A chaplain to Charles I, he left Britain during the Civil War, and travelled to Greece and Asia Minor, with the ambition of converting the Eastern Orthodox churches to Anglicanism.
[2] In about 1628 Basire settled in England, and in 1629 he received holy orders from Thomas Morton, then Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, who soon afterwards made him his chaplain.
In 1645 the rich living of Stanhope became vacant; it was in the gift of the Bishop of Durham, but Morton, "oppressed and overawed by the terrors of the rebels, durst not dispose of it".
[2] In 1646 Basire, who as royal chaplain had markedly identified himself with the king's cause, was seized at Egglescliffe and taken to Stockton Castle and his livings were sequestered.
On his release he was "forced by want of subsistence for himself and his family" to go abroad, leaving his wife and children to live upon the so-called "fifths", which "were paid by sixes and sevens, or rather by tenths and twelfths", and upon the small sums which Basire conscientiously remitted to them whenever he possibly could.
Mrs Basire, however, found a kind friend in Richard Busby, who had been most intimate with her husband, and who frequently expressed himself under great obligations to him for spiritual counsel.
When Basire went to London he always stayed with Busby at Westminster School, and he placed his eldest son under the doctor's charge at an unusually early age.
With these three he began his travels in the summer of 1647, going first to Paris, where he had an interview with the unfortunate Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, who gave him a recommendation to Sir Kenelm Digby, the English legate at Rome.
It seems at first sight a wild and quixotic enterprise for a man who had no knowledge of any eastern language to attempt to impress his religious opinions upon the unchanging East; but he had a thorough conviction that the true position of Anglicanism only required to be known to secure its acceptance among earnest and intelligent Christians, and the result proved that his design was more than a day-dream.
Basire visited Messina, Zante, the Morea, Smyrna, Aleppo, Antioch, Jerusalem, Transylvania, Constantinople, Mesopotamia, and many other places, ever keeping his one object before him.
In a letter written in 1653 from Pera to Sir Richard Browne, the father-in-law of John Evelyn, and the mainstay of the English church in Paris, he describes what he had effected.
At Aleppo he held frequent conversations with the patriarch of Antioch, then resident there, and left copies of the church catechism translated into Arabic.
He had picked up a little Arabic at Aleppo, and he joined a company of twenty Turks, an apparently dangerous escort; but they treated him well, because he acted as physician to them.
"In 1661", he wrote: Basire still kept his one object in view at Alba Iulia, for we find him writing to Sir Edward Hyde (afterwards Lord Clarendon) in 1658: "As for maintenance here 'tis competent; but my especial loadstone hath been the opportunity in the chair to propagate the right christian religion as well for discipline as doctrine".
Rákóczi made an heroic but unsuccessful struggle against the invaders at the Battle of Gyalu, but was mortally wounded and died soon after (June 1660).
Rákóczi, "loath to lose him", concealed this letter from Basire for a while, and after his death his widow begged him still to stay in Transylvania and educate her son.
Evelyn mentions in his Diary (10 November 1661) that there "preached in the abbey (Westminster) Dr. Basire, that great traveller, or rather French apostle, who had been planting the church of England in divers parts of the Levant and Asia"; but we do not hear much of him from other sources.