Bolsover Castle

Bolsover Castle stands in Old Bolsover, in the north-east of Derbyshire, on a ridge above the Vale of Scarsdale. A published grid reference for the site, SK471707, is a point on the Ordnance Survey National Grid. What a visitor sees is mostly a seventeenth-century house built for pleasure and display. It sits on the earthworks and buried masonry of an earlier castle.

The Little Castle, a compact tower with turrets, occupies the end of the promontory. South of it lies the Fountain Garden. Beyond that, the roofless Terrace Range faces the vale, and the Riding House Range closes the great court. The place was a fortress, then a ruined royal castle, then an aristocratic retreat, and it is now open to the public.

The age of the first castle is not agreed. One account says the castle was founded in the late eleventh century by William Peveril, a knight of William the Conqueror, and that it was neglected from the middle of the fourteenth century. Another says the Peverel family built the original castle in the twelfth century, and that it became Crown property in 1155 when William Peverel the Younger died. A third describes an eleventh-century motte and bailey, a twelfth-century tower keep, and the standing seventeenth-century country house built over them.

Excavation has produced a pre-motte surface that dates the motte to the early eleventh century, which is earlier than both the late eleventh-century foundation and the twelfth-century stone castle. A monument record dates the motte and bailey to the years 1066 to 1099 and the stone castle and keep to the twelfth century. The later medieval castle is said to have respected the earlier plan. The motte and bailey took the form of a large oval outer bailey with a smaller inner bailey.

The square tower keep appears to have stood on the site of the original mound. Foundations of the twelfth-century keep are said to survive under the present Little Castle. A stone castle was probably not begun until the early twelfth century and has otherwise vanished. Early stonework was seen during repairs in 1946 and in 1978 in the forecourt of the central area.

A measured survey later found medieval architectural fragments reused in the fabric of the seventeenth-century building. The open ground of the inner and outer baileys is thought to have been left largely undisturbed since the eleventh century, and to hold buried buildings from every medieval phase.

The Ferrers family, earls of Derby, laid claim to the Peverel property. The castle account that begins with a twelfth-century foundation says the Crown kept Bolsover after 1155. Another account says the castle was forfeited to the Crown in 1155 and remained a royal possession until the reign of Edward I. The two statements agree on the forfeiture and differ on how long the Crown held it.

In the Revolt of 1173–1174, three of the sons of King Henry II rose against him. Henry II had ruled England, Normandy, and Anjou since 1154, and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had ruled Aquitaine since 1137. In 1173 their legitimate sons were Henry, called the Young King, Richard, later Richard the Lionheart, Geoffrey, and the boy John. Henry the Young King was eighteen.

He had been crowned in his father’s lifetime in 1170, as titular king of England, duke of Normandy, and count of Anjou and Maine, but he had no real power and no means to pay the knights he kept. A decision to give three castles in Anjou, inside the Young King’s expected inheritance, to John, as part of John’s betrothal, sharpened the quarrel. In February 1173 the Young King asked his father for England or Normandy. Louis VII of France had encouraged that demand.

Eleanor joined the sons. She was stopped on her way to them and imprisoned, and she remained in captivity until Henry II died in 1189. The Young King, Richard, and Geoffrey went to Louis in Paris. The revolt page names Geoffrey as Duke of Brittany among the commanders.

Geoffrey’s own life dates that ducal title to his marriage to Constance, from 1181 to 1186, so the title and the revolt do not sit in the same years. Richard was not expected to be king. He was the third of five sons, and he ruled from 1189 until his death in 1199 only because his elder brothers died before their father.

The wider revolt lasted eighteen months, from April 1173 to 30 September 1174, and it failed. Four earls joined it, among them William de Ferrers, 3rd Earl of Derby, who burned the royal town of Nottingham. That earl is not the William de Ferrers, 4th Earl of Derby, who later dealt with King John over Bolsover. Normandy was the rebels’ main target, because holding Rouen would have split Henry’s lands.

Attacks from Flanders, France, and Brittany failed. The Earl of Leicester brought Flemish mercenaries to England and was beaten at Fornham. In 1174 Hugh Bigod took Norwich Castle with more than eight hundred men. Henry II landed in England on 8 July 1174, did penance at Canterbury for the murder of Thomas Becket, and the next day William the Lion of Scotland was captured at Alnwick.

