COLTON’S TOWER, DOVER CASTLE.
Dover Castle, that “great fortress, reverend and worshipful,” sits regally on the lofty cliffs and looks (what it has several times proved not to be) impregnable. It occupies a site of thirty-five acres within its ceinture of curtain-walls, studded at intervals with twenty-six defensible towers, of every size and shape. The chief entrance to the Castle precincts is by the great “Constable’s Tower,” also variously styled Fiennes, or Newgate Tower, to distinguish it from the Old Tower, formerly the principal entrance. The others have, for the most part, names sounding as strangely as those of Arthurian romance: Abrancis, or Rokesley Tower; Colton’s; Arthur’s, or North Gate; Armourer’s; Well Tower; Harcourt’s; Chilham, or Culderscot; Hurst; Arsic, or Sayes Tower; Gatton; Peveril’s Gate, also called Beauchamp, or Marshal’s Tower; Porth’s, Gasting’s, or Mary’s Tower; Clopton’s; God’s-foe; Crevecœur’s, Craville’s, or the Earl of Norfolk’s Tower; Fitzwilliam or St. John’s; Avranches, or Maunsel’s; Veville, or Pincester; Ashfordian Tower; Mamimot, or Mainmouth Tower; Palace, or Subterranean Gate; Suffolk Tower; and the Arsenal Tower. Besides this imposing array there were, and there remain still, profoundly deep ditches outside the walls. In midst of all these outworks, rising bold and massive as the great keep of the Tower of London itself, is the Palace Tower, or Keep. This is not the actual “castellum Dofris” which Harold, under stress and durance, was made to swear on the bones of the saints that he would yield to William Duke of Normandy, “with the well of water in it,” but a later array of buildings; the Keep being Norman work of about 1153. The actual well is the one now arched over and covered up in the north angle of the Keep.
The last occasion on which Dover Castle was the scene of warlike operations was when it was captured from the Royalists on August 1st, 1642. This successful enterprise was the work of a mere merchant, one Drake, and a dozen men, who at dead of night, by means of ropes and scaling-ladders, climbed the cliffs at an “inaccessible” point; as such left unguarded. Seizing the sentinel, the gates were thrown open, and the officer on duty, thinking the invading party was a much larger one, surrendered.
THE CHURCH OF ST. MARY-IN-THE-CASTLE, WITH THE ROMAN PHAROS, DOVER.
The most ancient and venerable object here—it is the oldest building in England, supposed to have been built A.D. 49—is the Roman pharos, or lighthouse, one of two that once guided the ships of the Roman emperors into the haven that was situated where the Market-place of Dover now stands. The other, of which only the platform and one fragment of stone have been found, was situated on the western heights. The fellow-tower at Boulogne, the Gessoriacum of the Romans, still remains. The rugged, roofless tower of this venerable beacon curiously neighbours the quaint early church of St. Mary-within-the-Castle, itself of great and uncertain age, and both contrast strangely with the modern evidences of casemated batteries and the sentry-go of soldiers. Many generations have tinkered and repaired the Roman pharos, whose original tufa blocks and courses of red tiles still defy the elements and the ravages of mischievous hands, while the casing of flint and pebbles set in concrete, added some two centuries ago, long since began to decay. The Roman windows were altered by Gundulf, and the upper story would seem to be the work of Sir Thomas Erpingham, Constable of Dover Castle in the reign of Henry the Fifth, for his sculptured shield of arms appears on it.
The church of St. Mary in 1860 experienced a narrow escape from complete destruction by the War Office, and was only with difficulty rescued by dint of urgent protests from antiquaries. The Department has experienced the like elsewhere, and doubtless wishes all antiquaries at the devil. The building had at that time been reduced to the condition of a coal-bunker, a process begun about a hundred and fifty years before, when it had been ruthlessly cleared out and converted into a storehouse. Among other ejected objects was the monument of the Earl of Northampton, already noticed at Greenwich. The building was opened again in 1862, after restoration.
The twenty-four-foot long brass cannon within the castle grounds, known as “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket-pistol,” is by far the best-known and most popular object here. It is not given to every one to appreciate the Roman pharos or the Norman architecture of the keep, but this long, slender piece of ordnance makes a direct and easily understood appeal to the sympathies of the crowd, largely on account of the rhyme associated with it, supposed to be a translation of the inscription in Low Dutch that is to be seen on the cannon itself, amid the arabesque devices that decorate its whole length. This familiar jingle runs thus:
“Load me well and keep me clean,
And I’ll carry a ball to Calais Green.”