# Carisbrooke Castle

motte and bailey castle and museum on the Isle of Wight, England, UK

Newport and Carisbrooke, United Kingdom

Palace · Fortification. 1100 CE

## Story

• An Anglo-Saxon bank and stone wall of about the year 1000 were rebuilt after the Norman conquest as a motte and shell keep above Carisbrooke.
• Isabella de Fortibus formed the great hall, chamber and chapel, and at her death in 1293 the castle passed to the Crown.
• George Carey and Federigo Giambelli added a five-bastion artillery fort around 1600, and it was never used in action.
• Charles I of England was imprisoned here in 1647 and 1648, and both of his escape attempts failed.
• Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom later used the castle as governor, and the museum she opened in 1898 is still in the hall range.
• Sixth-century graves were excavated on the hill, while test pits in 2022 and 2025 found no significant new structures.

## Visiting

The castle is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with last entry at 3pm. Tickets booked online until midnight the day before the visit are discounted, and a ticket bought on the day, online or on arrival, is full price. Tickets are valid all day within opening hours. Entry is free for members who bring a membership card.
Dogs on leads are allowed to enter the exterior, other dogs may not enter the museum, and assistance dogs are allowed to enter throughout. Smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not allowed. The tea room closes one hour before the advertised closing time, and it is open daily from April to October and at weekends from November to March. Admission to the museum is included with the castle ticket.
From 1 November the museum is open on Saturday and Sunday only, from 10.30 to 3.45, with last entry at 3.30, and the same visit information also gives Wednesday to Sunday from 10.30 to 4.00, with last entry at 3.30. From 1 April the museum is open every day from 10.30 to 4.45, with last entry at 4.30. From November to February, group talks are available by advance booking on weekdays, when the castle and museum are closed on weekdays to the general public. Wheelchair users are allowed to enter the well house and the ground floor of the museum, and they may not enter the wall walk or the upper floor of the museum because the stairs are steep.
A wheelchair is available on request for visitors who are allowed to enter. Last entry onto the wall walk is by steep stairs, stone and grass may be slippery when wet, and some stretches have sheer drops and no handrails. Admission to the on-site car park is free for members displaying a valid sticker, non-members must pay, and one notice gives the charge as £3 a day for about 100 spaces. Visitors can book in advance for the Bowling Green Apartment, a two-bedroom cottage inside the castle.

## History

Carisbrooke Castle occupies the abrupt end of a ridge above Carisbrooke, with Lukely Brook to the west and the headwaters of the Medina to the south and east. Around the year 1000 an earthen bank, later faced in stone, enclosed timber buildings as a likely refuge against Viking raids. After the Norman conquest that enclosure became a castle, recorded in 1086, and a motte and shell keep were raised on chalk and stone that could not carry a tall tower.

Who received the island in 1100 is told in two ways. One account gives it to Richard de Redvers, and another to Baldwin de Redvers. In 1136 a defence against King Stephen failed when the water ran dry, and the lord who had backed Empress Matilda did not recover his lands until 1153. Stone walls already stood on the banks, and the chapel, a parish of its own, probably lay where the chapel stands now.

Countess Isabella de Fortibus, last of the de Redvers, made Carisbrooke her home and built the great hall with her chamber at one end and her chapel at the other, plus a constable’s lodging and a kitchen. On her deathbed in November 1293 she sealed a sale of the Isle of Wight to Edward I, and the castle has been Crown property since. Later lords repaired the defences during the French wars. The island was raided five times between 1336 and 1370, and the castle was besieged in 1377.

William de Montacute remodelled the hall before 1397.

The entrance gate is tied both to 1464 and to a grant of 1467 to Anthony Woodville, brother-in-law of Edward IV. Edward Woodville received the castle in 1485 as the last Lord of the Isle of Wight, and he was killed in Brittany in 1488. Under Henry VIII the castle served mainly as a store while new forts lined the coast. Nicholas Wadham (1472–1542) was captain from 1509 to 1520.

George Carey, captain from 1583, rebuilt the decayed lodgings and, with Federigo Giambelli, added a five-bastion artillery rampart between the late 1590s and 1602 or 1603. That trace was never fought over.

In 1642 the Countess of Portland surrendered the castle to Parliament, which used it as a prison. Charles I of England was held there from November 1647, dated either from the 13th or from the 22nd, until September 1648. Two escape attempts failed, one on 20 March when he stuck in a window, and one on 29 May when the governor walked in. He was tried and beheaded on 30 January 1649.

His daughter Elizabeth died at the castle in 1650, aged 14.

Governors still stayed at times, but the military role faded. The chapel was rebuilt in a Georgian form in 1738, demolished for a ruin in 1856, and raised again in 1904 as a memorial both to Charles I and to 2,000 island dead of the two world wars. Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom became governor after her husband and used the castle from 1913, either until 1938 or until her death in 1944, which occurred at Brantridge Park. The museum she opened in 1898 later moved into the hall range.

The courtyard well is 49 metres deep, with water now about 12 metres down, beside a keep well given as 48 metres and also as 200 feet. Donkeys have turned the wheel since at least 1696. Excavation from 1976 found three sixth-century graves, and a 2020 survey traced a ditch outside the outworks. Test pits in 2022 and 2025 found worked flint, modern rubbish and no significant structures.

The castle is a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building, and it is not a World Heritage inscription. It received 100,605 visitors in 2025.

## Photographs

- [Carisbrooke Castle, 14th century - Model — Charles D P Miller](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Carisbrooke_Castle_14th_century.jpg)
- [Carisbrooke Castle gatehouse, Isle of Wight, looking in from the east. This tower, built in 1464, is a grade I listed building in England. — DeFacto](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Carisbrooke_Castle_gatehouse.jpg)
- [Model Village, Blackgang Chine (2) The model depicted is Carisbrooke Castle ( SZ4887 ). The model village was lost completely in the early 1990s due to coastal — Harold Dilworth Crewdson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Blackgang_Chine_Model_Village_2.jpg)
- [Carisbrook Castle. — Claire Ward](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Carisbrook_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_11625.jpg)
- [Cannon at Carisbrooke Castle This cannon on the East Bastion is pointing towards Mount Joy Cemetery. — Barry Shimmon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Cannon_at_Carisbrooke_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_943052.jpg)
- [A brace of cannons. (You have to look closely) — grumpylumixuser](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/A_brace_of_cannons._%28You_have_to_look_closely%29_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Carisbroke Castle - Feb 2015 — Forester2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Carisbroke_Castle_-_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Carisbroke Castle from the battlements - Feb 2015 — Forester2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Carisbroke_Castle_from_the_battlements_-_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Carisbroke Castle from the battlements in Feb 2015 — Forester2009](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Carisbroke_Castle_from_the_battlements_in_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Carisbrooke Castle - Isle of Wight — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/CarisbrookeCastle1.jpeg)