On 30 September the sons returned to their father. Peace was sealed at Montlouis. At least twenty English castles were ordered demolished. During this war Henry II spent £116 on building at Bolsover and at Peveril in Derbyshire.

The garrison was increased to a force led by twenty knights, shared with the castles of Peveril and Nottingham.

Richard died in 1199, and his brother John became king. John lost Normandy and most of his other French lands to Philip II of France. The baronial revolt at the end of his reign produced Magna Carta. William de Ferrers, 4th Earl of Derby, kept up the claim of the earls of Derby to the Peveril estates.

He paid John 2,000 marks for the lordship of the Peak, but the Crown retained Bolsover and Peveril. On 1 June 1216, as rebellion spread, John ordered Brian de Lisle to defend Bolsover if it could be held and to slight it if it could not. John then gave Bolsover and Peveril to Ferrers to secure his support. Lisle refused to hand them over.

Both men were John’s supporters, and John gave Ferrers permission to take the castles by force. John died in 1216. Henry III, also called Henry of Winchester, became king that year and ruled until 1272. Bolsover fell to Ferrers in 1217 after a siege.

In 1223 the castle returned to the Crown, and £33 was spent repairing the damage the earl had caused six years earlier. Over the next twenty years four towers were added, the keep was repaired, parts of the curtain wall were repaired, and a kitchen and a barn were built, at a cost of £181. A separate account says there is documentary evidence for stone walling and for two interval towers in the early thirteenth century. Those figures, four towers and two interval towers, are not the same count.

From 1290 the castle and its manor were granted to a series of local farmers. Under them the castle fell into disrepair. One account places neglect from the middle of the fourteenth century. Another says the castle was ruinous by the end of that century.

Edward VI was king of England and Ireland from 28 January 1547 until his death on 6 July 1553. He was born on 12 October 1537, the only surviving son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, and he was crowned on 20 February 1547 at the age of nine. He was the first English monarch raised as a Protestant. A regency council ruled for him, first under his uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, from 1547 to 1549, and then under John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, from 1550 to 1553.

In 1553, the last year of that reign, Bolsover was granted to Francis Talbot, 5th Earl of Shrewsbury. Another account says it was sold to Lord Talbot in 1553. Granted and sold are different transactions, and both dates fall in the same year.

Francis Talbot’s son, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, was the keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Chatsworth House. Mary had been Queen of Scots from 14 December 1542, six days after her birth, until her abdication on 24 July 1567. She was executed on 8 February 1587. In 1574 two Scottish servants in the stable at Bolsover, Alexander Hamilton and John Stewart, were suspected of carrying letters secretly to her.

Stewart named the bailiff of Bolsover as Henry Smith, the housekeeper as Jane Mason, and the maids as Jane Jackson and Elizabeth Wise. The suspicion belongs to the years when a royal prisoner’s correspondence was treated as a danger, and it places Bolsover inside the household that guarded her, not merely near Chatsworth.

George Talbot died in 1590. His son Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, sold the ruins of Bolsover to his step-brother and brother-in-law, Sir Charles Cavendish, who wanted a new castle on the site. A life of that Charles dates the acquisition of Bolsover Castle and of Welbeck Abbey from Gilbert to 1613. The sale is therefore not the same event as George’s death in 1590.

This Charles was born on 28 November 1553 and died on 4 April 1617. He was a son of Bess of Hardwick and of William Cavendish, who died in 1557. He was educated at Eton and at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1570 he travelled to Venice with his stepbrother Gilbert Talbot, and in 1574 they went to Rome.

He was knighted in 1583. He married Margaret Kitson on 6 February 1580. She died in childbirth in 1583. In 1592 he married Catherine Ogle, daughter of Cuthbert, 7th Lord Ogle.

She was the heiress of Bothal Castle and died in 1627. Their sons were William, born about 16 December 1593, and Charles, born in 1594.

