Raglan Castle began its transformation into a major residence around 1435 under Sir William ap Thomas, a Welsh landowner and soldier who rose through service to the English crown. He acquired the property through marriage and built the freestanding hexagonal Great Tower within its own moat. His son William Herbert expanded the complex after supporting Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses and becoming Earl of Pembroke. Raglan’s scale and refinement expressed a family’s rapid ascent from regional influence to the center of Yorkist government.

Successive courtyards, a powerful gatehouse, hall, chapel, kitchens, private apartments, gardens, and water features made Raglan far more than a defensive post. The Great Tower offered security and lordly accommodation, while later ranges used large windows and elaborate stonework to stage hospitality. Herbert’s household included relatives, officers, servants, retainers, craftsmen, and estate workers. Architecture organized their ranks and movement, enabling the earl to entertain allies, administer extensive lands, and present political authority through ceremony as well as armed strength.

William Herbert’s fortunes collapsed when Lancastrian forces defeated the Yorkists at Edgecote in 1469 and executed him. Raglan passed through descendants and marriage to the Somerset family, earls and later marquesses of Worcester. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they adapted the castle into a fashionable country house with long galleries, terraces, fountains, and gardens. The medieval towers remained potent symbols, but comfort, collecting, and sociability increasingly mattered more than preparation for siege.

That balance changed during the English Civil War. Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester, held Raglan for Charles I and sheltered a large Royalist garrison. Parliamentarian forces under Thomas Morgan and later Thomas Fairfax besieged it in 1646, one of the war’s final major castle operations. Artillery, trenches, shortages, and negotiation ended with surrender in August. Parliament ordered the defenses slighted; workers damaged the Great Tower and other structures, while local people removed useful materials from the abandoned residence.

The picturesque ruin later attracted antiquarians, artists, and tourists. Conservation stabilized the gatehouse, hall, courts, and shattered Great Tower without reconstructing their lost roofs and interiors. Cadw now cares for Raglan as a scheduled monument open to visitors. Its surviving fabric charts the changing purpose of a late medieval castle: dynastic statement, administrative household, Renaissance pleasure residence, Civil War fortress, quarried ruin, and protected heritage site. The deliberate breach in the Great Tower remains physical evidence that its ruin was politically created, not merely produced by time.