# Brownsea Castle

grade II listed Device Fort in Purbeck, United Kingdom

Studland, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1545 CE

## Story

• Brownsea Castle, also called Branksea Castle, was a Henrician blockhouse and gun platform on Brownsea Island, dated from 1545 to 1549, and built to cover Poole Harbour.
• Poole garrisoned it with six men and eight guns, Christopher Hatton held it from 1576, and Parliament armed it again in the English Civil War.
• William Benson (architect) made it a house after buying the island in 1726, and Humphrey Sturt raised a four-storey tower from 1765.
• George Cavendish-Bentinck died there in April 1891, and fires placed in 1892 and on 26 January 1896 were followed by a rebuild in 1897.
• Mary Bonham-Christie let the castle decay after 1927, and from the early 1960s it has been a staff hotel that visitors are not allowed to enter as a public monument.
• A south-west vault trench found no archaeological deposits, and in November 2023 a three-toed footprint was found in the grounds.

## Visiting

Visitors are not allowed to enter the castle as members of the public. Admission is limited to the staff of the partnership that leases it, together with their family and friends. The hotel is open from the end of January to the last week before Christmas. The castle closes at midnight under the existing curfew.
Other guests may not enter except at an additional 10 to 20 events a year outside school-holiday peaks. A public ticket is sold only for occasional events that include entry to the castle. No change is made to the number of overnight stays or to the closing time.

## History

Brownsea Castle, also called Branksea Castle, stands at the eastern end of Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, in the parish of Studland. Henry VIII had it built as a one-storey blockhouse with a hexagonal gun platform, to cover the harbour entrance against French attack. The dates on record run from 1545 to 1549, including a finish in 1547 and platform work in 1548. The island had passed from Cerne Abbey to the Crown in the Dissolution of the monasteries.

Poole shared the cost and maintained a garrison given, in Elizabeth’s reign, as six men and eight guns. Repairs in 1573 cost £520, and work in 1584 and 1585 raised the walls and completed a four-foot enclosure. In 1576 the castle was granted to Christopher Hatton, who claimed searches of ships and the ferry revenues, and lost the ferry case. In 1589 the guns fired on the Bountiful Gift, killing two of the crew, and Captain Walter Partridge was convicted of manslaughter and then pardoned.

In the English Civil War the castle was held for Parliament, under the Governor of Poole. Four guns and four chests of muskets were ordered up in 1644, and the garrison is given as 20 men by 1646. The defences later decayed, and Poole stopped manning them. William Benson (architect) bought the island in 1726 for £300, demolished the outer works, and made a house after Poole’s complaint was dropped.

From 1765 Humphrey Sturt raised the core into a battlemented four-storey tower with wings, lakes and firs. Sir Charles Chad bought the estate in 1817. In 1818 Prince George, later George IV and still prince regent, was received with a salute from the castle guns. Colonel William Waugh, also named William Petrie Waugh, tried to found a pottery in 1852 or 1853, built Maryland for the workers, and fled to Spain in 1857 when the clay proved useless for fine china.

George Cavendish-Bentinck is said to have bought the castle in 1873 for £30,000, while another account gives a sale in 1870, and he died there in April 1891. Fire is placed in 1892 and on 26 January 1896, with rebuilding in 1897 by the architect Philip Brown of Southampton. Charles van Raalte and Florence van Raalte then kept a large musical household, and on 1 August 1907 an experimental camp of 20 boys was held on the island at his invitation. Mary Bonham-Christie bought the estate in 1927 for £125,000, lived nearby, and left the castle to decay until her death on 28 April 1961.

A trust acquired the island in the early 1960s, a transfer dated both to 1961 and to 1962, and also to 1962–3, while the staff-hotel lease is also dated from 1963. The sixteenth-century walls remain in the basement, about 43 by 44 feet, with the old entrance blocked, and the rooms above are largely of 1897. A single trench in a south-west vault found no archaeological deposits. On 15 November 2023 a three-toed footprint was found in the grounds, in stone that may have come from the Isle of Purbeck, and visitors are not allowed to enter the castle as a public monument.

