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Personalities
Throughout
its history Berkhamsted Castle
was a royal castle, a favoured residence of
English monarchs and their families. Princes and princesses were born here, queens and
earls died here, and many others of national importance resided here. Records tell us that
Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine kept Court
here in 1163 and that Henry visited on other occasions too. Thomas à
Becket, as Chancellor,
had transformed the castle for Henry into one of his more comfortable
households.
King John spent some time here in 1216 shortly before his
death, improving the defences against threatened revolts of the barons; his widowed queen,
Isabel, was here when the castle surrendered to Louis of France in December 1216 after two
weeks’ siege. In 1226 Richard, Earl of
Cornwall, was granted the
Honour and Manor of Berkhamsted and made the castle the administrative centre of the entire
earldom. His son, Edmund, later founder of the College of
Bonhommes at Ashridge, was born here. The
Black
Prince hunted
regularly in the deer park and he and his wife,
Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, honeymooned at the castle. Later, after the battle of
Poitiers in 1356 King John of France was imprisoned at the castle.
A century later in 1469 Edward IV granted the castle to his
mother Cicely,
Duchess of York. After her death in 1495 it was no longer inhabited. It passed in turn to
three of Henry VIII’s queens, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, until
Edward VI granted it to his sister, Elizabeth. In 1580 she leased the Manor to Sir Edward
Carey, Keeper of the Queen’s Jewels, who built himself Berkhamsted Place on the hill above the castle.
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