# Deal Castle

16th century coastal artillery fort, located in Deal, Kent, England, UK

Deal, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1539 CE

## Story

• Deal Castle was built on the Kent shore at Deal for Henry VIII in 1539 and 1540, with the work also placed at about 1539 to 1542, against France and the Holy Roman Empire.
• The moated fort, likened to a Tudor rose and described as a six-lobed keep within a six-lobed curtain, guarded the Downs together with Walmer and Sandown.
• In the Second English Civil War the garrison took the king’s side, and Deal surrendered in August 1648, on a date given as both 20 August and 25 August.
• John Norris (Royal Navy officer) and Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington, adapted the fort as a captain’s house, and the War Office gave it up as a defence in 1904.
• A bomb in 1940 destroyed the quarters of William Birdwood, and the castle is a scheduled monument designated on 9 October 1981.

## Visiting

The castle is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with last entry at 3.15pm. Tickets booked online until midnight the day before the visit are sold at a discount, and booking in advance saves 15 per cent. A ticket bought on the day, online or on arrival, is charged at full price. Tickets are valid all day within opening hours.
Admission is free for members, who should bring a membership card.

## History

Deal Castle is an artillery fort on the Kent shore at Deal, built for Henry VIII between 1539 and 1540, with the campaign also placed at about 1539 to 1542. It was the largest of three castles, with Walmer and Sandown, raised to cover the Downs anchorage inside the Goodwin Sands and the beach where soldiers could be landed. The low fort of Kentish ragstone, brick and Caen stone is likened to a Tudor rose and is also described as a six-lobed keep inside a six-lobed curtain.

The device of 1539 answered an alliance of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Charles V, whose aunt was Catherine of Aragon, reigned as emperor from 1516 to 1556, and Francis I reigned in France from 1515 to 1547. Work at Deal began in April, with 1,400 men on the site the next month, and Anne of Cleves dined there in December when the castle was mostly complete. The three castles are also said to have been finished in October 1540, and together they cost the Crown £27,092.

The gun figures do not agree, and one account gives 66 artillery positions and 53 handgun loops on four tiers. Another gives 145 gun-ports and five tiers, with a design for all-round fire from over 140 guns. In 1547 the castle held 57 guns, and a fully armed fort of over 140 pieces was never realised. In 1570 there were only 17 guns, most of them unserviceable.

Elizabeth I inspected the castle in 1573, and the coast was mobilised against the Spanish Armada in 1588. James I and Charles I neglected the fabric. Repairs were put at £396 in 1615 and at £1,243 in 1624. In 1639 the guns of the three castles could not stop a Dutch fleet mauling Spanish ships in the Downs.

In the Second English Civil War the garrisons declared for the king. Parliament had won the wider rising at Maidstone at the start of June 1648, and Colonel Nathaniel Rich took Walmer in July. Deal, resupplied from the sea, surrendered on 20 August in one account and on 25 August in the other, after a relief attempt on 15 August had failed and after three landing attempts by Prince Charles had also failed. Rich found the castle much torn and spoiled with the granades, also spelled granadoes, and he put the repairs at £500 or more.

The eighteenth century turned the fort into a house without quite giving up the guns. John Norris (Royal Navy officer), captain in the year after the castle was given 11 culverins in 1728, rebuilt his rooms, and the Captain’s House was finished in 1732. Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington, captain from 1802 until his death on 18 September 1838, extended that house. The military role is said to have effectively ceased by about 1800, yet nine 36-pounders were mounted in the French wars and four 32-pounders were still kept in 1860 as relics.

The War Office decided in 1904 that the castle had no value as a defence or as a barracks and transferred it to the Office of Works. In the Second World War a German bomb wrecked the captain’s quarters, on 5 October 1940 in one account and in November 1940 in the other, and William Birdwood moved to Hampton Court Palace. Six-inch guns stood by the promenade until 1944. The castle ceased to be a residence in 1951, the year Birdwood died.

It is operated by English Heritage and received 25,256 visitors in 2008. It is a scheduled monument, designated on 9 October 1981 under the name Artillery castle at Deal. The ground-floor ceiling beams of the central tower are original, felled between 1530 and 1555, while the consoles date from 1604 to 1629. Trenches on the east and north-east bastions found walls, a possible earlier surface and an artillery chimney, and no earlier attempt at waterproofing.

## Photographs

- [Artillery castle at Deal — JimRussell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Deal_Castle_Front.jpg)
- [Deal Castle — Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Deal_Castle_%281%29.jpg)
- [Deal Castle Deal Castle is one of the finest Tudor artillery works in England. It was built as part of a chain of coastal fortresses between 1539 and 1540 by — JThomas](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1289809.jpg)
- [Deal Castle Deal Castle was built during the reign of King Henry VIII, part of a series of castle which included Pendennis in Cornwall, and nearby Walmer. — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406977.jpg)
- [Deal Castle Deal Castle was built during the reign of King Henry VIII, part of a series of castle which included Pendennis in Cornwall, and nearby Walmer. — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406979.jpg)
- [Deal Castle Deal Castle was built during the reign of King Henry VIII, part of a series of castle which included Pendennis in Cornwall, and nearby Walmer. — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406984.jpg)
- [Deal Castle Deal Castle was built during the reign of King Henry VIII, part of a series of castle which included Pendennis in Cornwall, and nearby Walmer. — Philip Halling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1407012.jpg)
- [Deal Castle — Elliott Simpson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1823614.jpg)
- [1717 engraved map of England and Wales with vignettes, by George Willdey — George Willdey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/A_New_and_Correct_Map_of_England_and_Wales%2C_Now_Called_South_Britain_1717.jpg)
- [Deal Castle — Helmut Zozmann](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2262278.jpg)