## Photographs

- [Brownsea Castle, trimmed slightly from original — Iain A. Wanless](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Brownsea_Castle_seen_from_sea.jpg)
- [Brownsea Castle, Poole Harbour, Dorset, England, UK. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/emilymaloybishop/249162705/, GFDL permission granted by Emily Hanson — Rlevse](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Brownsea_Castle.png)
- [Brownsea Island Scout Camp — LordHarris](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Brownsea_Island_Scout_Camp_3.JPG)
- [Brownsea Castle, also known as Branksea Castle. A mid 16th century square blockhouse protected by a moat which was built on small island in Poole harbour. It — Jim Linwood](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Brownsea_Castle%2C_Brownsea_Island%2C_Poole%2C_Dorset.jpg)
- [Branksea Castle, Brownsea Island, Poole. Image taken from the ferry when returning to Poole Quay. — William Kemp](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Branksea_Castle%2C_Brownsea_Island%2C_Poole_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6483.jpg)
- [Branksea Castle, Brownsea Island, Poole. The castle and landing stage seen from the ferry Barfleur. — Stephen Williams](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Branksea_Castle%2C_Brownsea_Island%2C_Poole._-_geograph.org.uk_-_366768.jpg)
- [Branksea Castle. Branksea Castle and landing stage, Brownsea Island. — gary radford](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Branksea_Castle._-_geograph.org.uk_-_393188.jpg)
- [A yacht in Brownsea Road With Branksea Castle in view. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/A_yacht_in_Brownsea_Road_-_geograph.org.uk_-_449878.jpg)
- [Brownsea Island - Branksea Castle As seen from the sea. — Chris Talbot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Brownsea_Island_-_Branksea_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_573439.jpg)
- [Branksea Castle From the Pier Branksea Castle on Brownsea Island — Shaun Ferguson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Branksea_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_775317.jpg)

## Sources

- [Brownsea Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsea_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Henry VIII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII) — Wikipedia
- [Mary Bonham-Christie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bonham-Christie) — Wikipedia
- [William Benson (architect)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Benson_(architect)) — Wikipedia
- [English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Christopher Hatton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hatton) — Wikipedia
- [George Cavendish-Bentinck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cavendish-Bentinck) — Wikipedia
- [George IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_IV) — Wikipedia
- [Humphrey Sturt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_Sturt) — Wikipedia
- [Brownsea Castle, Studland](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1120277) — Historic England
- [Brownsea Castle, Studland](https://heritage.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/Monument/MWX822) — Dorset Council
- [Post-Medieval Tudor Blockhouse, Brownsea Castle](https://heritagerecords.nationaltrust.org.uk/HBSMR/MonRecord.aspx?uid=MNA137362) — National Trust
- [History of Brownsea Island](https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/dorset/brownsea-island/history-of-brownsea-island) — National Trust
- [Three-toed dinosaur footprint spotted at nature reserve](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czk210gp42eo) — BBC News
- [John Lewis: Brownsea Island closer to historic offering](https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/24855665.john-lewis-brownsea-island-closer-historic-offering/) — Bournemouth Echo
- [Brownsea Island](https://www.phc.co.uk/itinerary/brownsea-island/) — Poole Harbour Commissioners
- [Brownsea Castle excavation index](https://ariadne-portal-dev.d4science.org/resource/c8a1120a6ec95cc8bc97b14e760aa42d15d85a99a61e80744478927d0e81c97d) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Brownsea Castle seen from sea.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Castle_seen_from_sea.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brownsea Castle.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Castle.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brownsea Island Scout Camp 3.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Island_Scout_Camp_3.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brownsea Castle, Brownsea Island, Poole, Dorset.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Castle,_Brownsea_Island,_Poole,_Dorset.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Branksea Castle, Brownsea Island, Poole - geograph.org.uk - 6483.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Branksea_Castle,_Brownsea_Island,_Poole_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6483.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Branksea Castle, Brownsea Island, Poole. - geograph.org.uk - 366768.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Branksea_Castle,_Brownsea_Island,_Poole._-_geograph.org.uk_-_366768.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Branksea Castle. - geograph.org.uk - 393188.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Branksea_Castle._-_geograph.org.uk_-_393188.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A yacht in Brownsea Road - geograph.org.uk - 449878.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_yacht_in_Brownsea_Road_-_geograph.org.uk_-_449878.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brownsea Island - Branksea Castle - geograph.org.uk - 573439.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsea_Island_-_Branksea_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_573439.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Branksea Castle - geograph.org.uk - 775317.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Branksea_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_775317.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Brownsea Castle, also called Branksea Castle and Bronksey in an older spelling, stands at the eastern end of Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, in the parish of Studland, Dorset. The island is the largest in the harbour, and the harbour is described as the second largest natural harbour in the world. The castle point is given as 50 degrees 41 minutes 18 seconds north and 1 degree 57 minutes 30 seconds west, and as latitude 50.68834 and longitude 1.95826 west. Grid references are given as SZ 03048 87646, as SZ 0304 8763, as a centre at SZ 0305 8764, and as 030876. It was designated on 13 December 1984 at Grade II. It is not a recorded world-heritage inscription. The building is a country house and holiday centre wrapped around a Henrician blockhouse. Much of the sixteenth-century fort remains, but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century additions hide it. Two of the blockhouse walls are said to form part of the historic core.

