Castle (36 page)

Before his arrival, the siege had been under the direction, loosely speaking, of the splendidly named Sir Henry Cholmondley, a Blimpish figure who for months had been furnishing his superiors in London with rosy reports of his progress. In actual fact, Cholmondley had been so busy quarrelling with other Parliamentarian officers on how best to prosecute the siege that he had not even managed to mount an effective blockade; supplles were still finding their way to the Royalists inside the castle.

Cromwell, when he arrived at the start of November, therefore found he faced a near-impossible task. Regarding the castle itself, he echoed Paulden’s estimation of its defensive advantages.

‘The place is very well known to be one of the strongest inland garrisons in the kingdom,’ he wrote to Parliament, ‘well-watered, situated upon a rock in every part, and therefore difficult to mine. The walls are very thick and high, with strong towers, and… very difficult to access, by reason of the steepness of the graft.’

Disabusing MPs of the notion that victory was close to hand, he wrote, ‘My Lords, the castle has been victualled with 240 cattle within these three weeks, and they also gotten in salt enough for them, so that I apprehend they are victualled for a twelvemonth. The men inside are resolved to endure to the utmost extremity, expecting no mercy – as indeed they deserve none.’

Having made his assessment and stated his case, Cromwell proceeded to list the tools necessary for the job. To break Pontefract would require at least three regiments of foot, two regiments of horse, five hundred barrels of gunpowder, six good battering guns and eighteen hundred cannonballs. A couple of mortars would also be nice, he added, if Parliament could spare them.

As at Raglan, it was going to be weeks before any of these items arrived at Pontefract. In the meantime, Cromwell wrote to the Royalists and demanded their surrender. In response, their captain sent only a teasing letter – was Cromwell quite sure that he had full authority in this matter? Perhaps he ought to check with Sir Henry Cholmondley, and see what he thought? When they had sorted it out between them, could they get back in touch? Cromwell’s answer, written or otherwise, is sadly not recorded. But after two more weeks of waiting, he turned from Pontefract, and headed towards London. He had not, however, given up on his Royalist enemies: on the contrary, he was about to play his trump card.

Cromwell arrived in London on 6 December, and that evening sent Colonel Pride to purge the House of Commons of his political opponents. Now that the fighting was all but over, the Army had grown tired of Parliament’s dithering about what to do with the king. As far as Cromwell and his comrades were concerned, Charles I was a tyrant and a traitor, a king who had made war on his own people, ‘a man of blood’. Like the criminal that he clearly was, Charles was going to be tried, convicted and punished. For a man guilty of such crimes, there was only one possible punishment. On 30 January 1649, the king was led to the scaffold in Whitehall, and publicly beheaded.

By this shocking, unprecedented act, the siege of Pontefract was brought to an end. For the Royalist garrison, who by now were being pounded by cannon and mortars, the king’s death was a crushing blow to their cause. After they heard the news, they made a show of pledging their support to Charles’s son, but a few weeks later their resistance crumbled. At the start of March, negotiations for a surrender began, and by 22 March the Royalists had capitulated. Pontefract was retaken, and the second Civil War was over.

Having killed the king, Cromwell and his supporters now set out to kill the castle. No way was there going to be the kind of general reprieve that had followed the last war. Pontefract, recently the biggest thorn in the government’s side, was one of the first candidates for the chop. This was far from being an unpopular decision. As early as 24 March – just two days after the siege had ended – the cry had gone up for the castle to come down.

‘The chief news now,’ wrote one local correspondent, ‘is that the grand jury of York, the judge… and almost all this county are petitioning to get this castle pulled down.’

Parliament concurred in this opinion – with the Commons shorn of its more hesitant members in December, and the House of Lords
recently
abolished as ‘useless’, power was in the hands of uncompromising men. When the order was given that Pontefract ‘be forthwith totally demolished and levelled to the ground’, this time they meant it. When you visit the castle site today, you can see how literally the commissioners and the people of south Yorkshire took the decision: hardly one stone was left standing on top of another. Pontefract, one of the mightiest royal castles in England, was reduced to a pile of rubble.

