Southsea Castle

Henry’s device of 1539 ordered forts built along the English coast after France and the Empire allied against him. The threat receded, then returned in 1544 with France menacing a Channel crossing backed by Scotland, and a second device followed.

Work began at the southern end of Portsea Island in early 1544 to cover the deep-water channel running through the Solent to the naval base at Portsmouth, under Sir Anthony Knyvett, Governor of Portsmouth, with Thomas Bertie as master mason. Knyvett called the design “of his Majesty’s own device”, which usually meant the king had taken a hand in it: it abandoned semi-circular bastions for an angular plan, an early if imperfect English adoption of the Continental trace italienne. It was finished by October, at a cost of at least £3,100, £1,300 of it from the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Admiral Claude d’Annebault crossed the Channel and stood off the Solent with 200 ships on 19 July 1545, putting troops ashore on the Isle of Wight. Henry’s fleet made a brief sortie — the Battle of the Solent, in which the flagship Mary Rose was lost — before withdrawing behind the fortifications. The king was at Portsmouth, and the Cowdray engraving of the battle shows him visiting Southsea Castle. He ordered stone flankers and timber caponiers added that summer against a landing party.

In the early 1600s a survey found Southsea “verie ill prepared for defence”, with no guns mounted on the walls and no powder stocked. Fire gutted the interior of the keep in March 1626 and went unrepaired until 1635; another burned the lodgings and store rooms in 1640.

When the Civil War opened in 1642, Southsea was held for the king by Captain Challoner with eleven men and fourteen guns. Colonel Richard Norton attacked with 400 infantry and two troops of horse in the early hours of 5 September; the garrison had trained their guns inland, so the attackers stormed the moat from the seaward side. Challoner, who had been drinking heavily with George Goring the night before, refused to discuss surrender and asked them to come back later in the day. A fresh assault brought the garrison out without a life lost, and Portsmouth, its position now untenable, surrendered.

The castle served mainly as a prison under the interregnum and the early Restoration. Charles II commissioned his Dutch-born master engineer Sir Bernard de Gomme in 1665 to overhaul Portsmouth’s defences against a Dutch attack, though the work did not begin until the 1680s, when an earthwork glacis, a new gate, four projecting turrets and a redesigned keep were added. The stone plaque of Charles’s arms above the gatehouse is dated 1683.

In 1688 the military establishment around Portsmouth was under James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, the Catholic king’s illegitimate son, and the port mattered to James II as a possible escape route to France for the royal family until late December. George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, pressed FitzJames to hand the castle to the Protestant Captain Carter on 18 December, and Portsmouth surrendered to the revolution two days later.

In August 1759 cooking sparks reached gunpowder stored in the castle by the 72nd Regiment of Foot; the blast wrecked the east side and killed seventeen men, women and children. In 1785 the Master-General of the Ordnance judged the fort “of too bad a form to deserve the expense necessary to repair it”. Major-General Benjamin Fisher began an expansion in 1813 estimated to cost £18,105, finished in the main by 1814. Southsea then held military prisoners from 1844 until 1850, up to 150 at a time.

At the 1856 fleet review before Queen Victoria the castle answered a mock gunboat attack with a volley of forty 8-inch guns that scattered the watching crowds. After the Royal Commission of 1860 reported on Portsmouth’s security, new batteries with underground magazines were built east and west between 1863 and 1869, and the old castle was left to range-finding.

The castle formed part of the “Fortress Portsmouth” scheme from the start of the 20th century, serving through the First World War, and became Headquarters Portsmouth Fixed Defences in the Second. On 23 June 1940 it was ordered to man its guns against the French warships sheltering in the harbour, lest they fall to the Germans; one gun, not ready for action, was levelled at the fleet and the destroyer Léopard trained its guns back, but nobody fired, and on 3 July British forces boarded and seized the ships under Operation Grasp. The castle was sold to Portsmouth City Council in 1960 for £35,000 and opened as a museum in 1967.