Deal Castle

Henry VIII's break with Pope Paul III in 1533, made so that he could annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, insulted her nephew the Emperor Charles V; in 1538 France and the Empire allied against Henry, the Pope urging both to attack. In 1539 the King issued the order known as a device, instructing the defence of the realm in time of invasion and the building of forts along the coast.

Deal, Walmer and Sandown were raised to cover the Downs in east Kent, the anchorage formed by the Goodwin Sands which opened onto Deal Beach. Four earthwork forts and a two-and-a-half-mile ditch and bank tied the three together, collectively the castles of the Downes.

The designer is not known; Sir Edward Ryngeley and Thomas Wingfield were the commissioners. Work began in April; 1,400 men were on the site by the following month, and a strike for higher pay was broken up over the summer by Ryngeley. By December, when Anne of Cleves dined there, the castle was mostly complete. Deal and the other Downs fortifications cost the Crown £27,092, much of it drawn from the dissolution of the monasteries.

A keep with six semi-circular bastions, ringed by six more bastions and a moat, it was larger than its sisters at Walmer and Sandown and carried sixty-six firing positions in four tiers. Wingfield became the first captain in 1540, commanding eight soldiers, sixteen gunners and two porters. Deal was reinforced in 1558 against fresh fear of a French attack and its main bastions filled with earth around 1570, probably for heavier guns; Elizabeth I inspected it in 1573, and the coastal defences were mobilised against the Armada in 1588.

By 1615 Deal was in a poor state, its outer walls damaged by storms and coastal erosion and a survey putting the repairs needed at £396. Its captain, William Byng, wrote often to his superiors: winter storms had filled the moat with water and beach stones and undermined the foundations, and by 1618 most of the garrison were living in the town, only a small guard manning the castle at night. A further survey in 1624 put the repair bill at £1,243. In August 1642 Parliamentarian forces seized Deal at the opening of the First Civil War, replacing Byng — suspected of Royalist sympathies — with William Batten, though the castle played little part in that conflict.

When the Second Civil War broke out in 1648 the Parliamentarian navy lay in the Downs under the guns of the Henrician castles, but by May a Royalist rising had spread across Kent. Batten, forced the previous year to resign as Commander of the Fleet, now urged part of the navy to change sides. Sandown's garrison declared for the King, and Walmer and Deal followed.

Parliament broke the wider rising at Maidstone at the start of June and sent Colonel Nathaniel Rich against the castles of the Downs. Walmer surrendered on 12 July; Deal, resupplied by the Royalists from the sea, was besieged that same month. A Royalist fleet bombarded the besiegers and briefly landed 1,500 Flemish mercenaries, though lack of money soon sent them back, and a sortie by the garrison was fought back with losses. In August the fleet under Prince Charles tried three times to put a fresh force ashore, and failed with heavy losses. News of the defeat at Preston settled it: Deal surrendered on 20 August, and artillery fire then brought in Sandown. Rich, made captain, reported the place "much torn and spoiled with the granades" and reckoned the repairs at £500 at least.

Deal was reinforced at the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1652, and in December 1688 the townsfolk seized the castle for William of Orange. It remained armed, but grew domestic: in 1729 the captain, the naval officer Sir John Norris, rebuilt his own accommodation, giving the keep mock-medieval battlements and wood-panelled rooms at the rear looking out to sea. In 1904 the War Office concluded it had no further value as a defence or a barracks and transferred it to the Office of Works, which opened it to visitors when the by-then honorary captain was away.

German bombers destroyed much of the captain's quarters in November 1940, forcing the incumbent, William Birdwood, to move to Hampton Court Palace. Two 6-inch naval guns stood in front of the castle from 1940 to 1944, manned by 337 Battery of 563 Coast Regiment. After Birdwood's death the castle formally ceased to be a residence in 1951, and restoration in the 1950s removed most of the surviving eighteenth-century work on the seaward side.