Secrets Of Great British Castles - Season 1, Episode 3 Warwick Castle
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00:00For me, a great British castle is a fortress, a palace, a home.
00:11And a symbol of power, majesty and fear.
00:16For nearly 1,000 years,
00:18castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.
00:24These magnificent buildings have been home to some of the greatest heroes
00:28and villains in our national history.
00:31And many of them still stand proudly today,
00:34bursting with incredible stories of warfare, treachery, intrigue and even murder.
00:46Join me, Dan Jones, as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.
00:55This time, I'm at Warwick Castle.
00:58This stunning palace has been home to medieval warriors, royal mistresses and Hollywood actors.
01:07But for many of them, the castle has been too hot to handle.
01:12Warwick's big and it's beautiful, but it has a nasty habit of bringing its owners to their knees.
01:29MUSIC PLAYS
01:44One of the last earls of Warwick to live here in the castle went by the stage name Michael Brooke.
01:49He was better known as the Duke of Hollywood.
01:52Blinken will miss him.
01:54But he's here in a film from the 1930s, starring alongside David Niven and Errol Flynn.
02:01He lived an incredibly glamorous life out in Hollywood,
02:05but the reality was that underneath it, he was scrabbling around to earn a crust,
02:10crippled by the cost of running this place.
02:16When he was out in Hollywood, Brooke gave an interview to Life magazine,
02:19which tells you everything you need to know about his situation as Earl of Warwick.
02:24He says the Earl's armour and art are worth $16 million.
02:29His castle has 200 servants, 20 square miles of grounds and 24 downstairs dining rooms.
02:36That he was taking a movie job so he could afford the great expense of being Earl.
02:42He says, if I made $5,000 a week, that would not be sufficient.
02:47I hardly have pin money, he complained.
02:51The Duke of Hollywood wasn't the first Earl of Warwick
02:55to feel that the castle was getting on top of him.
03:00It's a massive fortress, and it's always come with serious obligations.
03:10Built on a natural cliff at a bend of the River Avon,
03:14this castle is pretty much bang in the middle of England.
03:21Today, it has neat lawns and picturesque gardens.
03:28It's surrounded by a huge 500-metre curtain wall
03:32with a massive Barbican gatehouse and seven great towers.
03:39But it wasn't always this pretty.
03:44The first castle was built here by William the Conqueror
03:47during the Norman Conquest in 1068.
03:50Back then, it was little more than a wooden fort on top of a hill, known as a motte.
04:03All the same, it was a crucial military base.
04:08Commanding it was a big responsibility.
04:121,000 years ago, this was a place of vital strategic importance.
04:16From Warwick, you could control Wales to the west,
04:19the roads to Scotland in the north,
04:21and England all around you from the Midlands.
04:25William the Conqueror knew that,
04:27which was why, as he moved north two years after the conquest,
04:30he left his most trusted men here as constables of the castle.
04:35Eventually, those men were replaced by the nobles,
04:39Eventually, those men were rewarded for their loyalty with a title of Earl.
04:45So, right from the start, the earls who kept Warwick Castle
04:49were expected to be trusted henchmen of the king.
04:53At the end of the 13th century,
04:55Edward I made William Beecham Earl of Warwick.
05:00His descendants became one of the most important and wealthy families in the land.
05:09The Beechams' family mausoleum is just around the corner from Warwick Castle,
05:14in the Church of St Mary.
05:17And it shows how spectacularly well they did out of being close to the crown.
05:30You don't see many royal tombs as splendid and ornate as this.
05:36This is Richard Beecham, Earl of Warwick,
05:39the man who this whole place is about, really.
05:42No wonder, this is one of the richest people, not just of his time, but of all time.
05:46This was the guardian of kings, this was the friend of kings,
05:49this is one of the greatest soldiers of his day,
05:52and it made him a fantastic amount of money.
05:58The Beecham family kept the earldom of Warwick and the castle for seven generations.
06:06Serving nine of England's kings.
