Historic Description of Warwick Castle

Warwick Castle

This very beautiful castle goes back in its origin to the first days of the Norman Conquest, but displays very little of its early structure, being in the main a picturesque fourteenth and fifteenth century enceinte, set with exceptionally lofty towers, enclosing a very attractive Jacobean residence, standing on the cliff above the Avon. We need not go back to foolish legends about King Guitolin, or the giant-quelling Guy of the romances – Warwick starts in 915 with Ethelfleda, the warlike Lady of the Mercians, who “timbered a burh” here, i.e., ditched and palisaded one of those frontier fortresses against the Dane, which were destined to grow into the county-towns of the Midland shires. But she was the parent of the Borough, not of the Castle of Warwick. The town which she fortified was a prosperous place with over 250 burgesses when Domesday Book was drawn up, but the castle was placed outside it, between the burh and the river. Its foundation was decreed by King William as early as 1068, and the custody of it was given to Henry de Newburgh, son of the famous Roger Beaumont of Mellent, who was made by William Rufus the first Earl of Warwick, and became the founder of a dynasty. He was well endowed with the lands of Turchil of Arden, a great English thane in those parts.

Henry de Newburgh was the builder of a large “motte and bailey” fortress on the site of the present castle. His motte is still clearly visible, set in the western wall of the present enceinte, but is covered so thickly with trees that it is difficult to investigate. A tower of much later date is built upon its northern face. The bailey may very well have included the whole area of the existing castle, its motte being not central but set upon its western and highest side.

Henry de Newburgh was the trusted friend and councillor of King Henry I, for whose accession he had been largely responsible. He was favoured in every way, used as his master’s representative, and enfeoffed by him with the Welsh March of Gower, which he planted and settled out with colonists. As he lived long, it is probable that he may have been responsible for the first stone buildings of the castle before his death in 1123, by converting the wooden house of defence on the motte into a shell-keep: and he or his son Roger (1125-1153) probably replaced the palisading of the whole enceinte with a regular wall. But the shell on the motte is not now in existence, its stone casing having been completely removed at some date before the “North Tower” now visible on the motte was erected in the fourteenth century. Roger, the second earl, had his lot cast in the unruly days of Stephen, for which he was not well suited. Being an easy-going man (vir mollis) he did not join the rebels, but was a weak supporter of the king, and finally endeavoured to escape trouble by taking the Cross and going to the Holy Land – a most inadvisable voyage in a time of civil war. The lands of a crusader were supposed to be immune from war, and this may probably have been his reason for absconding. His sons, who followed in the succession, William and Waleran, were loyal servants of Henry II – the elder of them died on Crusade in 1184, having apparently inherited his father’s tendency to roam abroad. Waleran’s son, Henry, second Newburgh of that name, was one of the few barons who supported King John during the troubles of the time of the Great Charter. In the next reign the house of Newburgh, having lasted for five generations, died out in the male line, like so many other of the comital families. The last earl, Thomas, (obit 1242) had a sister Margaret, whose husband, John du Plessis, one of the Poitevin favourites of Henry III, was on his death in 1262 the nearest heir was William Mauduit, the son of Margaret’s aunt Alicia. The one earl of the Mauduit house was originally a Montfortian; perhaps the fact that he had been kept out of the earldom for so many years by one of the king’s foreign minions made him a nationalist. But in 1263 he fell away from the opposition, and submitted to the royalists. This brought on disaster: in April, 1264, Earl William saw his castle surprised and completely sacked and dismantled by John Giffard then commanding at Kenilworth as Montfort’s lieutenant. He had to pay 1,900 marks ransom before he was released. It must have been at this time that the shell-keep was cast down, and other damage done to the original Norman buildings. Mauduit only survived this blow for a few years, and died in January, 1268, when castle and earldom went to the son of his sister, Isabella, who had married William Beauchamp, a small baron of Worcestershire.