## Sources

- [History of Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/history/) — English Heritage
- [Charles I: A Royal Prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/history/charles-I-prisoner) — English Heritage
- [Isabella de Fortibus](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/women-in-history/isabella-de-fortibus/) — English Heritage
- [Meet the Carisbrooke Donkeys](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/things-to-do/meet-carisbrooke-donkeys/) — English Heritage
- [Visit Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and Opening times for Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/prices-and-opening-times) — English Heritage
- [Carisbrooke Castle Facilities](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/plan-your-visit/facilities/) — English Heritage
- [Carisbrooke Castle Access](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/plan-your-visit/access/) — English Heritage
- [Carisbrooke Castle Family Guide](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/Carisbrooke-Castle-Family-Guide/) — English Heritage
- [Plan your visit to Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carisbrooke-castle/plan-your-visit/) — English Heritage
- [Carisbrooke Castle: a shell keep castle on the site of a Saxon burh](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1013870) — Historic England
- [Carisbrooke Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1034657) — Historic England
- [Plan your visit](https://carisbrookecastlemuseum.org.uk/plan-your-visit/) — Carisbrooke Castle Museum
- [Carisbrooke Castle Museum](https://carisbrookecastlemuseum.org.uk/) — Carisbrooke Castle Museum
- [The Well House at Carisbrooke Castle](https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?resourceID=19191&uid=1532525) — Heritage Gateway
- [Carisbrooke Castle, Newport, Isle of Wight. Report on Geophysical Surveys, December 2020](https://doi.org/10.5284/1097438) — Historic England
- [East Field, Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight. Archaeological evaluation report](https://doi.org/10.5284/1135558) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Carisbrooke Castle. Archaeological Watching Brief - Donkey Field and South Revetment Wall Trial Pits](https://doi.org/10.5284/1141295) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Small mammal remains found in a Saxon bucket at Carisbrooke Castle, 1981 excavations](https://doi.org/10.5284/1095623) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Carisbrooke Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carisbrooke_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Charles I of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Isabella de Fortibus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_de_Fortibus) — Wikipedia
- [Nicholas Wadham (1472–1542)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wadham_(1472%E2%80%931542)) — Wikipedia
- [Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Beatrice_of_the_United_Kingdom) — Wikipedia
- [Edward IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_IV) — Wikipedia
- [Edward Woodville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Woodville) — Wikipedia
- [Empress Matilda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Matilda) — Wikipedia
- [Federigo Giambelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federigo_Giambelli) — Wikipedia
- [Carisbrooke Castle 14th century.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbrooke_Castle_14th_century.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Carisbrooke Castle gatehouse.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbrooke_Castle_gatehouse.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Blackgang Chine Model Village 2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blackgang_Chine_Model_Village_2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Carisbrook Castle - geograph.org.uk - 11625.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbrook_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_11625.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cannon at Carisbrooke Castle - geograph.org.uk - 943052.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cannon_at_Carisbrooke_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_943052.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A brace of cannons. (You have to look closely) - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_brace_of_cannons._(You_have_to_look_closely)_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Carisbroke Castle - Feb 2015 - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbroke_Castle_-_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Carisbroke Castle from the battlements - Feb 2015 - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbroke_Castle_from_the_battlements_-_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Carisbroke Castle from the battlements in Feb 2015 - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carisbroke_Castle_from_the_battlements_in_Feb_2015_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [CarisbrookeCastle1.jpeg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CarisbrookeCastle1.jpeg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Carisbrooke Castle stands on the south-west end of a long ridge above the village of Carisbrooke, in the parish of Newport and Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight. Lukely Brook runs on the west of the high ground, and the headwaters of the River Medina lie to the south and east. The ridge ends abruptly, and the land falls away on three sides. The castle is the strongest on the island and can be seen from some distance, yet it does not dominate the countryside in the way many other castles do. Seventy-one steps climb to the keep. The domestic buildings in the enclosure are mostly of the thirteenth century, with upper parts of the sixteenth, and the main rooms stayed in good repair as the official residence of the governor of the Isle of Wight until the 1940s. It is a scheduled monument, first designated on 9 October 1981 and amended on 21 October 2026, and a Grade I listed building first listed on 1 February 1972. The monument grid is given as SZ 48615 87772, and the listed building as SZ 48594 87774. It is not a World Heritage inscription.

Roman occupation of the area around the hill has been suggested and has also been described as never proved. At least three Roman villas are known nearby, which is taken as a sign of considerable wealth, but no Roman occupation of the hilltop itself has been found. A ruined wall is read as a late Roman building, and traces of a Roman fort are also described under the later castle. Along the foot of the pre-Domesday earthworks, on the east and west, remains of a late Roman masonry wall are recorded, with a shallow semi-circular bastion near the north-eastern corner and traces of an inturned gate in the middle of the east side. The earliest certain use of the hill is a pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery of the sixth century. Three graves were found in excavation, in the bailey or ward. Grave goods included glassware, bowls, a bronze bucket and a fine drinking horn. In a Saxon chalk-cut grave of that century, opened in the 1981 season, the skeletons of six common shrews and a woodmouse were found in a bucket. The shrews were identified from the size and shape of their mandibles, and from non-metric characters, as Sorex araneus, the common shrew of the English mainland, rather than the closely related Sorex coronatus of the Continent and Jersey. Carrion-feeding insects and their larvae may have drawn the shrews to the grave, and curiosity may have led them into the bucket. Coins from a seventh-century Saxon settlement show that the area was already a connected trading place.

In about 1000 the hilltop, which commands the centre of the island, was given a rectangular fortification. An earthen bank, later faced with a stone wall, enclosed large timber buildings. This was probably an Anglo-Saxon burh, a fortress and fortified settlement, made as a refuge against Viking raids. Remains of the Saxon lower enclosure wall of about 1000 can be seen on the west side of the castle, near the base of the Norman bank. The student account of the site places the first work at about the year 1000, a chalk bank later strengthened with stone, to the right of the gatehouse. The outer defences are of a type compared with burghal defences elsewhere, but no document confirms that reading, because the Isle of Wight lay outside the Burghal Hidage, the record of the burhs of Wessex associated with Alfred or Edward the Elder. Vikings based themselves on the island from 998 to 1009 so that raids on the south coast of England would be easier. The local answer was to build burhs, to concentrate defence and to shelter people. Carisbrooke is the likely burh for the island.

Shortly after the Norman conquest the burh was turned into a castle to hold the island for the new rulers. A defended enclosure was cut into one corner of the Saxon work by digging deep ditches inside it. The Isle of Wight was granted to William FitzOsbern, a cousin of William I, who probably developed the Saxon burh soon afterwards. The castle is recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086. FitzOsbern’s heir rebelled against William I and was deprived of his lands, so Carisbrooke was held directly by the Crown.