06:14As well as building themselves whacking great golden tombs,
06:18the Beechams piled money into Warwick Castle.
06:23They put up that huge curtain wall
06:26and added many of the enormous towers that still stand today.
06:36It was all proof that in the Middle Ages,
06:39it paid to be a loyal servant of your king.
06:43Because if he can count on your bravery, your loyalty, or even your duplicity,
06:48he'll reward you with all the wealth and the power you can imagine.
06:54But all of this wealth and power could come at a cost.
06:58For as one Beecham Earl discovered,
07:01if you turned from being a king's friend into his enemy,
07:04then holding Warwick Castle wasn't a blessing, it was a curse.
07:13Warwick Castle was built by earls who amassed their fortunes
07:17through friendship with English kings.
07:22The tenth Earl was Guy Beecham.
07:25He lived at the end of the 13th century
07:28and helped the warrior king, Edward I,
07:31fight his brutal wars with Scotland.
07:37But in 1307, Edward died
07:40and was succeeded by his feckless son, Edward II.
07:47This Edward was idle, immature and politically naive.
07:52Worst of all, he was obsessed with his best friend and confidant,
07:57a French knight called Piers Gaveston.
08:02Gaveston was loathed by Guy Beecham
08:05and Warwick Castle became the centre of a covert plot
08:09to get rid of the king's toxic companion.
08:16Gaveston and Edward were lifelong friends.
08:19We don't know if they were lovers, if they were blood brothers
08:22or if they were something else.
08:24What we do know is Gaveston annoyed the hell
08:27out of the other English nobles.
08:33He was rude, he was obnoxious
08:35and he made up funny nicknames for them.
08:38His nickname for Guy Beecham was the Black Dog of Arden.
08:45Gaveston occupied all of Edward's time and attention.
08:49Instead of crushing the Scots on the battlefield,
08:52as his father had done,
08:54Edward simply hung out with his best mate,
08:57wasting time and taxation.
09:01To men like Guy Beecham, who had built his name and his castle
09:05on fighting in royal wars, this was incredibly frustrating.
09:10But worse than anything else, Gaveston distracted the king
09:13at a time when England needed strong leadership.
09:18Eventually, Beecham and a group of other nobles
09:21decided that something had to be done.
09:25In 1311, a group of earls, led by Guy Beecham
09:29and the king's cousin, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster,
09:32drew up an incendiary document they called the Ordinances.
09:40These were a set of rules designed to rein in the young king
09:44and to get rid of Gaveston,
09:46the man they described as his most evil counsellor.
09:51If you want to get an idea for just how much the English earls
09:54hated Gaveston, it's here in the Ordinance that relates to him.
09:58So they say,
09:59"'Piers Gaveston has led the Lord King astray,
10:02"'counselled him badly and persuaded him deceitfully
10:06"'in many ways to do evil.'"
10:08And it goes on,
10:09"'He's gathered to himself all the king's treasure,
10:12"'he's made the king take bad ministers,
10:14"'and he does all of this treacherously
10:17"'to the great disgrace and loss of the realm
10:20"'and the manifold destruction of the people.'"
10:25And here's Gaveston's punishment.
10:27He has to leave England and all the king's realms
10:30forever and without return.
10:32The problem was, it wouldn't be long before Gaveston was back
10:36and England's earls were having to consider
10:38an even more drastic solution.
10:41And Warwick Castle would be the key to it.
10:45In 1312, Gaveston broke the terms of his exile.
10:50He came back to England.
10:52He thought the king could protect him from his enemies.
10:56He was wrong.
10:58As he passed through the village of Deddington,
11:01just 25 miles from Warwick,
11:03Beecham and his men kidnapped Gaveston
11:06and took him back to the castle.
11:08Gaveston was imprisoned in preparation for a trial.
11:11Now, it was dressed up to look like justice,
11:13but obviously it was nothing of the sort.
11:19He was brought to the great hall of the castle to face his judges.
11:25On one side was Gaveston.
