And Britain is proceeding with some energy to rule the waves at Dover, for the Harbour of Refuge is completed; to the end that the battle-ships, the merchantmen beating up and down Channel, and the fisher-boats may ride in some degree of safety, protected from the north-easterly gales that nowadays strew the Downs and the Goodwin Sands with wrecks. For centuries this project had been discussed—and shelved in the dusty pigeon-holes of the Admiralty offices. Raleigh reported in the reign of Elizabeth that “no promontory, town, or haven in Europe was so well situated for annoying the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches from the Continent;” and works were commenced to replace the pier begun by Henry the Eighth that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin. But when Defoe was here the Harbour had fallen back into its old state, half-choked with shingle cast up by the set of the tides from the westward, and the piers decayed. “Ill-repaired, dangerous, good for nothing, very chargeable and little worth,” those were the epithets the author of Robinson Crusoe applied to it, and thus it remained until 1847, despite local and half-hearted attempts to prevent the accumulation of shingle. In that year the Admiralty Pier was commenced. Meanwhile, the sea, and the tides, thrust out from Dover Harbour by this mighty arm, are setting in strongly upon the Castle Cliffs, and that Castle, the survival of six hundred years of strife and change, is being very slowly but very surely undermined. And thus it goes round our coasts; turn away the currents that eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the havens with sea-drift, and they set with additional fury upon the next unprotected place, presently to be, at great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game that never ends: a game of General Post of which the sea, at least, never tires.
DOVER CASTLE, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD: SUNRISE.
XLIII
Dover Castle possesses the longest and most continuous, if not quite the most stirring, military history of any fortress within these narrow seas. Described picturesquely by ancient chroniclers as “the very front door of England,” or, as “clavis Angliæ et repagulum,” it is, and in very truth has ever been, since its foundation, the main bulwark of Britain against foreign foes. At what precise period a Castle was first raised here is a question that has never yet and probably never will be settled. The Romans built their lighthouse here, with another on the topmost point of the Western Heights, but the first Castle is not supposed to have been built before the time of Edward the Confessor, and the first reference to it is found in that oath which Harold swore to the Duke of Normandy, that he would yield up to him both the fortress and the well which was contained in “castellum Dofris.” Of this building nothing now appears to be left, and the earliest portion of the present Castle is Henry the Second’s Keep.
DOVER CASTLE
But whatever the size and strength of the Castle that stood here in Harold’s day, it would seem to have been formidable enough to induce William the Conqueror to seek a landing elsewhere. He landed at Pevensey, and it was not until after Hastings and the fall of Romney that he turned and took Dover from the rear. The Castle was then made the seat of government for Kent, and one of those fierce fighting Bishops, Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror, installed. The Kentish people, revolting in 1074, endeavoured in vain to seize it; it was held against Stephen, and eventually surrendered to him; and here within the gloomy walls of the Saxon stronghold he died in 1154. No sooner was Henry the Second crowned than his advisers urged the rebuilding of the Castle, and to this period belong the Keep and the Inner Ward. Sixty years later the fortifications of Henry’s reign received their first shock of war when, England having been given by the Pope to Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, King of France, that Prince endeavoured to take the gift. But hateful though John, King of England, might be, Englishmen were neither content that their allegiance should be transferred without reference to themselves, nor willing to become again the prey of invaders. Therefore, they bade Prince Louis to take the Pope’s present if he could, and held Dover Castle against his forces. England, divided against itself, had permitted Louis to land, and even to be crowned in London, but the Constable of Dover Castle at that time, Hubert de Burgh, was a patriot to be won over neither by threats nor promises, and he held the Castle against all comers. The siege was undertaken in earnest. Louis sent over to France for all the artillery that the time could produce. It consisted of battering-rams and stone-throwing machines, and in this way it was sought to breach the walls. A wooden shelter for the attacking force was constructed and built up to the outer walls of the inland face of the Castle, and under cover of this device the soldiers worked the battering-rams until the defences shook again. The garrison retorted by flinging heavy stones and fire-balls on the shelter, and would either have demolished or burnt it had it not been for an ingenious invention which the French had imported. This consisted of a series of tall wooden towers called malvoisins, and ill-neighbours, indeed, they were, for they were established on the edge of the Castle ditch, where, overlooking the outer ward, and being filled with archers whose practice soon slackened the defenders’ fire, they would soon have brought the siege to a close, had not the death of the English King removed internal quarrels and aroused a united spirit of patriotism throughout England which boded ill for the prospects of the French prince. The invaders retired from London and the southern counties which they had held, not so much by force of arms as by favour of disaffected Englishmen; they gave up the siege of Dover Castle, and presently re-embarked for France.
The struggles between a despotic King and a rapacious nobility which had caused these troubles in the reign of John were soon resumed, and Dover Castle became alternately the hold of one party or the other. The most notable incident in these events was that of 1265, when the Barons held the Castle and had fourteen knights of the King’s party imprisoned in the Keep. Prince Edward attacked the Castle from without, and the prisoners, bursting out from their cells and rushing upon their gaolers from within, forced the garrison to surrender.