From around 1100 the island, with extensive estates in Devon, was granted by Henry I to Richard de Redvers. Henry, who reigned from 1100 to 1135, feared attack from his brother Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy. In that account Richard de Redvers almost certainly built the motte-and-bailey, and over the next two centuries his descendants added stone walls, towers and a keep. A second account says that in 1100 Henry I created a powerful lordship for Baldwin de Redvers, one of his key supporters, and that the island stayed in that family until 1293. In the second account it was probably Baldwin who raised the massive motte-and-bailey that still dominates the hill. The keep is also placed in the reign of Henry I. The motte is built in layers of chalk and stone and could not carry a tall heavy tower, so a shell keep was built, a wall around the top with lean-to buildings inside. Sockets in the keep wall were used to winch water. The well in the keep is given as 48 metres deep, and another well inside the castle is given as 200 feet, or 61 metres, with the keep well reputed to have been still deeper.

After Henry I died, the succession split the kingdom. Empress Matilda, also called Empress Maud or Athelicia, was born about 7 February 1102, possibly at Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire, and she died on 10 September 1167. She was the eldest child and only surviving daughter of Henry I and his first wife, Matilda of Scotland. As a child she was sent to Germany and married to the future emperor Henry V. She was consort from 1110 until 1125, travelled with him to Italy in 1116, was crowned empress in St Peter’s Basilica in a ceremony that caused controversy, and acted as imperial regent in Italy. They had no children. When Henry V died in 1125, Lothair of Supplinburg took the imperial crown. Her brother William Adelin had already died in the White Ship disaster of 1120, so Henry I recalled her to Normandy and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou to protect his southern border. He had no further legitimate children. He named her his heir and made his court swear loyalty to her and to her successors, a choice that was unpopular. Henry died in 1135. His nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown with the backing of the English Church. Matilda and Geoffrey faced baronial opposition. The civil war known as the Anarchy is dated from 1138 to 1153. In 1139 she crossed to England, supported by her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and by her uncle David I of Scotland, while Geoffrey conquered Normandy. Her forces captured Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, but the attempt to crown her at Westminster Abbey collapsed before the London crowds. She was never formally declared queen and was titled Lady of the English, domina Anglorum. Robert was captured after the Rout of Winchester in 1141, and she exchanged Stephen for him. That winter Stephen besieged her at Oxford Castle. She escaped at night across the frozen River Isis, the Thames, to Abingdon. The war settled into a stalemate, with Matilda holding much of the south-west and Stephen the south-east and the Midlands, while local barons held large parts of the rest. She returned to Normandy in 1148 and left the English campaign to her eldest son, Henry. After the Treaty of Wallingford he was declared Stephen’s heir and became king in 1154. She kept a court near Rouen, advised her son, tried to mediate in the Becket dispute, founded Cistercian houses, and was buried under the high altar at Bec Abbey, later moved to Rouen Cathedral.

Baldwin de Redvers, Richard’s son in the first account, supported Empress Matilda in that claim and lost his lands to Stephen of Blois, recovering them only in 1153. In 1136, by the other account, Baldwin probably meant to defend Carisbrooke and was forced to surrender to King Stephen when the water supply ran dry. By then the banks carried stone walls, though the internal layout is uncertain. The castle chapel, a parish in its own right, was probably on the site of the present chapel, with an enclosure behind it in what is now the Privy Garden. Twelfth-century buildings were identified at the castle in work published in 2009. The keep well is the one said to have failed in 1136, and the courtyard well is described as the supply sunk afterwards.

The last of the de Redvers was Countess Isabella de Fortibus, also Isabel de Forz or Isabel de Redvers. She was born in July 1237 and died on 10 November 1293. She was the eldest daughter of Baldwin de Redvers, sixth Earl of Devon, who lived from 1217 to 1245, and of Amice de Clare. Her early life was apparently spent at Tidcombe, near her father’s seat at Tiverton. At 11 or 12 she became the second wife of William de Forz, also called William de Fortibus, fourth Earl of Albemarle, who died in 1260. He held land in Yorkshire and Cumberland and was Count of Aumale in Normandy. She bore him four sons and two daughters, six children in all, and all of them died before her. Their names are given as John, Teron, Thomas, William, Avice and Aveline. John and Teron died before both parents. Thomas, William and Avice died before April 1269. Aveline is dated 1259 to 1274 and also 1258 to 1273. When William died in 1260 the children were minors. Wardship of the heir, whose name is not known, and of the estates passed to Henry III. Isabel received a third of her husband’s estates as dower: a third of the barony of Holderness, half the barony of Cockermouth, and the barony of Skipton. She also received custody of the younger sons Thomas and William. Prince Edward, later Edward I, received the other two thirds and the marriage of the heir. She was a widow at 23. She lived with her children and her mother at Burstwick in Holderness. She and Amice bought the remaining two thirds of Holderness and administered that land together for some years.

In 1262 her brother Baldwin de Redvers, seventh Earl of Devon, died childless. Subject to the dower of his widow and of his mother, she inherited his lands in Devon, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Harewood in Yorkshire, and the feudal barony of Plympton. From then she lived mainly at Carisbrooke, which she held from the king as tenant-in-chief. She used the titles Countess of Aumale and of Devon and Lady of the Isle, and her charters regularly give the Latinized name Isabella de Fortibus. By one reckoning she was 26 when this inheritance made her one of the great landowners of England. Before she was thirty she was one of the richest women in the kingdom. She chose Carisbrooke as her main home and turned it into a residence fit for that wealth. Her records survive in unusual quantity, and the castle often reads as a building site throughout her tenure. She reordered the main apartments, adding a chapel at one end of the great hall and a great chamber at the other. The chamber’s main window, looking over the island, was glazed, a luxury at the time. Steps up to that window let her see across her lands. Enough of her chapel survives, partly hidden by a later staircase, to show its former scale. She later built apartments for the constable, the officer who ran her estates, and a new kitchen, with many other buildings around a central courtyard, and she also worked on the defences. The great hall that stands, much altered, is hers, with her chamber at one end and her private chapel at the other. A carved stone head at Christchurch Priory in Dorset is thought to be her portrait.

As a rich widow she was pursued. In 1264 the younger Simon de Montfort, second son of Simon de Montfort, sixth Earl of Leicester, acquired the right to marry her. Female tenants-in-chief, and widows of such tenants, needed a royal licence to remarry. She refused him. He tried to abduct her. She hid at Breamore Priory in Hampshire and then in Wales. In November 1268 Henry III granted her marriage to his son Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster. She refused him as well. In 1269 Edmund married her daughter Aveline, described as ten years old in one account and as dying childless four or five years later at 15. Her net income in the 1260s rose by two thirds, from £1,500 to £2,500. From about 1274 her estates were managed by Adam de Stratton, a money-lender, with the Tuscan bankers the Riccardi of Lucca. In 1276 she gave Stratton her office of Chamberlain of the Exchequer, probably as a reward, and he remained her chief financial officer until at least 1286. She apparently owned a copy of the Statutes of the Realm and, with her advisers, brought dozens of civil and criminal cases.

