Cooling Castle

In 1379, during the Hundred Years' War, a French raid devastated towns and villages along the Thames Estuary. John de Cobham, 3rd Baron Cobham, whose family had acquired the manor of Cooling in the mid-13th century, appealed to the Crown for licence to fortify his manor and received permission in February 1380; the building work was complete by 1385. Surviving records show the prominent gatehouse built by local labour under several master masons, among them Thomas Crompe, William Sharnall and Thomas Wrek, with the king's master mason Henry Yevele taking a supervisory role. It was the earliest English castle designed for the use of gunpowder weapons by its defenders: Cobham's instructions to his masons required "x arket holes de iii peez longour et tout saunz croys" — ten holes for arquebuses, of perhaps three feet length, and all without cross-slits.

The layout was unusual, perhaps dictated by the marshy ground it stood on: within an 8-acre perimeter, two walled wards of unequal size sat side by side, each raised on its own mound within a figure-of-eight system of moats and ditches, the moat around the inner ward perhaps up to 20 metres wide. An attacker would have had to take the larger outer ward, entered through its twin-towered gatehouse, before reaching the inner one.

Cobham fell out of royal favour shortly after the castle was finished and was exiled for a time, though he later returned and died at Cooling in 1408. His granddaughter Joan inherited the estates and married four times; her last husband, Sir John Oldcastle, was executed in 1417 for his part in the Lollard heresy. The Cobham title remained intact, but Cooling itself passed down the female line to other families.

Cooling saw action only once. In January 1554 Sir Thomas Wyatt, opposing Queen Mary's engagement to Philip II of Spain, raised an army of some 4,000 men and captured two cannon from the army of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, at Strood before turning on Cooling — perhaps for personal reasons, since its occupant was his uncle, George Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham. Contemporary reports give Cobham just eight men, armed with "only four or five handguns, four pikes and some blakbylls". The defenders surrendered on 30 January after eight hours of siege and bombardment that badly damaged the castle.

Wyatt proceeded to London, where he was defeated and executed for treason. Cobham and his son were imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of having deliberately failed to defend the castle, but were soon released and allowed to return to their estates. Cooling was never rebuilt; the Cobhams abandoned it and lived thereafter at Cobham Hall, and it fell into disrepair.

The castle remained in the Cobhams' ownership until the 18th century. Between 1650 and 1670 Sir Thomas Whitmore built a farmhouse within the outer ward, since much altered; the musician Jools Holland now lives there, and a 17th-century timber-framed barn nearby serves as a wedding venue.