This castle, founded by Roger de Montgomery, on a rock, in the north-east angle of the town, supposed to be in the year 1112, was considerably enlarged by Sir Henry Sydney. Its ancient British name, Dinan Llys Tywysog, signifies the Prince’s Palace. The vicissitudes of war have frequently been exemplified in this castle; it has had its lords and its princes; it has been plundered, captured, dismantled, and repaired, in those periods of civil warfare, which this unfortunate country in former times continually experienced. Philips, in the History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury, during those melancholy troubles, gives some account of this castle. Some historians affirm that King Edward V. and his brother were born in Ludlow Castle; but others, not crediting this assertion, attribute their birth-place to Wigmore; certain, however, it is, that during their minority they here held their court, under the tuition of Lord Anthony Woodville and Lord Scales, till they were removed to London, and soon after smothered in the Tower by the command of their cruel and ambitious uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Here, likewise, Prince Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII., celebrated his marriage with the virtuous Catherine of Arragon; and in the year 1502 he here paid the debt of nature, and was buried in the cathedral church of Worcester. The account of the representation at Ludlow of Milton’s celebrated mask of Comus, is thus mentioned in the life of that poet, prefixed to Newton’s edition:—“It was in the year 1634 that this mask was presented at Ludlow Castle. There was formerly a president of Wales, and a sort of a court kept at Ludlow, which has since been abolished; and the president at that time was the Earl of Bridgewater, before whom Milton’s mask was presented on Michaelmas night; and the principal parts, those of the two brothers, were performed by his lordship’s sons, the Lord Brackly and Mr. Thomas Egerton; and that of the lady, by his lordship’s daughter, the Lady Alice Egerton.” In the first year of William and Mary the presidency was dissolved by Act of Parliament, “being a great grievance to the subject, and a means to introduce an arbitrary power, especially in the late reign, when a new convert family were at the head of it.”