Edward I, king from 1272 to 1307, had long wanted her estates. The island was valued for its position and for the wealth it produced. In 1276 he proposed that she sell him the southern lands inherited from her brother, but the conveyance was not completed. After Aveline died in 1274, a jury at the inquisition post mortem found, against expectations, that John de Eston was the next heir. In 1278 Eston quit-claimed to the Crown her northern lands and the county of Aumale. By supporting a claimant to the Aumale earldom and then buying him out, Edward acquired the northern lands. She twice refused to sell the southern estates. In 1281 she won when he challenged her control of the Isle of Wight in court. In November 1293, travelling from Canterbury, she fell gravely ill and stopped near Lambeth, opposite the Palace of Westminster, at her manor of Stockwell. Walter Langton, a clerk in chancery and one of the king’s leading councillors, came to the bedside and read a charter selling the Isle of Wight, with other lands in Devon and Hampshire, to the king. She ordered her lady of the bedchamber to seal it. She made her will, received the last sacrament, and died before dawn. The dated account places that death in the early morning of 10 November 1293, when she was 56, at Stockwell, with burial at Breamore Priory. The sale has been treated ever since as questionable. Perhaps the king took advantage of a dying woman, or perhaps she cared little for the distant cousin who was her legal heir. Either way the island’s independence from royal control ended, and the castle has remained Crown property. Her heir for the barony of Plympton was her cousin Hugh de Courtenay, born in 1276, feudal baron of Okehampton, a seventeen-year-old second cousin once removed. Both descended from William de Redvers, fifth Earl of Devon, who died in 1217. Hugh was declared Earl of Devon in 1335. In 1315 he petitioned Parliament, without success, for the lordship of the Isle of Wight and the manor of Christchurch. Countess Wear, now a suburb of Exeter, takes its name from a weir she built on the River Exe.

For the rest of the Middle Ages the castle was governed by a rapid succession of Crown-appointed lords of the island, who visited infrequently. Work concentrated on the defences, especially in the wars with France. The island was raided five times between 1336 and 1370, and the castle was besieged in 1377, in the reign of Richard II. The account written about two centuries later says that a local man, Peter de Heyno, shot the French commander and that the invaders then agreed to leave for a payment of 1,000 marks. At the end of the fourteenth century William de Montacute, lord of the island from 1386 to 1397, remodelled the great hall and rebuilt the chamber block beside it. Little is known of the castle from the late fourteenth century into the early fifteenth, because the lords’ tenures were short. In 1450 the islanders petitioned Henry VI to intervene. The castle lacked a garrison and was in general disrepair.

Edward IV was born on 28 April 1442 and died on 9 April 1483. He was King of England from 4 March 1461 to 3 October 1470, and again from 11 April 1471 until his death. He was a central figure in the Wars of the Roses, fought between York and Lancaster from 1455 to 1487. He inherited the Yorkist claim at eighteen when his father, Richard, Duke of York, was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460. After victories at Mortimer’s Cross and Towton in early 1461 he deposed Henry VI. On 1 May 1464 he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a widow with two sons, whose Lancastrian husband John Grey of Groby had died at the Second Battle of St Albans. Warwick, Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, learned of the marriage in October and was enraged, because he had been negotiating a French match with Anne of France or Bona of Savoy. The Privy Council told Edward that she was no wife for a prince such as himself, because she was not the daughter of a duke or an earl. Her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, came from the upper nobility, but her father, Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, was a middle-ranking baron. Twelve of the queen’s siblings survived into adulthood and took offices, estates and marriages. Edward dismissed Warwick’s brother George Neville, the chancellor and Archbishop of York, in 1467. Warwick allied with George, Duke of Clarence. Clarence married Warwick’s daughter Isabel at Calais in early July 1469. On 24 July 1469 a Neville force defeated the royal army at Edgecote Moor. Edward was held at Middleham. On 12 August his father-in-law Richard Woodville and Richard’s younger son John were executed at Kenilworth. Edward was released in September. In 1470 Warwick and Clarence briefly restored Henry VI. Edward fled to Flanders with a few hundred men, including his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Anthony Woodville and William Hastings. He returned in March 1471, won at Barnet, where Warwick was killed, and at Tewkesbury, where Edward of Westminster was killed. Henry VI was then found dead in the Tower, possibly on Edward’s orders. In 1475 Edward invaded France and accepted the Treaty of Picquigny from Louis XI, which is treated as the formal end of the Hundred Years’ War, already in abeyance since 1453. He died suddenly in April 1483 and was succeeded briefly by his son Edward V, with Richard of Gloucester as protector. The sons disappeared, probably killed between July and September 1483, and Richard took the throne as Richard III.

The brother-in-law of Edward IV, Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales and later Earl Rivers, obtained a grant of Carisbrooke and the rights of lordship in 1467. He is credited with the Woodville Gate, now the entrance gate. The gateway tower is also dated to 1464, when Lord Scales was lord of the castle. Anthony was killed in 1483 after Richard arrested him at Stony Stratford. Richard put his own supporters into the Isle of Wight and Porchester, which had been an Edward Woodville power base.

Edward Woodville was the twelfth child and youngest son of Richard Woodville, first Earl Rivers, and Jacquetta of Luxembourg. He died in 1488. He survived the reign of Richard III, in which several of his relatives were executed after the death of his brother-in-law Edward IV, went into exile with Henry Tudor, fought at Bosworth, and saw Henry marry his niece Elizabeth of York. He has been called the last knight errant for his devotion to a chivalrous ideal. After Anthony’s death he was called Lord Scales because Anthony bequeathed him the Scales lands, and Spanish and Breton writings use that title, but he never officially held the barony and seems never to have received the lands. Dominic Mancini, an Italian courtier, placed the young Edward Woodville among those who encouraged Edward IV’s licentious life, as promoters and companions of his vices. In 1472 he went with Anthony to Brittany, when Francis II, Duke of Brittany, asked Edward IV for help against France. The king sent 1,000 archers with the Woodvilles, and the French withdrew. In 1475 Edward IV made him a Knight of the Bath. In 1480 he was given Portsmouth and Porchester Castle. In 1482 he joined Richard of Gloucester’s invasion of Scotland and was made a knight banneret on 24 July 1482. The next year he was commissioned to prepare a force for France, but the king’s death stopped it.

