Liverpool Castle

No record fixes when Liverpool Castle was first raised, but by 1235 one seems already to have stood: in that year, during the reign of Henry III, William de Ferrers, 4th Earl of Derby, was issued a licence to crenellate with specific permission to 'strengthen his castle', and the earl's garrison of 140 soldiers was transferred from his motte-and-bailey at West Derby, acquired in 1232. West Derby was abandoned entirely in 1297 and reported in ruins by 1326. The new castle guarded the port King John had founded by letters patent in 1207, sited at the junction of Castle Street and Lord Street on the high ground above the Pool, the tidal inlet that served as Liverpool's harbour.

The castle stood on an artificial plateau ringed by a moat twenty yards wide, cut from solid rock. A gatehouse flanked by two towers faced Castle Street, with round towers at two of the remaining corners; inside stood a hall and chapel adjoining the south-western tower, a brewhouse and bakehouse, and a passage running under the moat toward the river, with a dovecot beneath the walls and an orchard running down to the Pool.

William de Ferrers died in 1247 and Liverpool and West Derby castles passed to his son William; the heir to the title was Robert de Ferrers, who rebelled against Henry III, was arrested and held in the Tower of London and then Windsor Castle, and forfeited his lands and title to the Crown. Henry III granted them, with Lancaster, to his second son Edmund. Mary de Ferrers, the forfeited earl's wife and the king's niece, was ordered to surrender the castle in July 1266. The land passed from Edmund to his successor Thomas, who in 1315 granted Liverpool Castle to Robert de Holland.

The grant to Holland provoked other landowners: on 25 October 1315 Adam Banastre, Henry de Lea and William de Bradshagh raised a force and attacked the castle in what became known as the Banastre Rebellion, but were beaten within the hour. It was the only recorded attack on the castle before the Civil War.

Edward II lodged at the castle from 24 to 30 October 1323, and early in the reign of Edward III Liverpool was used as a port of embarkation for the king's wars with Scotland and Ireland; in 1327 Edward ordered the constable to shelter men fleeing the Scots. Sir Richard Molyneux was appointed constable in 1440, a post made hereditary in his family five years later, and in 1442 a fourth tower was added at the south-east corner for £46 13s 10¼d. In October 1559 the castle was recorded as being 'in utter ruin and decay'; it was decided that it would undergo repairs costing around £150 rather than permit 'a grate defacement unto the said towne of Litherpole'.

At the outbreak of the First English Civil War the castle was held for Charles I by the Royalist James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby. In April 1643 Parliamentarian troops crossed the Mersey, joined forces at Childwall and took the castle, killing 80 Royalists and capturing 300 more; its constable, Richard Molyneux, 2nd Viscount Molyneux, escaped with the survivors to Everton Brow.

A year later Prince Rupert brought a Royalist army back to retake it, preparing the attack from Everton Brow, from where he is said to have looked down and dismissed the castle as 'a crow's nest that any party of schoolboys could take'. It held out for a week of heavy fighting before falling, at a cost to Rupert's force of 1,500 men.

Protestant supporters of William of Orange seized the castle during the Glorious Revolution in 1689. In 1704 the burgesses leased the castle and its site from the Crown for fifty years, a settlement disputed by William Molyneux, 4th Viscount Molyneux, who still claimed hereditary constableship; the dispute delayed matters until 1726, when the last remaining ruins were cleared. A 1715 Act of Parliament had already ordered the castle demolished to make way for a church, and a London surveyor working on Liverpool's new wet dock had proposed reusing the castle's stone in the dock walls — a plan that may have gone ahead.