## Sources

- [Deal Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Henry VIII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII) — Wikipedia
- [John Norris (Royal Navy officer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Norris_(Royal_Navy_officer)) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smith,_1st_Baron_Carrington) — Wikipedia
- [William Birdwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Birdwood) — Wikipedia
- [Holy Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire) — Wikipedia
- [Second English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Second World War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_World_War) — Wikipedia
- [War Office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Office) — Wikipedia
- [History of Deal Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/deal-castle/history-stories/history/) — English Heritage
- [Deal Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/deal-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and Opening Times for Deal Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/deal-castle/prices-and-opening-times) — English Heritage
- [Local Learning: Deal Castle and Walmer Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/teaching-resources/local-learning/-deal-castle-and-walmer-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Deal Castle, Victoria Street, Deal, Kent: Radiocarbon wiggle-matching of oak timbers](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/8703/DealCastleVictoriaStreetDealKentRadiocarbonWiggle-MatchingofOakTimbers) — Historic England
- [Deal Castle Bastions, Deal, Kent: Archaeological Evaluation](https://doi.org/10.5284/1119180) — Archaeology Data Service
- [A watching brief at the Paddock Car Park, Deal Castle, Deal, Kent](https://doi.org/10.5284/1055717) — Archaeology Data Service
- [TR 35 SE 6 - Deal Castle](https://heritage.kent.gov.uk/Monument/MKE7308/) — Kent Historic Environment Record
- [Deal Castle 468386](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/0d636742-8028-4a8c-8b7c-e1f9aaf2d338/d1e4e4c8-55c1-4e35-b714-9fa9837fc4cb) — Historic England
- [Deal Castle Front.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_Front.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle (1).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_(1).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1289809.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1289809.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1406977.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406977.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1406979.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406979.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1406984.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1406984.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1407012.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1407012.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1823614.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1823614.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A New and Correct Map of England and Wales, Now Called South Britain 1717.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_New_and_Correct_Map_of_England_and_Wales,_Now_Called_South_Britain_1717.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Deal Castle - geograph.org.uk - 2262278.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deal_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2262278.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Deal Castle stands on the Kent shore at Deal, an artillery fort built for Henry VIII between 1539 and 1540, with the building campaign also placed at about 1539 to 1542. It was the centrepiece of three stone castles, Deal, Walmer and Sandown, raised to cover the Downs, the anchorage between the beach and the Goodwin Sands, and to deny an enemy the easy landing on Deal Beach. The king knew that stretch of shore. A drawing made in 1539, widely taken for an early version of a castle in the Downs, belongs to the same moment of planning. The finished work is a low, rounded fort of Kentish ragstone, brick and Caen stone, set inside a dry stone-lined moat. One description likens the plan to a Tudor rose. Another describes a six-lobed keep, with a three-storey central tower, inside a six-lobed curtain. The keep is given as 86 feet, or 26 metres, across, the bastion walls as 15 feet, or 4.6 metres, thick, and the whole castle as about 234 by 216 feet, or 71 by 66 metres, covering 0.85 acres, or 0.34 hectares. It was larger than Walmer and larger than Sandown.

The fort belongs to the crisis of the last years of Henry VIII. He was born on 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and he became king on 22 April 1509, at seventeen, after his elder brother Arthur had died in 1502. In 1493, at the age of two, he had already been named Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the office to which the captains of Deal would later report. He was baptised by Richard Foxe, Bishop of Exeter, taught Latin and French and some Italian, and on 9 February 1506 the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I made him a Knight of the Golden Fleece. Of his six or seven siblings, only Arthur, Margaret and Mary survived infancy. He was not expected to be king, and his early care was in the hands of Elizabeth, Lady Darcy, and then of Elizabeth Denton. At the age of three he was Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He was made a Knight of the Bath, created Duke of York the next day, and about a month later Warden of the Scottish Marches. In May 1495 he was appointed to the Order of the Garter. The offices were given to the child so that his father could keep those lucrative posts out of the hands of established families. As Duke of York he used the royal arms with a label of three points ermine. In November 1501 he took a large part in the ceremonies for Arthur’s marriage to Catherine, the youngest child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Arthur was fifteen, and the marriage had lasted only twenty weeks. Henry was created Prince of Wales in 1504. In the early years of his reign he was spoken of as an attractive, educated and accomplished king. He grew dissatisfied with Catherine because he wanted a male heir, and Clement refused the annulment he asked for. By the end of his life he was remembered both as one of the greatest English monarchs and as a king who had grown more tyrannical, egotistical, lustful and paranoid. He married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, under a papal dispensation. Catherine was the aunt of Charles V. When Henry sought to end that marriage, one account says that in 1533 he broke with Pope Paul III in order to annul it. The account of his life says that he appealed to Pope Clement VII, that Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declared the marriage void in the eyes of the Church of England in 1533, and that Clement excommunicated him. He then took the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England through the Acts of Supremacy and dissolved the monasteries, taking their wealth. He ordered the beheading of two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. A jousting accident in 1536 left him with a gangrenous leg. In his later years he was described as morbidly obese and immobile, and he was said to have suffered from diabetes, oedema and organ failure. He died on 28 January 1547, was buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, and was succeeded by his son Edward VI.