In July 1582 this Charles had some involvement with Mary, Queen of Scots, who declined a request of his. In March 1583 Mary claimed that Charles, his brother William, and Bess of Hardwick had tried to convince her that the Earl of Shrewsbury was her enemy, and she told William Waad that Charles had slandered her. In March 1584 she wrote that he was in London and had kept a pair of swift horses ready to ride to her with news if Elizabeth I died. Those are Mary’s claims about him, not a proved plot.

He feuded with the Stanhope family, including over a fish weir in the Trent. He arranged a duel with John Stanhope at Lambeth, with rapiers. The fight was called off when Stanhope was found to be wearing a sword-proof padded doublet. In November 1599 Charles was shot in the backside while visiting Kirkby Hardwick, also called Sutton Hardwick, where he was repairing and extending the house.

That house was demolished by the Coal Board in 1966.

He discussed buildings with the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury and sent them drawings developed after talks with Lord Lumley’s architect. The designs were Italianate, with a hall and a small dining room called a tenelli. Charles said a tenelli suited an Italian gentleman who kept only a pair of servants and ate salads and frogs, and that it did not suit an English earl. That remark is about his taste in planning.

It is not a description of a room that was built at Bolsover. The black-and-white marble fireplaces in the Little Castle were installed after his death. They were likely inspired by the English translation of Sebastiano Serlio’s architecture, published in 1611. A design for the hall chimney, probably by John Smythson, also drew on Serlio.

The new house was meant for elegant living rather than defence. Charles worked with the designer Robert Smythson. Robert Smythson was born about 1535 and died on 15 October 1614. He is first recorded in 1556 as stonemason at Longleat for Sir John Thynne.

He worked there for almost eighteen years from 1568, carving much of the external detail, and he is believed to have influenced the design. In 1580 he moved to Wollaton Hall. He also designed Hardwick Hall and Burton Agnes Hall. Other houses, including Gawthorpe Hall and Chastleton House, have been attributed to him on style alone.

At Bolsover the castle was unfinished when the two men died, Robert in 1614 and Charles in 1617. Charles was buried at Bolsover. His son built the monument to his parents in the church of St Mary and St Laurence at Bolsover.

The start of the Little Castle is given in several ways. One account says Sir Charles began it in 1612 as a retreat from Welbeck, a few miles away, and that most of the structure was finished when he died in 1617. Another says the first structure was built between 1612 and 1617. Another says he acquired the castle in 1613 and commenced rebuilding in 1613.

A wall-painting audit, using information gathered before March 1996, says building commenced between 1608 and 1613 and was supervised by John Smithson after his father Robert’s death in 1614, with the name spelled Smithson. A research summary says the Little Castle was built between 1613 and 1618. Another says the present keep was built from 1613 to about 1616, probably on the foundations of the earlier keep. In one listing the keep was built from 1612 to 1621 for Sir Charles, of coursed squared limestone and ashlar with tiled roofs, and the architects were probably Robert and John Smythson.

A further account says the sons finished the tower known as the Little Castle around 1621. These ranges overlap, and they do not collapse into one pair of years.

Accounts survive for the early stages of the Little Castle. Unusually for the period, women’s labour was written down, and the women’s names or their husbands’ names are given. The names themselves are not repeated in the short account of those accounts. When Charles died, his son William inherited the Little Castle and completed the interiors with the architect John Smythson, son of Robert.

The other son, Sir Charles Cavendish (Nottingham MP), born in 1594 and died in 1654, is also said to have built a mansion on the site his father had bought, to a design by John Smythson, and that this work was never completed. The father’s Little Castle and the son’s unfinished mansion are both on the same hill, and they are not the same building campaign. The younger Charles was knighted at Welbeck on 10 August 1619, during a visit of the king to his brother. John Aubrey later called him a little, weak, crooked man.

He studied mathematics and supported Walter Warner, Robert Payne, and William Oughtred.

The sons were influenced by the Italian-inspired architecture of Inigo Jones. Jones was born on 15 July 1573 in Smithfield, London, and died on 21 June 1652. He was the first significant architect of early modern England to use Vitruvian proportion and symmetry, and he introduced the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance. The Queen’s House was the first English building in a pure classical style.

He designed the Banqueting House at Whitehall and the layout of Covent Garden. He also designed several dozen masques, many of them with Ben Jonson. None of that makes Jones the designer of Bolsover. The influence claimed for the sons is a taste for Italian planning, not an attribution of the Little Castle to him.

