St Mawes Castle

Henry VIII's 1539 "device" ordered forts built along the English coast after France and the Empire allied against him the previous year, following his 1533 breach with Pope Paul III to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Carrick Roads, at the Fal's mouth, was an important anchorage; plans for five protecting castles there were narrowed to two, St Mawes and Pendennis, sited for overlapping fire. Construction began in 1540 under Thomas Treffry, appointed Clerk of Works by Lord Admiral Russell; the castle was "half-made" by year's end and mostly finished by 1542, at a cost of £5,018.

The clover-leaf castle, with a small blockhouse at the water's edge, was armed with 19 pieces meant as "ship-sinking" weapons, and its small garrison was expected to be supplemented by local militia in a crisis. Michael Vyvyan was appointed the castle's first captain in 1544.

Hannibal Vyvyan succeeded Michael as captain in 1561, and on his death in 1603 was succeeded by his son Sir Francis Vyvyan. St Mawes and Pendennis's captains frequently argued; a 1630 dispute over search rights to incoming shipping ended with the Admiralty proposing they share the traffic. Francis was dismissed in 1632, accused of "practising a variety of deceptions" that included claiming wages for non-existent men.

War with Spain from 1569 brought a larger garrison — 100 men by 1578 — and a battery to fire further upriver. After the failed Armada of 1597, two earth-and-timber bastions were added, becoming the castle's main gun positions. By 1623 St Mawes held ten guns and 14 men; an 1634 survey found structural problems needing £534 of repair.

When civil war broke out in 1642, St Mawes held for the King; Falmouth was a key Royalist supply link, and Carrick Roads a base for Royalist piracy. By March 1646 Thomas Fairfax had entered Cornwall with a large Parliamentary army. St Mawes's captain, Major Hannibal Bonithon, was invited by Pendennis's Colonel John Arundell to help defend that stronger fortress, but instead surrendered to Parliament without resistance — put down to war-weariness, the opposing force's size and generous terms, though the historian Samuel Oliver suspected Bonithon held Parliamentarian sympathies. Parliament took 160 small arms and 13 guns, redeploying them to the siege of Pendennis, which fell that August.

The castle was kept afterward on a skeleton "care and maintenance" garrison until the Restoration of 1660, when Sir Richard Vyvyan took command of a garrison of 13 men he judged too small. His son, Sir Vyel Vyvyan, succeeded him but, having no heirs, sold the castle's lands to the Earl of Bath, separating them from the captaincy.

Despite more than 30 artillery pieces mounted at St Mawes in the 1780s, an inspection in 1797 found only one gun still serviceable. Visiting in 1809, Lord Byron judged the castle "extremely well calculated for annoying every body except an enemy", garrisoned, he noted, by a single elderly man. The Tudor captaincy was abolished in 1849 on the death of its last holder, Sir George Nugent.

Fears of war with France and new ironclad warships prompted an overhaul from the 1850s: a Grand Sea Battery and magazine was cut into the rock beneath the Henrician castle and armed with rifled muzzle-loaders, while the old castle became a barracks too small — 30 men — for more than training use. An electrically operated minefield was laid across Carrick Roads in 1885, jointly controlled from St Mawes and Pendennis, with quick-firing guns added in the 1890s; a further battery went up above the old castle in 1900–01, the earlier positions having proved poorly sited.

A 1905 review judged St Mawes's naval guns superfluous once Pendennis and St Anthony's could cover the anchorage between them; disarmed, it served as a barracks in the First World War before passing to the Office of Works in 1920 and opening to visitors, promoted by the Great Western Railway. The Army reoccupied it in 1939, and from late 1941 a new twin six-pounder gun position nearby, with a Bofors anti-aircraft gun, gave it renewed close defence.

The castle left active service in January 1945 and reopened to the public the next year; its wartime battery closed in 1956, and by 1970 the Victorian earthworks around the Grand Sea Battery had been cleared. St Mawes is now run by English Heritage as a tourist attraction, protected as a scheduled monument and Grade I listed building; the historian Paul Pattison has called it "arguably the most perfect survivor of all Henry's forts".