Warwick Castle is a masterpiece that's become a medieval theme park — but then again, it always has been
John Goodall looks at the development of Warwick Castle since the 16th century and the way in which its history has been enriched by legend. Photography by Will Pryce for Country Life.
When Henry VIII died at Whitehall Palace in the early hours of January 28, 1547, the Crown passed to his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, and power to a council of individuals named in his will. Only three days later, the leading figures in the new administration took advantage of their position to reward themselves. Their acknowledged leader, Edward Seymour, uncle to the new King, assumed the titles of Lord Protector of the Realm and Duke of Somerset, as the royal servant, John Dudley, soon to be appointed Lord Great Chamberlain, became Earl of Warwick.
Dudley had been constable of Warwick Castle since 1532, which was then in royal ownership. His choice of this particular title probably reflects both that connection and the exceptional prestige attached to it. As described last week, the earldom was established in 1089, but was linked back yet further through the fictional hero Guy of Warwick to the deep, imagined past. Dudley had earlier adopted his namesake castle of Dudley, Warwickshire, as his seat. Now, he claimed a family connection with the Beauchamps, previous Earls of Warwick, and adopted their heraldic devices of a bear and ragged staff. He also sought to obtain full ownership of the castle and town.
Fig 2: The Cedar Drawing Room with panelling of the 1670s by William and Roger Hurlbut. The rich plasterwork is by James Pettifer.
To facilitate this acquisition, he gave a deliberately misleading account of the state of the castle. It was, he claimed, ‘not able to lodge a good baron with his train, for all the one side of the said castle with also the dungeon tower is clearly ruinated and down to the ground’. As constable, however, he had presided over extensive works to the buildings on behalf of the King. These included the reuse in 1538 of a ‘well-tiled’ roof, 60ft long, taken from the recently suppressed Blackfriars in the town, to cover a new kitchen, as well as repairs to the cliff beneath the principal domestic range that ran along the River Avon.
A more disinterested account of the castle in the 1540s is offered by the antiquarian John Leland. It was, he wrote, ‘magnificent and strong… [and] set upon an high rock of stone’ (Fig 4). He also refers to ‘the principal lodgings’ where ‘the King doth much cost in making foundations in the rocks to sustain that side of the castle’. Independent accounts record the delivery of 500 carts of stone to stabilise the cliff. It’s conventional to think of castles as passing out of fashion in the Tudor period, but this investment in Warwick underlines the prestige that some still enjoyed.
Dudley subsequently fell out with the Duke of Somerset and, in turn, became the principal power in the realm. In 1551, he assumed the title of Duke of Northumberland and seems to have set in motion an unsuccessful attempt to assume control of the palatine of Durham and its castle. At the same time, however, he also secured possession of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, the sister foundation to Warwick. At Kenilworth, he built a massive new stable, its timber framing evoking the emblem of the ragged staff, modelled on its lost 15th-century predecessor at Warwick.
Fig 3: The main gate and barbican, the masonry inset with iron hooks. Caesar’s Tower stands beyond. Between them is the laundry and wash-house range that was begun in 1669.
Dudley’s career was famously cut short by his catastrophic attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the English throne after the death of Edward VI in July 1553. He was executed for his efforts, but his two eldest sons, Ambrose and Robert Dudley, were restored by Queen Mary and, as close political associates, rose to great power in Elizabeth I’s Court. Ambrose, as the elder, acquired the title and castle of Warwick. His more celebrated brother, the Earl of Leicester, a suitor for the Queen’s hand, adopted Kenilworth as his seat, but clearly aspired to his brother’s inheritance, founding the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.
Both brothers hosted Elizabeth I on grand and carefully choreographed visits to their respective castles, Ambrose at Warwick in 1566 and again in 1572. On the latter occasion, the Queen occupied the main medieval domestic range and watched country dancing from her chamber window in the castle courtyard. Her rooms also overlooked the river, a specially created garden and the park, where a mock battle was staged for her benefit.
Ambrose died in 1590, after his brother, and was buried beside him in the Lady Chapel of St Mary’s, Warwick, the mausoleum of the Beauchamp Earls. All his titles became extinct and a depressing survey of the castle taken the same year suggests that the buildings had not been well maintained. One curiosity is mention of two large stone windows that appeared ready to collapse. These may have been ‘compass’ windows — bay windows on complex plans — that projected out over the river below. Similar windows were added by his brother to Kenilworth Castle.
Fig 4: Warwick Castle. The domestic range stands on a cliff, now retained and encased in masonry, that rises from the River Avon.
One local landowner, Sir Fulke Greville, saw the ruins as a possible source of building materials to repair his own house of Beauchamp’s Court, Alcester. The castle had, he asserted in 1601, ‘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… so as in very short time there will be nothing left but a name of Warwick’. Happily, his request for the stone was rejected and, in 1604, his son and namesake, a soldier, writer and courtier, managed to acquire the castle and completely repaired it.
The motive was probably family piety; the younger Fulke inherited the Barony of Brooke and claimed through it connections with the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick. It may have been in preparation for these works that a detailed plan of the castle was drawn up by the architect John Smythson. It shows the main domestic ranges in much their present form running along the edge of the cliff and a central hall with service buildings, screened by a wall, at one end and withdrawing apartments at the other.
Fig 5: The Red Drawing Room was remodelled in its present form during the 1760s.
The antiquary Sir William Dugdale reported that the repairs cost Lord Brooke more than £20,000 and judged the castle ‘a place not only of great strength, but extraordinary delight, with most pleasant garden walks such as this part of England can scarcely parallel’. Greville was murdered by a manservant in 1628 and buried in the chapter house of St Mary’s Church, Warwick.