The Little Castle was meant to look, from a distance, like a Norman great tower, rising sheer from the cliff. Inside, the basement has massive round Romanesque vaults, and the entrance floor has pointed Gothic vaults. Great windows on the upper floors were made for views across the landscape. The keep is square, of three storeys over a semi-basement, with square angle turrets, a larger stair tower at the north-east, and a battlemented parapet.

The south front has five symmetrical bays and a full-height porch. The windows have mullions, or mullions and transoms. A forecourt to the south is enclosed by walls and four battlemented towers, two of them flanking the entrance. The building has been called a toy keep, a place of luxurious state rooms rather than a residence for everyday life.

Friends are said to have called it the peak of perfection and compared it to a pearl. The family lived mainly at Welbeck and came to Bolsover to entertain, to read, to write, and to hear music and plays. A 2014 account of the reopening says it was never intended as a residence.

William Cavendish was born at Handsworth in South Yorkshire, the eldest surviving son of Sir Charles and Catherine Ogle, and a grandson of Bess of Hardwick. He was created a Knight of the Bath in 1610. He was a member of Parliament for East Retford from 1614 to 1620, in the parliament that became known as the Addled Parliament, and he succeeded his father in 1617. He was created Viscount Mansfield in 1620 and Earl of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1628.

He was Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire from 1628 to 1638. In 1618 he married Elizabeth Howard, who lived from 1599 to 1643. Their children were Jane, born in 1621, Charles and Elizabeth, born in 1626, Henry, born in 1630, and Frances. Jane and Elizabeth wrote poetry, encouraged by their father.

Henry became the second duke.

William spent £15,000 entertaining Charles I in 1634 and did not gain a significant political post by it. On 30 July 1634, during that royal visit, he and Elizabeth received the king and Queen Henrietta Maria. Ben Jonson wrote a masque for the occasion. One title for it is Love’s Welcome at Bolsover.

Another is Love’s Welcome to Bolsover. It was performed in the Fountain Garden. Jonson was born about 11 June 1572 and died on 6 or 18 August 1637. He popularised the comedy of humours.

His best-known plays include Every Man in His Humour of 1598, Volpone, or The Fox, of about 1606, The Alchemist of 1610, and Bartholomew Fair of 1614. He was regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, in the reign of James I. He wrote lyric and epigrammatic poetry, and he collaborated with Inigo Jones on court masques. The Bolsover masque is the piece that belongs to this castle.

A stage in the Little Castle now lets visitors perform scenes from it.

The Fountain Garden is enclosed by a rebuilt seventeenth-century version of the inner bailey wall. A drawing of about 1633 shows entry from a simple arched opening west of the present entrance, and it shows the wall crenellated on each side of a wall-top walk. Those crenellations had gone by the end of the eighteenth century. The present south entrance, with rusticated piers, is not on that drawing.

Three garden apartments sit in the thickness of the wall, possibly where early thirteenth-century mural towers stood. The western room has an arched entrance with a lion mask, a rib-vaulted roof, an elaborate chimneypiece, and niches. A room to its east, with a barrel vault, a corner chimneypiece, and a mullioned window, stands where the old entrance was, so it is later than the drawing of about 1633. The south room and the east room are simpler barrel-vaulted chambers with fireplaces.

A blocked door in the east wall once led to steps down the slope. Three seating alcoves have arched heads and stone seats on consoles. At the centre, the Venus Fountain is one of a very small number of seventeenth-century fountains in England that remain in place. It has a deep octagonal well, a crenellated parapet, and niches in the inner walls, described in the late eighteenth century as holding busts of Roman emperors.

A pedestal carries a life-size Venus rising from her bath. The fountain may have been made ready for the royal visit of 1634. It was adapted from a design by John Smythson. The garden is a registered park of the highest grade, dated in one record from the Stuart period into the Victorian, from 1630 to 1900, with the fountain itself placed, with a question on the dates, between 1630 and 1640.

