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The Hilltop of a Thousand Years
Corfe: Is there anything like it in England? If so we have not seen it. It is unique and beautiful. It clusters round a ruin of a throne, the walls of the castle rising magnificently to be seen for miles. It dominated this place about a thousand years ago and it dominates it still, a ruin but majestic, high over all, shattered by shell and battered by time, yet still defiant of time and violence, an enduring monument of resistance, a page of rude history that thrusts itself on human notice.
Historically the story of Corfe is the story of its castle and England has no ruin more imposing. Whether it is seen from the flat of the heath as it is approached from Wareham, or from the village street coming from Swanage, or from the hillsides that rise above it, east and west, or from the midst of its own walls and towers, Corfe Castle is lordly in situation and pose, though what remains gives no conception of the mass of the original pile.
It is commonly said that the castle was built to guard the passage of the hills, but what place did it guard and what danger was feared? Southward there is only the little valley system from which the Corfe streams come, a system encircled by hills or by the sea. It could be invaded on any side and there is nothing in the Purbeck vales that needed a castle for defence.
The truth is probably that in castle-building days, Norman or Plantagenet, a castle builder passing this way thought “What a noble site for a castle to lord it over this part of England”. And forthwith it was built impregnable, nobody knows when but its first siege was in the reign of Steven.
In the reign of John it was a royal castle used to guard his treasure and as one of his prisons. Its memories as dark as those of the Tower of London.
In Saxon times, before it was a castle, when it was a lodge convenient for hunting in the royal Forest of Purbeck, its tragedies began.
The widow Queen Elfrida lived here and her stepson Edward was king, but she wished her own son Ethelred to reign so the story runs.
Young King Edward came hunting in the Purbeck and tired and thirsty, called at the lodge for a drink. The Queen brought him a cup of wine and while he drank it, sitting on his horse, one of her servants stabbed him in the back. Spurring his horse he galloped towards Wareham but fell fainting from the saddle, according to tradition was dragged by the stirrup to a place on the Wareham road where there is now a little house called
St Edwards Cottage. There his body was found. It remained hidden for a while before being buried in Wareham. It was later reburied with great pomp at Shaftsbury.
What followed this terrible murder should be known. The murdered king was canonised as Edward the Martyr, and Corfe Church (which had been founded by St Aldhelm) was afterwards dedicated to him. Queen Elfrida, according to some accounts, retired to a nunnery at Bere Regis to amend her life and become Abbess. Her son, Ethelred the Unready, succeeded the murdered king but his reign was a period of fierce conflict with the Danes who repeatedly overran the country. He was the father of two later kings, Edmund Ironside and Edward the Confessor.
Corfe Castle continued its tale of tragedy. After resisting a siege in Stephen’s reign it came into evil repute in the reign of John. Having disposed of his own nephew, Arthur of Brittany (the boy whose fate gives Shakespeare one of his most piteous scenes), he sent 24 knights who had fought for Arthur to his castle at Corfe and starved 22 of them to death. Prince Arthur’s sister Eleanor was also kept for many years a prisoner in the castle, she died in another prison after 40 years of captivity. Here John also imprisoned Isabel and Margery, daughters of the King of Scotland.
One of the most hideous of John’s misdeeds at this Castle of Sorrows was a sequel to a scene in Shakespeare’s King John. A messenger has arrived giving John the news that his own mother and Prince Arthur’s have both died, and that a French army under the Dauphin has landed in England. As he exclaims “Though hast made me giddy with these ill-tidings” his half-brother Phillip enters with Peter of Pomfret, saying
As I travelled hither through the land
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possessed with rumours, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear:
And here’s a prophet, that I brought with me
From forth the streets of Pomfret, whom I found
With many hundreds treading on his heels;
To whom he sung, in rude harsh-sounding rhymes
That, ere the next Ascension-day at noon
Your highness should deliver up your crown.
John. Thou idle dreamer, wherefore didst thou so?
Peter. Foreknowing that the truth will fall out so.
John. Hubert, away with him; imprison him;
And on that day at noon, wheron he says
I shall yield up my crown, let him be hanged,
Deliver him to safety; and return.
The safety to which Peter of Pomfret was delivered was imprisonment in Corfe Castle, and so the year went on until Ascension Day at noon was passed. Then Peter of Pomfret was brought forth from his dungeon, dragged behind a horse to Wareham, and hanged there.
And yet Peter had been right. His prophesy had come true for by the time he had foretold, King John had sold his kingdom to the Pope and so became a vassal and no more a king.
Corfe Castle was one of the prisons to which Edward the Second was secretly removed during the eight months that elapsed between his surrender of his crown and his murder in Berkeley Castle. It was one of the places where state was kept up afterwards to lead people to think he was still there, alive.
As the centuries went by the castle was repeatedly given away, but reverted to the Crown. Its comparatively modern history begins with Queen Elizabeth’s gift of it to her handsome favourite Sir Christopher Hatton, who also owned Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour. From Sir Christopher it passed to his nephew who left it to his wife Elizabeth, grand-daughter of the great Lord Burghley.
When she became a widow, rich and clever, there was great competition for her hand in marriage, the first favourites being Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Edward Coke, rivals in love and law. Lady Hatton accepted Coke, who hurried the wedding so speedily that, in spite of Coke’s legal lore, it was carried out illegally and they had to submit themselves to the ecclesiastical court to be absolved from their mistakes. The marriage proved persistently unhappy. Both were wealthy and both litigious and they practised on each other. After Coke’s death his widow sold the castle to Sir John Banks and its key is now at Kingston Lacy, the Dorset seat of the Banks family.
When the civil war came, and all castles were involved, the Banks family prepared their castle for the services of the King and it was twice besieged. So strong was it that Lady Banks, her maids and servants and a handful of men, were able to beat back one attack, though 150 seamen from Poole with scaling ladders tried to clamber up the steep lopes of the walls. At the second attack the stronghold was given away by treachery, an officer of the garrison opening a gate at nightfall.
After that Parliament ordered that the castle be blown up. But it would not blow up. The wonderful masonry resisted destruction. Turrets were overthrown, but did not crumble. Though some of the bastions have gone hurtling down the grassy slope, enough remains of the walls and chambers and the pinnacled keep, still sternly defiant after nearly three centuries of ruin, to make us feel that here is a monument of the work of man’s hand holding its own with the stoutest masterpieces of Nature’s building.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands.
They melt like mist; the solid lands
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Yes, nothing stands; but there is pride and romance in the work that stands a long, long time by the measurements of our lives, and in Corfe and its castle are among the enduring things that man has made.
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