The Holy Roman Empire was the other great party to the threat. It was a decentralised polity across much of Central and Western Europe, headed by an elected emperor, and after 1512 it was also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a form of the name first used in a document in 1474 and adopted in a decree after the Diet of Cologne. The realm is traced either to the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 or to the crowning of Otto in 962, and it lasted until Emperor Francis II dissolved it on 6 August 1806, after Napoleon formed the Confederation of the Rhine from German states loyal to France. At the outset it comprised three kingdoms, Germany, Italy and, from 1032, Burgundy, joined by the emperor’s overlordship. The imperial title had lapsed by 924 before Pope John XII crowned Otto of Saxony in 962. Otto the Great, King of the Germans, was treated as Charlemagne’s successor. Power was widest in the middle of the thirteenth century under the Hohenstaufen, and that stretch of territory was an overextension followed by a partial collapse. Election usually lay with a handful of prince-electors and with spiritual electors who were archbishops, and in diplomacy the emperor was treated as first among Catholic monarchs. A reform in the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth created institutions that endured until the nineteenth. Before the word holy was added, the realm was simply called the Roman Empire. From 1157, under Frederick Barbarossa, it was the Holy Empire, and the name Holy Roman Empire is attested from 1254. It was also called the whole kingdom, the Christian empire and the Roman empire, and the claim to rule rested on a transfer of authority from the ancient emperors of Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century it was bound more closely to a German identity, and around 1500 it was often called simply Germany. For most of its life it covered the lands now forming the Czech lands, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Switzerland, Slovenia, Germany and Austria, together with large parts of eastern France, northern and central Italy, and western Poland. By the early sixteenth century its effective weight lay in the Kingdom of Germany. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, reigned from 1516 to 1556. Francis I, King of France, reigned from 1515 to 1547. While France and the Empire fought each other, raids on England were common but an invasion looked unlikely, and the Crown had mostly left coastal forts to local lords. Modest blockhouses and towers stood in the south-west and along the Sussex coast, with a few stronger works in the north. In 1538 France and the Empire declared an alliance against Henry, and the pope encouraged them to attack. Another account places that alliance, urged on by an enraged pope, at the point the works were ordered in 1539. An invasion of England appeared certain.

Henry answered with an order called a device, issued in 1539, for the defence of the realm in time of invasion and for forts along the coast. Three castles were to protect the beaches around Deal and the Downs. They were planned and built by the staff of his Works departments. It is not known who designed Deal itself. Sir Edward Ryngeley and Thomas Wingfield served as commissioners, Robert Loyrde as paymaster, David Marten as comptroller, Christopher Dickenson as master mason and William Clement as master carpenter. Work began at Deal in April and moved quickly. By the following month 1,400 men were on the site, and another account says more than 1,400 workmen finished the building in eighteen months. Over the summer Ryngeley broke a strike for higher pay. In December, when Anne of Cleves dined at the castle, it was mostly complete. The Downs castles are also said to have been completed in October 1540. They were garrisoned by the end of 1540. By the end of the reign in 1547, Deal was one of 42 new artillery forts on ports, anchorages and estuaries. Another account of the same programme says that before he died Henry built over 30 forts on the east and south coasts.

The three stone castles lay along the coast within three miles of one another, Walmer to the south and Sandown to the north, and they were tied together by earthworks. Four earthwork forts supported them: the Great Turf, the Little Turf Bulwark, the Great White Bulwark of Clay and the Walmer Bulwark, with a defensive ditch and bank 2.5 miles, or 4.0 kilometres, long. Those earthworks are now obliterated. Sandown has been almost totally destroyed by the sea. Together the three castles became known as the castles of the Downs. Deal, Walmer and Sandown cost the Crown £27,092, much of it from the dissolution of the monasteries a few years before. Lead, timber and stone from local religious houses were reused in the walls. The ragstone came from near Maidstone, the bricks were made locally, and the Caen stone was taken from those dissolved houses.

The gun numbers are not given as a single figure. The castle is described with 66 firing positions for artillery and another 53 loops in the basement for handguns, arranged in four tiers, the heaviest pieces on the upper levels including the keep. It is also described with 145 gun-ports on five tiers, and with guns mounted in five tiers so as to give all-round fire from over 140 guns. A continuous gallery called the Rounds ran at basement level around the outer bastions, with 53 handgun ports covering the bottom of the moat. In 1547 the castle was armed with 57 guns. A castle fully armed and bristling with over 140 guns was never realised. For the rest of the sixteenth century it was maintained on a shoestring and made ready only for particular scares.

