CORFE CASTLE
LIKE some cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of
blood. Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at
arm’s length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the
now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered “God help him!” of some
compassionate warder. Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply
uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second
ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of
the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little
ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more
mercifully ended by the assassin’s dagger. Twenty-four knights captured
in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur,
were imprisoned here, in 1202, and twenty-two of them met death by
starvation in some foul underground hold. Prince Arthur, as every one
knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur’s sister,
Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol,
where, after forty years, she died. Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals,
and those who aided them, in the “good old days,” and other monarchs, not
so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in
danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned
here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle. Sympathies go out
to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things
tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and
the positions been reversed.
This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had
offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King’s
deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others immured for mere caprice. The
place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a
hyæna’s lair.
[Picture: Corfe Castle]
So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle. Its last great
appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King
and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved
the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges;
falling in the second solely by treachery. It had by that time passed
through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it
is still owned. It was only eight years before the first siege in this
war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that
celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of “Coke upon Littleton.”
[Picture: Corfe Castle]
When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the King’s side
at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near
Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from the covert sneers and petty
annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not
slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to
Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested.
Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the
heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have
anticipated being besieged; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district
had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of
antiquarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the
sequel was presently to show.
The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge,
ingenious and plausible enough. The Mayor of Corfe had from time
immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought
that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to
attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the
thing would be done with ease. So probably it would, but for the keen
feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a
guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and
demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once
denied admission, and effectually unmasked. The revolutionary committee
sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to despatch a body of
sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the
surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was
armed. “But,” says the _Mercurius Rusticus_, a contemporary news-sheet,
“instead of delivering them, though at the time there were but five men
in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their
ladies’ Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading
one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men
that they all quitted the place and ran away.”
Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and
resourceful general. By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends,
who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about
a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters,
and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more
than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble
home again. We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them. Lady
Bankes, however, did not despair. A born strategist, she perceived how
vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of
provisions; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered
in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although
they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm.
The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle
alone for a while; thinking its defences weak enough. But it was soon
thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under
the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole
next turned their attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a
porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient
seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done to
death—when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and
hit anybody.
The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole
made their appearance. They numbered between two and three hundred horse
and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle
from the neighbouring hills, with little effect. Then came an interlude,
ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between
five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers. They brought with
them a “Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres,” and with these fired a
hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either
hand. The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then
determined to attempt a storming of the castle. This grand advance, made
on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be
granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with
the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even
sallied out and slaughtered some of the foremost, who were approaching
cautiously under cover of strange engines named the “Sow” and the “Boar.”
The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower,
“which,” we are told, “they, without fears of prophanation used,” and
breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases. The ammunition
included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off the roof
and rolled up.
All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors
was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards and
grenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the
enterprise in a fair way of being ended. The sailors, nothing loth, were
made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of
twenty pounds was offered to the first man up. With preparations so
generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and
hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche
of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up
by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by
antiquaries “garderobes,” against such a contingency as this. One sailor
has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another’s courage is dowsed
with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into
the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements,
and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another’s heels,
are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in
the bastioned walls. Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers
have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy
weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly
suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprisonment; and a more than
ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent,
is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead. “The knocks are too
hot,” as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to
bury their dead, to tend one another’s hurts, and those most fortunate to
cleanse themselves. That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle,
hearing a rumour of the King’s forces approaching, hurriedly raised the
siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe
Castle again molested.
This time it was beset to more purpose. Lady Bankes, now a widow, for
her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe,
vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between
Roundhead garrisons. Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a
hotbed of disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea. A gallant
deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer
strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no
avail. He with his troops burst through the enemy’s lines at Wareham and
on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he
captured and brought to Corfe. This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes
an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused,
for on the way back the little party were captured.
The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for
forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment. In the meanwhile,
Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the
imprisoned governor of Wareham. Every one knew the King’s cause here and
in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge
of fighting for a losing side unnerved all. Seeing the inevitable course
of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders’ officers,
secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and,
succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post
deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshire was
expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fifty Parliamentary
troops into the keep. When morning dawned the garrison found themselves
betrayed; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners,
they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender. And then, when
all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid in keep and
curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied.
When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls
that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe
had gone up in ruin.
Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the fulfilled
prophecies of “not one stone upon another,” concerning Nineveh, and the
Cities of the Plain; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still
represent the keep and gateway, and curtain-towers remain in recognisable
shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that
they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their
foundations are set. Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the
agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as
fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another has been
torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is
another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of
Pisa. Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased;
floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second,
third and fourth floors turned to mouthpieces for the winds. And yet,
although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost
impossible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is
still a fine and an impressive ruin. It is grand when seen from afar,
and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which
runs the road to Wareham.