Powis Castle

Welshpool's castles were not English works raised to subdue the Welsh, as Conwy and Caernarfon were, but the seat of the Welsh princes of Powys Wenwynwyn. The earliest reference dates from 1111, when Cadwgan ap Bleddyn is recorded planning a castle at Trallwng Llywelyn – the oldest record of a native Welsh castle – though he was assassinated that same year. The first account of a standing castle here records its capture by an English army in 1196; the Welsh took it back within the year.

The present masonry contains 13th-century fabric, most likely the work of Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn (r. 1241–1287), though its date is uncertain. In 1274 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd destroyed Gruffydd's "first castle" at Welshpool as punishment for his part in a scheme to assassinate him. Gruffydd held to his alliance with Edward I, and at the end of the conquest of Wales in 1282–83 the king permitted him to rebuild as a reward for that loyalty.

The Parliament of Shrewsbury abolished the ancient kingdom of Powys in 1283, and in 1286 Gruffydd's son Owain renounced his royal title, becoming the last hereditary prince of Powys and taking instead the barony of de la Pole. On his death the castle passed to his daughter Hawys Gadarn, the Lady of Powis, who married Sir John Charlton in 1309. The Charltons held Powis until the fifteenth century, when it was split between two daughters, Joyce Tiptoft and Joan Grey.

In 1578 an illegitimate son of the last Baron Grey of Powis began leasing the lordship to a distant relative, Sir Edward Herbert. Herbert bought the castle outright in 1587 and began turning a border fortress into an Elizabethan country house; the Long Gallery is the major survival of his work. His wife was Roman Catholic, and the family's allegiance to Rome and to the Stuart kings shaped its fortunes for over a century.

William Herbert, granted the barony of Powis in 1629, supported Charles I, and the loyalty cost him castle and estates: on 22 October 1644 Powis was captured by Parliamentary troops, and was not returned to the family until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. In 1674 a younger William Herbert was created Earl of Powis; the Great Staircase followed in the 1670s, probably under William Winde, who may also have designed the terraced gardens.

Barred from high office under Charles II by his Catholic faith, he became one of James II's chief ministers in 1685 and was made Marquess of Powis in 1687, only to fall at the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and follow James into exile in France, where he died in 1696. William III granted the castle to his own nephew. Even so the Herberts went on building through their thirty-year exile, completing the Baroque water garden below the castle, their fortunes improved by a lucrative lead mine on the Welsh estates; the second Marquess was reinstated in 1722.

The marquessate became extinct with the third Marquess in 1748 and the estates passed to a relative, Henry Herbert of Oakly Park. Under his son Powis was much neglected: John Byng, travelling in Wales in 1784, wrote "the balustrades and terraces are falling down, and the horses graze on the parterres!!!"

That same year Henry Herbert's daughter Henrietta married Edward Clive, eldest son of Clive of India, a match which replenished the much-depleted family fortune; her husband was created Earl of Powis in 1804, and the Clive money paid for long-overdue repairs by Sir Robert Smirke. The Indian collection at Powis, Tipu Sultan's painted chintz state tent among it, combines Robert Clive's acquisitions with objects Edward and Henrietta gathered during his service with the East India Company and as Governor of Madras. William Dalrymple has written that much of Clive's wealth was loot illicitly collected after the Battle of Plassey.

The 3rd Earl declined Disraeli's offer of the viceroyalty of India, writing "Not worth considering. Powis" on the envelope. The last alterations were made for the 4th Earl by George Frederick Bodley between 1902 and Bodley's death in 1907, while the Earl's wife Violet remade the gardens, hoping to turn what she called "a poor and meagre garden" into one of the most beautiful in England and Wales.

Violet died after a car accident in 1929, and Lord Powis outlived both his sons – Percy of wounds received at the Somme in 1916, Mervyn in a plane crash in 1943. On his death in 1952 he bequeathed the castle and gardens to the National Trust; the Herbert family still live in part of the castle under an arrangement with the Trust.