Greville's Castle
Warwick Castle is a 17th century reconstruction of a
ruined 14th castle (with Norman origins) carried out by
the Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, Fulke Greville between 1604 and
1614. In 1589 Warwick Castle reverted to the Crown on the death of
Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick. In 1590 Queen Elizabeth had a
survey carried out which showed that the castle was little more than
a ruin. In most places the walls had fallen down and the building
was so far gone that the surveyors were instructed to estimate how
much the stone, timbers, glass, tiles and iron would fetch if the
castle was dismantled and sold. By 1601 Warwick Castle was so
derelict that it was in danger of collapsing into the River Avon.
Thomas Spencer, in his manuscript life of Robert, 2nd Lord Brooke,
described the once great building as:
a
neglected desert; only Caesar’s Tower was an uncouth prison of
felonious persons clogd with fetters and bolts of yron. But the
rest was a habitation of night monsters, a court of satyres, an
house of hagges, a dwelling of the scritch-owle, and the flying
mouse.
In
October 1601, the old Stratford Recorder, Sir Fulke Greville and his
son Fulke, made an offer to buy the ruined castle from the Queen.
Greville senior wrote to Elizabeth’s first Secretary, Sir Robert
Cecil (HMC, Salisbury, xi. 433-4):
‘Now,
Sir, the Queen hath the ruins of a house in the country, which have
been a common gaol these ten or twelve years; the walls down in many
places hard to the ground; the roof open to all weathers; the little
stone building there was, mightily in decay; the timber lodgings
built thirty years agone for herself [Elizabeth], all ruinous;
the garden let out for forty-four years, the barns fallen and stolen
away, the court made a common passage, wherein the people prescribe
already; so as in a very short time there will be nothing left but a
name of Warwick. This, Sir I beg not, but desire to buy for as much
as it is worth; because the stone is ready cut and the love of my
country will give me carriage.’
In May
1604, King James sold what was left of Warwick Castle to Fulke
Greville junior who completely rebuilt it at the fantastic cost of
£20,000 (Dugdale), the equivalent of many millions of pounds in
today’s money. From the Watergate Tower, where he lodged, Greville
directed every detail of the re-building and his work is described
in detail in Philip Styles’s unpublished notes for a lecture given
to the Warwick Society at the Court House on the 1st of May 1953 (The
Architectural History of Warwick Castle). Greville had, for his
time, a very unusual sense of architectural history and he built in
the original late medieval style rather than in a contemporary
fashion. He transformed Warwick into one of the most luxurious
residences in England, filled with sumptuous furnishings and art
treasures, while at the same retaining its total defensive capacity.
Bishop Corbet, who visited Warwick in 1618, described the artful
combination of luxury, scenery and defence in Fulke Greville’s ‘new’
Castle of Warwick:
… a scholars home;
A place of strength and
health; in the same fort
You would conceive a castle
and a court.
he orchards, gardens,
rivers and the air
Do with trenches, rampires,
walls compare
It seems nor art nor force
can intercept it,
As if a lover built, a
soldier kept it.
His
rebuilding of Warwick Castle has secured the Recorder of
Stratford-upon-Avon an honourable place in the history of English
architecture and conservation. |
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