11:27Across the room were his enemies, Guy Beecham,
11:30the king's cousin, Thomas Earl of Lancaster,
11:33and many of the barons he'd spent so much time with.
11:37For his friends, he'd spent so much time insulting.
11:42This was a kangaroo court.
11:46As soon as he was brought in, Gaveston's fate was sealed.
11:54After a short hearing,
11:56in which he was not allowed to speak in his own defence,
11:59he was convicted as a traitor and sentenced to death.
12:03No!
12:06No!
12:11No!
12:13Gaveston was taken from Warwick Castle to nearby Blacklow Hill.
12:17He was dragged, kicking and screaming, begging for mercy.
12:23He'd receive none.
12:26GUNSHOTS
12:33In the hollow of this rock was beheaded on the first day of July, 1312,
12:38by barons lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall.
12:43I love that. Barons as lawless as himself.
12:46We know exactly who we're talking about here.
12:48Lancaster, the king's cousin, but also Guy Beecham, Earl of Warwick.
12:56When the king found out about Gaveston, he was apoplectic
13:00and he swore revenge on the men who'd done it.
13:03Lancaster was dead within ten years, Beecham was dead within three,
13:07and it looked as though the family name was ruined forever.
13:16But not for long.
13:18Just 12 years later, Edward II had himself been deposed and murdered.
13:23His son, Edward III, took over,
13:26and Guy's son, Thomas, soon had the new king's ear.
13:30The earls of Warwick and their castle could rise again.
13:40This is the tomb of someone who's very close to kings.
13:43This is Thomas Beecham, Earl of Warwick.
13:46And you can see he's dressed here in his chain mail
13:51and his plate armour.
13:53This is a man who'd fought the French in the Hundred Years' War.
13:57The fact he's been buried or represented after death as a soldier
14:02tells you how he would have thought of himself.
14:07Here he's lying hand-in-hand with his wife,
14:10but in life he'd have gone hand-in-hand with the king.
14:16Edward III transformed England
14:18into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe.
14:27Thomas Beecham and his family helped to smash the French,
14:31and you can still see the rewards they earned today.
14:37Thomas Beecham fought at some of the most famous engagements
14:40of the Hundred Years' War.
14:42Crecy, Poitiers, the Siege of Calais.
14:45He was known as the Devil Warwick.
14:48Entire French towns would surrender or flee in terror
14:52when they heard he was coming.
14:55For his loyalty and his bravery,
14:57the king rewarded him with money, land and titles.
15:02The booty the Beechams earned while fighting overseas
15:05was pumped back into their castle in England.
15:10In the 14th century, they added a heavily fortified gatehouse
15:14and barbican on the north-east wall.
15:19The 12-sided, 40-metre-tall Guy's Tower
15:23and the even taller and more imposing Caesar's Tower.
15:32But they didn't just expand the castle upwards.
15:35They went down, too.
15:38Deep below Caesar's Tower lies a dungeon
15:41that once held prisoners captured during England's war with France.
15:46It was one of the most feared dungeons in Europe.
15:50In fact, it was such a rotten, filthy place to end your days
15:54that the French came up with a special name for it,
15:57the Oubliette.
16:00Oh, God!
16:02Well, I can see a very small hole.
16:04What's the thinking behind this?
16:06Well, it's, as the name implies,
16:08derived from the French oubliette to forget.
16:10They would take a prisoner and they'd put him down this hole
16:13and literally forget about him.
16:15Absolutely terrible.
16:16From the look of it, I reckon I could just about fit down there.
16:19Well, let's give it a whirl, then.
16:21I'm going to take my jacket off.
16:23If you take that grill away.
16:25It is absolutely tiny.
16:27I mean, I can fit my feet down there.
16:30Oh, dear.
16:32God, it gets colder as soon as you...
16:36..squeeze in.
16:37It's a tight squeeze. Watch yourself.
16:39Just trying to fit my shoulders in.
16:44And if you pass me my torch...
16:48Oh!
16:52Well, it's cold, it's dark.
16:55I mean, this is just about as grim as it gets.
