Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  William Somerset, faced with the challenge of adding a gallery to Raglan, managed to pull it off with considerably more panache, though the position of his gallery on the second floor would still have irked Roger North. He might, however, have been tempted up the stairs by the sheer scale of Somerset’s gallery. It stretched over the roof of the existing chapel, screens passage and buttery, and a brand new section of castle allowed it to extend further still; from end to end it measured 126 feet. North might also have been placated by the quality, both of the interior fittings and the spectacular views from the far end, where the gallery concluded with a grand set of windows looking out across the hills to the north. This magnificent room, however, did not even survive until North’s day; it is one of the most comprehensively ruined places in the castle. A few broken pieces of the great north window, and one half of a fine Renaissance fireplace, are all that remain of what was once Raglan’s most glorious room. However, some idea of its vanished splendour can be gained from contemporary equivalents. The gallery at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, for example, if hung with paintings, would look very similar to the one that graced Raglan.

  William Somerset’s additions to Raglan were not confined to the infrastructure of the castle. He also began a redevelopment of the grounds and gardens that was continued by his son and grandson, transforming his home from a castle into a pleasure palace. By the time we finally catch up with Henry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, who inherited his father’s estate in 1628, the castle was, in the words of a contemporary, ‘accounted one of the fairest buildings in England’. The moat about the great tower had been ringed with a walkway, complete with niches containing the busts of Roman emperors. From the water rose a great fountain, its plume leaping to the same height as the castle walls. To the west lay a bowling green, admired for its situation and fine views. Beyond lay gardens and meadows, ‘fair built with summer houses, delightful walks, and ponds’. Into the distance stretched ‘orchards planted with fruit trees, parks thick planted with oaks and richly stocked with deer’.

  No one arriving at Raglan in 1640 would have been in any doubt that they were in for a good time. The marquis of Worcester, with an income of £24,000, was accounted one of the richest individuals in the kingdom. His household extended to some five hundred persons; besides him and his large family, there were the steward, the comptroller, and the cook; the master of arms and the master of hounds; the wardrober and the secretary; brewers, bakers, and bailiffs; footmen, grooms, ushers, and doormen; chaplains, foresters and falconers; waiters, parkers and pages.

  We also have some sense of what the marquis of Worcester was like at this time, thanks to one of his chaplains, Dr Thomas Bailey. Later in life, Bailey collected a number of his former master’s favourite stories and reminiscences, and published them under the rather misleading title Wittie Apophthegmes. Few are genuinely clever or funny – for the most part they are the self-indulgent tales of an old man, doubtless much improved by constant retelling. Nevertheless, Bailey claimed to have compiled them with ‘exactness and choice’, and they provide us with a portrait of a kindly, good-natured man, with a nice line in self-deprecating humour, and much liked by his family and household.

  For over two hundred years, the marquis and his family had lived at Raglan castle, making it bigger and better with each year that passed – more opulent, more brilliant, more lavish. They could afford to do so because England was a peaceful place. The biggest danger to the marquis was gout; according to Dr Bailey, he was more than partial to a drop of claret. (‘Give it to me, in spite of all physicians and their books,’ he once quipped. ‘It never shall be said I forsook my friend to pleasure my enemy.’)

  But the days of small talk in long galleries were drawing to a close. For the first time in its history, Raglan was going to experience war. It only remained to be seen whether the marquis and his ancestors, by customizing their castle, had compromised its defences.

  The war was the English Civil War, or as some historians more appropriately call it, ‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. To say what sparked the conflagration is difficult. A complicated mixture of causes combined to bring society to its knees in the 1640s. Some were long-term, deep-rooted problems that had existed for many decades; others were catastrophes brought about by particular individuals and specific events at the time.