Similar severe punishments were dealt out to other castles in the wake of the king’s execution. At Belvoir, Montgomery and Nottingham, destruction took place on a scale comparable to Pontefract. Significantly, both Belvoir and Montgomery had escaped destruction in 1647, when only the new works that had been added to them were destroyed.

Parliament soon found, however, that the cost of such wholesale demolition was unbearable. At Pontefract, even though the sale of the lead, stone and timber from the demolished castle had raised £1,779, the townspeople still found that the job saddled them with a debt of £145. At Belvoir and Montgomery, the government hit upon the idea of paying the owners to pull down their own castles. Since both were the property of former Royalists, who were heavily fined for supporting the king, ‘payment’ was simply a matter of reducing their fines rather than actually shelling out hard cash.

But where demolition was not self-financing, it became much harder to enforce. Local government was soon complaining about the cost of carrying out orders for total destruction, and in many places those orders were not carried out for lack of money. In other instances, a lack of expertise also created problems on the ground. There were laughable scenes at Belvoir when the Earl of Rutland had finished pulling down his castle. Parliament naturally wanted the work inspected to make sure that the job had been done properly. Unfortunately, however, the men they appointed to view the work were local gents rather than military engineers, who were forced to confess they did
not
know whether the castle was now indefensible or not. Faced with such difficulties, central and local government arrived at a compromise. castles in future would not be demolished but ‘slighted’. Rather than outright demolition, the authorities would be content with limited destruction that made castles untenable – left standing in places, but incapable of being defended in battle.

Slighting was the solution that was finally adopted at Raglan, and the castle as it stands today bears testimony to the terrible effectiveness of the procedure. Having tried and failed to bring down the great tower stone by stone with pickaxes, engineers opted instead for the quick fix of undermining its walls: the same technique that King John had used to devastating effect at Rochester four centuries beforehand. ‘The weight of [the tower was] propped with timber,’ said an eye-witness, ‘while two of the sides were cut through; the timber being burned, it fell down in a lump.’ There was more to slighting, however, than simply making a castle indefensible. By throwing down the walls of the homes of the nobility, walls that for centuries had symbolized the power of an aristocratic elite, the revolutionary government was making a striking visual point about its own power. No longer, it said, would individuals be allowed to defy the state (the Commonwealth, as it would soon be called) in the name of privilege. The broken towers at Kenilworth and Scarborough, Helmsley and Corfe, were witness to their owners’ impotence in the face of Parliament’s might. At Raglan, the deliberate and systematic spoliation of what had been one of the greatest, fairest and noblest buildings in the country was carried through with savage thoroughness. Every window was smashed, every fireplace ripped out, every valuable removed. The banks of the ponds and the moat, both still teeming with carp, were broken. The chapel, filled as it was with images of Popish idolatry, was singled out for special attention. Most callously, and in direct contrast to the way in which the Bodleian in Oxford had been spared, the huge library of rare books and manuscripts at Raglan,
reckoned
one of the most important collections in Europe, was deliberately put to the torch. What took place at Raglan was not just an act of essential demolition – it was an act of vengeance.

While the heart was being ripped out of his castle at Raglan, Henry Somerset, the Marquis of Worcester, lay dying in London. His ancestral home, he now knew, would not be passing to his heirs, as he had always imagined it must. The assurances of fair treatment made by General Fairfax had, in the end, counted for nothing. Having fought what he considered an honourable fight in defence of his faith and his king, the marquis had good cause to reflect on his shabby treatment at Parliament’s hands. By his bedside stood Dr Bailey, his chaplain, remembering the old man’s last words even as he administered the last rites.

‘Ah, Doctor,’ said the marquis, ‘I forsook life, liberty and estate… and threw myself upon their mercy; [but] if to seize all my goods, to pull down my house, and sell my estate… be merciful, what are they whose mercies are so cruel?’

Nevertheless, in spite of his appalling experience that summer, the plethoric constitution that had preserved him for seventy years still refused to desert him. Even as he stared into the abyss, the Marquis of Worcester managed one last witticism. He asked where he was to be buried, and was told that his final resting place would be the great chapel at Windsor Castle.

‘Why then,’ he quipped, ‘I shall have a better castle when I am dead than the one they took from me when alive.’

