Castles That Never Were

Last weekend I was in Wiltshire with the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society, visiting the two Wardour Castles, neither of which is a castle in the true sense of the word.

Old Wardour Castle (left) is an English Heritage property. It was built in the late 14th century as a showy fortified house rather than a fortress with real military potential; later additional comforts like larger windows made it less defensible still. Despite this it was besieged and captured in the Civil War. The owner then besieged it again in an attempt to get it back but the gunpowder went off at the wrong moment. He got his home back. Or rather, what was left of it.

The master mason at Wardour was William Wynford, who also worked on Windsor Castle and the cathedrals at Wells and Winchester. (We do do ‘W’s in Wessex.) In this case inspiration was drawn from contemporary French hexagonal castles, a fashion import that resulted from the Hundred Years War and which in this precise form is unique in Britain. The Elizabethan alterations appear to have been the work of Robert Smythson, designer of Longleat for the neighbouring Thynne family.

The owners of Wardour from the 16th century until modern times were an old Cornish family, the intensely Catholic Arundells. (Sir Humphrey Arundell was the leader of the Cornish forces in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549; Anne Arundell was the wife of Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland.) Their other estates were at Lanherne in Cornwall; my great-great-grandparents were married there in 1833, theirs being the only Catholic marriage among my recent ancestors. Wardour, like Lanherne, was an estate populated by Catholics, following the example of the squire. On a small scale, cuius regio, eius religio. By the late 18th century, this part of Wiltshire was reported to have the largest Catholic population outside London.

At the Dissolution, Sir Thomas Arundell obtained several of the estates of Shaftesbury Abbey, possibly to hold in trust for a restoration of the old order that never came. In 1873, the family owned about 182 acres (plus manorial rights) in Cornwall and 6,037 in Wiltshire. After the destruction of Old Wardour Castle they had settled nearby at Breamore in Hampshire, before returning in the 18th century to build the ‘new’ Wardour Castle, a severe Palladian mansion with grounds by ‘Capability’ Brown. In fact, a most unlikely building to which to give the name of ‘Wardour Castle’. The choice reveals a traditionalism that runs very deep.

The house is now flats but its chapel in the west wing survives in all its finery. It was designed by James Paine and extended by the young John (later Sir John) Soane (after whom the extraordinary London museum is named). The multi-marbled altar (left) was designed by Giacomo Quarenghi, who later worked on St Petersburg for Catherine the Great. The sarcophagus enclosed by the altar contains bones from the Roman catacombs. These were a gift to the Arundells from Pope Alexander VII, rather unconvincingly identified as those of the martyrs Primus and Secundus. The whole edifice is a reminder that while Catholicism was frowned upon in 18th century Britain, and its adherents subjected to a wide range of disabilities, it was far from being actively persecuted. Indeed, in 1780 the Gordon Riots occurred in London in protest against increased leniency. The date falls between Paine’s work at Wardour and Soane’s.

The chapel possesses an exceptional collection of vestments, including the so-called Westminster Chasuble (left), parts of which are 15th century Flemish work and bear the arms of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (encircled with the collar of the Golden Fleece) and those of his wife, Margaret of York. The couple were married at Westminster Abbey in 1468 by Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury and the original chasuble is thought to have been their gift to the Abbey.

Other features are later ornamentation – the lily of France, the Tudor rose, the portcullis of the Beauforts and, giving the date away, the pomegranate, the badge of Catherine of Aragon. The word ‘pomegranate’ comes from the Latin for ‘seeded apple’ but the fruit was also used as a heraldic pun, the ‘apple of Granada’ and appears today in the royal arms of Spain. In Greek myth, the pomegranate is a symbol of the indissolubility of marriage. With that precedent held in mind, that Catherine was never going to leave quietly.