Thomas Wingfield became the first captain in 1540. He had a lieutenant and a garrison of eight soldiers, sixteen gunners and two porters, and he reported to the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. That officer commanded the defence of the Kent and East Sussex coast until the middle of the eighteenth century, and he regulated the Cinque Ports of Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, New Romney and Hastings, an old trading alliance that supplied the Crown with ships and men in war. The original invasion threat passed. The castle was reinforced in 1558 because of a fresh fear of French attack. Around 1570, or in the 1570s, the main bastions were filled with earth, probably so that heavier guns could stand on them. In 1570 the castle had only 17 guns, most of them unserviceable, so all-round defence could not be achieved. Queen Elizabeth I inspected the castle in 1573. The coast was mobilised in 1588 against the Spanish Armada, and the defences were probably kept ready through the rest of her reign. The years of special preparation are also given as 1568 to 1570, 1583 to 1588, including the Armada, and 1596 to 1599.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century England was at peace with France and Spain, and the coastal forts were little regarded. James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625, and Charles I, who reigned from 1625 to 1649, neglected Deal. By 1615 the castle was in a poor state. Storms and coastal erosion had damaged the outer walls, and a survey put the repairs at £396. The captain, William Byng, wrote repeatedly that winter storms had filled the moat with water and beach stone and had undermined the foundations. By 1618 he reported that most of the garrison lived in the town, with only a small guard in the castle at night. A small garrison of about 22 men did what it could. Fighting among Dutch, French and Spanish ships in the Downs became common, and pirate vessels took merchantmen, which made the Kent forts matter again even while the masonry failed. A new survey in 1624 put the repairs at £1,243. George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, suggested that Camber Castle be pulled down to supply material. That does not appear to have been done, though some repairs were probably carried out in the late 1630s.

Keeping the peace in the anchorage was often impossible. In 1639, during the Battle of the Downs, the guns of Walmer, Deal and Sandown could not stop a Dutch fleet from mauling a Spanish fleet that had sought the neutrality of the anchorage. Several Spanish ships were sunk, and 2,000 shipwrecked sailors struggled ashore, leaving the English to organise their relief.

At the start of the First English Civil War, in August 1642, Parliamentarian forces seized Deal. William Batten replaced William Byng, who was suspected of Royalist sympathies. The castle played little part in that war. Another account calls the place peaceful throughout the First English Civil War of 1642 to 1646.

The Second English Civil War took place between February and August 1648 in England and Wales. It belongs to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the series that runs from 1639 to 1653 and includes the Irish Confederate Wars, the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, and the later Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Charles I had tried to bring the Church of Scotland into line with Laudian changes in the Church of England. Scots who signed the National Covenant, the Covenanters, defeated him in the Bishops’ Wars and then required office-holders to sign the Covenant. In England the argument was over a well-ordered monarchy, the balance of king and parliament, and whether bishops or congregations should appoint church leaders. The First English Civil War broke out in 1642. In 1643 Parliament and the Scots allied under the Solemn League and Covenant. After four years Charles surrendered to the Scots Covenanters on 5 May 1646 rather than to Parliament, hoping to use the divisions among English and Scots Presbyterians and English Independents. The peace terms offered to him, the Newcastle Propositions, would have required his subjects in the three kingdoms to sign the Covenant and would have given up much of his authority. He refused significant concessions. When the Presbyterian majority in Parliament failed to disband the New Model Army in late 1647, many joined the Scottish Engagers in an agreement to restore him. The Scottish invasion that followed was supported by Royalist risings in South Wales, Kent, Essex and Lancashire, and by sections of the Royal Navy. The risings were poorly coordinated. By the end of August 1648 they had been defeated by forces under Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax. Charles I was executed in January 1649, the Commonwealth of England was established, and the Covenanters crowned his son Charles II as King of Scotland, which led to the Anglo-Scottish War of 1650 to 1652.

At Deal the war arrived through the fleet and the three castles. The Parliamentarian navy was based in the Downs, protected by Walmer and the other Henrician forts. The year before, Batten had been forced to resign as Commander of the Fleet. In 1648 he encouraged parts of the navy to change sides. Sir Henry Palmer, a former sailor, and other Kentish gentlemen called on the fleet to revolt, counting on the many Kentish men in the crews. Infighting among Parliamentary factions over the future of Charles I produced a mutiny of the fleet in the Downs. Walmer and Deal declared for the king, and the Sandown garrisons did so shortly afterwards. Rainsborough was removed from his post as captain. With the coastal forts and the navy in Royalist hands, Parliament feared that foreign troops might be landed or that help might be sent to the Scots.

Parliament defeated the wider rising at the Battle of Maidstone at the start of June and sent Colonel Nathaniel Rich to recover the Downs castles. One account says Rich arrived early in June. Walmer was besieged first and surrendered on 12 July. Another account says Walmer fell in July to a murderous mortar bombardment. Deal, which the Royalists had resupplied from the sea, was besieged in July. It received similar treatment and held out. A Royalist fleet bombarded the besiegers and temporarily landed 1,500 Flemish mercenaries, but a shortage of money forced those men back to the Continent. The garrison made a surprise attack and was driven back with losses. In August the fleet under Prince Charles tried three times to land a fresh force and failed, with heavy losses. Another account says that on 15 August a relief force trying to break the siege and resupply the castle was decisively defeated. News then arrived of the Royalist defeat at Preston. Deal surrendered on 20 August in one account and on 25 August in the other. Artillery was then turned on Sandown, and the remaining garrisons gave up. Sandown is also said to have surrendered on 3 September. The lead summary of the castle’s story speaks of several months of fighting before the Parliamentary recovery. Five months after the August surrender, Charles I was executed.

