The heavily restored gatehouse to Nottingham Castle (A Nicholson, 2000).
The heavily restored gatehouse to Nottingham Castle (A Nicholson, 2000).

At the commencement of hostilities the Castle was garrisoned by the Parliamentary army under the command of Colonel John Hutchinson, who was subsequently made Governor of the town as well as the Castle. How well he acquitted himself in the performance of his arduous duties has been well described in the “Memoirs” written by his clever and devoted wife, and needs no further chronicling; but a graphic description of the Castle as it appeared in 1643 contained in the “Memoirs,” notwithstanding slight historical inaccuracies, is very instructive. Mrs. Hutchinson writes:—“The Castle was built upon a rock, and nature had made it capable of very strong fortification, but the buildings were very ruinous and uninhabitable, neither affording room to lodge soldiers nor provisions. The Castle stands at one end of the town, upon such an eminence as commands the chief streets of the town. There had been enlargements made to this Castle after the first building of it. There was a strong tower, which they called the old tower (the Norman fortress), built upon the top of all the rock, and this was that place where Queen Isabell, the mother of King Edward the Third, was surprized with her paramour Mortimer, who by secret windings and hollows in the rock came up into her chamber from the meadows lying low under it, through which there ran a little rivulet called the Line, almost under the Castle rock. At the entrance of this rock there was a spring which was called ‘Mortimer’s Well,’ and the cavern ‘Mortimer’s Hole’; the ascent to the top is very high and not without some wonder. At the top of all the rock there is a spring of water; in the midway to the top of this tower there is a little piece of the rock on which a dove-cot had been built, but the Governor took down the roof of it and made it a platform for two or three pieces of ordnance, which commanded some streets and all the meadows better than the higher tower; under that tower which was the old Castle there was a larger castle (the Edwardian additions), where there had been several towers and many noble rooms, but the most of them were down; the yard of that (the inner ballium) was pretty large, and without the gate there was a very large yard (the outer ballium) that had been walled, but the walls were all down, only it was situated upon an ascent of the rock, and so stood a pretty height above the streets; and there were the ruins of an old pair of gates with turrets on each side. Before the Castle the town was on one side of a close which commanded the fields approaching the town; which close the governor afterwards made a platform; behind it was a place called the park that belonged to the Castle, but then had neither deer nor trees in it, except one growing under the Castle, which was almost a prodigy, for from the root to the top there was not one straight twig or branch on it; some said it was planted by King Richard the Third, and resembled him that set it. On the other side the Castle was the little river of Line, and beyond that large flat meadows bounded by the Trent. In the whole rock there were many large caverns, where a great magazine and many hundred soldiers might have been disposed, if they had been cleansed and prepared for it, and might have been kept secure from any danger of firing the magazines by any mortar pieces shot against the Castle. In one of these places it is reported that one David, a Scotch King, was kept in cruel durance, and with his nails had scratched on the walls the story of Christ and His twelve Apostles.

The Castle was not flanked and there was no works about it when Mr. Hutchinson undertook it, but only a little breastwork before the outmost gate. There was a large room which was the chapel in the Castle; this they had filled full of prisoners, beside a very bad prison, which was no better than a dungeon, called the lion’s den.”