After Edward IV died, the Woodvilles tried to bypass Richard’s protectorate and crown Edward V quickly. The council made Edward Woodville admiral of a fleet, nominally against French privateers under Philippe de Crèvecoeur. He left London to take command soon after Richard arrested Anthony at Stony Stratford, and he sailed in April, apparently not yet knowing of the arrest. By mid-May Richard was trying to take the fleet. At Southampton, Edward Woodville had just confiscated a large sum in gold coins, allegedly the king’s, from a merchant ship. Most of the fleet surrendered. He escaped with two ships and probably the money, and joined Henry Tudor in Brittany, where he seems to have received a monthly allowance from the duke. Richard executed Anthony, proclaimed himself king, and tried to have the exiles handed over. The duke refused. Edward Woodville returned with Henry in 1485, fought at Bosworth, and in the first year of Henry VII was appointed Lord of the Isle of Wight, the last person given that title. He was again given Porchester, together with Carisbrooke Castle. In September 1486 he carried the canopy of estate at the christening of his great-nephew Prince Arthur. In 1486 he went to Spain to fight with Ferdinand and Isabella, possibly to fulfil a vow of crusade. At the siege of Loja he led a scaling attack, was struck in the face by a stone, was knocked unconscious, and lost his front teeth, which he treated as a badge of honour. The king and queen visited him. The chronicler Andrés Bernáldez gives his reply that Our Lord, who reared this fabric, had only opened a window to discern more readily what lies within. In 1487 he commanded the light cavalry against Lambert Simnel, harassed the rebels in Sherwood Forest with tactics he had seen in Spain, slowed their march, and fought on the right wing at the Battle of Stoke. The next year he was made a Knight of the Garter.

In 1488 Francis II again faced a French invasion. Henry VII tried to negotiate. Edward Woodville asked leave to raise men and, when the king would not commit, collected them on his own authority from the Isle of Wight: between 400 and 700 archers and 40 of the local gentry. He sailed to Saint-Malo and plundered a French ship on the way. The Bretons dressed 1,300 of their own men in English colours, perhaps to trade on the reputation of the longbow. At the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier his force was the vanguard. He attacked at the opening, a French counter-attack broke the Breton centre, and his men were almost wiped out. He was killed after apparently refusing to surrender for ransom. One supposed survivor, a boy called Diccon Clarke, returned to the island with the news. Edward Woodville was buried in Brittany. A monument put up by Breton nationalists in 1988 names the English leader, wrongly, as Talbot Earl of Scales. A memorial plaque to Edward Woodville was set up at Carisbrooke Castle in 2009. Richard III did not honour Anthony’s will. Henry VII did not officially grant the Scales title. When Edward defied the order to stay out of the Breton war, Henry wrote to the French king of Sir Edward Woodville, knight, calling himself Lord of Scales. Spanish writings call him Conde d’Escalas, and the French chronicler Jean Molinet calls him Le Seigneur d’Escales.

In the early sixteenth century the castle’s importance fell as Henry VIII put his effort into coastal forts. Carisbrooke was essentially a munitions store for an attack from France that was feared and that came in 1545, a short raid after which the attackers left. The captain through the earlier part of that reign was Nicholas Wadham (1472–1542). The life gives him as born by 1472, or before 1472, and as dying on 5 March 1542. He was a landowner, courtier, politician and administrator from Somerset, with Merryfield at Ilton, Catherston Leweston in Dorset, and Edge at Branscombe in Devon. He was the first son of Sir John Wadham, who died in 1481, and Elizabeth Stucley. He was Sheriff of Somerset and Dorset in 1498 and Sheriff of Devon in 1501. By 1503 he was an esquire of the body, and he was knighted on 18 February 1504. From 1509 to 1520 he was Captain of the Isle of Wight, responsible for the island’s defence. He is not known to have fought in the French and Scottish campaigns of 1512 and 1513, but as a commissioner of array for Hampshire from 1511 he held musters at Southampton in 1512 and at Portsmouth in 1514. He was a subsidy commissioner for Hampshire and Somerset in 1512 and for Somerset in 1514, 1515 and 1524. He was Sheriff of Devon again in 1514, a justice of the peace for Hampshire in 1515, and Sheriff of Wiltshire in 1516. In 1520 he went with Henry VIII to the Field of the Cloth of Gold to meet Francis I, and to the meeting with the Emperor Charles V. He was a justice for Dorset in 1521. He and his uncle Sir Edward Wadham were jurors at Bristol in May 1521 at the treason indictment of Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham. In 1522 he was Vice-Admiral to the High Admiral. In 1524, without a legal qualification, he was admitted honorarily to the Middle Temple, and he received a patent to make a park at Merifield of 200 acres of pasture and 40 acres of woodland. After thirty years of service, and in good standing with Thomas Cromwell, he was chosen as MP for Somerset in 1529. In 1530 he was a commissioner to inquire into the estates of Cardinal Wolsey. He was Sheriff of Somerset and Dorset again in 1534. In October 1535 he asked Cromwell to continue him for another year so as not to lose the revenues, and was refused. He was probably re-elected for Somerset in 1536, when his link with Queen Jane Seymour, his niece by marriage, would have mattered, and in 1540 he was named a justice for all the western counties. His will of 25 November 1539, proved on 31 January 1543, mentions only Somerset assets and asks for burial at Ilminster. He left his fourth wife the silver, clothing and goods she had brought, with much of his own jewellery, silver, livestock and grain, and 100 pounds and a horse to each of three younger sons then living. Most of the rest was to be sold for debts and legacies. His executors included Sir Hugh Paulet and William Portman. His wives, in order, were Joan Hill, Margaret Seymour, who had died by June 1517, Isabel Baynham, and Joan Lyte.

The castle’s domestic buildings had fallen into decay by the time Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, appointed her cousin George Carey captain of the island in 1583. He is also called Sir George Carey and, later, Lord Hunsdon. He remained captain until his death in 1604 and had a strong sense of his own importance. He rebuilt the domestic ranges for a great magnate. Between 1584 and 1586 he built the mansion, given as a house of 13 rooms in one account and, as Carey’s Building, a new range of 17 rooms and a long gallery in another. The hall block and Saint Peter’s Chapel were radically changed by the insertion of an upper floor. With a Spanish invasion feared, he made modest additions to the defences in 1587. In the scare of 1596 to 1597 he persuaded the queen and the local gentry to pay for a major artillery fort. An artillery platform was built around the south-west tower in the sixteenth century for heavy guns.