Rich became the new captain. He reported the castle much torn and spoiled with the granades, a phrase also given as granadoes, and he thought the repairs would cost at least £500. A governor, Samuel Taverner, was appointed, with a corporal and twenty soldiers. Because of the Dutch threat the castle was kept stocked with powder. At the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1652 it was reinforced with earthworks and soldiers. The Dutch wars are also dated 1652 to 1654, 1665 to 1667 and 1682 to 1684, and the castle is said to have played an important part in defending the Downs during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, with help from local trained bands. After the Stuart Restoration in 1660 the garrison was cut and its pay reduced. Byng tried to reclaim the captaincy and may have been briefly reappointed early in 1660.

In 1667 a Dutch fleet cruised the Kent coast looking for a place to strike. The captain, Colonel Silius Titus, whose life is given as 1622 or 1623 to 1704, prepared for a landing between Walmer and the Isle of Thanet. He commanded several hundred soldiers, the castle garrisons, local trained bands and companies of professional troops, including the newly formed Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, later the Royal Marines. The Dutch attacked the River Medway instead, and Deal was left unscathed. England also fought France from 1688 to 1697, and the coast was often threatened. After the Glorious Revolution of December 1688 removed James II, the townspeople of Deal seized the castle for William of Orange and took steps to defend the Downs against an Irish invasion that never came.

Through the eighteenth century the castle remained armed and was slowly turned into a house. In 1713 British involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession, which had engulfed Europe since 1701, came to an end, and peace brought a review of coastal forts. At Deal that review produced modernisation. In 1728 the castle was equipped with 11 culverins. Military engineers of the Ordnance Office also installed 12 modern 9-pounder guns. The following year the captain, the naval officer John Norris (Royal Navy officer), redeveloped the castle to improve his own rooms. Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Norris, born in 1670 or 1671 and dead on 13 June 1749, was a Royal Navy officer and a Whig politician. His parentage is given as uncertain and Irish. He joined the navy in 1680 as a captain’s servant, became a lieutenant in August 1689 in the third-rate Edgar under Cloudesley Shovell during the Nine Years’ War, and served off Ireland in the Williamite War in the third-rate Monck. He was promoted commander on 8 July 1690 and commanded the fire ship Pelican at the Battle of Beachy Head, then the fire ship Spy at Barfleur and La Hogue in May 1692. He was made captain on 13 January 1693, fought at Lagos in the Sheerness, and served in the Mediterranean. In 1697 he took a squadron to Hudson Bay to protect settlements there. He planned to retake places in Newfoundland and Labrador that the French had seized the previous winter, but the local council overruled him, and he was criticised for inaction until the Earl of Orford defended him. Investigations were restarted in 1699 and he was suspended in April of that year. He was given the third-rate Orford early in 1702 and served under Sir George Rooke at Cádiz. He commanded the vanguard at Malaga in August 1704 and served under the Earl of Peterborough at the capture of Barcelona in October 1705. As a flag officer he was sent to the Baltic to support Russia, Denmark and Hanover in the Great Northern War. In 1716 Tsar Peter took personal command of the coalition fleet and made Norris his deputy. Together they protected merchant ships from the Swedish Empire. After the death of Charles XII of Sweden in November 1718, Britain changed sides, and Norris returned to protect British trade from Russian raiders. He was a commissioner for the talks that produced the Treaty of Nystad in September 1721, ending that war. In 1739 he was commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet at the start of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. In 1744 he was ordered to meet an expected French invasion. Storms scattered the invasion transports, with heavy loss of life, and the immediate threat ended.

At Deal, similar comforts had already been made at Walmer in 1708 by Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, and there may have been some rivalry between the two captains. The keep at Deal was given medieval-style battlements and wood-panelled rooms at the rear, looking over the sea, and the porter’s lodge was updated. The battlements on the castle today are faux medieval rather than Tudor, and they are dated to 1732. An engraving of 1735 by the Buck brothers shows the newly castellated keep and inner bastions, and a square block, the Captain’s House, finished in 1732. In 1730 to 1732 the engineers built that house and improved a large garden just outside the castle. Craftsmen took down the old Tudor parapets and replaced them with the more decorative crenellations, of which part survives. Later work added new parapets on the three seaward bastions in 1738, so that each gun had a wide arc, a new keep roof in 1739, a new drawbridge in 1741, and a high brick wall around the captain’s garden from 1744 to 1750. The result was an uneasy hybrid, a larger and more fashionable residence and a reformed battery for the Downs.

By then only a lieutenant, a master gunner and a porter were usually based in the castle. In 1749 the lieutenant was also the master gunner and looked after the guns and stores. In 1765 a tiny cabin in the courtyard gave a duty gunner somewhere to rest, and the other gunners were sent for when needed. The whole of the keep and the inner bastions formed the captain’s lodging. In 1773 a muster listed a nominal garrison of only eight gunners, enough for two guns. During major alarms, in 1744 to 1745 and in 1779, when French forces were expected, militia and regular soldiers came to help work the guns and hold the castle.