Before the fort, the island belonged to Cerne Abbey. It is not in the Domesday survey of 1086, which has been read as a sign that there was little of value there, though the monks were granted whatever washed ashore from wrecks. A hermit monk is believed to have lived on the island around the ninth to the tenth century, lighting beacons for boats and offering spiritual care to sailors. A record of 1534 says there was yet a chapel for a hermit and that it belonged to Cerne Abbey. An early seventeenth-century map shows a building about 100 metres west of the later castle, thought to be that chapel. In 1581 or 1582, three tons of brazil nuts were stored in the chapel of Bronksey, hidden because they were pirate spoil bought illegally. In the 1970s, seven bodies were unearthed near Church Field during work at nearby farm cottages. They were thought to have died between 1030 and 1350, in the centuries when the abbey was active, which has been taken to suggest that the chapel stood nearby. Those graves are not under the castle. In 1964 two sections of a 33-foot Iron Age log boat were found just off the island. Carbon dating put its preservation in the marine silts at almost 3,000 years. People had been active in the local area since at least the Iron Age, placed from 750 BC to AD 43. The boat is not a find from the castle walls.

The fort belongs to the last years of Henry VIII. He was born on 28 June 1491 and died on 28 January 1547, king of England from 22 April 1509. He was the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. His elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, died in 1502, and Henry became heir. He married Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, after a papal dispensation, at the friars’ church in Greenwich on 11 June 1509. Their only surviving child of that marriage was Mary, born in February 1516. A son, Henry, born on 1 January 1511, died seven weeks later. Henry’s dissatisfaction with the marriage, and his pursuit of a male heir, led him to seek an annulment.

The accounts of the break with Rome do not name one pope only. One account says that in 1533 he broke with Pope Paul III in order to annul the marriage to Catherine of Aragon and remarry, and that France and the Holy Roman Empire declared an alliance against him in 1538, with the pope encouraging an attack on England. His own life says he appealed to Pope Clement VII, that Clement refused, and that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer declared the marriage void in the eyes of the Church of England in 1533. Clement objected and excommunicated him. The Acts of Supremacy then made Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England. A further excommunication, by Pope Paul III, is dated 17 December 1538, after the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury was dismantled. In 1542 the remaining monasteries were dissolved and their property went to the Crown. Another account dates an Act of 1534 ordering the closure of every monastery and nunnery in England and Wales, and says that in that process Brownsea passed from Cerne Abbey to the Crown. The castle account says the island was confiscated from Cerne Abbey during the Dissolution a few years before the fort was built.

Coastal defence had usually been left to local lords and communities. While France and the Empire fought each other, raids were common but an invasion of England seemed unlikely. Modest blockhouses existed in the south-west and along the Sussex coast. In 1539 Henry ordered, through an instruction called a device, fortifications on the most vulnerable coasts. The immediate threat passed. It returned in 1544, when France threatened an invasion across the Channel, backed by allies in Scotland, and he issued another device, especially for the south coast.

His life gives the war that sat behind that second scare. The 1539 alliance of Francis I and Charles V soured into renewed war. With Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn dead, Henry made a secret alliance with the emperor and planned an invasion of France for 1543. First he turned on Scotland, then led by his nephew James V. The Scots were defeated at Solway Moss on 24 November 1542, and James died on 15 December. Henry hoped to marry his son Edward to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. The Scottish regent, Lord Arran, agreed in the Treaty of Greenwich on 1 July 1543. The Parliament of Scotland rejected the marriage on 11 December. Eight years of war followed, later called the Rough Wooing, and unrest in Scotland continued until Henry’s death despite several peace treaties. Henry went to France in June 1544. The Duke of Norfolk besieged Montreuil without success. The Duke of Suffolk besieged Boulogne. Henry took command, and Boulogne fell on 18 September 1544. He refused Charles’s request to march on Paris. Charles made peace with France that same day, and Henry was left alone. Francis I attempted to invade England in the summer of 1545. His forces reached only the Isle of Wight and were repulsed at the Battle of the Solent. The Treaty of Camp, on 7 June 1546, left Boulogne in English hands for eight years, then to be returned for 2 million crowns, or £750,000. The 1544 campaign had cost £650,000. Henry died at the Palace of Whitehall on 28 January 1547, aged 55, on what would have been his father’s ninetieth birthday, and was buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, next to Jane Seymour. The Brownsea blockhouse was rising in those same years, against the French attack the harbour was thought to face.

