In the same neighbourhood is Allington Castle, an ivy-mantled ruin, another example of vanished glory, only two tenements occupying the princely residence of the Wyatts, famous in the history of State and Letters.  Sir Henry, the father of the poet, felt the power of the Hunchback Richard, and was racked and imprisoned in Scotland, and would have died in the Tower of London but for a cat.  He rose to great honour under Henry VII, and here entertained the King in great style.  At Allington the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt was born, and spent his days in writing prose and verse, hunting and hawking, and occasionally dallying after Mistress Anne Boleyn at the neighbouring castle of Hever.  He died here in 1542, and his son Sir Thomas led the insurrection against Queen Mary and sealed the fate of himself and his race.

Hever Castle, to which allusion has been made, is an example of the transition between the old fortress and the more comfortable mansion of a country squire or magnate.  Times were less dangerous, the country more peaceful when Sir Geoffrey Boleyn transformed and rebuilt the castle built in the reign of Edward III by William de Hever, but the strong entrance-gate flanked by towers, embattled and machicolated, and defended by stout doors and three portcullises and the surrounding moat, shows that the need of defence had not quite passed away.  The gates lead into a courtyard around which the hall, chapel, and domestic chambers are grouped.  The long gallery Anne Boleyn so often traversed with impatience still seems to re-echo her steps, and her bedchamber, which used to contain some of the original furniture, has always a pathetic interest.  The story of the courtship of Henry VIII with “the brown girl with a perthroat and an extra finger,” as Margaret More described her, is well known.  Her old home, which was much in decay, has passed into the possession of a wealthy American gentleman, and has been recently greatly restored and transformed.

Sussex can boast of many a lordly castle, and in its day Bodiam must have been very magnificent.  Even in its decay and ruin it is one of the most beautiful in England.  It combined the palace of the feudal lord and the fortress of a knight.  The founder, Sir John Dalyngrudge, was a gallant soldier in the wars of Edward III, and spent most of his best years in France, where he had doubtless learned the art of making his house comfortable as well as secure.  He acquired licence to fortify his castle in 1385 “for resistance against our enemies.”  There was need of strong walls, as the French often at that period ravaged the coast of Sussex, burning towns and manor-houses.  Clark, the great authority on castles, says that “Bodiam is a complete and typical castle of the end of the fourteenth century, laid out entirely on a new site, and constructed after one design and at one period.  It but seldom happens that a great fortress is wholly original, of one, and that a known, date, and so completely free from alterations