Happy New Year, and welcome back to the first Podcastles episode of 2021!
This week we’re kicking off the county of Dorset by looking at two very different castles.
Portland Castle was built by Henry VIII between 1539-41 as one of Henry’s defensive castles against an attack by France or the Holy Roman Empire.
Or both. It could have happened really, given that Henry angered Catholic Europe by establishing the Church of England so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon. A Queen who was also related to the Holy Roman Emperor.
Whoops.
Over the centuries, Portland Castle saw itself repeatedly made ready for battle and then abandoned again once the danger was past. The Spanish Armada, the English Civil War, the Anglo-Dutch War. Portland Castle was ready to face them all.
Highcliffe Castle, on the other hand, had very little to do with war whatsoever. In fact, Lord Stuart de Rothsay, the man who built the castle that’s still standing today, was actually a 19th-century diplomat.
Highcliffe Castle was a family home for much of its life until the 1950s when it became a children’s home. Before that, however, it was rented by the Selfridge family (of department store and ITV drama fame), and was visited by famous guests including Kaiser Wilhelm II.
You can find out more about that connection in the ghosts and skeletons section of the episode.
As always, you can find the episode on your preferred streaming service, and you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
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Portland Castle
Fleck, Andrew, ‘“At the Time of His Death”: Manuscript Instability and Walter Raleigh’s Performance on the Scaffold’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48 No. 1, (January 2009), pp4-28 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25482960
Highcliffe Castle
Hare, Augustus J. C., The story of two noble lives: being memorials of Charlotte, Countess Canning, and Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, (London: G. Allen, 1893)
Mommsen, Wolfgang J., ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and German Politics’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. ⅔, (May-June 1990), pp289-316 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/260734
Phibbs, John, ‘Mingle, Mass and Muddle: The Use of Plants in Eighteenth-Century Gardens’, Garden History, Vol. 38, No.1 (Summer 2010), pp35-49 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27821615
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