The castle was built on the south-east corner of the island to cover the entrance of Poole Harbour. The dates are not one date. It is placed between 1545 and 1547, in 1545–47, as finished in 1547, as a fort of 1547–8, as a blockhouse and gun platform of 1548, and as built in 1547–9. A payment in April 1547 of 33 shillings and 4 pence for lead, recorded in the Poole town accounts, is used to support a statement in a document of 1573 that the castle was finished in 1547. Work continued into 1548, when £56 7 shillings was paid for finishing the platform. Another statement gives the 1548 platform work as £56. Further work in 1552, at Poole’s cost, is given as £133. Later calculations set those sums, in 2014 terms, across very wide ranges: £56 in 1548 between £27,000 and £12 million, £133 in 1552 between £43,000 and £21 million. Royal spending on all the device forts from 1539 to 1547 is given as £376,500, with St Mawes at £5,018 and Sandgate at £5,584. Brownsea was a small work beside those.

The design was conservative. It was a one-storey square blockhouse, reported in 1552 as 44 feet, or 13 metres, across, able to carry guns on the roof and divided into three rooms. It had been intended to have two storeys, and that second storey was not built. As late as 1572 it was still incomplete for that reason. A moat surrounded three sides. On the seaward side a hexagonal gun platform was enclosed by a low wall. The entrance was on the south-west, across the moat, by a drawbridge given as 24 feet, or 7.3 metres, long. A view and plan inset on a map of Poole Harbour dated 1597 shows three guns on the roof of the main block and an empty platform, with the platform wall partly broken down. The Crown and the town of Poole paid for the work. Poole took on the garrison and the maintenance. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign the usual garrison is described as six men, with eight artillery pieces. Another summary says six soldiers and eight guns. In 1551, 101 piles were driven, probably against the sea eating at the site. In 1561 the town petitioned the Crown for help with repairs and new cannon.

The fabric needed money again and again. A complaint in 1571 said the castle was ruinous. Repairs followed two years later, in 1573, costing £520, with 4,000 tonnes of stone, also given as 4,000 tons of rough stone and chalk. A later range for that £520, in 2014 terms, runs from £158,000 to £62 million. In 1584, £200 was spent raising the walls a further four feet, high enough for a parapet. In 1585 repairs included the stone fabric, loopholes, windows and lead, the strengthening of the gun platforms, and the completion of a wall four feet, or 1.2 metres, high around the castle. One account says that by 1576 the fort had fallen into ruin. Another places the 1576 grant in that same year, so the ruin and the grant sit side by side.

In 1576 Elizabeth I granted the castles of Brownsea and Corfe, for life, to Christopher Hatton, and one account calls him Admiral of Purbeck. Another calls him Vice Admiral of Purbeck and Constable of Corfe Castle. He lived from 12 December 1540 to 20 November 1591. He was a favourite of Elizabeth, later Lord Chancellor, and one of the judges who found Mary, Queen of Scots, guilty of treason. He was the second son of William Hatton of Holdenby and Alice Saunders. He entered St Mary Hall, Oxford, at 15 or 16, left without a degree, and enrolled at the Inner Temple on 26 May 1560. In 1561 a masque brought him to Elizabeth’s notice. He was nicknamed the Dancing Chancellor. In 1564 he became a gentleman pensioner and a gentleman of the privy chamber. In July 1572 he was captain of the yeomen of the guard. On 11 November 1577 he became vice-chamberlain, was sworn of the Privy Council, and was knighted. The castle grant of 1576 therefore calls him Sir Christopher Hatton in accounts that use that title, while his life places the knighthood in November 1577. In June 1578 the queen granted him the Bishop of Ely’s house in Ely Place. Rumours that he was her lover were current, and Mary, Queen of Scots, made that charge in 1584. He was a commissioner at the trial of Anthony Babington in 1586 and at Mary’s treason trial the next year, and he urged that the warrant go to Fotheringhay. He became Lord Chancellor in 1587, with no great knowledge of the law, and was said to have been a Roman Catholic in all but name while treating religion moderately. From 1570 he built Kirby Hall. In 1583 he began Holdenby, intended as the largest private Elizabethan house in England, with 123 great glass windows, two courts, and a state room for the queen, who never stayed. He would not sleep there until she did. He died in debt at Ely Place on 20 November 1591, nine days after the queen visited him, and was buried at St Paul’s on 16 December. He never married. The estates went to his nephew Sir William Newport, who took the name Hatton.

At Brownsea, Hatton claimed the right to search ships entering Poole Harbour and the revenues of the ferry. He lost the ferry case around 1581. His deputy Francis Hawley was known for striking deals with local pirates, and captains of the castle were rumoured to have protected leading pirates for a share of the booty. A documented firing is separate from that rumour. In 1589 the ship Bountiful Gift refused to come in for inspection, arguing that it already had a valid pass. The castle fired on her and killed two of the crew. The captain, Walter Partridge, was tried and convicted of manslaughter, and was pardoned. The rest of the island, but not the castle, was leased to various landowners.

