Sherborne Castle is a 16th-century Tudor mansion southeast of Sherborne in Dorset, England, within the parish of Castleton. It stands in a park which formed a small part of the Digby estate. Old castle Sherborne Old Castle () is the ruin of a 12th-century castle in the grounds of the mansion. The castle was built as the fortified palace of Roger de Caen, Bishop of Salisbury and Chancellor of England, and still belonged to the church in the late 16th century. In the early 1140s, the castle was captured by Robert Earl of Gloucester during the Anarchy, when it was considered, "the master-key of the whole kingdom". After passing through Sherborne on the way to Plymouth, Sir Walter Raleigh fell in love with the castle, and Queen Elizabeth relinquished the estate, leasing it to Raleigh in 1592. Rather than refurbish the old castle, Raleigh decided to construct a new lodging for temporary visits, in the compact form for secondary habitations of the nobility and gentry, often architecturally sophisticated, that was known as a lodge. The new house, Sherborne Lodge, was a four-storey, rectangular building completed in 1594. The antiquary John Aubrey remembered it as "a delicate Lodge in the park, of Brick, not big, but very convenient for its bignes, a place to retire from the Court in summer time, and to contemplate, etc." It had four polygonal corner turrets with angled masonry as if they were to serve for military defence, which Nicholas Cooper suggests "may be an obeisance to the old building". Its most progressive feature for its date was the entrance, disguised in one of the corner towers so as not to spoil the apparent symmetry of the facade, which was centred on a rectangular forecourt. The entrance vestibule also contained a winder stairwell and gave directly on the hall. During Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower, King James leased the estate to Robert Carr and then sold it to Sir John Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol in 1617. In the 1620s, the Digby family, in order to suit the lodge to a more permanent seat, added four wings to the house in an architectural style similar to the original, retaining the original corner towers. Civil War In the Civil War, Sherborne was strongly Royalist, with the castle now owned by Lord Digby, an advisor to the king. The castle was captured by Parliamentarians in September 1642, and