The engineer of the new trace was Federigo Giambelli, also written Gianibelli, Genebelli and Genibelli. He was an Italian military and civil engineer from Mantua, born about the middle of the sixteenth century, who worked in Spain, the Spanish Netherlands and England. He offered his service to Philip II and, finding a lukewarm reception and no immediate employment, moved to Antwerp, where he gained a reputation and is said to have married. He is said to have sworn vengeance for the Spanish rebuff. When Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, besieged Antwerp in 1584, Giambelli offered his service to Elizabeth I, who engaged him to advise the defence. His plan for provisioning the town was rejected. A modified scheme was accepted for destroying the pontoon bridge that closed the seaward entrance. Two ships, of 60 and 70 tons, were turned into infernal machines, or hellburners. Each had a masonry chamber in the hold, filled with 7,000 pounds, or 3,175 kilograms, of gunpowder, heaped with millstones, tombstones and scrap iron. Timber and brushwood on deck made them look like ordinary fireships. A clockwork mechanism was to fire a flintlock. One ship exploded against the bridge, allegedly killing more than 1,000 Spanish soldiers and opening a breach of more than 200 feet, or 61 metres. The waiting Dutch fleet might have relieved the town if Vice-Admiral Jacob Jacobsen, also called Jacobzoon, had not hesitated. After Antwerp surrendered, Giambelli went to England and was employed by the Crown from 1585 to 1602, the last of a line of Italian engineers at court. In July and August 1588 he worked on the Thames estuary, thought the likeliest place for a Spanish landing. Earthen ramparts were built around the old blockhouses at Tilbury and Gravesend, and a boom of a chain on 120 ships’ masts, costing £2,000, was laid across the river, with a pontoon bridge so the army could cross. The boom broke at the first flood tide. His exact share of that work is unknown, because the Earl of Leicester’s reports do not name him, but the accounts do, at six shillings and eight pence, a third of a pound, a day. When fireships attacked the Armada in the Calais roads, Spanish panic owed much to the belief that the ships were Giambelli’s infernal machines. He was in fact busy on the Thames, and a national shortage of gunpowder kept it out of the English fireships. In 1591 he put two schemes to Lord Burghley, one to flush the foul ditches around the City of London and another, perhaps a form of fire hydrant, to fight city fires. Neither was acted on.

Starting in 1597, Federigo Giambelli built a trace italienne around Carisbrooke, a low, roughly rectangular rampart with five bastions. One account says the work was mostly complete by 1600, at a cost of £4,000, and that peace with Spain in 1604 let the pressure fall so that the castle returned to being an arsenal for the rest of the island’s defences. Another says the ramparts, nearly a mile long and faced in stone for protection against gunfire, were built between 1597 and 1602, were completed in 1602, and were never used in action. Remodelling of two of the castle’s original towers was not finished until 1603. A further account says the earthworks were begun in the year before the Spanish Armada and finished in the 1590s, and that the outer gate carries the date 1598 and the arms of Elizabeth I. The keep was surrounded with additional fortifications when the Armada was expected, by Carey, who had been appointed in 1583. In 1602, at the request of the Privy Council, Giambelli surveyed the fort on Plymouth Hoe, on the ground later occupied by the Royal Citadel, after complaints that the defences were inadequate. He made three reports and suggested a wall with nine ravelins. He is said to have died in London in a year that is not known.

Almost at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642 the castle was surrendered to Parliament by the governor’s wife, the Countess of Portland. It saw no action. Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke, was appointed governor by Parliament, and the castle became a prison for important Royalists. Its principal use until 1660 was that prison. The most notable prisoner was Charles I of England.

Charles I of England was born on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline Palace and was executed on 30 January 1649. He was King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 27 March 1625. He was the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, of the House of Stuart. He was baptised on 23 December 1600 in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood by David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, and created Duke of Albany, with the titles Marquess of Ormond, Earl of Ross and Lord Ardmannoch. When Elizabeth I died childless in March 1603, James became king of England. Charles was a weak infant and stayed in Scotland with Lord Fyvie when the rest of the family left. By 1604 he could walk the length of the great hall at Dunfermline, and in mid-July he came to England, where he spent most of the rest of his life, in the charge of Elizabeth, Lady Carey, wife of Sir Robert Carey. He became heir in 1612 when his elder brother Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, died. An attempt to marry him to the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain failed, and an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 showed that the negotiation was futile. Soon after his accession he married Henrietta Maria of France. He quarrelled with Parliament, believed in the divine right of kings, and was determined to govern by his own conscience. Taxes levied without parliamentary consent, his marriage to a Catholic, and his support for high-church Anglicans fed the opposition of Puritans and of Scottish Covenanters. He failed to aid continental Protestants successfully in the Thirty Years’ War. His attempt to force high Anglican practice on the Church of Scotland led to the Bishops’ Wars, strengthened both parliaments, and helped bring him down. From 1642 he fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments. After defeat in 1645 by the New Model Army he fled north from Oxford, surrendered to a Scottish force, and was handed to the Long Parliament in London. He refused a constitutional monarchy.

The First Civil War ended in June 1646 with the king militarily beaten and no political settlement in sight. He still had some freedom of movement and could play English factions against the Scots. By November 1647, almost a year and a half later, there was still no settlement. Fearing that radical soldiers of the New Model Army controlled Parliament, he slipped away from lax custody at Hampton Court in the dark, with no clear plan that can now be recovered. He reached Place House at Titchfield, the home of Thomas Wriothesley, fourth Earl of Southampton. His companions John Ashburnham and John Berkeley crossed the Solent and brought back the island’s governor, Colonel Robert Hammond. There was a thought that Hammond was sympathetic, so the king went to the island expecting a refuge at Carisbrooke. It was a prison. One dating puts him on the island, primarily at the castle, for just over a year from 13 November 1647. Another puts his imprisonment in the castle from 22 November 1647 to 6 September 1648. He had wrongly believed that Hammond would help him escape. Hammond was courteous but wrote at once to Parliament. Charles was a prisoner again, with some freedom of movement, in the hands of an officer of the army he had tried to avoid. He was housed with ceremony in the hall range, attended by members of his own household. A portrait of him with his son James was painted at Hampton Court by Peter Lely in 1647.

In December, talks for a political and religious settlement resumed. He held separate meetings at Carisbrooke with commissioners from the English and Scottish parliaments. Secretly he made the agreement called the Engagement, in which the Scots pledged military and political support in return for religious reforms in England, including a Presbyterian church. In January 1648 a small rising for the king at Newport was easily suppressed. His freedom was then cut back. He was confined to the castle, denied private audience or communication, his household was reduced to 30, his chaplains were dismissed, and he was watched more closely. A bowling green was laid out for him in the outer ward, on the east side. His household included Thomas Herbert and Henry Firebrace as grooms of the bedchamber, Anthony Mildmay as gentleman usher, and Silius Titus as equerry. Firebrace and Titus were sympathetic. Mildmay was not. Two of the household slept across the bedchamber doors. Coded letters moved in and out, usually by servants. Some of the couriers were almost certainly double agents, and Parliament knew much of the planning. The escape manager outside was probably Jane Whorwood, working with the courier Jane Wheeler. For a time letters passed by Mary, also called Mary Lee, who looked after the king’s linen. Among Whorwood’s correspondents were John Ashburnham, often at Netley Abbey near Southampton, and her uncle William Hamilton, Earl of Lanark. She suspected informers, notably the merchant John Loe, who offered a ship. The king often consulted the London astrologer William Lilly, by coded letter or by Whorwood in person, and Lilly almost certainly passed the plans to Parliament. By 20 January, Colonel Hammond had been warned by the Derby House Committee to watch carefully.