The castle was garrisoned through most of the seventeenth century. The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was a series of wars between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms from 1639 to 1653. The First English Civil War was fought over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I. It ended in June 1646 with the Royalists beaten and the king in custody. Most who fought in 1642 had wanted Parliament’s place in government, not the end of the monarchy. Charles’s refusal to concede produced a stalemate. Fear of radicals in the New Model Army, among them Oliver Cromwell, helped an alliance of moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists, backed by the Covenanter Scots. Defeat in the Second English Civil War of 1648 led to the execution of Charles I in January 1649, on the 30th, outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and to the Commonwealth. Charles II was crowned in Scotland in 1650. The Anglo-Scottish war ended with a Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The arrangement was undone at the Restoration in 1660. Poole sided with Parliament, the Roundheads. Brownsea was held for Parliament under the Governor of Poole, refortified, and kept a strong military presence through the conflict. In 1644 Parliament ordered four pieces of artillery and four chests of muskets to the castle. By 1646 the garrison is given as 20 men. Another account says the House of Commons ordered additional guns in 1645/6. The first war’s end in June 1646 and a garrison of 20 in 1646 belong to the same year. The castle was not a field army. It was a harbour post on the Parliamentarian side of a war about whether the king could rule without Parliament.

During the Interregnum the merchant Sir Robert Clayton bought the surrounding island. One account says that in 1660, when Charles II returned from exile, the castle was owned by Robert Clayton, who later became Mayor of London. He probably did not live in the castle. It fell into disrepair, and by the end of the century Poole refused to garrison the decaying defences. It had fallen out of use again.

William Benson (architect) bought the island from Clayton’s heirs in 1726 for £300. He was born in 1682 and died on 2 February 1754. He was an amateur architect and a Whig, in the Commons from 1715 to 1719. His father was Sir William Benson, sheriff of London in 1706–07. A long stay in Hanover from 1704 to 1706 brought him close to the Elector and the Electress Sophia. In 1707 he married Eleanor Earle. In 1709 he designed Wilbury House at Newton Tony, called the earliest neo-Palladian villa in England, a one-storey house of nine bays with a pedimented portico, published under his name in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715. He was High Sheriff of Wiltshire in 1709. A piped-water scheme at Shaftesbury, which a memoir gives to the curate Mr Holland, helped his election. He sat for Shaftesbury from 1715. In 1718 he displaced the aged Sir Christopher Wren as Surveyor of the King’s Works, with help from John Aislabie. The surveyorship lasted fifteen months. He sacked able subordinates, angered the Treasury, and told the House of Lords that their chamber was about to collapse. The lasting work of those months was the state rooms at Kensington Palace. He was relieved in July 1719. He later held the Auditor of the Imprests, promised in 1717 and taken up in 1735, until his death. Alexander Pope mocked him in The Dunciad for a Milton monument in Westminster Abbey in 1737 set beside a bust of the minor Latin poet Arthur Johnston. One account calls him Mad Benson. He is the man who turned the Brownsea fort into a house, years after the surveyorship failed.

Poole complained. The town went to the Attorney General and argued that Benson had bought the island, not the castle, and that the castle was a national fortification built by Henry VIII and owned by Poole. Benson answered that the building had not been a castle but a lodging house, that Henry had not built it, and that earlier owners of the island had merely allowed the town and the government to place artillery there. The matter was dropped. He demolished the external fortifications, made a Great Hall, planted trees, and preserved hundreds of rare plants. The conversion is also dated to 1718, to the early eighteenth century, and to an original country house of 1727 that incorporated the blockhouse. The purchase price of £300 in 1726 is elsewhere set, in 2014 terms, between £40,000 and £5.4 million. He dismantled what were by then called derelict fortifications and rebuilt the place as a residence.

The castle then passed to a Mr Chamberlayne and, in one account, to Sir Gerard Sturt in 1762, and to Gerard’s cousin Humphrey Sturt in 1765. Another account says that in 1765 Humphrey Sturt acquired Brownsea from his cousin Sir Gerard Napier of More Crichel. The two predecessors are not the same name, and both are left as stated. Humphrey Sturt was born about 1724 and died on 20 October 1786. He was a landowner, an architect, and a Tory member for Dorset, returned unopposed in 1754, 1761, 1768, 1774 and 1780, and he did not stand in 1784. His mother, Diana Napier, brought him Crichel House. He remodelled that house and, at Horton, made a lake of 200 acres. At Moor Crichel he drowned the old village under a smaller crescent lake and moved the cottages to New Town at Witchampton, leaving the church, later rebuilt in 1850, and a park before the mansion. He designed Horton Tower, or Sturt’s Folly, in 1750, six storeys and 140 feet, or 43 metres, with a fireplace halfway up. A map of 1765 calls it an observatory. A local legend says it was a stand from which he could watch the hunt when he was too old to ride. On the island he used steam power for threshing, imported large quantities of manure, and planted new crops. The castle accounts add that he extended the house around the sixteenth-century core into a Palladian four-storey tower with battlements and new wings on three sides, built a walled courtyard with hothouses, and landscaped two lakes and a large number of firs at a cost of £50,000. One account says he increased the height to four storeys, added wings, and built the first farm. Engravings show a simple battlemented building with Palladian or arched windows, and a courtyard with corner pavilions on the site of the later walled garden to the north-east. The £50,000 of 1765 is elsewhere set between £6.3 million and £657 million in 2014 terms. One caption calls him Sir Humphrey Sturt. The account of his years in parliament and at Crichel does not call him Sir. The estates passed to his younger son, Charles Sturt. The castle account says that son made Brownsea his main home but was often away because of the Napoleonic Wars, and that a further Charles, that son’s son, inherited and sold the property to Sir Charles Chad in 1817. Those Charleses are not forced into one man beyond what each account says.

