The successors of this gorgeous nobleman--not being Lords Treasurers--could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place, fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road, and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John, fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘_Aimez Loyaulté_,’ he wrote with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and, provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of the arts; reposing after the warlike fatigues of the day in a bed whose gorgeous trappings made it worth £1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other; a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the name of _Basting_ House.’ But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places. Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.