Siege of Tutbury Castle
History & Significance
Tutbury Castle is a largely ruined medieval castle at Tutbury, Staffordshire, England, in the ownership of the Duchy of Lancaster and hence currently of King Charles III. It is a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building. People who have stayed in the castle include Eleanor of Aquitaine and Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a prisoner there.
Tutbury Castle became the headquarters of Henry de Ferrers and was the centre of the wapentake of Appletree, which included Duffield Frith. With his wife Bertha, he endowed Tutbury Priory with two manors in about 1080. It would seem that Tutbury at that time was a dependency of the Norman abbey of St Pierre‑sur‑Dives.
William de Ferrers, 3rd Earl of Derby joined a rebellion against Henry II in 1173–74 and Tutbury Castle was one of at least twenty castles belonging to the rebels that were slighted.
The castle was "nearly destroyed" by Prince Edward in 1264 after the rebellion of Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby. In 1269, after a further rebellion the lands were given to Edmund Crouchback and have remained part of the Duchy of Lancaster.
By the 1300s the castle was largely repaired, though as a residential castle rather than a military strong-point.
"Thomas, the second Earl of Lancaster [c. 1278–1322], not only repaired the ravages it had sustained while in the hands of the Earl of Derby, but gave to it a grandeur and magnificence which it had not previously possessed. He made it his principal residence, and, from the more than princely style in which he lived, became a benefactor to the surrounding country, giving a stimulus to the industry of his tenantry, and finding a market for all their productions; his housekeeping in one year (1313) amounting to the amazing sum of 22,000l of our present money, and this too at a time when provisions of all kinds were remarkably cheap."
Some time before 1370 the castle was even more substantially rebuilt again by John of Gaunt. From 1372 until her death in 1394, the castle was the permanent residence of Constance, the wife of John of Gaunt. Her court lavishly patronised music and the arts, and was said to have "somewhat similar to a modern Windsor" in its ambition.
In June 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots was at Carlisle Castle after fleeing from Scotland after her defeat at the battle of Langside, and the English Privy Council decided to lodge her either at Nottingham Castle, Fotheringhay Castle or Tutbury, so that she was further from the Scottish border or Yorkshire. In January 1569 the Scottish Queen was taken from Bolton Castle, going first to Ripon and staying a night nearby, then to Wetherby staying a night with John Vavasour at Hazlewood Castle, then on to Pontefract, Rotherham, Chesterfield, and Wingfield Manor. George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury was given detailed instructions for keeping Mary, which permitted him to lodge her at Sheffield from time to time (which he preferred), and briefed him on what he should say to her regarding her political predicament.
The ground they fought on
The site of Siege of Tutbury Castle lies on Triassic Rocks (Undifferentiated), bedrock that formed in the Triassic. The rock here is mudstone, siltstone and sandstone.
The failed assault of 1643 was a footnote to a far larger prize moving through the same country: the Queen's arms convoy. Henrietta Maria had landed at Bridlington in February 1643 with weapons and munitions bought abroad for her husband's cause, and the whole summer's fighting along the Trent turned on getting that train of supplies safely south to the King at Oxford. Sir John Gell's attack on Tutbury and, days later, Thomas Tyldesley's cavalry charge across Burton Bridge were moves in the same game. Tutbury, on its ridge above the valley, was one of the Royalist strongholds guarding the road the convoy had to take.
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- Tutbury Castle · Wikipedia
- Battle of Burton Bridge (1643) · Wikipedia