During the long conflict with France from 1792 to 1815 the south-east became a military zone, but Deal was no longer treated as a key defence. The Captain’s House compromised it, though the bastions still carried guns that could be used against ships. Its symbolic weight was considerable, because the captain was an eminent man who led the local volunteers. The castle was armed with nine 36-pounder guns, and further batteries stood along the beach. In 1794 William Pitt the Younger, then both prime minister and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, formed infantry and cavalry units called fencibles to protect Deal. In 1802 bombardiers he had recruited exercised at the castle. Huge new barracks were built in Deal and in the village of Walmer in 1794 to 1797 for about 1,000 men. A naval hospital was added in 1800 for a Channel squadron, with the Navy Yard at Deal as its depot. Several large expeditions sailed from the town. In 1809 the attack on Walcheren in the Netherlands, meant to stop French use of Antwerp, used Deal as one of five ports of embarkation for a force of 40,000 men. The expedition failed. Thousands of soldiers died of marsh fever, that is malaria, and the hospital at Deal filled to overflowing. From 1730 the castle had been gradually transformed into a genteel residence, and its military role is said to have effectively ceased by around 1800, even while those wartime guns and the later relic guns remained.

The politician and banker Robert Smith, 1st Baron Carrington, carried out improvements in 1802, apparently as a rival scheme to the work of his friend Pitt at Walmer. He was born on 22 January 1752, the third son of Abel Smith and Mary Bird, and his grandfather Abel Smith had founded Smith’s Bank of Nottingham. He married Anne Boldero-Barnard at Tottenham on 6 July 1780. His elder brother Abel died on 22 January 1779, three months after being returned as member for Nottingham, and Robert was returned unopposed in his place on 9 February 1779. He was re-elected in 1780, 1784, 1790 and 1796. In 1796 he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Carrington, of Bulcote Lodge, an elevation largely due to his part in sorting out the parlous personal finances of Pitt. The next year he was made Baron Carrington, of Upton in Nottinghamshire, in the Peerage of Great Britain, and he had to leave the Commons. Sir John Borlase Warren replaced him as one of the members for Nottingham. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1800 and of the Society of Antiquaries in 1812, and in 1819 he was admitted as a nobleman to Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was Captain of Deal Castle from 1802 until his death. According to Samuel Wilberforce, Carrington hoped to charge the cost of the works to the Treasury, but when he submitted the claims Pitt rejected them and Carrington paid himself. An engraving published in 1828 shows the Captain’s House much extended by him a few years earlier, overlooking the sea. He was the last captain to be salaried. He remained in post until his death on 18 September 1838, at the age of 86. Anne died in 1827. In 1836, at 83, he married Charlotte Hudson, who was 65. By his first wife he had one son and five daughters. His son Robert succeeded and took the surname Carrington the next year. He was also associated with claims under the compensation paid after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the Slave Compensation Act of 1837. He was awarded a payment as a slave trader. Two of three claims succeeded. He owned 268 enslaved people in Jamaica and received £4,908. The sum paid to former slave-owners as a whole was financed by a government loan of £15 million, raised with interest from Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore and charged to taxpayers, a charge that ran on until 2015.

After 1815 Deal remained a military and naval town, and the castle continued as the captain’s house. The captaincy, long since an honorary reward of the Crown, was used by most later captains as an occasional retreat while Deal grew into a summer resort. In 1829 there was an argument about whether the castle should pay local tax as a private dwelling or stay exempt as a military site. By 1860 small ornamental gardens occupied parts of the outer bastions, beside four 32-pounder guns whose presence was no more than a memory of the past. Those four guns are still at the castle. Across the Deal to Walmer road, walls enclosed a large kitchen garden with a conservatory and a hot bed, and against the outer face stood the captain’s stable and coach house. Even so, the Office of Ordnance went on maintaining the four guns and a gunpowder magazine. In reality the guns were obsolete relics, and no one treated the castle as a place of defence.

The War Office was the department that then judged it. The name has covered several bodies concerned with the army. Between 1857 and 1964 it was the department that administered the British Army, after which its work passed to the Ministry of Defence. It stood equivalent to the Admiralty for the navy and, later, to the Air Ministry for the air force. Before 1855 the words meant the office of the Secretary at War. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the army’s business was split among independent offices: the commander-in-chief, the Secretary at War, the two secretaries of state, the controller of army accounts, the Army Medical Board, the Commissariat Department, the Board of General Officers, the Judge Advocate General, the Commissary General of Muster, the Paymaster General, and, for the militia, the Home Office. When the commander-in-chief’s post stood empty, the Secretary at War answered directly to the sovereign, and he kept that independence after the command was restored. From 1704 to 1855 he was a minister of the second rank, and after 1794 he was sometimes in the Cabinet, though many of his duties moved to the new Secretary of State for War. That secretaryship began under Charles II as the secretary to the commander-in-chief. The department was called the Warr Office as early as 1694, and its growth is traditionally ascribed to William Blathwayt, secretary from 1684, who had gone with William III in the Nine Years’ War. After Blathwayt retired in 1704 the post was political, usually held by a member of the Commons, who presented the Army Estimates and was taken to signify parliamentary control of the army. Strategy sat with the Northern and Southern Departments. A Secretary of State for War was created in 1794, and in 1855 that office was merged with the Secretary at War. Thereafter War Office and War Department were used somewhat interchangeably. The former home of the department, at the junction of Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall, was sold on 1 March 2016 for more than £350 million, on a 250-year lease, to be turned into a hotel and flats. In 1898 the War Office agreed that the Office of Works should be consulted over any external change to the historic castle and that the Office of Works would pay for the work that followed. In 1904 the War Office concluded that the castle no longer had any value either as a defence or as a barracks, and it transferred the castle entirely to the Office of Works, to be conserved as a historic building. When the captain was not in residence it was opened to visitors. It was still the captain’s house, and the relationship of landlord and tenant was often strained, with arguments about what the public purse should provide. Maintenance continued until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and resumed when that war ended.