Fulke’s adopted heir was a cousin, Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, a religious and political radical. From January 1642, as the Civil War brewed, he modernised the defences of Warwick Castle, reworking the motte as an artillery fortification. It has been suggested that the iron hooks on the exterior of the gatehouse (Fig 3) are fixings for woolsacks to protect the masonry from shot.
Fig 6: The chapel ceiling was under construction in 1748 and possibly by Daniel Garrett. It combines Gothic detailing with the coats of arms of families associated with the history of the castle. One consistent theme of the remodelling of Warwick Castle, up to the present day, is a sense of history.
The castle withstood a short Royalist siege in August 1642 and, after the Royalist disaster at Edgehill on October 23, Caesar’s and Guy’s Towers were pressed into use as prisons. Thereafter, Warwick became an important Parliamentarian stronghold. In January 1645, its garrison included 302 soldiers with their officers, 15 mounted scouts, six drummers, two gunners, seven grooms, a surgeon and a vicar. As such, it miraculously survived the Civil War substantially intact, one of a handful of major English castles to do so.
Lord Brooke was killed at the siege of Lichfield on March 2, 1643, shot from the spire of the cathedral. The title passed in sequence to two of his young sons, the eldest, another Robert, 4th Lord Brooke, was one of the peers sent to the Hague to invite Charles II to return. Following the Restoration in 1660, the garrison was disbanded and the castle handed back to him. Soon afterwards, he began improvements to it and, in 1667, a grand Classical stable and coachhouse were built outside the walls, since demolished. Two years later, a laundry was begun beside the main gate and a master carpenter and builder from Warwick, Roger Hurlbut, was contracted to wainscot the Great Hall.
Fig 7: The Green Drawing Room was redecorated in the 1840s. Its 1760s ceiling, copied from Palmyra, Syria, is by Roger Moore of Warwick. The enfilade runs to the great hall.
This was the start of the complete renovation of the withdrawing apartments in the most fashionable style. Brooke’s brother, William, was sent to see the new interiors designed by Sir Roger Pratt for Sir Ralph Bankes at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, and these clearly informed the redecoration of the full suite of withdrawing chambers now known as the Red Drawing Room (Fig 5), the Cedar Drawing Room (Fig 2), the Green Drawing Room (Fig 7), the State Bedroom and Boudoir. These rooms were created within the existing shell of the range, which was internally partitioned to accommodate a corridor, now known as the Armory Passage. Final payment for these rooms was made by Robert’s brother, Fulke Greville, 5th Lord Brooke, who succeeded to the title in 1677.
Born after his father’s death in 1642, Fulke lived until 1710 and, on November 4, 1695, loyally welcomed William III to Warwick Castle. Pitch and tar illuminations devised by Nicholas Paris were burnt on Guy’s Tower for the occasion and 100 gallons of punch distributed in an iron cauldron, the supposed porringer of Guy of Warwick. Guy’s relics, proudly presented by the porter, amused the traveller Celia Fiennes, when she visited the castle in 1697. She admired the house and gardens as well as the ‘vast prospect’ from the castle motte. In 1768, this mount was further ornamented with two towers constructed by a local builder Job Collins.
The development of the castle in the 18th century involved a litany of professionals ornamenting and improving the buildings at the direction of successive Grevilles, who, from 1759, were also Earls of Warwick. A common theme of the work is a consciousness of history and the use of Gothic detailing, as in the ceiling of the castle chapel that was being installed in 1748 (Fig 6). Equally thoughtful externally is the battlemented dining room added by Timothy Lightoler in the 1760s in front of the great hall.
Over the same period, the level of the courtyard was raised and the grounds of the castle more clearly defined. In the process, the town was gradually pushed away. By the end of the century, it’s no exaggeration to say that the castle was a nationally admired monument. As a reflection of this, elements from it were widely copied in other buildings such as, in the same county, Edgehill Tower of 1746–67 by Sanderson Miller, or Charleville Castle, Co Offaly in Ireland, from 1800.
Fig 8: The Boudoir with its opulent 17th-century ceiling. The mannequins, a feature of the modern interpretation in the castle, are of Henry VIII and his wives.
A financial crisis in the first decade of the 19th century brought sustained investment in the castle to a close, but improvements were made to receive Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1858. Then, in 1861, the architect Anthony Salvin was employed to begin further changes to the building. He also directed repairs after a devastating fire gutted the private apartments in the medieval service area and hall (Fig 1) in 1871. Salvin’s renewed domestic rooms are an unusually fine survival of their period, their interiors decorated in strikingly different styles. In 1894, on the birthday of the celebrated socialite and beauty, Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the castle was supplied with electric light, still then a novelty.
During the mid 20th century, the costs and complexity of maintaining the castle steadily increased and, in 1978, David Greville — from 1984, 8th Earl of Warwick — reluctantly sold the castle and 100 acres of surrounding landscape to Madame Tussauds for £1.25 million. Major repairs followed the purchase and the interiors began to be presented in what was then a completely novel fashion with lifelike mannequins.
The approach proved hugely successful and, today, there are two displays of this kind, one on the medieval theme of Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and the other on an Edwardian weekend house party. Henry VIII also appears with his wives (Fig 8). There are numerous additional exhibitions and displays, as well as a busy round of live events, all of which take advantage of the castle setting. For the 750,000 visitors it now receives each year, Warwick Castle — since 2007 run as part of the Merlin Entertainments group — is a theatre, where fantasy and history meet. The extraordinary thing is that in very different ways, through the figure of Guy of Warwick, it always has been.
Visit the Warwick Castle website to find out more about visiting.
This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