17:00You're right here at the very base of the castle.
17:04And what's weird is just that silence.
17:07You've got feet upon feet of rock all around you.
17:10I can see up here what I guess would have been the latrines,
17:14so God knows what would have come flying down here and rolling down.
17:18So I'm basically imprisoned in a sewer down here.
17:21Exactly right.
17:22God, that's disgusting.
17:24And in complete darkness.
17:26And that must drive you mad eventually.
17:29If you look at prisoners who've been kept in confined spaces
17:32for greater lengths of time,
17:34a lot of them will develop complete character disintegration.
17:38They'll be hypersensitive to stimuli of any sort.
17:41Violent hallucinations are not uncommon.
17:43I think I'm getting some of those already, actually.
17:46Oh, dear. So how long do you think you'd last?
17:49Well, if you'd truly been forgotten, you weren't fed or watered,
17:52maybe you would have lasted anything from three weeks to a couple of months.
17:56So in a way, it would probably be worse to die of starvation
17:59than to be fed and kept in here going madder and madder.
18:03You try to cry, but you can't cry because you've got no tears.
18:07Oh, my God.
18:08Your mucous membranes would break down
18:11and you'd bleed from your nose and mouth.
18:13You break down in sores, you bleed.
18:16Eventually, you start to get more physiological effects,
18:19like renal failure or the heart shuts down.
18:23So once you're down in the oubliette, it's a one-way ticket.
18:27You're not coming out.
18:28That's absolutely right.
18:37In the 1440s, the long line of Beecham male heirs ran out.
18:42The Warwick title and the castle now passed by marriage
18:46to one of the most notorious men of the whole Middle Ages,
18:51Richard Neville, or as he's better known, Warwick the Kingmaker.
18:57Neville was the central player in the Wars of the Roses,
19:01a bitter conflict between the rival English royal houses
19:05of Lancaster and York.
19:08Both of them claimed the crown for themselves.
19:12Their long and bloody struggle for supremacy tore England apart
19:17and one of its most dramatic episodes was played out here
19:21at Warwick Castle.
19:23For more than 30 years, royal authority in England collapsed
19:27and the crown was fought over by factions,
19:30each aiming to put their own king on the throne.
19:34In the middle of them all was Richard Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker.
19:41Richard Neville was clearly a very ambitious man
19:44who'd done very well, he'd married into a great earldom.
19:48He was also a very calculating, manipulative sort of guy
19:52who always backed himself to play factions off against one another
19:57and come out with the best possible result for himself,
20:00for his family and for the dynasty he was trying to create.
20:06And that relentless, ruthless ambition meant that Neville
20:10would go to any lengths to achieve his ends, including high treason.
20:18In the 1450s, Neville and a small group of other noblemen
20:22rebelled against King Henry VI, a weak, vacillating monarch
20:27who was simply not cut out for kingship.
20:33They succeeded in deposing Henry.
20:36In his place, Neville helped to put a new king,
20:40Edward IV of the House of York.
20:43As a reward for helping Edward take the throne,
20:46Neville expected almost limitless power, territory and titles.
20:52But before long, Edward and Neville had fallen out
20:56and the Kingmaker had taken spectacular revenge.
21:01In Warwick's Machiavellian mind, Edward was going to be the sort of king
21:05he could push around, a puppet, if you like,
21:08but it didn't work out like that.
21:11At the beginning of his reign, Edward married in secret
21:15and Neville was forced to watch as power drained away from him
21:19and Neville was forced to watch as power drained away from him.
21:23At the beginning of his reign, Edward married in secret
21:27and Neville was forced to watch as power drained away from him
21:31towards the king's new in-laws.
21:33He was never going to put up with that.
21:43In a bid to regain the power he'd lost,
21:46Neville masterminded another rebellion.
21:50In 1469, he led an army against Edward.
21:55Edward's forces were defeated in battle
21:58and the king was taken prisoner.
22:01Warwick brought him to the castle, threw him in Caesar's Tower
22:05and began to rule England himself.
