It was in the time of Edward the First that Dover Castle reached its full development. That was the grand era of castle-building in England, when military engineering was practised without reference to ordnance, and had attained to a remarkable ingenuity. Like all Edwardian Castles, that of Dover is concentric and has three wards, enclosed within high curtain walls strengthened with a great number of defensible towers. The outer ward had no less than twenty-seven of these towers, among which the Constable’s Tower and gateway is first for size and beauty.

It is a long, steep, and dusty climb to Dover Castle from the town. Halfway up, the visitor of forty years ago would be attracted by the tinkling of a small bell, and, looking round, his gaze would fall upon haggard creatures, gaunt and unkempt, who crouched behind iron bars and piteously adjured him to “remember the poor debtors.” Poor devils! condemned by the brutality of obsolescent laws to moulder in captivity in expiation for pitiful debts. But brutal though we were until comparatively recent years, we must not believe Victor Hugo when he says that in 1820 the grim picturesqueness of the Castle Hill was enhanced by the spectacle of three malefactors’ bodies, tarred and obscene, which swung in the winds of Heaven. That picturesque detail is more romantic than truthful; but the man who, like Victor Hugo, could write seriously in another place of the Firth of Forth as “la première de la quatrième” is not to be taken for either geographer or historian.

All these evidences of a brutal age are gone, and Dover Castle is remarkable nowadays chiefly for the extraordinary way in which old and new are grafted one upon another. Side by side with the Norman Keep are modern magazines and military storehouses, while the curtain walls of the wards give support to repositories of Royal Artillery shot and shell. Even the roof of the Keep is put to practical purpose by the War Department, for it has been vaulted and strengthened to carry a battery of heavy cannon. The Keep is of three floors; on the third floor are the State apartments in which Charles the First welcomed his Queen, and where, seventeen years later, he bade her a sad adieu. They are gloomy rooms, heavy with suspicion of danger, conspiracy, and intrigue, and are approached by a staircase flanked with secret guard-rooms; the walls pierced with arrow-slits, scarcely to be distinguished in the darkness of the place, even when you are bidden to look for them.

It is strange to read in the struggles between Charles and the Parliament with what laxity fortresses were often held for either side. Dover Castle is a case in point. It was held for the King by a small force whose discipline and courage were so to seek that it needed but the daring of a Dover merchant and a few followers to capture it. With this exploit ends the story of the warlike doings here, and all that is left to tell relates only to Marlborough’s French prisoners, who were for years cooped up within these walls pining and eating away their hearts for very love and despair of ever reaching la belle France, whose outlines they could dimly see from the narrow embrasures of their foreign prison.

For from Dover Keep the Eye of Faith may discern the coast of France, twenty-one miles across the Silver Streak; but there be those to whom, if visible at all, that coast seems like nothing so much as filmy clouds resting upon the water, and there are but few days when the sun and the absence of sea-mists enable the Englishman’s straining eyes clearly to discern that land.

The famous well of Dover Castle still exists, enclosed in the massive walls, and still nearly three hundred feet deep, despite the rubbish and unmentionable abominations cast into it by the prisoners, who chiefly occupied the second floor in which are the Norman Chapel and two large rooms, their walls still bearing traces of the prisoners’ handiwork in the shape of inscriptions. Here is the Armoury, with matchlocks, Brown Besses, muskets, and rifles; obsolete and in use. Here, too, are the pikes issued to the peasantry when all England armed to resist Napoleon’s threatened invasion. Down below (you can see it from those embrasures) is “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Pistol,” familiar, even to those who have never seen it, by the popular rhyme—

Load me well and keep me clean,
And I’ll carry a ball to Calais Green;

and all around are batteries old and new.

The sentry on Dover Keep at night, when all the world is still, has leisure for contemplation. When the moon rises in solemn majesty on summer nights and makes a lane of silvery glory across the Channel; when the winking light from Cape Grisnez shows where the French coast lies, and the glow from the lighthouse on the Admiralty Pier marks the harbour at his feet; when Dover lamps burn yellow beside the moonrays, and the high-road to London lies stark and white in the valley of the Dour, then may the sentry on his eyrie hear, between the ghostly tapping of the halyards on the flagstaff, the tramp of the ages. Forty centuries looked down upon the French in Egypt; the sentry on Dover Castle looks upon nineteen hundred years of invasion and foreign expeditions. There, where Dover streets now stand, rode Cæsar’s galleys and there our ancestors bled for their country. Down that white highway, so still at this midnight hour, have marched many generations of archers, men-at-arms, and soldiers of a more recent era, to return, covered with wounds and glory; and across that shining sea have sailed fleets innumerable. For a distance of four hundred feet below him run a series of fortified galleries and platforms, built in the Castle Keep or excavated through the solid chalk down to sea-level; while level with him, rise the Western Heights, rich in heavy ordnance, across the town. Here, then, is the end of the Dover Road, looking out across the sea; and he must needs be dull of brain who does not perceive the epic fitness of its ending.

THE END