The Second World War, or World War II, ran from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945, a global conflict between the Allies and the Axis. It began when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and the United Kingdom and France declared war. After the fall of France in June 1940 the fight continued between Germany, soon assisted by Italy, and the British Empire, including the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. In December 1941 Japan attacked American and British territories, including Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. The war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945 and signed the document on 2 September. The dead are reckoned at 60 to 75 million people, a majority of them civilians.

The causes lay in unsettled business after the First World War and in the rise of fascism in Europe and of militarism in Japan. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Germany’s annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland came first. Poland was also invaded by the Soviet Union in the middle of September 1939 and partitioned under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania, while Germany conquered Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. After France fell, Britain faced Germany across the Channel, which is why a landing on the Kent shore was expected that May. Deal felt that war as an invasion coast. In May 1940, with a German landing expected, the Royal Artillery requisitioned the castle. Two emplacements for 6-inch guns were built next to the promenade, and an underground magazine was made in the paddock. A concrete observation post to direct the guns was built on the east bastion, while the interior became the battery headquarters. Another account says two 6-inch naval guns stood in front of the castle from 1940 to 1944, manned by 337 Battery of 563 Coast Regiment, and that the castle worked as a Battery Operating Post, with a first-floor room in the keep used as the Battery Office, and that it provided accommodation. Engineers put barbed wire and concrete obstacles, called dragon’s teeth, on the beach, the promenade and the neighbouring streets. The captain was William Birdwood. Field Marshal William Riddell Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood, was born on 13 September 1865 at Kirkee in India and died on 17 May 1951. He was the second son of Herbert Mills Birdwood and Edith Marion Sidonie Impey. His father had been born in Bombay, educated in Britain, and had returned to India in 1859 after passing the Indian Civil Service examination. In 1861 Herbert married Edith, the eldest daughter of Surgeon-Major Elijah George Halhed Impey of the Bombay Horse Artillery, who was also postmaster-general of the Bombay Presidency. They had five sons and a daughter. When William was born, his father sat on the Bombay legislative council, and he later became a judge of the Bombay high court. William was promoted brevet major on 20 November 1901 and local lieutenant colonel in October 1901, and the South African honours list of 26 June 1902 gave him a brevet lieutenant colonelcy. His substantive majority came on 9 May 1903. On 26 June 1905 he was military secretary to Kitchener with the rank of full colonel, and on 14 February 1906 he was made an aide-de-camp to the king. He was educated at Clifton College, held a militia commission in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1883, resigned it in March 1885, and was commissioned early from Sandhurst, because of the Russian war scare of 1885, as a lieutenant in the 12th Royal Lancers on 9 May 1885. He transferred to the Bengal Staff Corps on 20 December 1886 and to the 11th Bengal Lancers in 1887, and he saw action on the North-West Frontier in 1891. He was adjutant of the Viceroy’s Bodyguard in 1893, a captain from 9 May 1896, and he served in the Tirah campaign of 1897 to 1898, including Chagru Kotal, Dargai on 18 October 1897, Saran Sar, the Warran Valley and Dwatoi. He was mentioned in despatches. In the Second Boer War, which began in October 1899, he was a brigade major with a mounted brigade in Natal from 10 January 1900 and then deputy assistant adjutant general on the staff of Lord Kitchener from 15 October 1900. Kitchener later wrote that this young officer had held a difficult post as assistant adjutant-general of mounted troops and as adviser on the distribution of remounts, and that he had shown exceptional ability and remarkable tact. Birdwood became Kitchener’s military secretary on 5 June 1902 and followed him home in the Orotava, which reached Southampton on 12 July 1902. He went back to India with Kitchener in November 1902. In the First World War he commanded the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli in 1915, leading the landings and later the evacuation, and he then commanded the Australian Corps and the Fifth Army on the Western Front. He commanded the Northern Army in India in 1920 and was Commander-in-Chief, India, in 1925, and he retired as a field marshal.

Early in the Second World War a German bomb destroyed much of his quarters at Deal and he moved to Hampton Court Palace. The date is given both as 5 October 1940, when a bomb severely damaged the Captain’s House, and as November 1940, during the Blitz. A photograph of the repair work in the 1950s shows damage to the eastern inner bastion from a German bomb in 1940. The superstructure around the eastern bastion was rebuilt after the war. In April 1944, as the prospect of invasion receded, the Home Guard replaced most of the artillerymen until the end of the war. In 1945 the Office of Works took the castle back and planned to restore it, as closely as possible to its Tudor form, and to open it to the public. That meant removing what remained of the Captain’s House. From 1951, the year of Birdwood’s death, the castle officially ceased to be a residence and passed to the Ministry of Public Building and Works. Restoration in the 1950s largely removed the remaining eighteenth-century alterations on the seaward side. No captain was appointed from 1951 until 1974 in one account. In another, the captaincy, in abeyance since 1951, was revived in 1972 as an honorary appointment and given to General Sir Norman Tailyour, who was succeeded in 1979 by Major General Ian Harrison. Since Harrison’s death in 2008 the captaincy has been held by virtue of office by the Commandant General of the Royal Marines. The castle is no longer a residence. It reopened to the public in the early 1960s. In the twenty-first century it is operated by English Heritage as a place for visitors and received 25,256 visitors in 2008. It remains part of the Crown Estate. It is a scheduled monument and a guardianship monument, designated on 9 October 1981 under the name Artillery castle at Deal.