In 1638 William was appointed governor of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and made a Privy Counsellor. A later account says he taught that prince to ride. When the Bishops’ Wars began in 1639 he lent the king £10,000 and a troop of volunteer horse. He was appointed Gentleman of the Robes in 1641, was implicated in the Army Plot, and withdrew from court for a time.

The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was a series of civil wars between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms from 1639 to 1653. The name Cavalier was used for supporters of Charles I, and Roundhead for supporters of Parliament. The struggle is divided into a first war and a second, and the Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 is sometimes called a third. Construction at Bolsover was interrupted by those wars.

The castle was taken by the Parliamentarians and slighted, and it fell into a ruinous state.

William fought for the king. In the early part of the first war he was Royalist Captain-General in the north, largely because he would pay his own troops. He later claimed that his spending on the war exceeded £1,000,000. An attempt to take Hull in July 1642 failed.

When Charles declared war in August, William received command of four northern counties. In November he advanced into Yorkshire, raised the siege of York, and forced Lord Fairfax to retire after an attack at Tadcaster. Through the winter he tried to secure a landing for arms that Henrietta Maria was buying in the Dutch Republic. In late February 1643 she landed at Bridlington with weapons and was escorted toward Oxford.

In June a victory at Adwalton Moor near Leeds led to William’s creation as Marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The castle account dates that marquessate to 1643, which matches the year of Adwalton Moor. In February 1644 a Scottish army under the Earl of Leven besieged Newcastle upon Tyne. The Earl of Manchester then beat a Royalist force at Selby, and William had to leave Durham and hold York.

York was besieged by the Scots, by Sir Thomas Fairfax, and by Manchester’s Army of the Eastern Association. Prince Rupert marched north, reached Knaresborough on 29 June, and the largest battle of the war was fought on 2 July 1644 at Marston Moor, against William’s advice. The Parliamentarians under Lord Fairfax and the Earl of Manchester, with the Scottish Covenanters under Leven, defeated the Royalists under Rupert and the Marquess of Newcastle. The defeat lost the Royalists the north.

York surrendered on 16 July. Clarendon later wrote that Newcastle was as fit to be a general as a bishop. The same life says he understood his limits and recruited reliable subordinates. After the battle he left for Hamburg with two sons and his brother Charles.

In April 1645 they moved to Paris.

Elizabeth Howard had died in 1643, the year before Marston Moor. In Paris, William met and married Margaret Lucas, who had travelled there as a maid of honour to Henrietta Maria. One life places the marriage in 1645. She had been born Margaret Lucas at Colchester in 1623, and she died in London on 16 December 1673.

She was a natural philosopher, poet, writer of fiction, and playwright. She published more than a dozen original works under her own name when most women writers stayed anonymous, and with revisions the total reached twenty-one. She published six books on natural philosophy. She rejected Aristotelianism and the mechanical philosophy, and she argued that nature is made of free, self-moving, rational matter.

Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and The Blazing World appeared in 1666 and again in 1668. The Blazing World is one of the earliest works of science fiction. Philosophical Letters appeared in 1664, and Orations in 1662. Her plays were not acted in her lifetime.

In May 1667 she became the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, where she engaged with Robert Boyle and others. A separate line says she was the first woman invited to attend a session. Samuel Pepys called her a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and still wanted to read her. Dorothy Osborne wrote that there were soberer people in Bedlam.

William’s life says she was known as Mad Madge for an extravagant style. He wrote a sonnet as an introduction to The Blazing World, and she wrote his biography. She estimated his total losses in the war at £941,303. That figure is not the same as his own claim of more than £1,000,000 spent on the war.

Her brother-in-law Charles shared an interest in natural philosophy and supported her studies, and Thomas Hobbes, who had instructed that Charles, is thought to have influenced her.

William left Paris in 1648 for Rotterdam, hoping to join the Prince of Wales with the fleet, and then settled in Antwerp until the Restoration. He lived in the house where Peter Paul Rubens had lived, kept a riding school, practised the art of manège, and in 1658 published Méthode et invention nouvelle de dresser les chevaux. The book influenced the French riding master François Robichon de La Guérinière, and also Baucher. William is said to have invented draw reins.

In April 1650 he was appointed to the privy council of Charles II. The Garter was bestowed on him in 1650 and he was invested with it in 1661. On the Cavendishes’ return to England in 1660, an Act restored the honours, manors, and lands he had held on 20 May 1640. He and Margaret began to restore their estates.