Chad spent heavily on the castle. In 1818 Prince George visited and was met with a salute from the castle guns. That prince was the future George IV. George IV was born George Augustus Frederick on 12 August 1762 and died on 26 June 1830. He was king of the United Kingdom and of Hanover from 29 January 1820. From 5 February 1811 he had been prince regent for his father, George III, under the Regency Act. In 1818 he was still regent, not yet king. The visit belongs to the regency, not to the reign. The diplomat Sir Augustus Foster acquired the castle in 1840 on his retirement. He killed himself at the castle in 1848. The inquest called it temporary insanity following a disease of the heart and lungs.

A retired Indian Army officer, Colonel William Waugh, bought the island in 1852, hoping for a profitable pottery. Another account says that in 1853 Colonel William Petrie Waugh and his wife Mary purchased it. He restored the castle and built a Jacobethan range along the south and east, the crenellated gatehouse and clock tower at the courtyard entrance, and the family pier below the castle, with castellated watch towers. The pier is a brick gallery and open terrace on arches, of about 1852, ending in two octagonal stucco towers in a Tudor style. In the gallery are stone carvings, probably Venetian, including fifteen with shields, two dated 1601 and 1619, three with the lion of St Mark, three basins, and a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century door-head. The gatehouse, about 30 yards north-east of the castle, is brick with rusticated quoins, an embattled parapet and a clock turret, of about 1852. Maryland, four blocks of four dwellings, was built for clay workers about 1852 and named for Mary Waugh. A three-storey pottery stood on the south shore, with engines and brickworks, and a horse-drawn tram brought clay from the north. The Church of St Mary on the island is also credited to him. The clay would not make fine china. The Branksea Clay and Pottery Company turned to terracotta chimney pots and pipes. The venture failed. Waugh fled his creditors to Spain in 1857. Another account says that after just five years the Waughs went bankrupt, fled to Spain, and the island was auctioned. A Mr Faulkner continued the pottery for a time. The Villa was still incomplete in 1857. The first quarter of the nineteenth century had already enlarged the house to the north-west, and the second quarter extended it to the north-east, before Waugh’s south-east front.

The next owner is named in two ways. One account says the property was resold in 1873 to the politician and lawyer George Cavendish-Bentinck for £30,000. He purchased Branksea Castle in 1873. Another account says it was sold in 1870 to the Hon. Augustus Cavendish Bentinck, who brought a collection of Italian stone carvings. The names and the years are both left standing. George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck was born on 9 July 1821 and died on 9 April 1891. He was the only son of Major-General Lord Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck and of Mary Lowther, daughter of the Earl of Lonsdale, and a grandson of the 3rd Duke of Portland. He was a barrister, a Conservative member of parliament from 1859 until his death, and a cricketer for Marylebone, with one match for Cambridge. Under Benjamin Disraeli he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade from 1874 to 1875 and Judge Advocate General from 1875 to 1880, and he was sworn of the Privy Council in 1875. On 14 August 1850 he married Prudentia Penelope Leslie. Their children included William George Cavendish-Bentinck, born in 1854, who married Elizabeth Livingston in 1880, and Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck, born in 1856, who married Ruth St Maur. The castle account says George gave the island as a family home to his son William, paid for a renovation, and that William and his wife Ruth moved in in 1888. The life names William’s wife as Elizabeth and Frederick’s wife as Ruth. Those pairings are not collapsed into one couple. He closed the pottery, introduced Jersey cows, and is also said to have introduced Guernsey and Jersey cows, and to have developed the agriculture. Renaissance sculpture, including Venetian wellheads, was set in the grounds. Some of it remains in the churchyard and on the quay. In 1889 he was named by John Saul, in a police statement, as a client of the male brothel at the centre of the Cleveland Street scandal. He died at the castle in April 1891, aged 69, and the header of his life gives 9 April 1891. The castle account says he died in 1891 with extensive debts, which forced William to sell. His wife survived him by five years and died in June 1896. The £30,000 of 1873 is elsewhere set between £2.6 million and £42 million in 2014 terms.

