Chapter 7. The Civil War*
- Cromwell Blows the Crap out of Basing House

 

The historical high-water mark for Basing House was during the English Civil War when it was personally blown to pieces by Oliver Cromwell and his puritanical army of Roundheads. The house, which was generally considered to be fabulous, was inhabited at the time by The Marquis of Winchester, further evidence that even in historical times, basingstoke was a much better place to live than Winchester. Like all hereditary piers of the time, the Marquis was of course a staunch royalist. He did a terrific job of repelling repeated attacks by Sir William Waller (Willy Wally, as he is known locally), withstanding his sieges and killing a bunch of roundheads in the "Bloody Barn".

This went on for well into the war until at last Cromwell himself was forced to stop off on his way back up North and blast the place into the pages of history.

*For those of you who have yet to learn about it, the English Civil War (or "CW1" as we like to call it) is far superior to the crappy American sequels. I never really got "The Revolutionary War", which seems rather pointless to me, especially in light of what we learned in the aftermath of CW1 i.e. that it is sociopaths who cause all our problems, so why aren't we fighting them, instead of listening to their meaningless drivel that is only designed to make us fight each other for their benefit? I mean I realize that your average Puritan was well-meaning like the other 99% of humanity, but any system that does not somehow acknowledge and account for the existence of the 1% of us that are sociopaths, is doomed to be corrupted by them sooner rather than later. For an AMAZING movie on CW1, watch "A Field in England". Still, I did like the dark ending of "TRW" (definately "revolutionary" for its time), which set us up nicely for the conclusion of the trilogy in "CW2". As for CW 2, I personally find it incredibly dull, but at least there was a decent motivation for the action, and I do heart all the reenactors on all three sides. Although I grew up on "WW1" and all it's spin-off's, I'm not really very much emjoying of the more recent corporate-era, immersive-experience crap they're putting out nowadays. Come on humanity, we can do better!

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8. Basingstoke in the Sixties - A Modernist Utopia

Index