THE SIEGE

When some 6,000 parliamentarians tried to prise a few hundred royalists out of Basing House in 1643, they began a brutal siege that would drag on for years - and see thousands slaughtered. Jessie Childs tells the story of a desperate struggle that became a defining episode of the Civil War

- Jessie Childs

In the line of fire

The siege of Basing House, in a contemporary engraving. The royalist stronghold was seen as a "microcosm of Stuart degeneracy", which the parliamentarians were determined to purge

On a plant-finding expedition to Kent in 1633, the apothecary Thomas Johnson looked out from the tower of Canterbury Cathedral and despaired at the inadequacy of the town's defences. "Our people," he lamented, "like the Spartans of old, set more store upon arms than upon walls for protection." A decade later, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was shoring up the defences of Basing House in Hampshire, ahead of an imminent parliamentarian attack and presumably wishing that someone had listened to him earlier.

We have always preferred the glamour of the battle to the dog-work of a siege. We hear the rumble of the cavalry charge and the first dry rattle of new-drawn steel more keenly than the sound of digging and guard duty. We imagine the king's battle standard rescued at Edgehill and the royalist horse reduced to "stubble" by Cromwell's troops on Marston Moor, but a half-starved garrison negotiating terms of surrender is rarely part of the picture.

Yet the Civil War was not only won at Marston Moor, nor even at Naseby when Charles I lost his artillery and a large part of his officer corps in June 1645. It was won three months later, at Bristol, when his nephew Prince Rupert yielded England's second city and, with it, his command of the royalist army. It was won when further strongholds were taken and destroyed, securing parliament's supply lines and, ultimately, giving the king nowhere to hide.

"We make war more like foxes than lions," wrote Roger Boyle. "You will have 20 sieges for one battle"