22:13Neville thought he had power in England all sewn up, but he was wrong.
22:17He'd reached the limits of his ambition.
22:20The other English nobles refused to accept Neville ruling over them.
22:26As England dissolved into chaos, disorder and lawlessness,
22:30Neville realised he had no choice but to let Edward go free.
22:35But the struggle for the English throne was far from over.
22:40Six months later, Edward was back,
22:43with troops supplied by the Duke of Burgundy.
22:46He met Neville at the Battle of Barnet.
22:48Their armies clashed in the fog
22:50and in the confusion, Neville's army attacked itself.
22:58Neville tried to flee on horseback, but he was captured and cut down.
23:03Neville's death wasn't enough for Edward.
23:06No-one locked up kings of England in their castle and got away with it.
23:11He had Neville's corpse brought to St Paul's Cathedral in London
23:15so that everybody could see what happened to kingmakers in the end.
23:20For generations, earls of Warwick had benefited from being close to the king.
23:25But Edward was not.
23:28For generations, earls of Warwick had benefited from being close to the crown.
23:33But Richard Neville had taken it too far.
23:38He'd juggled kings like they were oranges.
23:41He'd tried to run England as the power behind the throne.
23:44And eventually, his ambition had got the better of him,
23:47leaving him lying dead and naked on public display at St Paul's Cathedral.
23:53During the century and a half that followed Neville's death,
23:57the castle fell slowly into disrepair.
24:02But it remained at the centre of British history.
24:07Its towers and chambers held everyone from princes to poets.
24:13And with them came drama,
24:15including a murder that would shock the entire nation.
24:23In the early 17th century, Warwick Castle was in a sorry state.
24:30The walls and the gardens were slowly falling into disrepair.
24:36One of the mightiest castles of the Middle Ages
24:39looked like it was drifting into scruffy retirement.
24:44Then, in 1604, the castle was given as a gift by James I
24:50to a politician called Fulke Greville.
24:55But that gift would become a curse.
25:02Fulke Greville wasn't just a politician.
25:04He was a poet, an author, a philosopher.
25:07He was a man of the arts.
25:09Fulke Greville wasn't just a politician.
25:11He was a poet, an author, a friend of Shakespeare and Bacon
25:15and a favoured courtier of Elizabeth I.
25:17When he was given Warwick Castle as a reward for his loyal service,
25:21it was basically a dump.
25:23He had to throw £20,000, that's £4 million now, into refurbishing it.
25:28But he set Warwick Castle on the road to becoming what it is today.
25:40Fulke also used his time at the castle
25:43to produce a string of acclaimed plays and books.
25:48They included a biography of Sir Philip Sidney,
25:51another famous poet who may have been one of Fulke's lovers.
26:01He continued in Crown service and earned himself and his family
26:06the title of Baron Brooke.
26:09But if Fulke's life at the castle sounds tranquil,
26:12it certainly didn't end up that way.
26:19Fulke Greville lived to the ripe old age of 73,
26:22but he didn't die peacefully in his bed.
26:24One evening, as he was coming back from the toilet,
26:27his manservant was doing up his trousers,
26:30but unfortunately for Fulke, the manservant bore a grudge.
26:34He'd just found out how much money he was being left in his master's will.
26:38And it wasn't very much.
26:41The manservant's name was Ralph Hayward,
26:44and he'd expected to be handsomely rewarded
26:47for his long service to the Lord of Warwick Castle.
26:57He wasn't just disappointed, Hayward was boiling with rage.
27:04Drawing a long blade, Hayward stabbed his master twice...
27:11..before turning the blade on himself.
27:18Fulke was seriously wounded, but he was also seriously rich.
27:23As one of the most powerful men in England,
27:26he had access to the best medical care the 17th century had to offer.
27:34Exactly what that treatment was is detailed in a letter
27:39written at the time by another English nobleman.
27:43It offers an extraordinary insight
27:46into the grisly world of 17th-century A&E.
27:51Let's work out what was going on here.
