Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England

God’s Traitors

A true story of plots, priest-holes and persecution and one family's battle to save Catholicism in Reformation England.

A triumph of story-telling, backed by first-rate research

Richly packed, absorbing... A parade of extraordinary characters

God’s Traitors, with its crisp prose and punctilious scholarship, brilliantly recreates a world of heroism and holiness in Tudor England... It is little short of a triumph

Beautifully written... Hollywood could not have made it up

Truly excellent... God's Traitors crosses the divide between popular and academic history. It raises issues of some real historical importance

This vivid, minutely researched and brilliantly original history is a much-needed look at the dark side of the Elizabethan age

Excellent... An engaging history of English papists, filled with memorable episodes

In the quality of her research and sensitive handling of issues  that remain raw to this day, Jessie Childs succeeds in evoking ‘the  lived experience of anti-Catholicism’ as few have done before... Childs’s  language is lively and inventive... By picturing Elizabethan recusants in  all their complexity, Jessie Childs has enabled them to speak for  themselves at last

Superb and groundbreaking... It isn’t possible in the space of a review  to do justice to the breadth and depth of Childs’ research and insight;  but they illuminate the entire landscape of English life...a superlative,  flawlessly written book... Childs’ description of an exorcism at Lord  Vaux’s house in Hackney...is one of the most extraordinary things I have  ever read

Childs is a lucid, passionate writer and she gets under the skin of her subject... It's not often that history books get the balance of expert research and storytelling with chutzpah just right but Childs has managed it with this informative and entertaining book

[A] moving historical account... Childs paints a vivid, sometimes even humorous picture of devout Catholics keeping up appearances

Vivid but measured…never has the actual experience of the recusants been rendered with such a wealth of searing detail…richly packed, absorbing… It is a parade of extraordinary characters and a banquet of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose

This superbly researched and vividly narrated account conjures a lost world of exorcisms, priest’s holes and miracle-performing relics

[A] fascinating work of narrative history… What makes Childs’s book different is that she concentrates not on the derring-do of the foreign diplomats and priest-adventurers – who invariably ended up hung, drawn and quartered – but on the stay-at-home English Catholics who were obliged to negotiate their divided loyalties in these trickiest of times

Splendid book… Childs does a splendid job of explaining this unenviable situation and of putting it in the wider context of Elizabethan Catholic life. There are many fruitful digressions

A gripping account of an aristocratic family defying Elizabeth I’s thought police and executioners

·         Thorough research coupled to a vigorous, readable style… This colourful saga of a downwardly mobile family on the losing side of national events reminds us that history is not all about the winners

All the way through, you ask: just how far would I go to protect and express my faith?

It’s been eight years since Jessie Childs’ last book, and her latest…was worth the wait

There have been many books on the turbulent lives of Catholics in post-Reformation England, but Childs’s nuances account of the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall in Northhamptonshire convinced me there is still new ground to explore or, at least, revisit with fresh eyes

A timely exposé of our gruesome, intolerant past

Jessie Childs was born in London in 1976 and read history at Brasenose College, Oxford, where she took a first. Her first book Henry VIII’s Last Victim won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Her second book God’s Traitors was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book Prize, and won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, 2015. 
Jessie frequently appears on TV and radio, and has written and reviewed for many publications, including the Telegraph, the Guardian, Literary Review, Standpoint and the Times Literary Supplement. She is one of the judges for the 2016 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History. 
She lives in Hammersmith, London, with her husband and two daughters. 
www.jessiechilds.com

*Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize* 
*Longlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction* 
*A Sunday Times Book of the Year* 
*A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year* 
*A Times Book of the Year* 
*An Observer Book of the Year* 
 
A woman awakes in a prison cell. 
 
She has been on the run but the authorities have tracked her down and taken her to the Tower of London - where she is interrogated about the Gunpowder Plot. 
 
The woman is Anne Vaux - one of the ardent, brave and exasperating members of the aristocratic Vauxes of Harrowden Hall. 
 
Through the eyes of this remarkable family, award-winning author Jessie Childs explores the Catholic predicament in Elizabethan England - an age in which their faith was criminalised and almost two hundred Catholics were executed. 
 
From dawn raids to daring escapes, stately homes to torture chambers, God's Traitors exposes the tensions masked by the cult of Gloriana - and is a timely reminder of the terrible consequences when religion and politics collide.

The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry VIII's Last Victim

A biography of a Tudor maverick and poetic genius whose life - full of swashbuckling derring-do and courageous defiance - sheds new light on the reign and personality of Henry VIII.

Rarely have I felt so utterly captivated by a history book. It is stunning! Jessie Childs is a major new talent. She brings her characters to life so vividly, and the narrative just flows, packed with amazing detail.  This, for me, is a surprisingly fresh view on a period with which I am very familiar.

Clatters along like an epic gangster movie... gripping.

Jessie Childs is a rising star among historians. Just when we thought everything had been said about Henry VIII she makes us see him from a completely new angle - through the eyes of a poet aristocrat.

Childs's description of these complex manoeuvrings [at Henry's court], as of the French wars, is excellent...this book opens a fascinating window on the mid-Tudor world.