The Scots were divided over the Engagement and did not discuss it in earnest until 7 March 1648, when they asked the English Parliament for the king’s release and were refused. One unused plan was that the king would climb from his bedchamber into the room above, cross the roof space to an unguarded room, and leave by a window. The first actual attempt was on 20 March. He tried to climb from a window, lower himself 10 feet, about 3 metres, on a silk cord into the unguarded courtyard, and leave by an outer bastion on the south side, where Henry Firebrace waited. He stuck fast between an iron bar and the frame, between breast and shoulders. Firebrace heard him groan and could not reach him. The king retreated and lit a candle as the signal that the attempt had failed. That bedroom, used for his first five months, was in the chamber block of the great hall. The window he used was later replaced, in 1901, by the window seen now. A window high in the north wall is said to be the one planned for the May attempt.

The second attempt took longer. A hacksaw and nitric acid were smuggled in so that he could loosen a bar. He was to climb down and leave by the bowling green on the east. Jane Whorwood chartered a ship. Henry Firebrace organised a boat off the island. John Burroughs, a royal harbinger, arranged horses. The route was Portsmouth, then Arundel, then Queenborough on the Medway, where Whorwood would take him to Holland. Derby House knew of the plot by 15 April. Whorwood and Firebrace warned the king on 23 April. She was then at Queenborough, watched by parliamentary spies. Hammond moved Charles to more confined rooms in the domestic wing against the north wall. On 19 May John Ashburnham was arrested at Netley Abbey and the plan was found. On 29 May the attempt began anyway. Charles was applying nitric acid and working with the hacksaw when Hammond walked in and offered to take leave of him, because he heard the king was going away. The king is said to have laughed in resignation. Two sentries, bribed to keep silent, had betrayed him.

He failed to escape just as the Second Civil War began, a set of uncoordinated risings in his favour, bloody even so. A revolt in south Wales was beaten in early May. Maidstone fell in late May and early June. The sieges of Walmer, Deal and Sandown lasted until 5 September. Colchester was besieged from June until 28 August. Smaller risings in Cornwall, north Wales, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Surrey were put down quickly. On 8 July a Scots army at last honoured the Engagement and marched south. It was late, ill prepared and half-hearted, and it was defeated at Preston on 17 to 19 August, surrendering on the 25th. Parliament nonetheless agreed further talks. One account says he was removed to Newport in September. Another says he left Carisbrooke for the Newport negotiations on 15 September, which runs past the date of 6 September given for the end of the imprisonment. The talks dragged into November and were doomed, because army hardliners had decided to bring him to London. Between 13 and 25 November, Jane Whorwood was in Newport and the means of escape were ready, but the tired king refused. He was taken to Hurst Castle, on the mainland opposite the island, and stayed there until the 19th. On 6 December the army expelled moderate members from the Commons in Pride’s Purge, leaving the Rump. He was tried in Westminster Hall and found guilty of trying to uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people. He was beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. A portrait of him at the trial, after Edward Bower, who died in 1667, shows him in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished and the Commonwealth was set up as a republic. It was restored in 1660, with his son Charles II as king.

In 1650 two of his children, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, were confined in the castle. Elizabeth died within weeks, in 1650, at the age of 14, of an illness taken after playing bowls. She is buried in Saint Thomas’s Church. Henry stayed until February 1653, when he was allowed to join his family in exile in France. Other Royalist prisoners were held at Carisbrooke until the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II turned the castle into a prison for Parliamentarians.

Later in the seventeenth century the castle declined as other island defences grew and the Royal Navy became a strong force. It remained an important store. A plan to build barracks in the eighteenth century never happened. Governors still lived there from time to time, so some buildings were kept up, but the military role faded and the place became more of a country house. Lord Cutts, governor from 1692 to 1706, and the Earl of Cadogan, governor from 1715 to 1726, carried out repairs and alterations. In 1738 the Chapel of Saint Nicholas was demolished and rebuilt in a Georgian style.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the castle was no longer the governor’s home, though it still had a military use. From 1853 it was a training ground for the Isle of Wight Artillery Militia, mostly civilians who could be called to man coastal guns in wartime. The roof and floors of the gatehouse had been removed. Carey’s building had been reduced to a ruin. Many other buildings were in poor repair. It was also becoming a tourist attraction. In 1856 it passed to the Office of Works. Philip Hardwick restored it that year. He converted the Constable’s Lodging, at the southern end of the hall range, and the L-shaped block in the south-east corner to their present form before the money ran out. He also demolished the Chapel of Saint Nicholas to make a romantic ruin. The ruins were considerably restored in the nineteenth century.

The strongest influence on the castle as it stands was Percy Stone, also Percy Goddard Stone, an architect and the island’s historian. He published the first study of the castle’s history and architecture in 1891. Royal interest returned when Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom was appointed governor. She was Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, born on 14 April 1857 and died on 26 October 1944, the fifth daughter and youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, later known as Princess Henry of Battenberg. Queen Victoria at first refused to discuss her marriage. Suitors included Louis Napoléon, the Prince Imperial, who was killed in the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, and Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg, son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine and of Julia von Hauke. After a year of persuasion the queen consented under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, on condition that the couple live with her. They married on 23 July 1885 at Saint Mildred’s Church at Whippingham, near Osborne. Beatrice wore her mother’s Honiton lace veil and was escorted by the queen and the Prince of Wales. They had four children. Henry grew bored at court. The queen made him Governor of the Isle of Wight in 1889. Another account appoints him governor in 1894. He longed for active service and was allowed to join the Ashanti expedition, also called the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War and the Anglo-Asante war. He and Beatrice parted on 6 December 1895. He died of malaria on the way home. A telegram reached Beatrice at Madeira on 22 January 1896 with news that he had died two days earlier, on 20 January. The queen then appointed Beatrice to the vacant governorship, which is also given simply as 1896, in succession to her husband. She remained with her mother until Victoria’s death on 22 January 1901, and she spent much of the next thirty years editing her mother’s journals as literary executor.