At Bolsover they rebuilt the state apartment in the Terrace Range and built the Riding House Range, with a high roof and viewing galleries. One account dates the Riding House to the 1660s and calls it one of the earliest in England to survive complete, and a landmark in British equestrianism. Another says the Riding School Range was begun before the Civil War and completed after it. A monument classification dates a riding school to the 1640s and 1650s.

Another says the Riding School, the gallery range, and the reception rooms were probably all finished by 1634. These cannot all be the date of one uninterrupted build. William used the Riding House to train great horses in stately dressage. In 1667 he published a second horse book, A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses.

He later set up a racecourse near Welbeck.

The Terrace Range is a long roofless shell overlooking the vale. One account says William added it, with a great gallery and state rooms, in the outer bailey or great court during the 1630s, and that the main state rooms were built in the 1660s. The list description dates additional ranges to about 1627 to 1642, to designs by John Smythson, and ranges of about 1635 to 1642 possibly by Huntingdon. The interior, now derelict, had the Great Gallery along the south side and, facing the court, a bedchamber, a withdrawing room, a hall, and a great hall or dining room, with service rooms and private apartments at the north end.

The Cavendish apartments at the north are of two storeys over a basement. The main range is of one storey over a basement, ten bays, with banded rustication and large cross windows. The Riding School range has gabled dormers. Its centre, the school itself, projects, with a heavily rusticated entrance and a broken segmental pediment around a ball finial.

A second gateway served the forge. Test pits inside the seventeenth-century riding school found a build-up at least 1.2 metres deep, showing that the interior was lowered before or during construction, and foundations going down at least 1.8 metres below the floor. A watching brief in the forge area found a large quarry or ditch under the Riding School, and service trenches there found medieval burials and Civil War occupation.

William was created Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 16 March 1665. The shorter title Duke of Newcastle is also used for him. He remained on the edge of Charles II’s court and grew critical of the king. He was Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire from 1660 until his death.

In his later years he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Margaret’s death in 1673 was a blow from which he did not recover. He died on 25 December 1676 at Welbeck and was buried in Westminster Abbey. By then, one account says, Bolsover had been restored to good order.

The main use of the building is said to have extended over twenty years, with the family presumed to have lived there toward the end of that period. He patronised Ben Jonson, and also Shirley, Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell, Flecknoe, Hobbes, Gassendi, and Descartes. With Dryden’s help he translated Molière’s L’Etourdi as Sir Martin Mar-all. His own plays include The Country Captain and The Varietie, both printed in 1649, The Humorous Lovers, and The Triumphant Widow.

While William was abroad, his brother returned earlier. At William’s request, Sir Charles Cavendish (Nottingham MP) came back to England in 1651 and managed to buy Bolsover Castle and Welbeck Abbey, which Parliament had confiscated. He had been a lieutenant general in the Royalist army in the north under his brother, and he had gone into exile with him after Marston Moor. He died at Bolsover in February 1654.

The wall paintings of the Little Castle are rare survivals of the early seventeenth century. The artists are unknown. One account says every painted scheme was finished in William’s time. The ceiling of the Heaven Closet shows the Ascension and is dated from 1619, with angels around Christ and cherubim on the walls holding the instruments of the Passion.

The subject has Catholic associations, despite William’s professed ambivalence in religion, and it may have been prompted by his travel on the continent. The Heaven and Elysium closets opened off his bedchamber and were extremely private. The Elysium Closet, probably used for intimate gatherings, has a frieze of Roman gods, including Bacchus, Minerva with her owl, and Mercury with his winged hat. The ante-room shows the Four Elements and the Four Temperaments, each scene copied from prints by Pieter Jode, who lived from 1570 to 1634.

The hall shows the labours of Hercules, perhaps as a sign of a man overcoming animal passions. The Elysium room shows an assembly of pagan gods, and the Heaven room shows Christ ascending. The iconography fits a house used for masques. The Star Chamber has a gilded blue ceiling and painted panelling.

