One man to ask is Oliver Cromwell....
As a show piece of upper class excellence and aristocratic self-satisfaction it had few rivals, although its halcyon days lasted not much over a 100 years. How fitting then that it was Oliver Cromwell, a man of the earth who styled himself as a humble agent of God's people should take part in bringing judgement to this extravagant seat of privilege. But Cromwell was a fundamentalist by mentality and was full of the certitudes of righteousness, a dangerous condition which so often afflicts religious zealots. Nevertheless, as I have remarked before, Cromwell had pioneering ideas about government by parliament but he failed to implement them. He failed to implement them because a man of such decided religious conviction was simply unable to accept that given our very human tendency toward self-interest and our epistemic limitations, government by argument (as opposed to government by ruling class diktat) and government by agreeing to disagree was the inevitable norm of a genuine parliament. So, in all his fundamentalist self-confidence Cromwell could not accept a quarrelling parliament of ordinary human beings and regarded them as too unrighteous to rule; that is, all except himself of course! So, although he rightly didn't have the gall to accept the crown he nevertheless became the "righteous" dictator who ruled with an arrogant certitude.
Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester is also credited with conceiving the idea of a parliamentary democracy. His and Cromwell's ideas were moving in the direction of democratic accountability but ultimately they both muffed it. De Montfort was to the Jews of the country as Cromwell was to England's Catholic community; both leaders unleased terror upon their identified pet hate group, a group they regarded as a conspiratorial cartel of the wicked and who therefore became objects of blame and persecution. Cromwell's and De Montfort's jealously held certainties may account for them both failing to implement a true parliamentary "rule by argument and disagreement" government (but constrained by a constitution). It wasn't until the days of King William III that things started to move in the right direction.
Appendix
This photograph shows a breach in the curtain wall of the Old House allegedly made during the parliamentary siege..