  Certainly one of the major causes was religion. The three kingdoms had been moving in different directions for a hundred years since the Reformation. Ireland, although it had been settled by a powerful minority of Protestants, remained a Catholic country. Scotland, by contrast, had become fiercely Protestant, having adopted an uncompromising form of worship known as Presbyterianism. It was England, however, that had ended up with the strangest arrangement of all. The Anglican Church was a curious blend of contradictory positions: a lot of the doctrine was Protestant, but the Church itself was still governed along traditional Catholic lines. Most of the population in England were regular attendees of Anglican services, some of them zealously so. There remained, however, a small but powerful Catholic minority who were not. They tended to be aristocrats, who had both the chapels in which to practise their religion privately, and the money to pay the fines that the government imposed for non-attendance at Protestant services.

  The marquis of Worcester was one such Catholic aristocrat. In his chapel at Raglan (of which very little remains) he would have continued to listen to mass surrounded by gold and silver plate, and the icons and crucifixes that many of his fellow countrymen would have considered idolatrous. But despite being a member of a small religious minority, penalized if not persecuted, the marquis himself does not appear to have been a zealot. He was a godly man, certainly; Dr Bailey recalled that in all the years he spent in the marquis’s household, he ‘never saw a man drunk, nor heard an oath amongst any of the servants… very rare it was to see a better ordered family’.

  But the marquis could not see much point in arguing about religion.

  ‘Men are often carried by the force of their words further asunder than their question was at first,’ he once said. ‘Like two ships going out of the same haven, their journeys’ end is many times whole countries distant.’

  This tolerant attitude was no mere pose; the marquis applied his philosophy when recruiting his domestic staff.

  ‘What was most wonderful,’ Bailey recalled, was ‘half of them being Protestants and half Papists, yet never were at variance in point of religion.’

  Under the marquis’s roof at Raglan, Protestant and Catholic worked side by side, with the marquis – genial, tolerant and wise – presiding over all like a good father.

  If only as much could have been said for his king. Charles I, son of James I (James VI of Scotland) had come to the throne after his father’s death in 1628. A silly and stubborn man by nature, Charles contrived to make himself even more unpopular by his stance on matters of religion. The king and his court hankered after bells and smells in their church services, despite the fact that many Protestants saw this as Catholicism creeping in by the back door. Charles had also further compounded his error in the opinion of his subjects by choosing to take a Catholic as his queen.

  None of this would have mattered quite as much had the king not also had a very inflated sense of his own importance and rectitude. Whereas the Marquis of Worcester appears to have been tolerant and wise, Charles was dogmatic, headstrong and foolish. In 1637, in a misguided attempt to bring unity to his three kingdoms, the king tried to force his Scottish subjects to use the new English Prayer Book. The staunchly Presbyterian Scots, as the more prescient of the Charles’ advisers had forecast, rose in rebellion.

  Telling his Scottish subjects what to do would have been a lot easier for Charles had he been listening to his English ones; unfortunately he had not. By the time the king was ready to get to grips with the Scottish crisis in 1640 there had been no Parliament in England for eleven years. Charles had preferred to govern the country as he saw fit, raising money by arbitrary
methods of dubious legality. Lack of funds to deal with Scotland, however, left him with no choice but to summon Parliament, and this unleashed a storm of complaints against his rule; MPs refused to co-operate over the Scottish business unless the king first addressed their long-nurtured grievances. Charles refused, jammed his fingers in his ears and tried to sort out the mess himself; but things just got messier.

  In October 1641, the king’s Catholic subjects in Ireland rebelled, and many people in England regarded this new rising as a Popish plot engineered by Charles. Events finally came to a head at the end of the year, when MPs in England presented their complaints to the king in a document they called the Grand Remonstrance. Charles, however, was not about to start listening at this late stage. He tried instead to arrest his leading parliamentary critics – but failed dismally. By the time the blundering monarch and his troops arrived in Westminster, the individuals in question were long gone. But the cat was now out of the bag. Charles stood exposed as a king who had no respect for law or Parliament; a tyrant who would use force against his own subjects. As the king hurriedly gathered up his family and left London under cover of darkness, Royalists were already rallying to his aid. Parliament, meanwhile, began to organize itself to fight for its privileges. The slide towards war had begun.