The Pillar Parlour and the Marble Closet also carry decoration. Paintings on canvas or timber in the Pillar Chamber, the Star Chamber, and the Marble Closet were treated as a different kind of work from the paintings on stone or plaster. An audit based on information gathered before March 1996 found the paintings in the ante-room, the hall, the Elysium room, and the Heaven room still deteriorating, most likely from a poor interior climate and thick varnish. They had been extensively retouched.

The audit called for emergency treatment, for monitoring of humidity and temperature, and for a study of whether some of the varnish could be removed. That audit does not describe any treatment after March 1996.

Decline is said to have begun under William’s son Henry, who dismantled the state apartment. By the 1770s the Terrace Range was already a ruin. The estate passed to the dukes of Portland, who kept the Little Castle as a retreat until the early nineteenth century. For most of the nineteenth century it was tenanted and used as a vicarage.

It also passed through Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, into the Bentinck family, and became one of the seats of the earls and dukes of Portland. Margaret Cavendish Bentinck was styled Duchess of Portland from 1734 until her husband died in 1761, and Dowager Duchess from 1761 until her own death in 1785. She was described as the richest woman in Great Britain of her time. Another account says the castle was uninhabited after 1883.

That can sit beside a vicarage tenancy only if the tenancy ended before 1883, and the accounts do not spell out the handover. After Bolsover Colliery opened in 1889 the castle suffered mining subsidence and pollution.

A research note on slavery connections from 1600 to about 1830 says there is little evidence that the direct owners of Bolsover held plantations, though plantation ownership appears in the wider families. It finds more evidence that the owners employed black servants, and it says further research would be needed to show whether any of those servants worked at Bolsover. No names of servants at the castle are given.

In 1945 the castle was given to the nation by William Cavendish-Bentinck, 7th Duke of Portland, whose full name is given as William Arthur Henry Cavendish-Bentinck. He was styled Marquess of Titchfield until 1943, and he was a Conservative peer. One account says that in 1945 the site was placed in the care of the Ministry of Works and opened to visitors. Another says that in 1946 it was given to the Ministry of Works, which stabilised and repaired the buildings.

The year of the gift is therefore either 1945 or 1946, and both are stated. The Ministry stabilised the buildings and began opening parts to the public. Since 1984 the castle has been in the care of the national heritage charity. Horses are again a regular sight.

The parapets of the wall walk have been restored.

The castle is a scheduled monument, protected as a nationally important historic building and archaeological site, and it is listed at Grade I. One account says it was first listed in 1985. A buildings list for Bolsover Urban District is dated November 1961, and another list, for the District of Bolsover, is dated 23 March 1989. A scheduled-monument amendment is dated 11 March 1992.

The castle and its ancillary buildings are described as a Grade I group. It is also a guardianship monument. The differing list dates are left as they stand.

Excavation in 1977 revealed the medieval curtain wall. Other excavations revealed the bailey bank and the pre-motte surface already mentioned, and an aisled building that appears to be of early thirteenth-century date. In 1997 and 1998, ahead of a new visitor centre near the present entrance, large post-pits of part of an aisled timber building were found, with a nearby cesspit. Finds from the pits and the cesspit suggest a domestic use and a construction date in the first half of the thirteenth century.

An administrative use has also been suggested. The building went out of use toward the end of that century. These post-pits were described as the first medieval building recorded at the castle. The early thirteenth-century aisled building and this visitor-centre building may be the same structure described twice, or they may not.

The published wording does not settle it. An earlier evaluation of two trenches on the visitor-centre site found a possible outer bailey bank, with a date after which it existed falling in the eleventh century. During the construction, a service trench on the south side of the outer bailey bank cut a drystone wall set outside the medieval rubble bank, beside a recut in the bedrock that defined a deep ditch. The fill contained clay-pipe fragments dated to about 1650 to 1660, and possible kiln saggars.

The wall and the recut ditch were interpreted as refortification during the Civil War.

A geophysical survey in the walled garden, looking for an earlier formal garden, detected pipes that might have fed a fountain, and fainter anomalies that might be a former parterre. In 1996 an excavation investigated earlier path layouts. It recorded evidence for the former appearance of the Fountain Garden, limestone metalling in the Great Court, a stair from the Terrace Range that had once been more elaborate, and a metalled drive along the terrace. The original width of the carriageway could not be determined.

