Chartley Castle

A motte-and-bailey castle was built at Chartley, north of the village of Stowe-by-Chartley in Staffordshire, about 1100 by one of the early Earls of Chester, as a safe stop-over on their journeys to places such as Tutbury. Ranulph de Blondeville, 4th Earl of Chester, rebuilt it in 1220. The rare cylindrical keep, fifty feet in diameter, is thought to be his work, along with a curtain wall flanked by two half-round towers, a twin-towered gatehouse and an angled tower; a nineteenth-century survey identified five towers ranging from thirty-five to forty-one feet in external diameter. One author has noted similarities between the plan and the Château de Montlhéry near Paris, which de Blondeville may have known, while M. W. Thompson noted architectural similarities to Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire and Beeston Castle in Cheshire, both also thought to have been built under him. He died in 1232.

After Ranulph's death the castle passed by marriage to William de Ferrers, 5th Earl of Derby, and remained in the Ferrers family for more than two hundred years. In 1453 it passed to Walter Devereux through his wife Anne de Ferrers, the Ferrers heiress; through her he also became Baron Ferrers of Chartley, jure uxoris, in 1461. Walter Devereux was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The castle was then abandoned as a residence, and Chartley Manor — a moated and battlemented timber mansion — was built nearby.

When Chartley Manor belonged to Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, it became one of the last places of imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. Her jailor, Amias Paulet, came from Tutbury Castle to view the manor in September 1585 and judged the house just large enough to hold both his and the queen's households, "somewhat straitly". The manor was preferred over alternatives for its deep, if narrow, moat, which also let the queen's laundry be washed without her maids leaving the house — though Paulet thought its low, water-ringed position unlikely to please a queen sensitive to damp.

Paulet moved Mary from Tutbury before Christmas 1585, avoiding the market town of Uttoxeter. She spent almost a year at Chartley; her health improved, and by June she was carried out to watch duck-hunting on the ponds. In August 1586 Francis Walsingham arranged to arrest her under cover of a hunting trip while the leading members of her household were arrested and her papers taken. Acting on the Babington Plot, Mary was arrested on 11 August 1586 while out riding and hunting with a crossbow, together with her secretaries Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, Bastian Pagez, her physician Dominique Bourgoing and others; armed soldiers took the party to Tixall. Nau, Curle and the cipher clerk Jérôme Pasquier were then arrested and questioned about her involvement in the plot. On 21 September 1586 Mary was removed to Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, where she was beheaded on 8 February 1587.

Chartley Manor, the timber house where Mary had been held, was destroyed by fire in 1781; the building later known as Chartley Manor was in fact a separate farm, called Chartley Manor Farm until the 1980s. Substantial masonry from the medieval castle survives, including the keep, the twin-towered gatehouse and the curtain wall with its half-round towers. The remains and their earthworks have been a Scheduled Monument since 1925, and the castle itself is a Grade II* listed building.