The Castle Where a Queen Asked for Refuge and Became a Prisoner Carlisle

The Castle Where a Queen Asked for Refuge and Became a Prisoner Carlisle She crossed the Solway Firth in an open fishing boat, still wearing the travel dress she had not changed in eleven days, and she walked through the gate of Carlisle Castle believing it would open again. It did not. On the eighteenth of May, fifteen sixty eight, Mary, Queen of Scots, five days beaten at Langside, asked England for refuge and an army. What she received was the deputy warden Richard Lowther and armed custody, then Sir Francis Knollys as her keeper, and a lodging in the two storey Warden's Tower in the south east corner of the inner ward. This is the story of the single afternoon that turned a fortress into a prison and a royal guest into a captive. We follow her last two days on the road from Dundrennan to that gate, we weigh the worn clothing she herself called very mean, and we read the letters she wrote from Carlisle expecting to be home in Scotland by August. She was moved to Bolton around the thirteenth of July, the opening stretch of a captivity that would not end until her execution nineteen years later. Grey and red sandstone, four hours of open water, and one crown resting on the good faith of a cousin she had never met. Sources: Agnes Strickland, Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1842. Calendar of State Papers Scotland, Volume 2, 1563 to 1569, British History Online. English Heritage, Carlisle Castle: Mary, Queen of Scots, official site history. English Heritage, Carlisle Castle phased site plan. The National Archives, Discovery catalogue, reference C13594. Wikipedia, Mary, Queen of Scots. Wikipedia, Wardrobe of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabethi.org, Mary, Queen of Scots: Captivity and Residences.