Hartlebury Castle

The manorial land at Hartlebury, in Worcestershire, was given to the Bishop of Worcester by King Burgred of Mercia, and a fortified manor house was built on it in the mid-13th century. Bishop Walter de Cantilupe, a supporter of Simon de Montfort, began the work of fortifying it; the castle was embattled and finished by his successor, Godfrey Giffard, in 1268.

Edward I became Hartlebury's first royal visitor in 1282, on his way to Wales. The gatehouse was added in the reign of Henry VI by Bishop Carpenter. Princess Mary came to Hartlebury in April 1526, and Queen Elizabeth stayed on 12 August 1575 with Bishop Nicholas Bullingham while travelling to Worcester. In 1582 Bishop John Whitgift signed the paper that allowed William Shakespeare to marry Anne Hathaway.

In 1646, during the First English Civil War, Hartlebury Castle was strongly fortified and held for Charles I by Captain Sandys and Lord Windsor, with 120 foot soldiers, 20 horse, and provisions for twelve months. When Colonel Thomas Morgan summoned it for Parliament, it surrendered in two days without a shot being fired. The castle was slighted, and the Parliamentary Commissioners seized it along with the manor estate, which were sold to Thomas Westrowe for £3,133 6s. 8d. Both were returned to the Bishop of Worcester after the Stuart Restoration of 1660.

The remains of the Civil War-era bastion ditch were first identified from cropmarks in July 2022 and excavated in 2023, when the ditch was found to be 3.4m deep and produced 17th-century finds including a coin of James I and lead pistol shot.

Bishop Hurd built the Hurd Library in 1782, and it still holds his extensive collection of books, which included works from the libraries of Alexander Pope and William Warburton, among them the copy of the Iliad from which Pope's translation was made. King George III, Queen Charlotte, three of the princesses and the Duke of York visited Hurd there in 1788.

Bishop Pepys presented Queen Victoria with the herd of deer that had been kept at Hartlebury since time immemorial, and the vivid diary of his ten-year-old daughter Emily Pepys, covering six months in 1844-1845, gives an idea of how a bishop's family lived in the castle in the mid-19th century. By 1890 some of the moats had been filled and laid out as flower gardens.

During the First World War the castle served as a Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment hospital, and scrapbooks left by the soldiers cared for there survive. The building was listed Grade I on 29 December 1952. In 1964 the north wing was taken over by Worcestershire County Council, and in 1966 it opened to the public as Worcestershire County Museum, which occupies the former servants' quarters. Hartlebury remained the residence of the Bishop of Worcester until 2007; with the coming of Bishop Inge in 2008 the bishop's residence moved to a house adjacent to the cathedral in the city of Worcester.

In 2010 BBC Midlands News reported that the castle was up for sale and that local people were campaigning to stop it falling into private hands. The Hartlebury Castle Preservation Trust, a registered charity, was formed to preserve the castle for education and public enjoyment and to allow the Hurd Library to remain intact there. Campaigners were given until April 2011 to raise £2 million to keep the house off the open market; on 17 August 2012 it was reported that the trust had agreed to pay its owners, the Church of England, £2.45 million for the freehold of the buildings, gardens and parks. An initial Heritage Lottery application succeeded in April 2013, and in October 2014 the trust, with Worcestershire County Council and Museums Worcestershire, gained £5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In March 2015 it bought the castle and its 43-acre estate, and in April 2018 renovations were completed and the castle opened to visitors.