The buyer was Major Kenneth Robert Balfour, also called Major Kenneth Balfour. He introduced Japanese sika deer and set up a peat-cutting trade that sent quantities to London. After new electric lighting was installed, the castle caught fire on 26 January 1896 and the interiors were gutted. Another account says there was no fire engine on the island, that islanders formed a human bucket chain, and that the castle was destroyed. A third places severe damage by fire in 1892, with a large refacing and extension in 1897, and also says the house changed hands in 1892 and was severely damaged shortly after. A fourth says the fire of 1896 gutted the house and that it was rebuilt in 1897. It was also recorded as gutted by fire and partly rebuilt in 1897. Balfour rebuilt with the architect Philip Brown of Southampton, softening the more complicated parts of the design, and he added fire hydrants. His wife Margaret Anne fell ill, and he sold the island in 1901. She is not the Prudence Leslie who died in 1896.

Charles van Raalte, also written Charles Van Raalte, a stockbroker, bought it in 1901 with his wife Florence. The castle then had 38 bedrooms. They lived lavishly, with summer house parties, servants, and a musical band. One account says most new male employees had to be musicians and play in the estate band, and that he employed 71 servants and workers, including a professional golfer and 12 crew for steam yachts that brought guests from across Europe. A piano in the castle played Gilbert and Sullivan. They collected about 250 historical instruments from Europe, Asia and Africa. They made a nine-hole golf course and kept shooting. The island was largely self-supporting, with a kitchen garden and a dairy herd. Of 30 islanders who went to war in 1914, only six returned. In the 1920s daffodils were grown for the Covent Garden market. During these years Guglielmo Marconi was a visitor and carried out experiments with wireless telegraphy. The account places that visit with the castle and the island together, and it does not say the apparatus stood in a named room. Charles died in 1908. Florence stayed until 1925, and her death is placed in 1927.

On 1 August 1907, while the van Raaltes owned the island, 20 boys pitched tents there for an experimental camp. Charles van Raalte invited Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, who lived from 1857 to 1941. The camp tested ideas drawn from the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and from the Siege of Mafeking, given as October 1899 to May 1902. Ten boys came from Boys’ Brigades in Poole and Bournemouth, and ten from public schools. The camp lasted a week, and is also called eight days. They tracked, lit fires, cooked, watched birds, animals, plants and stars, and heard talks on loyalty, courage, unselfishness, charity and thrift. Baden-Powell told campfire yarns. The camp is treated as the start of the Scout movement. Scouting for Boys followed in 1908, when the movement is said to have had 108,000 members. Girl Guiding began in 1910 with his sister Agnes. By his death in 1941 it was international. Later figures give over 40 million Scouts and 10 million Guides. The tents were on the island, not described as pitched inside the castle rooms. In 1932, the silver jubilee of that first camp, Mary Bonham-Christie allowed celebrations, and 500 Scouts camped on the original site.

On Florence’s death in 1927 the castle was sold to Sir Arthur Wheeler, who meant to auction the contents and demolish the building. The sale, including some of the instruments, paintings, and a library of 5,000 books, produced £22,300. A later comparison uses £22,000 and sets it between £1.2 million and £8.9 million in 2014 terms. The castle was not demolished. Mary Bonham-Christie bought it later that year for £125,000. She was born Mary Florence Whitburn on 23 July 1865 in Wandsworth and died on 28 April 1961. She was called the Demon of Brownsea. Her father, Charles Joseph Sofer Whitburn, died on 2 November 1911, and his effects were £1,476,795 2 shillings and 7 pence. She married Robert Bonham Bax Christie in 1889. He died on 27 April 1931, aged 72, with effects of £8,176 4 shillings and 6 pence. Their son Robert Arthur, born in 1893, married Kathleen Leech in 1917, and their son John, born in 1918, inherited. She also had a daughter, Elsie, born in 1890. She bought the island at auction, gave notice to about 200 residents, and banned hunting and fishing on the grounds of cruelty to animals. One account says she banished fishing, let the farm animals roam, stopped shooting and dairy farming, and left the orchards and daffodil fields untended, so that woodland and heath returned, along with invasive rhododendron. Most estate workers were made redundant. She lived in a house nearby rather than in the castle, and one account names Agent’s House on the quay. She let the castle decay. A legal fight followed the evictions. In 1934 a fire burned for three days and did enormous damage. The cause was never determined. Rumour at the time tied it to anger over the evictions. She blamed the Boy Scouts and forbade them to camp from then on. She hired a bodyguard to put intruders off the island. Her minimal interference left habitat for red squirrels, deer, Sandwich terns, avocets and other birds. She died aged 96, on 28 April 1961, in a nursing home off the island, moved there that day on a doctor’s orders. A local paper said her ashes were scattered on Brownsea. The monument at Marston Bigot says the ashes are at Bournemouth crematorium. By her death the castle roof had partly collapsed and a tree was growing through the centre.