Six Beauchamp earls followed in succession – a very vigorous and pugnacious race of high ability, each of whom in his generation was a leading man among the English baronage. As they must have taken over the castle in very bad order after the sack of 1264, it is not surprising to find that they completely rebuilt it, each earl adding his special contribution, and made Warwick into a fine castle with Edwardian features, but not of the “concentric” type. For the old enceinte of the Newburghs was preserved, and no inner ward added; the shell-keep was not restored, but residential buildings were erected on the cliff above the river, where the present Jacobean mansion stands. This latter conceals much of the Newburgh’s work, e.g., the great hall – burnt out and reconstructed – and much more of the Beauchamp’s buildings.

The great special feature of Warwick, however, is the set of towers inserted in its outer enceinte, by one or other of the Beauchamps. Earl Guy, the “Black Dog of Arden” – who (as he threatened) “bit Piers Gaveston, so that he died” by the herdsman’s sword, most illegally, on Blacklow Hill – had left his name to “Guy’s Tower,” but was not its builder, though he may have erected some of the minor and earlier towers in other parts of the walls. But the two great structures, “Caesar’s Tower” and “Guy’s Tower,” were really built by the two Earls Thomas, in the second half of the fourteenth century. The earlier Thomas, who commanded a wing at Cressy, and again at Poitiers, and was one of the most distinguished generals of Edward III, would appear to have been responsible for the massive gatehouse and barbican, as well as for Caesar’s Tower. His son, the second Thomas, one of the “Lords Appellant,” who tyrannized over Richard II, and were the victims of his revenge in 1397, built Guy’s Tower.

Both of these are mural towers of quite exceptional height, far overtopping the rest of the enceinte. One is polygonal, the other cylindrical; both have projecting machicolations, which makes them splay out at the top story. “Caesar’s has a small additional turret set upon the rampart-wall of the main tower. Guy’s Tower is 128 feet high, Caesar’s no less than 147 – their unusual loftiness makes them more like Continental than English work, and it is to be remembered that both the earls who built them had fought for many years in France.

Construction did not by any means cease at Warwick with the rearing of the great towers in the enceinte. The owners of the castle in the fifteenth century were men who made and played an even greater part in English history than did the two Earls Thomas. First came the great Earl Richard, the hero of the spirited series of biographical sketches in Rous’s Roll, that most invaluable authority for arms, dress and ceremonial in the Lancastrian period. He served through the campaigns of Henry V and Duke of Bedford across the sea, always in high command; he found time to visit the Holy Land as a pilgrim, and to joust before the princes of Italy; finally, he was regent of France in the time of oncoming disaster that followed Bedford’s death, and died at Rouen in 1439, still keeping up the losing game of English domination. He figures – a not very sympathetic character – in Bernard Shaw’s “St Joan,” as the astute warrior-statesman who cannot read the signs of the times. But to the men of his own day he represented the ideal of chivalry and loyalty, and they reared in his honour the most magnificent tomb in England. His only son is one of the pathetic “might-have-beens” of history – the lively and brilliant young man who captivated the fancy of the pious pedant Henry VI, who made him Duke of Warwick and – an odd freak – “King of the Isle of Wight.” Just as he seemed destined to rule king and state he died – aged only 22 and a few months – in 1446. He was the last male Beauchamp – the earldom passed to his infant daughter, and after her death at the age of five, to his sister Anne Beauchamp, the spouse of Richard Neville, “the Kingmaker,” always better remembered by his wife’s title of Warwick than by his paternal title of Salisbury. For twenty years Earl Richard was the most prominent figure in the realm, the pillar of the house of York, soldier, diplomatist and administrator, one whose lot should surely have been to guide the steps of a feeble king like Henry VI, rather than to be associated with his cousin Edward IV, a man as capable in war as himself, and far more unscrupulous. The clash of rival wills ended on the field of Barnet, and in 1471, the Earldom of Warwick was once more without a male heir. The castle passed first to “false fleeting perjured Clarence,” the husband of the Kingmaker’s elder daughter Isabel, and then, after the not undeserved execution and attainder of Clarence, to Richard of Gloucester, who had wedded Anne Neville, the younger sister of Isabel.

