The mediæval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial. The real Wiltshire peasantry, the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds’ crooks tied with cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented, and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite outside their notions of sheep-tending. Here my lady entertained great literary folk, among them Thomson of _The Seasons_, and here, in one of the sacred Arcadian grottoes, he and my lord were found drunk, and Thomson thereafter lost favour; was, in fact, thrust forth in haste and with contumely. This, my brethren, it is to love punch too well! Something of my lady’s artificial pleasance still survives, although greatly changed, in the lawns and the trees, now grown very reverend, upon which the south front of the old mansion looks; but in some eleven years after her time, when the property came to the Dukes of Northumberland, the building was leased to a Mr. Cotterell, an innkeeper, who in 1751 opened what had until then been “Seymour House” as a first-class hostelry, under the style and title of the “Castle” inn. In that year Lady Vere tells how she lay “at the Castle Inn, opened a fortnight since,” and describing it as a “prodigious large house,” grows indignant at the Duke of Northumberland putting it to such debased uses, and selling many good old pictures to the landlord. Cotterell apparently left the “Castle” almost as soon as he had entered, for we find another landlord, in the following year, advertising as follows in _The Salisbury Journal_ of August 17th, 1752: