So the lieutenant-general laid formal siege to it, and, on the morning of 14th October 1645, stormed it, and carried it in three-quarters of an hour. “He had spent much time in prayer,” says Mr. Peters, “the night before the storm, and was able to write that night to ‘the Hon. William Lenthall, Speaker of the Common House of Parliament,’ to the follow-effect: ‘Sir, I thank God I can give a good account of Basing.’” The marquis and two hundred prisoners were taken, and so speedily was the capture completed, that there is some reason for the tradition that the attack was a surprise, and that the garrison were playing cards. Hence the local saying, “Clubs trumps, as when Basing was taken.” Here, too, was slain Robison the player, who was mercilessly shot after the surrender by fanatical Harrison, who shot him through the head with the wild quotation, “Cursed is he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently.” The action and the remark evidence, better than anything else could, the increasing embitterment of the controversy, and the real, or pretended, religious fervour, or rather rancour, that accompanied its continuance. That the feeling was honest, however strained, with many who fought against the king, is undoubted; as undoubted as the religious fervour of the Jews when “Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord”; or when a modern Mohammedan charges home upon a British square with “Allah” on his dying lips. Incomprehensible to some, it is a feeling that has to be taken serious account of in the last great Civil War in England. So Basing fell. It was “now the twentieth garrison that hath been taken in the summer by this army; and I believe most of them the answer of the prayers, and trophies of the faith of some of God’s servants.” So thought Mr. Peters in that year of grace 1645, and so thought many who, in the Commons House of Parliament, heard him tell his story of how Basing fell.