The castle still keeps most of its sixteenth-century structure. A tall keep with six semicircular bastions stands at the centre, flanked by a further six rounded bastions, of which the western one served as the gatehouse, the whole surrounded by the moat and a curtain. The historian John Hale took the original design for a transition between older medieval English forts and the newer Italian manner. Like the other Downs castles, Deal had faults that were recognised later. It needed too many guns ever to be fully equipped. Its curved surfaces were vulnerable. The attempt to keep the walls low and thick was only partly successful, because several tiers of guns forced a relatively high profile and exposed the work to fire. The embrasures were widely splayed so the guns could traverse, and vents were made so that smoke could leave. The dry moat is 20 metres, or 66 feet, wide and 5 metres, or 16 feet, deep. It was originally crossed by a stone causeway and a drawbridge. The drawbridge is now a modern wooden bridge. The gatehouse still has its original iron-studded doors, which the historian Jonathan Coad considered among the best preserved of their date, and five murder holes for missiles or handguns along the passage. A portcullis once closed the entrance. The gatehouse originally looked onto a walled garden, since largely destroyed. The outer bastions have eighteenth-century ramparts. The passage called the Rounds runs along the outside of those bastions and links the handgun positions at the base of the moat.

Inside the keep a central newel stair joins basement, ground floor and first floor. The garrison lived on the ground floor, the captain used the first floor, and the basement held stores. Radial walls divide the ground floor, which was once further split by partitions. The original ovens and fireplace survive. The first floor mainly dates from the 1720s, with some Tudor parts remaining. A wooden lantern on the top of the keep holds a bell dated 1655, and there is graffiti of the early eighteenth century. Gun embrasures were turned into sash windows in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The timbers have been dated, and the dates separate original work from later repair. Sampling in 2014 and 2015 took 54 core samples. Analysis of 51 of them, together with measurements made in place on three boards from a door, produced six oak chronologies covering 21 samples and one pine chronology of six samples. An unusually high share, 75 per cent, stayed undated after that first campaign: 26 measured oak samples, one measured pine sample and one of the boards. All six consoles of the ground-floor ceiling in the central tower form a chronology of 137 rings spanning 1465 to 1601, with a felling range of 1604 to 1629, which indicates building work in the early seventeenth century. The gatehouse roof is pine, probably imported from Scandinavia. Its 170 rings span 1520 to 1689. One rafter has a possible felling date of 1689 and another of 1687, and the other pine samples also point to felling at the very end of the seventeenth century. The roof is therefore evidence of an undocumented rebuilding or significant repair at that time. Two boards from a first-floor door lack sapwood. One, with a last heartwood ring in 1520, was likely felled after 1535. The other was likely felled after 1452. The boarded door may be an early survival from the original fort.

The main ceiling beams were the puzzle. They had been suspected of belonging to the repairs of the 1950s. Six oak beams of the ground-floor ceiling, a sequence 118 years long, were dated by radiocarbon wiggle-matching in an investigation of 2021 to 2022, with the laboratory work on seven annual rings done in 2021. The heartwood-sapwood boundary on five of the six samples varies by only seven years, which suggests one programme of felling. The supported date spans 1401 to 1518. The final ring of the sequence is placed at 1518, and the average heartwood-sapwood boundary at 1515. Allowing 15 to 40 sapwood rings, the 95 per cent range for mature oaks in Kent, the estimated felling is 1530 to 1555. The beams radiate like the spokes of a wheel from the middle of the tower to the outer walls. They are original, and they are not the 1950s repairs that had been suspected. The consoles that sit with them are not original.

Water getting into the fabric of the east and north-east bastions led to an archaeological evaluation of two hand-dug trenches, one on each of those bastions, as a first look at how the bastions were built underneath. The report of that evaluation carries a publication date of 2021 and a catalogue issue date of 12 June 2024. Both trenches found structures from earlier phases of development and refurbishment: walls, a possible earlier surface of the eastern bastion, and an artillery chimney with its capping stones, the remains of earlier defensive fittings in the fabric. There was no sign that anyone had tried to waterproof the bastions when the castle was refurbished. The made ground is mainly silty sand, which is likely to let water move through the structure. The material is of the post-medieval centuries.

A separate watching brief, kept during improvements to the car park south of the castle, was published in 2018 and issued on 14 August 2019. It found more than a dozen buried features: eleven pits, two post-holes and a length of gravel path. All of them appeared to be of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Nothing there could be tied to the early occupation of the castle, and there were no traces of any significant structures of the Second World War coastal gun battery that had stood nearby. The finds were later post-medieval: glazed china and glass, fragments of clay tobacco pipe, a few pieces of broken red brick and roof tile, a small amount of animal bone, and some prehistoric flintwork, perhaps brought from elsewhere.

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