A small amount of medieval pottery was found with later material, and nineteenth-century and modern pottery was also recovered. A second investigation in the Fountain Garden followed because the first had not fixed the chronology of the paths. Small-scale excavation before repair of the Venus Fountain revealed details of the water system. An auger survey in the south-eastern part of the garden found stone, probably rubble from the medieval castle, in eleven of eighteen holes.

A watching brief on repairs outside the Fountain Garden entrance recorded a silted soakaway of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Between 17 and 29 January 2013 a targeted excavation was carried out in the Fountain Garden. Research excavations, with the site code BLR03, investigated the lodges and the garden rooms.

Other watching briefs found less. Eight trenches south-east of the Riding School Range recorded no archaeological activity. Monitoring of a telephone cable trench south of the Riding School found no archaeological deposits. Groundworks in the castle yard recorded no significant features.

Reinstatement of part of the South Drive after rain damage in 2014 recorded none either. A watching brief on small works inside the curtain wall, including planting, a conduit under gravel paths, a soakaway by the west garden-room door, and changes to paths, identified no features, deposits, or structural remains. Topsoil and compacted gravel were rarely penetrated, so anything beneath them was judged reasonably well protected. A layer of terram in one area showed that the topsoil there had been disturbed relatively recently.

A watching brief during earth-moving in four rooms of the Terrace Range is recorded without a list of finds. Monitoring near the site entrance recorded a range of medieval and post-medieval features, again without a published inventory in the summary.

In 2014 a restoration and refurbishment costed at £1.3 million reopened the Little Castle, the wall walk, and the Fountain Garden. Another account of the same kind of work gives £309,140 for the Little Castle, £812,203 for the Riding House, and £150,000 for the Venus Fountain, a total of £1,271,343. The two sums are not identical. The empty rooms received reproduction furniture of the seventeenth century, in silks and velvets.

In the Star Chamber, tapestries were hung against the gilded blue ceiling and the painted panelling. Cabinets in a seventeenth-century manner were made to open. The wall walk around the Fountain Garden, described as perilous before the work, was repaired with crenellations and obelisks, and opened for the first time in over 250 years. Nearly 5,000 plants were set in recreated borders, chosen to reflect the imported plants that had been fashionable.

The fountain was repaired as a working octagonal fountain, with restored statues of Roman emperors, putti, satyrs, and heraldic beasts. Fan-trained fruit trees were planted against the wall. A temporary garden in the shape of a serpent, from the Cavendish crest, was cut in turf and filled with coloured sand, in the manner of occasional gardens of the 1630s. One of the garden rooms, thought to have been used for experiments including fireworks made from saltpetre and brimstone, was noted, and the grandest room, with seating and an ornate fireplace, was restored and opened.

The former stables of the Riding House Range were refurbished as a discovery centre, with an interactive timber model of the Little Castle. Weekend and bank-holiday displays of dressage were introduced in the Riding House from April to September.

A televised paranormal investigation was filmed at the castle in October 2007 as part of Halloween events. In July 2015 the Antiques Roadshow was held there. In 2017 the staff of the charity that cares for the castle voted it the most haunted site in their care.

In May 2025 a visit, written up on 21 October 2025, recorded hexafoils on the wall of William Cavendish’s toilet room, the name Marion Marks near the main stair, and a set of concentric circles between the hearth and the window in the Star Chamber. A survey of medieval graffiti in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, by Matt Beresford, has identified protective marks in the stable and the riding school as well. The account of the May visit treats the careful placing of such marks near openings as a protective purpose.

In 2026 a two-year project, Margaret Cavendish’s Mind Lab, began from a grant of £248,000. It is a partnership with Junction Arts, Writing East Midlands, and the University of York. The project asks local people, schoolchildren, scientists, artists, and writers to respond to her philosophy, and it looks for a lasting public account of her at the castle, where interpretation had followed William. MindFest, a community festival of her ideas, was held at the castle on 1 August 2026.

More than 1,300 people came. A notice of the project dated 16 February 2026, and a university notice dated 3 August 2026, both describe the same grant and the same partnership. The August notice treats the festival as having happened that summer.