The Somerset Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The Luttrells took the Lancastrian side in the quarrels of Red Rose and White, and suffered severely for that partisanship; Sir James, who had been knighted for valour at the bloody battle of Wakefield, being mortally wounded at the battle of Barnet, 1471, and his property forfeited to the victorious Yorkists, who granted the Luttrell acres to the Earls of Pembroke. After the battle of Bosworth, however, fourteen years later, they obtained their own again, and held it uneventfully until the beginning of hostilities between Cavaliers and Roundheads, in 1642. Mr. George Luttrell, the then owner, garrisoned Dunster Castle for the Parliamentary party, and held it for a time successfully against the Marquess of Hertford, the Royalist commander in these parts, established at Minehead, who was satisfied, in view of the formidable front made by this hilltop stronghold, in merely keeping a watch upon it, and preventing any offensive movement on the part of the garrison: thus—to use a modern military expression—“containing” the enemy. Luttrell, for his part, was satisfied at keeping the Royalists thus inactive and useless for offence elsewhere; each side thus “containing” the other: a not very stirring method of warfare. In the following year, in consequence of the sequence of Royalist successes in the West, Mr. Luttrell surrendered the castle, which was then held for three years for the King by Colonel Francis Windham. It was at this period that Prince Charles, afterwards Charles the Second, stayed here. The bedroom he then occupied is still known as “Prince Charles’s.” In those years the fortunes of the King declined, and rapidly grew desperate; until at last Dunster Castle became the sole outpost of the cause in Somerset. Finally, in 1645, it was resolved to reduce this remnant, and in November of that year a force was despatched from Taunton to besiege the Castle. The investing force was commanded by Blake, great on sea and on land, and by Sydenham, and a lengthy and stirring siege began. Both sides worked vigorously. Attack and defence proceeded on engineering lines; Blake’s men advancing cautiously by trenches, mines, and batteries; the defenders pushing forth to meet them by the same mole-like methods. On February 5th, 1646, in midst of these laborious operations, when the garrison had come near to being starved out, a column under Lord Hopton relieved them, and Blake’s men were forced to retire from beneath the walls. He kept watch, however, upon Dunster, and in the meanwhile received reinforcements. At length, on April 19th, the sturdy Windham, convinced that, the King having lost everywhere else in the West, it would be futile to hold this one remaining post, surrendered. The victorious Parliament, careful to destroy those places that had held out against it, duly ordered the Castle of Dunster to be “slighted,” otherwise to be blown up; but the order was not enforced, probably for the sufficient reason that the Luttrells, as we have seen, were themselves partisans of the popular party. The Parliament found Dunster, thus preserved, a place useful enough; for here during twelve months, from June 1650, was imprisoned that dauntless reformer and pamphleteer of those troubled times, William Prynne, who proved himself a scourge to foes and friends. He began, absurdly enough, as it seems to us in these days, by attacking “love-locks” and long hair worn by men, and short hair affected by women, with an excursus upon chin-wags and lip-whiskers; and proceeding by easy stages to a denunciation of stage-plays, religious controversy, and political bludgeoning. He was, in short, a born controversialist: the Universal Provider, so to say, of red-hot pamphlets, and generally left his opponents dead, figuratively speaking. A very grim person was William Prynne. No one, it is quite safe to say, ever called him “Willie,” and as for “Bill,” that would have been an impossible familiarity with the stern-faced Puritan, even supposing that vulgar diminutive to have at that time been invented. By the way, have the vulgarian who originated “Bill,” and the period of its origination, ever been traced? His opponents were not skilled in wordy warfare, but what they lacked in repartee and argument they fully made up for with the pillory, the whip, and the branding-irons, and they inflicted some particularly cutting rejoinders when they caused his ears to be shorn off. Thus deprived of his face-flaps, many a man would have rested from his pamphleteering, but Prynne persisted, and earned thereby the particular attention of Laud, the High Church Archbishop of Canterbury, who procured his branding on the cheeks with the letters, “S. L.” for “seditious libeller.” With that iron humour that was all his own, Prynne referred to this horrible facial disfigurement as “Stigmata Laudis.”

The loss of his aural attachments, together with the addition of this undecorative poker-work, and a fine of £5,000, so embittered Prynne that he for ever after pursued Laud with an undying hatred, and had a prominent hand in hounding the Archbishop to public trial and execution, in those days when his fellow-Puritans had obtained the upper hand. Can we honestly blame that intense malevolence he directed at the insidious Romaniser, who would have imprisoned men’s consciences again, and who did not hesitate, in procuring these savage mutilations of his opponents, thus to disfigure the image of God!

The fearless Prynne, imprisoned here awhile, passed the time of his captivity in looking over and arranging the Luttrell family papers. He was himself a Somerset man, and his detention in this castle could not have been very unpleasant, for it was then as much residence as fortress.

The fortress built here by the first of the de Mohuns ceased to exist when the castle was rebuilt about 1417 by Sir Hugh, the first of the Dunster Luttrells. The keep of that Norman place of strength was situated on the crest of the hill, now clear of buildings and used as a bowling green. The spot was once known as St. Stephen’s, from an Early English chapel dedicated to the martyr having stood here.

Nothing earlier exists in the buildings of Dunster Castle than the great inner gatehouse, half-way up to the hilltop, now covered, together with the massive curtain-walls, with a thick growth of ivy. This was the work of Reginald Mohun, who died in 1257. The fine outer gateway, built during the enlargement under Sir Hugh, bears sculptured shields with the arms of Luttrell and Courtenay, Sir James Luttrell having, like his great-grandfather Andrew, married into that family.

DUNSTER: CASTLE AND YARN MARKET.

The military works of Sir Hugh were in their turn remodelled, for the purpose of converting the castle into a residence, rather than a fortress, by George Luttrell, in the first years of the seventeenth century. Much of the Renaissance decorative plaster-work, particularly that of the Hall, belongs to this period. The havoc wrought by the siege of 1646 was fully repaired, and the Castle yet again remodelled as a residence, by Francis Luttrell. The grand staircase, elaborately and beautifully carved in oak with representations of hunting scenes, is of this period.

Curiously painted ancient leather hangings, ancient furniture, and old paintings that have been in the Luttrell family for many generations, abound in the castle, which is, it may be added, the “Stancy Castle” of Thomas Hardy’s “A Laodicean,” although it should be still further added that it is by no means well characterised in those pages.

Additions were again made in 1764; but a general overhauling and rebuilding under the direction of Salvin was undertaken by Mr. George Fownes Luttrell in 1854.