In 1940, during her ownership, the island briefly sheltered exhausted Dutch and Belgian refugees. In early 1941 a night decoy was set at the western end of the island. Flares were lit to draw bombers away from Poole and Bournemouth. The decoy worked, and the estate cottages at Maryland, mostly empty since 1927, were damaged and later demolished. That decoy was at the western end, not a gun platform at the castle.

Her grandson John proposed development. One account says 400 luxury houses, refused after an outcry. The Treasury agreed to take the island in lieu of death duty, but dealt in money, and offered it to the trust that now owns it for £100,000. That trust could raise £25,000. The remaining £75,000 was raised in equal parts of £25,000 by the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, by the forerunner of the Dorset Wildlife Trust, also called the Dorset Naturalists’ Trust, and by the John Lewis Partnership. Helen Brotherton led the local campaign, helped raise the money, and the naturalists’ trust was formed in that effort. The wildlife trust took the northern half. The partnership took a 99-year repairing lease of the castle and gardens as a hotel for its staff, and restored the buildings in stages. Ownership by the trust is dated to 1962, to 1961, and to 1962–3. The lease is also dated from 1963. The new owners considered the castle to be of little antiquity or architectural interest. The partnership remains the tenant. The holiday use for its own people is still described as the main use.

What survives of the old fort is in the basement and on the ground floor. The walls are stone, now plastered, and can be told by a pronounced batter, though one account finds no old features visible. Measured as high as possible, they form a rectangle of 43 feet by 44 feet externally, and also of 13.4 metres by 12.5 metres. The interior is not fully accessible. The south-west wall still shows the original entrance, now blocked. The south-east retaining wall of the terrace is largely the wall that once enclosed the gun platform. The house around that core is irregular. It is part two storeys and part three, in coursed squared rubble and in brick with stone dressings, with flat roofs and battlemented parapets. The outside is mostly Victorian Tudor. A tower built off the blockhouse rises two further storeys. A two-storey range of about 1850 stands on the sea front before the tower, with angle buttresses, octagonal pinnacles, a cornice of carved lion heads, a canted bay, and pointed doorways. To the left of the tower is a two-storey brick range. To the right is a three-storey stone range with an octagonal turret. A single-storey range was added on the north-east in the mid nineteenth century, with one circular turret and one octagonal turret. The interior is largely of 1897. Several rooms keep panelling and ornamental ceilings. One first-floor room has a sixteenth-century stone fireplace surround, reset, with lion-head and lion-foot consoles. Another has carved stone cartouches including the lion of St Mark. These are probably from Venice. Four cannons, probably of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, remain. One on the terrace is 2 feet 10 inches long with a bore of 2 and a quarter inches. Three in the garden are 5 feet long with a bore of 3 and a quarter inches, a foundry mark of a rose and crown, and the initials RF on the trunnions. A stone statue of a man in cuirassier armour, cloak and laurel, with a broken baton and a helmet at his feet, of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, stood in the grounds and had been removed by the time of a later note.

An evaluation excavation was made in the south vault of the laundry cellar in November 1997. A watching brief covered repairs and alterations from December 2008 to February 2009. A historic building assessment of the castle and its outbuildings was made in February 2016. A record issued in 2020 describes a single trench in a vault at the south-west corner of the sixteenth-century artillery fort, and says that trench found no archaeological deposits. These notices are not merged into one dig beyond the dates each of them gives. Separately, on 15 November 2023, a ranger, Sophie Giles, found a three-toed footprint in rock in the grounds of the castle while she was running. It is thought to be about 140 million years old, a hind foot, comparable with prints at Langton Matravers on the Isle of Purbeck, and the rock may have come from there rather than formed in place at the castle. Martin Munt, a curator at the dinosaur museum in Sandown, called it a tridactyl print of that age, which could have been made by an iguanodontian or a related dinosaur. It is a find in the grounds, not a deposit from the Tudor vault.

The castle is still leased as a corporate hotel for employees and retired staff, and for their family and friends. It is not open to the public as a monument. A planning decision has allowed discussion of 10 to 20 events a year for other guests, outside school-holiday peaks, with no change to the maximum number of overnight stays or to a midnight curfew, and with no works proposed to the building. The partnership has also said that the details were still being settled and that the staff holiday remains the main use, especially in the season. The hotel season runs from the end of January to the last week before Christmas. Small groups of cruise guests have been received for afternoon tea or similar events. Occasional ticketed visits have included time inside the castle. The season of public entry to the island around it is a separate matter from entry to these rooms.

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