Both Clarence and Gloucester left their mark as builders on Warwick – to the former we owe the Clarence Tower; to the latter, the unfinished Bear Tower [so called from the Beauchamp cognizance of the Bear] which flank on either side an entry to the northern side of the castle, which must have been intended to supersede Earl Thomas’s great gatehouse on the east side of the main access.

With the accession of Henry VII there comes a break in the history of the castle and earldom. Clarence’s unlucky son lingered for fifteen years in prison and ended on the block; his sister Margaret Pole was never restored to the earldom, though she was granted that of Salisbury. And when Henry VIII attained and slew her in her old age, the Beauchamp dynasty might be supposed to have ended. This was not to be – among the king’s most useful and unscrupulous tools was John Dudley Lord Lisle, the son of the equally useful and unscrupulous Edmund Dudley, the minister of Henry VII. John Dudley descended from Margaret Beauchamp, sister of Duke Henry, and daughter of the great regent of France. And in 1547 he got himself created Earl of Warwick, to the prejudice of all the surviving descendants of the attained house of Clarence, and obtained possession of the castle no less than the title. This is the abominable intriguer who slew Protector Somerset, took the usurped title of Northumberland, and ruled the declining years of Edward VI. After the death of his ward he tried to be, if not a Kingmaker, at least a Queenmaker – placing his innocent daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne. Hence came the death both to him and to his unfortunate nominee on Queen Mary’s scaffolds. But on the accession of Elizabeth I, Ambrose Dudley, eldest surviving son of Northumberland, was “restored in blood,” and re-granted earldom, castle and estates – all the more willingly, perhaps, because he was the brother of the queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, who was soon to become Earl of Leicester and lord of Kenilworth.

Ambrose, a more steady and respectable character than might have been expected from the career of his father, was a trusted and competent servant of Queen Elizabeth I, in peace and war, and somewhat of a Puritan. He married thrice, but had no issue, so that when he died in 1589, a year after his brother Leicester, the earldom once more disappeared. The castle having been restored in 1560 only to Ambrose and his heirs male, fell back to the crown. Sixteen years after King James I bestowed it, in somewhat decayed conditions, as we are told, on Sir Fulke Greville, a wealthy local magnate, long M.P. of the shire, who was also given the title of Baron Brooke of Beauchamp Court. With this Fulke, and his nephew and successor, Robert, started the dynasty which still holds the place (1925). But for a century and a half the title of Warwick and buildings of the historic castle were divorced, for James I, gave the earldom to Robert Lord Rich, and Richs continued to hold it till 1759. Meanwhile the Grevilles were in possession of the castle: Fulke, their first representative, completely recast the residential block of buildings overlooking the river, into the pleasant Jacobean shape which it still preserves in the main, though George Greville in the time of George III, made many alterations in the style of his day. The second Lord Brooke, Robert, was the Puritan general whose troops ravaged Lichfield Cathedral, at whose storming he himself was slain by the ball of a “sniper” on the roof. The eighth baron, Fulke, was Tory, but a personage of such importance that on the death of the last Rich in 1759, he was possessed of sufficient influence to get the title of Warwick given to him within a few months, even by a Whig government. Thus earldom and castle were once more united, and have been so ever since.

Warwick is probably the best known and most visited, after Windsor, of all English castles. Its attraction lies in the combination of a very splendid Jacobean residence – containing some earlier features, such as the Great Hall – with a magnificent and impressive mediaeval enceinte. Probably the interior decoration and well furnished picture gallery, with its wonderful series of portraits, and the broad lawn and its peacocks, are the main delight of the tourist. But the antiquary will carry away in his mind the memory of Guy’s and Caesar’s Towers.

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