Walmer Castle

Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1533 turned Europe against him. Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage he had annulled, was aunt to the Emperor Charles V; France and the Holy Roman Empire declared an alliance against Henry in 1538, and with the Pope urging the two powers to attack, invasion looked certain. Henry's answer was the "device" of 1539, an order for forts along the English coastline — and few stretches mattered more than the Downs, the anchorage off east Kent formed by the Goodwin Sands, where an enemy could land soldiers on Deal Beach. Walmer, Deal and Sandown were built side by side to close it, linked by four earthwork bulwarks and a 2.5-mile defensive ditch and bank, at a combined cost to the Crown of £27,092.

Walmer rose between April 1539 and autumn 1540 under the surveyor Richard Benese, master carpenter William Clement and master mason Christopher Dickenson: a moated stone fort of a central keep and four rounded bastions carrying 39 firing positions for artillery on its upper levels. The first garrison — a captain, two lieutenants, two porters, ten gunners and three soldiers — cost £174 a year, and by 1597 the armament was listed as a cannon, a culverin, five demi-culverins, a saker, a minion and a falcon.

The castle declined in the early 17th century, its garrison so poorly paid that some men lodged in Deal and took second jobs. Parliament seized Walmer at the start of the first Civil War, but the real test came in 1648, when the Second Civil War broke out and a Royalist insurrection swept Kent. The Parliamentary navy lay in the Downs under the castles' guns; the dismissed Vice-Admiral William Batten and the Kentish gentleman Sir Henry Palmer called on the fleet to revolt, and Walmer and Deal declared for the King shortly after Sandown. With fleet and fortresses in Royalist hands, Parliament feared foreign troops might be landed on the coast or aid slipped through to the Scots.

Parliament broke the wider rising at the Battle of Maidstone at the start of June, then sent Colonel Nathaniel Rich against the castles of the Downs. Walmer was besieged first and surrendered on 12 July; Deal and Sandown followed by late summer. The fighting left Walmer badly damaged — Rich put the repairs at £500 at least — and in 1649 Parliament restocked the three castles with powder and ammunition. In 1688 the townsfolk of Deal seized Walmer for William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution; by the century's end the castle was looking militarily out of date.

In 1708 Lionel Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset, newly appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, abandoned the official residence at Dover Castle — probably because of its semi-ruinous state — and moved into Walmer instead. William Pitt the Younger, made Lord Warden in 1792, took the post's £3,000 salary to ease his debts and by 1803 used Walmer as his main residence; his niece Lady Hester Stanhope, together with Pitt, transformed the kitchen garden into landscaped ornamental grounds with the help of the Dover militia, while Pitt, fearing French invasion, raised a volunteer cavalry unit at the castle and armed a fleet of 35 fishing luggers with 12- and 18-pounder guns.

The Duke of Wellington sought the post in 1829 chiefly to get the use of Walmer, which he called "the most charming marine residence". He entertained there every autumn, living and sleeping in a single room, and in that room he died on 14 September 1852; around 9,000 people filed past his embalmed body in the two days it lay open to the public. After W. H. Smith died at the castle in 1891, the government carried out his proposal to protect its historic contents, binding almost 70 pieces of furniture and 50 artworks to Walmer by an Indenture of Heirlooms.

By 1904 the War Office judged Walmer of no military value and passed it to the Office of Works with £2,400 for repairs, and most of the castle was opened to the public. Lord Curzon, who moved in on returning from India in 1905, blamed the poor accommodation for the illness of his wife Mary, who died in 1906. Later Lords Warden used it lightly — Churchill, appointed in 1941, noted it lay within range of German guns on the French coast; Sir Robert Menzies visited annually from 1965; and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Lord Warden from 1978, took over the whole castle for three days each July from 1986. English Heritage manages the castle today, and its gardens include the Queen Mother's Garden, designed by Penelope Hobhouse as her 95th-birthday gift in 1997.