27:53Greville was coming from stool, he'd just been to the loo,
27:56and his servant was trussing up his Lord's point,
27:58he was doing his trousers.
28:00He drew a knife and stabbed Greville twice in the left side.
28:05Once a flesh wound, a lower blow,
28:08and once between the lower ribs and the back, perhaps mortal.
28:12Anatomically, talk me through what this means.
28:14Well, I think what we have to do is take ourselves back
28:17and, you know, look at the weapon that inflicted the injury.
28:20This is the sort of knife that would have been used, right?
28:23Right, well, it's a good starting point.
28:25Well, obviously, this is a ballack knife. OK.
28:27And it's made for one purpose and one purpose only.
28:30It has to penetrate as deep as possible,
28:32do as much damage as possible with stab wounding.
28:35And if we go to the model here, I can just demonstrate.
28:39So we've got one low flesh wound. Yep.
28:41The low flesh wound, I think, would have been more towards the back,
28:44striking bone or just not penetrating tissue.
28:47And then he has another go, entering perhaps about here,
28:51tickling the bottom of the spleen
28:53and maybe going into transverse colon, which is here.
28:57And this layer of fat is called omentum and this is small bowel.
29:02What may well have happened is that part of the bowel
29:05or some of this omentum may have even protruded through the stab wound.
29:11So this is... This is animal fat.
29:13This is, in fact, a length of bowel
29:16and this film-like material here,
29:19perforated with blood vessels and fat, is omentum.
29:23Or kel.
29:24So you were a 17th century surgeon.
29:26What are you going to do with this animal, kel, here?
29:28Probably what they did was to take some of this,
29:31not necessarily with the bowel,
29:33but pack it into the wound or around the area
29:36where the bowel had been prolapsing.
29:38For the day, this is top-level medical science.
29:41What's the thinking behind it?
29:43The thinking is that if you have omentum that's prolapsed out
29:47and there's necrose, you want to replace it with something.
29:50If there's a perforation in the bowel,
29:52you want to cover the bowel and stop it drying out.
29:55So what better thing to use than what looks like what's come out,
29:58which is this sort of a stuff.
30:00They put corrupted fat around the wound in the belly,
30:03which putrefied.
30:05Talk me through that.
30:07This says no blood supply. This is foreign material.
30:10It would cause a reaction and it would get infected.
30:15He's in terrible pain
30:17and he remains in increasing pain up until the day he dies,
30:2030 days later, in abject misery.
30:23So if there's a message here, number one,
30:25watch out for your manservant when you're just coming off the loo.
30:28Number two, if you do get stabbed, don't put animal fat on it.
30:32I think that's pretty accurate, yes.
30:34And as a medical man, I'm sure you're not very surprised by that.
30:40Falk never married,
30:42but his title of Baron Brooke passed to his cousin and adopted son, Robert.
30:48Warwick Castle would stay in the Greville family for generations.
30:54So it was the Grevilles who held the castle during the English Civil War,
30:58which broke out in the 1640s.
31:03Robert Greville, the new Baron Brooke,
31:05was a key commander for Oliver Cromwell's parliamentarians
31:09in their fight against King Charles I.
31:13Robert turned Warwick Castle from a country house
31:16into a bristling military garrison, packed with men and weapons.
31:23The windows in Guy's Tower were enlarged
31:26so that the defenders could fire hand cannons out of them.
31:30When the castle was besieged by Royalist forces in 1642, it held out.
31:37Robert also transformed the castle into a prison
31:40to hold captured Royalist prisoners.
31:44And inside its rooms, there are poignant reminders of the Civil War,
31:48literally carved into its walls.
31:53What have we got over here?
31:55The very, very potent symbol of the 17th century.
31:58That's a fleur-de-lis, right? The fleur-de-lis, exactly.
32:01And essentially what you're seeing here is the symbol of the king,
32:04the symbol of Charles I.
32:06And this is very much a way of prisoners who were locked in here
32:09during the Civil War, of letting everybody know that they are a Royalist
32:12and they serve the king.
