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.

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.”

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.