Stone first restored the gatehouse, replacing its roof and one upper floor, to make the first Isle of Wight Museum, opened in 1898 in memory of Prince Henry. Beatrice had been closely involved in collecting for that museum, which she opened in 1898, hoping for a full collection of objects connected with the island. It is the oldest museum on the island and now cares for more than 37,000 items. In 1904 Stone restored the Chapel of Saint Nicholas to a quasi-medieval form, a rebuilding also dated 1904 to 1905. It was reopened and reconsecrated as a national memorial of Charles I, and the chapel now seen is also described as built in 1904 to commemorate his execution in 1649. Its internal appearance comes from its use as the island’s war memorial to the 2,000 men of the Isle of Wight killed in both world wars. The woodwork is from HMS Nettle, one of the last wooden warships. Medieval chapel foundations can be seen at the base of the walls. There has been a chapel or church on roughly this site since the Norman conquest.

Beatrice lived at Osborne Cottage in East Cowes until she sold it in 1913, when the governor’s house at Carisbrooke fell vacant. She moved into the castle and kept an apartment at Kensington Palace. One account says she had the hall range and the Constable’s Lodging adapted in 1913 as her summer residence and used them until 1938. Another says she lived at Carisbrooke from 1913 until her death in 1944. Her daughter Victoria Eugenie, known as Ena, married Alfonso XIII of Spain on 31 May 1906, after converting to Catholicism, a step opposed by Edward VII. An anarchist tried to bomb the couple on the wedding day. Alfonso later blamed Beatrice for the haemophilia of the Spanish heir. Her favourite son, Maurice, was killed in the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. In 1917, when George V adopted the name Windsor, Beatrice dropped the style Princess Henry of Battenberg. Her eldest son Alexander became Sir Alexander Mountbatten and later Marquess of Carisbrooke. Her son Leopold, Lord Leopold Mountbatten, a haemophiliac, died in 1922 during a knee operation, one month short of his thirty-third birthday. She was patron of the Isle of Wight branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution from 1920 until her death, and a patron of the Ypres League. She laid wreaths at the Cenotaph in 1930 and 1935. In 1941 she published a translation of the diary of Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, under the title In Napoleonic Days. Her last home was Brantridge Park in West Sussex, the house of Alexander Cambridge, first Earl of Athlone, and of Princess Alice. She died there in her sleep on 26 October 1944, aged 87, the day before the thirtieth anniversary of Maurice’s death. After a funeral at Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, she was interred in the royal vault on 3 November, and on 27 August 1945 she was moved to a joint tomb with Henry at Saint Mildred’s, Whippingham, which had been her wish. After her death the hall and the Constable’s Lodging became the home of the museum, which moved out of the gatehouse into that larger range, where it remains. Since the Second World War the castle has stayed largely a monument, used sometimes for island ceremonies and chiefly visited by the public.

The Constable’s Chamber, in the medieval part of the castle, was Charles’s bedroom and later Beatrice’s dining room. It now holds a replica of his bed and her large collection of stag and antelope heads, and until recently it was the education centre. The Great Hall, the Great Chamber and several smaller rooms are open, partly furnished, and an upper room houses the museum. One of the museum’s main subjects is the imprisoned king and the window bars he could not pass in 1648. Near the domestic buildings the well house still has a working donkey wheel. The well in the inner bailey was needed after the keep well ran dry in 1136. It is 49 metres deep, lined with stone in the upper part and cut through chalk below, and the water now stands about 12 metres deep. By 1292, when repairs were done, a house and a treadwheel already stood over it. The well house and the oak wheel seen now were built by Carey in about 1587, also given as the 1580s, at the same time as a large underground cistern west of the Constable’s Lodging. One bucket takes 255 metres of turning. The wheel is thought to have been turned at first by prisoners. Donkeys are known in the role from at least 1696, and they still demonstrate it. A training note says a donkey needs seven months of preparation and historically worked two hours a day. Demonstrations now ask for two turns, about thirty seconds, on each day the castle is open. The other donkeys take thirty to forty seconds, and Jigsaw can do it in twenty. All the donkeys’ names begin with J. The castle account ties that letter to the way Charles signed letters while he was a prisoner, and it says that for 150 years every donkey has carried such a name. They graze a five-acre field behind the castle. Jack and Jill were born on the island in 2000. Jill is Jack’s half-sister and part miniature. Jigsaw was born in the New Forest in 2003. Juno was born in the New Forest in 2012, arrived in November 2017, and was named by a public vote. Jester, born in Wales in 2018, and Jingles, born in Wales in 2020, joined in late 2022 and were also named by public vote. The same account says that, being under five, they do not turn the wheel and are seen in the stables. The well is also the hiding place of the Mohune diamond in the 1898 novel Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner, which is fiction. Wyndham Lewis, who lived on the island as a child, used the donkey wheel as an image of the way machines impose a life on people. A visit by James Macandrew, one of the founders of Dunedin in New Zealand, led him to name his estate Carisbrook, and that name later passed to the city’s main sports ground.

The Princess Beatrice Garden, in an Edwardian manner, was designed by Chris Beardshaw. In 2007 a holiday flat was opened in former staff quarters. It is the Bowling Green Apartment, a two-bedroom cottage in the heart of the castle. The castle received 100,605 visitors in 2025. It has been given a Platinum Green Impact Award.

Partial excavation between 1976 and 1981, also described as excavations led from 1976 to 1983, showed settlement remains older than the castle and fixed the Saxon presence with the three sixth-century burials. The published excavation report covers seasons from 1921 to 1996. In December 2020, earth resistance, ground-penetrating radar and fluxgate gradiometer surveys were made for planned grazing and stabling for the donkeys, inside the scheduled area. Radar covered about 1.7 hectares of the paddocks, magnetometry about 0.6 hectares, and resistance about 0.5 hectares near the stable, with further work on the old bowling green and the eastern bastions. The clearest anomaly in the paddock was a linear ditch parallel to the outworks, possibly an extra defence or a former field boundary. An evaluation in the east field in 2022, for post-and-rail fencing to make three paddocks, used hand-dug test pits between 0.23 and 0.55 metres deep. None found archaeological features. The earlier geophysical anomalies were read as natural fissures and plough scour. Finds from the topsoil were mostly post-medieval and modern rubbish from manuring: earthenware, brick, tile, slate, window and vessel glass, nails and oyster shell, with a few medieval sherds of no further significance. A watching brief published in 2025 opened seven test pits. Five were in the Donkey Field, east of the defences and immediately west of Whitcombe Road, at national grid 448889 087768, and two were at a damaged retaining wall in the south-east courtyard, at 448664 087752, before work on donkey welfare and on the wall. Natural chalk and probable colluvium were found in the field, with some worked flint and modern material. The geophysical anomalies there were thought likely to come from the existing stable or from earlier stables. At the wall, the surface of a possible archaeological layer was exposed in a very small area, and no archaeological finds or features were recorded. The limited digging did not significantly damage archaeological deposits.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/carisbrooke-castle