32:14This is kind of, if you like, the visual reminder of those prisoners being here.
32:17So what fascinates me about this is, I mean, the rock isn't hard,
32:21but look, it would take a long time to scratch something like that.
32:24You can just imagine a bored prisoner sitting maybe in this window seat
32:28just scratching away. I mean, this would have taken hours.
32:31Absolutely. You can really tell these prisoners have got a lot of time
32:34on their hands to really be able to get those beautiful curves of that fleur-de-lis.
32:38And actually, if I take you into the next room,
32:40you have some other really, really incredible pieces.
32:42Sure, lead the way. Just inside here.
32:44We had this one name in the other room. We didn't think too much about it.
32:47And that was until a few months ago when we came into this room.
32:50And we came into this corner and we shined a light on the wall
32:53and essentially what we found was this here.
32:55So you can see a really wonderful date just there.
32:58It says here 1642, and what's this name underneath it?
33:00William Stanley. William Stanley, absolutely.
33:02And then directly underneath is another very recognisable name.
33:05Edward Disney. The Disney's originally, it's believed,
33:08came from a little village in Lincolnshire called Norton Disney.
33:11Edward Disney, we believe, was at the Battle of Edge Hill.
33:14For all the towers and all the rooms and all the fantastic entertainment here,
33:18you can tell so much about the history of the castle
33:21just from this square foot of space.
33:29So probably the kind of greatest symbol I think we have
33:33of kind of a stand against Warwick Castle is actually in this room here.
33:37So what we've got here is graffiti by a Scottish prisoner
33:41who's been fighting on the royal side in the Civil War.
33:44William Sutherland, prisoner here taken at Worcester
33:49in the defence of King Charles II, King of Great Britain,
33:55France and Ireland, defender of the faith,
33:58whom I pray God long preserves with the beautiful date there, 1651.
34:04It's amazing, isn't it, that it's still survived 450 years
34:08and this is as clear as if it were scratched in yesterday.
34:13So in a way it's because Warwick Castle was a parliamentarian stronghold
34:17that all of this still survives,
34:19otherwise it would have just been rubble on the ground.
34:21Absolutely, it is pure luck that we are still here today.
34:31The Greville family had profited handsomely
34:34from being on the winning side in the Civil War
34:37and little by little they began to restore Warwick Castle
34:41to its former glory, but not as a fortress.
34:45The state rooms were refitted
34:47and filled with the most expensive furniture and art of the day.
34:53By the end of the 17th century,
34:56the castle was quite literally fit for a king.
34:59William III paid a visit in 1695.
35:06The Grevilles built new guest rooms and a stunning conservatory,
35:10refitted the chapel and added a new stable block.
35:17By the 18th century, things had moved on,
35:20so the Greville family landscaped the gardens,
35:23raised the level of the courtyards
35:25and invited Canaletto to come and paint the place.
35:30This wasn't a military garrison any more, bristling with soldiers,
35:34it was a country pile,
35:36somewhere to invite your mates and friends.
35:39Somewhere to invite your mates up from London for the weekend.
35:52Warwick was a castle built on the spoils of war,
35:56but in peacetime it would overwhelm the Grevilles.
36:03At the turn of the 18th century,
36:06Warwick Castle was £115,000 in debt.
36:11Today, that would be about £9 million.
36:17By the start of the 1800s, the cost of running this place
36:20had left the Greville family teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
36:24They must have felt that Warwick Castle was a poisoned chalice,
36:27draining their resources,
36:29and perhaps they even cursed the name of their ancestor
36:32who had been awarded the place back in 1605.
36:36It was the default Greville.
36:43So, as the Victorian era beckoned,
36:46the Greville family's fortunes hung in the balance.
36:50Warwick Castle was still one of the most lavish country retreats
36:54in the land,
36:56but beneath the glamour lay a truly scandalous story.
37:01By the late 19th century,
37:04Warwick Castle was one of the most dazzling aristocratic homes in Britain.