  For the next three years, Parliamentarians (or, disparagingly, ‘Roundheads’), slugged it out with Royalists (‘Cavaliers’), but neither side managed to achieve a decisive victory. Broadly, London and the South-East fought for Parliament, while the North and West of England backed the king; but this simple analysis disguises the complexity of the conflict. The reality was a patchwork of allegiances, shaped and distorted by religious beliefs, regional rivalries and, ultimately, whether individuals put loyalty to the Crown above liberty and consent.

  Commanders on both sides struggled to transcend these difficulties as well as their own personal antagonisms. At the start of 1645, Parliament responded by creating a new national army – the so-called ‘New Model Army’. The Royalists, in an ebullient mood, misinterpreted their enemies’ decision to reorganize as a sign of weakness. By the middle of the year, each side was confident that it could beat the other in battle. When they met at Naseby (Northamptonshire) on 14 June, it proved to be the most decisive battle of the war – the turning point after three long years of fighting. Outnumbered and outgeneralled by the Roundheads, the Royalist divisions surrendered. As the king and the remnant of his army beat a retreat, they were left reflecting on the loss of four and a half thousand men, eight thousand weapons and all their great guns. From Naseby they headed west, deep into the Royalist heartlands of south Wales. Late in the day on 3 July, King Charles arrived at Raglan Castle.

  At Raglan, Charles knew he was guaranteed a warm welcome. The Marquis of Worcester might not have been an arch-Catholic, but he was definitely an arch-Royalist. In the three years since the outbreak of hostilities he had poured nearly a million pounds into Charles’ war effort – more money than any other individual. Immediately after his arrival, in his hour of greatest need, the king appealed for more cash, and rather brazenly at that. Dr Bailey relates how the king demanded access to the castle’s great tower, believing that his principal backer was still keeping some gold in reserve in the basement (he wasn’t). It didn’t matter, however, how rude or foolish Charles appeared to be (from Bailey’s reports of the king’s behaviour, the marquis had ample justification for being offended on several scores). For men like Henry Somerset, supporting the king was a matter of principle. Kings were appointed by God, and loyalty to them was absolutely non-negotiable. The marquis therefore bailed the king out again with such money as he had remaining, and permitted Charles and his army to reside at Raglan for three weeks. The only thing the marquis had not done up to this point was fight for the king in person; as a man in his mid-sixties, plagued by gout, he was unlikely to be found charging into battle. His opportunity to prove himself, however, was about to arrive: the battle was now coming to the marquis.

  The history of the Civil War is normally recounted as a series of battles: the quiet fields of Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby are all familiar to us because of the bloody mayhem of three and half centuries ago. As in the Middle Ages, however, so too in the seventeenth century: battles were actually the exception. Throughout the Civil War, the most common form of military encounter was the siege. Before the battle of Naseby, and apart from the major engagements mentioned above, the war had been conducted as a series of sieges by small local armies. After Naseby, the fighting once again took this form. The New Model Army split into smaller contingents and set about flushing out Royalist resistance, especially in the west of England.

  This was bad news for Royalists who had invested their money in luxurious but undefended mansions. In a sad echo of the Hardwick Hall rhyme, one Irish homeowner expressed the general feeling of aristocrats everywhere. ‘My house I built for peace,’ he wrote, ‘having more windows than walls.’ In such circumstances, castle owners did rather better. At Sherborne in Dorset, the local Royalist garrison put up a spirited defence, but even so the castle surrendered after only two weeks, battered into submission by Parliamentarian cannon.

  Successful defence, however, required not just strong walls but strong wills. The castle at Bristol, where the walls once stood seventeen feet thick, was expected to hold out no matter what. In addition to its mighty defences and lofty position, the castle was under the command of Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew. But when the New Model Army attacked Bristol on the night of 10 September, the expensive new defences that ringed the city proved worthless. With the town itself overwhelmed and the castle surrounded, Rupert decided that further resistance was pointless. By the end of the day he had surrendered.