A fascinating story ...a very readable, and diligently researched book.

A detailed and vivid picture of the daily and seasonal life of the landed aristocracy of the time, as well as of the political scheming and backbiting which in Henry's last years were all too often fatal.

This is a rumbustious tale and well worth the retelling but what makes this biography special is the quality of the writing. It is as fluid and engaging as the research is careful and penetrating.

Jessie Childs was born in 1976 and educated at West Heath and Stowe School. She took a first in history at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1999 and has worked in television as a researcher for historical documentaries. Her proposal for Henry VIII's Last Victim was a runner-up in the 2001 Biographers' Club/Daily Mail Prize. Her second book will tell the story of the persecuted Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth I. She lives in London.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was one of the most flamboyant and controversial characters of Henry VIII's reign. 
 
A pioneering poet, whose verse had a profound impact on Shakespeare, Surrey was nevertheless branded by one contemporary as 'the most foolish proud boy that is in England'. He was the heir of England's premier nobleman, first cousin to two of Henry VIII's wives - Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard - and best friend and brother-in-law to the King's illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. 
 
Celebrated for his chivalrous deeds both on and off the battlefield, Surrey became, at only twenty-eight, the King's Lieutenant General in France. But his confident exterior masked insecurity and loneliness. A man of intriguing contradictions, Surrey was both law enforcer and law breaker, political conservative and religious reformer and his life, replete with drunken escapades, battlefield heroics, conspiracy and courtroom drama, sheds new light on the opulence and artifice of a dazzling, but deadly, age.

Jessie Childs

Atmospheric, unflinching and...exquisitely witty

This is war as it should be, passionate, brutal, bloody and chaotic, all described in luscious, evocative prose

Jessie Childs is one of the finest historians working today; her illuminating, deeply researched, and beautifully written books are never anything short of superlative, and here she does it again. This is a vivid, thrilling story, rendered in delicious prose and brilliant with gems dug from the archives

A gripping account of the agony at Basing... Characters step off the page... The prose sparkles... Childs's book conveys the raw emotion of events, especially the trauma of the siege itself... In her aim 'to recover the shock of that experience and to look upon the face of the war' Childs could be describing the trenches of Ypres or Bakhmut or the sieges of Leningrad or Mariupol

Compelling... Childs reveals brilliantly the world of the Civil War in the grain of sand that is Basing House. She captures the horror, the courage, the sheer humanity of those, both besiegers and besieged, who endured the long, desperate lulls punctuated by intense episodes of visceral violence

The Siege of Loyalty House... enriches the packed civil war bookshelf with this elegantly written, close-focus history of a place whose ordeals epitomised the pain of a struggle that tore homes, clans, trades, and souls apart

A spectacular work of scholarship, this is epic, vital history, sweeping from the great trends and ideas of the time to the individual details of vividly lived lives. This brilliant book takes you into the heart of the Civil War, the brutal struggle for the sympathies of a country, the men who fought, women who tried to survive; this is blood, desire and struggle on the page, taking you deep into the seventeenth century world; you can feel its beating heart

Compellingly readable... [a] beautifully written and lucid account

A thrilling account of Basing House, a royalist stronghold during the English Civil War nicknamed 'Loyalty' and the sieges it withstood until its fall to Oliver Cromwell in 1645

Riveting... The breaking of such lives and communities makes poignant reading... [Childs's] focus is local and English, but the story is human and timeless

Underpinned by meticulous research, this finely crafted narrative unfolds in evocative and often poetic language, transporting readers back to a 'terrifying, electrifying time' and breathing fresh life into the men and women who endured it.

A perfectly crafted triumph of narrative history... One of the most pulsating books on seventeenth-century England I have read for many years

In this stunning feat of historical reconstruction, Jessie Childs brings England's brutal civil conflict to life, illuminating the human experience, and human cost, of this devastating war. A work of deep scholarship, The Siege of Loyalty House is gripping, moving, unputdownable

Beautifully written and gripping from first page to last. A sparkling book by one of the UK's finest historians

A thrilling, immersive read, especially searing in our own tormented and besieged times. Her beautiful writing drops the reader deep in the war, sees it through a cast of extraordinary characters from both sides of the terrible conflict, but most of all, shines with a compassionate understanding of human courage, folly, obstinacy and frailty, at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power

She is a gifted narrative historian, eloquent, graceful and witty; the stories she tells are the ones we all should know

Childs...has a good eye for evocative detail... [The Siege of Loyalty House is a] highly readable account [of the civil war]

[Childs's] great strength is her ability to deliver first-rate scholarship in really luscious prose, [and she] uses Basing as a microcosm through which to view the civil war in all its fog and mess

Enthralling ... the sort of coup de théâtre that only the most brilliant archival research can pull off ... Few books on the Civil War convey so powerfully the human cost ... All this is done with such clarity and economy that her book doubles as a fine introduction to 1640s England as a whole, quite apart from the engrossing story of Basing House ... A magnificent achievement. Rarely has such fine-grained focus on a single event been used so effectively to open up wider perspectives on that fractious age. And as an account of what it was like to live through the bloodiest and most traumatic decade in England's history, it has few rivals