37:09It was packed with fine art
37:12and decorated in the most fashionable styles,
37:15all at vast cost to the Greville family who owned it.
37:22And one family member was determined to enjoy it.
37:26She was the wife of the fifth earl, Francis Evelyn Greville,
37:30Countess of Warwick, better known as Daisy.
37:36She was the it girl of her day,
37:38a famous beauty who was connected to royalty.
37:42But beneath her glamorous lifestyle,
37:45things weren't quite as they seemed.
37:50Daisy and her husband were members of the elite Marlborough house set.
37:56This was a gathering of the great and good of Edwardian high society,
38:01led by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
38:07Daisy drank with them, socialised with them
38:10and, in many cases, slept with them.
38:14MUSIC PLAYS
38:22Some of her amorous conquests were played out here,
38:26in her blue boudoir at Warwick Castle.
38:35And if her name reminds you of a certain song,
38:38it's because that song was actually written about her.
38:43MUSIC PLAYS
38:46Daisy was a woman of many affairs.
38:48For nine years, she was mistress to the Prince of Wales.
38:51She was so indiscreet, she was known as Babbling Brook.
38:54She was so broke, she tried to sell her memoirs
38:57of sleeping with the heir to the throne.
39:03In 1928, Daisy was persuaded to submit her memoirs to an editor
39:08before publishing them.
39:14At the time, her book still seemed like a scandalous kiss and tell,
39:18but it has since been regarded
39:20as one of the best accounts of Edwardian high society.
39:26Like so many who'd lived here, Daisy found the castle
39:29and the lifestyle she was expected to maintain
39:32an impossible drain on her resources.
39:38In later life, Daisy abandoned her wilder excesses
39:42and became a passionate socialist and philanthropist.
39:45But Warwick Castle's connection with high society would live on.
39:51In 1928, Daisy's 16-year-old grandson, Charles Greville,
39:56became the last earl to live at Warwick Castle.
39:59Not that he spent much time here.
40:04Charles wanted to be a film star
40:06and he went to Los Angeles to crack the movies.
40:09He used the stage name Michael Brooke,
40:12although he was better known by nicknames like the Duke of Hollywood
40:16and Warwick the Filmmaker.
40:20But his film career tanked and so did his fortune.
40:24The cost of the castle forced him to sell family heirlooms
40:28and much of his armour collection.
40:32Eventually, in 1978, the castle itself was sold
40:37to one of Britain's most famous entertainment companies,
40:41the Two Swords Group.
40:44The castle is still going strong,
40:47but the earls of Warwick are long gone.
40:52These days, Warwick Castle is a tourist attraction,
40:55open to the public 364 days a year.
40:59But for all the family fun, the games and the entertainment
41:04that goes on in Warwick Castle today,
41:07the greatest legacy remains the notorious and outrageous stories
41:12of its 1,000-year history and the earls who lived here,
41:17and rightly so.
41:20You know, in their own way, all the owners of Warwick Castle
41:23have been close to the crown.
41:25You've got Fulke Greville, a senior politician,
41:28but a man who could also make the Queen laugh.
41:31Over the other side of this church, you've got the Beechams,
41:34guys who slaughtered their way around France at the side of the King,
41:38who would also kill the King's favourites when it needed them.
41:41And, of course, you've got the King himself.
41:44He's the one who's got the money,
41:46who would not only slaughter the side of the King,
41:48but would also kill the King's favourites when it needed to be done.
41:51And in between them, you've got the ultimate, Richard Neville,
41:54the Kingmaker, a man who wasn't just friends with kings,
41:57but would play them off against each other.
42:04Power brokers, agents of intrigue,
42:07tragic heroes or glamorous socialites,
42:11many of the inhabitants of Warwick Castle
42:14had a price for its ownership.
42:17Quite a few of them even paid with their lives.
42:22But, ironically, it's their memory and their stories
42:25which keep the turnstiles turning today.
42:31For every famous or infamous character that's been through here,
42:36the castle has outlived them all.
42:44CINEMATIC MUSIC
43:14.