  Charles, who was at Raglan organizing troops in order to relieve Bristol, received the news of his nephew’s capitulation with utter disbelief. The town was his last toehold in western England; with it went any hope of landing extra troops from overseas. The odds were becoming impossible, as many of the king’s supporters began to realize. As Charles slipped away from Raglan back to his temporary capital in Oxford, other Royalists started to surrender, sensing that all was lost. In October, the garrisons in the castles of Chepstow and Monmouth (both of which belonged to the Marquis of Worcester) submitted to their enemies.

  This was a war, however, where the fighting was motivated not by realpolitik but by real conviction. There were some who, in spite of the odds, would rather fight on than surrender. The Marquis of Worcester was one such man. His other castles may have fallen; the king may have left him to his fate; the chances of success might be minuscule; but the marquis prepared to make his last stand.

  The best preserved Civil War earthwork in Britain, Queen’s Sconce near Newark, has diamond-shaped bastions on each corner

  This was not just a matter of steeling himself and his family for the inevitable. Preparation for war in Britain at this time had become an arduous and time-consuming affair. Since the outbreak of the Civil War, both Roundheads and Cavaliers had been trying desperately to catch up with the military advances that had been taking place in Europe for the past hundred years. While England had enjoyed domestic peace during the sixteenth century, in Europe religious wars had raged. Across the Continent soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old had died in their tens of thousands. City authorities and rich individuals in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere had invested heavily in their own protection, in some cases spending up to half their annual budgets on the upkeep of their defences. These new fortifications were very different to the tall, crenellated walls that had been built in the Middle Ages. The advent of cannon had led to a radical rethink. Walls were no longer built tall, but massively thick and squat. For the most part they were built of earth, and only revetted (reinforced) with stone, which enabled them to absorb cannon shot without cracking. Battlements had become useless (a single shot from even a small bombard could blow them away), and so they disappeared. Instead, defenders
protected their walls by building bastions – diamond-shaped platforms of earth designed to carry cannon. They were thrust forward from the walls, in order to give covering fire along the length of the defences, as well as outwards in the direction of an approaching enemy.

  Defences like this were unknown in Britain (only the border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed had anything even remotely comparable). At the outbreak of war, the country’s defences were hopelessly outdated. Across all three kingdoms, and especially in England, towns and castles had to be brought up to speed rapidly. The only solace for defenders was that artillery in Britain also lagged behind that of Europe, and nobody was experienced in the arts of siege warfare. Both Royalists and Parliamentarians recruited experts from the Continent to advise on both the conduct of sieges and the construction of defences. Huge new earthworks went up around cities like London, Colchester, Oxford and Exeter.

  Having decided to stick it out and fight, the Marquis of Worcester was faced with exactly this task – converting his stately castle at Raglan into a military stronghold. Exact details as to how and when he carried out this process are lacking. We know that he had maintained a Royalist garrison in the castle since the start of the war. One contemporary put the number of infantry at three hundred men; another suggested that the total number of people inside the castle was eight hundred, but indicated that this figure included members of the marquis’s own household. The garrison was certainly large, and the precautions they took were correspondingly extensive. Inside, the castle was knocked around and modified. With nowhere to grind gunpowder for their twenty cannon, the Royalist soldiers converted the basement of the closet tower into a powder mill: the doorway has apparently been widened to enable barrels of gunpowder to be carried in and out. More importantly, the soldiers began to construct a ring of earthen defences around the castle. They may have started at an early date, but the context of certain comments made by Dr Bailey suggests that work was still being carried out at the time of the king’s visit in 1645. One of the bastion towers they built to the south of the castle has survived, though its contours have been much reduced by erosion (its shape can be best appreciated from the top of the great tower). From what survives, the completed defences are reckoned to have been vast, extending outwards from the walls by several hundred feet. Describing the stables and barns constructed for the garrison, an eye-witness thought them ‘built like a small town’.