Jessie Childs tackles this rolling tragedy with confidence and a clear eye ... There are wonderful character portraits throughout ... successfully brings the ghastliness of the period to life, dramatically, vividly and with pathos

Extraordinary: meticulously researched, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly relevant. I urge you to read it

Extraordinary. Exhaustively researched and beautifully (and wittily) written, a thrilling and immersive tale that offers the reader a rare window into the terrifying events of the English Civil War when religion and ambition divided families, friends and neighbours. One of the finest books I've read for years, a stunning achievement

The Siege of Loyalty House is not only deeply researched. Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic

This heroic story has not been told before in such detail and with such an eye for the tragedies of civil war. Childs handles a remarkable amount of source material with masterly skill...Thrilling

Gripping ... The accumulation and deployment of facts is impressive. The understanding of what they signify is profound. The elegance, wit and brio of the writing is sheer delight

The Siege of Loyalty House is exciting and scholarly, vivid and accessible. It is a perfectly-crafted triumph of narrative history...one of the most pulsating books on seventeenth-century England I have read for many years

In Jessie Childs [Basing House] finds at last a writer able to bring out in full its excitement, pathos, glory and tragedy, with a deep political, military and social context. As so many of the defenders of the house were transplanted Londoners, it is a tale that links the heart of Hampshire to the heart of the capital. Local Civil War history does not get better than this.

Childs brilliantly shows us the world of the civil war

Enthralling... This is history as rip-roaring narrative. ... Both her previous books won awards, and I would be amazed if this does not make it a hat-trick

Jessie Child's The Siege of Loyalty House turns an English Civil War stand-off into a fable of murderous polarisation: gripping, timely history

The Siege of Loyalty House ... tingles with a discerning historical imagination

[A] gripping tale of a royalist house standing its grown against the Roundheads ... Atmospheric, unflinching, and at times extraordinarily witty

UK Daily News, *Best History and Politics Books of 2022*

[A] poignant book... the story is timeless

Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, [The Siege of Loyalty House] tells the story of the epic two-year siege of Basing House, a royalist mansion finally captured by Oliver Cromwell in 1645.

When you are as good a writer as Jessie Childs, and as assuredly immersed in the archives, the pages zing with the technicolour of celluloid. ... [A] masterpiece.

Critic, *Non-fiction books of the year 2022*

Childs writes an engrossing, spellbinding narrative while laying out a clear and comprehendible history

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens to people during civil war: how quickly and imperceptibly order becomes chaos and decency yields to cruelty. In other words, how close to inhumanity humanity always is. The focus is on an episode in the English civil war, but the story is timeless

A gripping account of the agony at Basing, The Siege of Loyalty House is also a potted social history of the civil wars and how they started. Jessie Childs, [is] a gifted storyteller

A new history of the English Civil War

**A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, THE CRITIC, MAIL ON SUNDAY, ECONOMIST AND PROSPECT BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
'A gifted narrative historian, eloquent, graceful and witty; the stories she tells are the ones we all should know' Hilary Mantel 
 
It was a time of climate change and colonialism, puritans and populism, witch hunts and war . . . 
 
Drawing on unpublished manuscripts and the voices of countless victims of the crossfire, Jessie Childs weaves a thrilling tale of war and peace, terror and faith, savagery and civilisation. Throughout, we follow artists, apothecaries, merchants and their families from the streets of London as they descend on the royalist stronghold of Basing House. 
 
The Siege of Loyalty House is an immersive and electrifying account of a defining episode in a war that would turn Britain - and the world - upside down. 
 
__________ 
 
'Extraordinary, thrilling, immersive ... at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power' Simon Schama 
 
'Compellingly readable... [a] beautifully written and lucid account' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Brilliant. Original. Gripping.' Antonia Fraser 
 
'Beautifully written and gripping from first page to last. A sparkling book by one of the UK's finest historians' Peter Frankopan 
 
'The Siege of Loyalty House is not only deeply researched. Childs has composed a wonderfully poetic narrative and adds a touch of the gothic' The Times 
 
'Successfully brings the ghastliness of the period to life, dramatically, vividly and with pathos' Charles Spencer, Spectator

Jessie Childs

Praise for The Siege of Loyalty House

Atmospheric, unflinching and...exquisitely witty

This is war as it should be, passionate, brutal, bloody and chaotic, all described in luscious, evocative prose

Jessie Childs is one of the finest historians working today; her illuminating, deeply researched, and beautifully written books are never anything short of superlative, and here she does it again. This ...

Atmospheric, unflinching and...exquisitely witty

This is war as it should be, passionate, brutal, bloody and chaotic, all described in luscious, evocative prose

Jessie Childs is one of the finest historians working today; her illuminating, deeply researched, and beautifully written books are never anything short of superlative, and here she does it again. This ...

Atmospheric, unflinching and...exquisitely witty

This is war as it should be, passionate, brutal, bloody and chaotic, all described in luscious, evocative prose

Jessie Childs is one of the finest historians working today; her illuminating, deeply researched, and beautifully written books are never anything short of superlative, and here she does it again. This ...

Books by Jessie Childs

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter