The magnificent old castle has seen strange sights. While undergoing siege by Stephen, in his war against Maud, Prince Henry of Scotland, who accompanied him, was caught up by a long iron hook and all but pulled within the walls. Stephen himself galloped up just in time to cut the cords with his sword and rescue the dangling prince. The redoubtable Sir Hugh de Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, once lay captive in what is still known as Mortimer's Tower. It cost him three thousand marks of silver, besides all his plate, horses, and hawks, to go free again. Ludlow Castle was, at a later period, added by marriage to the already formidable holdings of the Mortimers. Roger de Mortimer took an active part in the deposition of Edward II and was created Earl of March. In imitation of King Arthur, whose great tradition arches over all that countryside, the ambitious young noble held a Round Table, and conducted Queen Isabella, with whom his relations were not above suspicion, and his boy sovereign, Edward III, to his castles of Wigmore and Ludlow, where he entertained them with "great costs in tilts and other pastimes." There was not room in England for him and for a king, and his arrogant career was ended on the Smithfield gibbet. Marlowe gives him a proud exit from the tragic stage: "Weep not for Mortimer That scorns the world and, as a traveler, Goes to discover countries yet unknown." It was his great-grandson, Edmund de Mortimer, who, by marriage with the daughter of Prince Lionel, third son of Edward III, gave that other Edmund Mortimer, his descendant, a better title to the throne than that of Henry IV. This last of the Mortimers was until his death the apparently listless centre of continual conspiracies. When he gave up his ineffectual ghost, his estates passed to his nephew, the vigorous Duke of York, who fixed his chief residence at Ludlow Castle. As the York rebellion gathered force and the Wars of the Roses set in, this neighbourhood became a centre of hostilities. The Lancastrians, in their hour of triumph, wreaked furious vengeance on Ludlow, but Edward IV, on his accession, consoled the town with a liberal charter and selected it as the residence of his sons, the Little Princes of the Tower. It is pleasant to think that before their swift fate came upon them they had a few years of happy childhood playing on the greensward of those spacious courts, perched up with their lesson books in the stone window-seats, and praying their innocent prayers within the arcaded walls of that circular Norman chapel, built on the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and praised by Churchyard as "So bravely wrought, so fayre and finely fram'd, That to world's end the beauty may endure."