Old Wardour Castle

The land at Wardour, on what are now the parish boundaries of Tisbury and Donhead St Andrew in Wiltshire, belonged to the St Martin family until Sir Lawrence de St Martin died in 1385; later that year it was acquired by John, fifth Baron Lovell. In 1392 or 1393 Richard II granted Lovell permission to build a castle on the site, and the work went up in the 1390s in greensand quarried locally at Tisbury, under the master mason William Wynford.

What Lovell built took its cue from the six-sided castles then in fashion in parts of the Continent, particularly in France, with the château de Concressault noted as a parallel — but the design as executed is unique in Britain, and no other British castle of that time provided several self-contained guest suites. The formal heart of it was the great hall above the courtyard stair, entered behind a wooden screen; rich fabrics on its walls concealed the machinery that worked the castle's two portcullises.

The Lovells backed the Lancastrian cause in the Wars of the Roses and fell with it. Wardour was confiscated in 1461 and passed through several owners until Sir Thomas Arundell of Lanherne bought it in 1544, bringing in a prominent Cornish family whose principal branches sat at Lanherne, Trerice, Tolverne and Menadarva, and which held several Wiltshire estates. Arundell, a staunch Roman Catholic, was executed for treason in 1552 and the castle confiscated a second time.

His son Sir Matthew Arundell, later Sheriff and Custos Rotulorum of Dorset, bought it back in 1570 and greatly altered it: windows enlarged, classical doorways and niches inserted, the great hall given a new musicians' gallery above its entrance screen and wooden panelling in place of the old hangings. The tall windows and the old wooden roof were retained, it is thought, to preserve something of Lovell's castle. The work was probably finished by about 1578, the year cut above the entrance, where Matthew set the Arundell arms and a statement of the family's possession of Wardour to mark the recovery of what his father's execution had cost them, with the head of Christ in a niche above and the inscription Sub nomine tuo stet genus et domus.

The Arundells, under Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, had become known as some of the most active Roman Catholic landowners in England at the time of the Reformation, and were naturally Royalists when war came. The 2nd Baron was away on the King's business, having instructed his wife, Lady Blanche Arundell, aged 61, to hold the castle with a garrison of 25 trained fighting men.

On 2 May 1643 Sir Edward Hungerford arrived with 1,300 men of the Parliamentarian army and demanded admittance to search for Royalists. Refused, he laid siege and set about the walls with guns and mines. After five days the castle was threatened with complete destruction and Lady Arundell agreed to surrender; command passed to Colonel Edmund Ludlow. Her husband died of his wounds that same month, after the Battle of Stratton.

Henry, 3rd Lord Arundell, the son of Thomas and Blanche, brought a Royalist force back to reclaim the family seat. By November 1643 he had blockaded Wardour, and after mining the walls he blew up much of it, forcing the Parliamentary garrison to surrender in March 1644. The blowing-up of the south-west side in 1644 turned the hexagonal courtyard, until then a dark and claustrophobic place enclosed by four or five storeys, into a light and spacious one. The castle was never habitable again.

The family recovered its position slowly, through the Commonwealth and the Glorious Revolution, until the eighth Baron, Henry Arundell, borrowed enough to rebuild. The Palladian architect James Paine raised New Wardour Castle some distance to the north-west — not a castle at all in style, but a symmetrical neoclassical house of a main block around a central staircase hall with two flanking wings — and folded the old castle's ruins into the surrounding parkland, to be looked at as a romantic ruin. A Banqueting House followed in 1773–74 as a place to entertain visitors, its architect probably Capability Brown, and in 1792 Josiah Lane of Tisbury built a grotto out of stone taken from the castle itself, with three standing stones from the vanished Tisbury stone circle set up nearby. The ruin is managed by English Heritage.