1.
Both Henry Somerset and Raglan have complicated identities. Somerset was Earl of Worcester down to 2 March 1643, at which point he was promoted to the rank of marquis. For simplicity’s sake I have called him ‘the marquis’ throughout. Monmouthshire was considered part of Wales when Raglan was built in the fifteenth century, but its status became ambiguous after 1536, and it was often treated as an English county. The ambiguity persisted until 1974, when the county was absorbed into the Welsh administrative region of Gwent.

HENRY SOMERSET, MARQUIS
of Worcester, died on 18 December 1646. He was aged about seventy. One week later, on Christmas Day, his body was laid to rest in the great chapel of St George in Windsor Castle. A marble tablet on the chapel wall still commemorates his passing.

A little over two years later, the marquis was joined by his king. After his execution, Charles I’s head was sewn back on to his body, and his corpse was brought to Windsor in the midst of a blizzard. Attended by only a handful of mourners, and without any form of ceremony, the dead king was interred in the same royal chapel, alongside the marquis, and amid the bones of his ancestors.

The Royalist cause, it seemed, was similarly dead and buried. Defeated in two separate conflicts by their Parliamentary opponents, the late king’s supporters were either imprisoned or had escaped into exile. Their estates were seized and their property impounded. In September 1651, the die-hard among them made a last-ditch attempt to reverse matters, only to be smashed with ease by Oliver Cromwell at Worcester. The figure they now championed, Charles I’s name-sake and eldest son, fled the field of battle, and was last seen hiding in an oak tree.

The Commonwealth regime, however, survived its royal victim for barely a decade. With so many competing voices and ideas in government, and so few genuine supporters in the country at large, the
administration
was held together only by the magnetic personality and iron will of Cromwell. When he died in September 1658, the revolution was undone. Quicker than anybody could have imagined, the monarchy was restored. On 29 May 1660, amid scenes of great rejoicing, Charles II was crowned king at Westminster.

Yet while the monarchy could be resurrected, the same was not true of the castle. The Civil War and the Commonwealth had dealt the ancient homes of the aristocracy a fetal blow. The destruction that had taken place at Raglan and Pontefract was repeated all over the country. Splintered and broken, undermined and collapsed, shelled, torched and smashed, castles everywhere were effectively written off. By the time the cull had finished, it was cheaper for the nobility to build from new than to restore the shattered homes of their ancestors. It was the dramatic end to a long, drawn-out process of abandonment. The aristocracy, who had been quitting their castles by stages and degrees for centuries, now deserted them
en masse
. After the Restoration, they invested in fashionable new stately homes, where the architecture spoke with a new vocabulary. Portcullises, drawbridges and battlements were consigned to the past. In came columns, porticoes and cupolas – neo-Classical elements for a new age.

When the grandson of the Marquis of Worcester decided to invest in a new home after 1660, he built just such a house: a grand new building in the fashionable Palladian style. But it was not at Raglan, nor even in Monmouthshire, that he made his new home. Like scores of other nobles, the new marquis moved on, leaving the old neighbourhood as well as the castle behind him. The future home of the Somersets would be on the opposite side of the Severn, in the Gloucestershire village of Badminton. The mansion he built is there to this day – as indeed are his descendants, who live in it.

At Raglan, time began to take its toll. Broken and exposed, the castle had to contend not only with the ravages of wind and rain, but
also
with the depredations of anyone seeking a convenient source of stone. The damage inflicted in the aftermath of the siege was compounded in the decades that followed by those in search of a nice fireplace or windowsill. In this respect the castle was no different to any other; almost every abandoned site suffered a similar fate. In some cases, destruction continued to be carried out for the sake of security – after the Restoration, Charles II countenanced the slighting of Caernarfon, Conway and Beaumaris. But in most cases, opportunistic pillage and plunder wreaked the most damage. The monarchy may have been welcomed back with open arms, but castles were still viewed with suspicion, hostility and contempt. Thomas Paulden, for example, escaped from Pontefract and lived to a ripe old age, but in the course of the siege he lost two of his brothers. Countless thousands of others like him had seen loved ones die in defence of castles, or fighting to reach their walls. While the memory of the war remained, castles could count on little sympathy.