Warwick Castle and Its Earls

IT is to be hoped that to not a few of the American visitors who form so large an element in that never - ending procession of sightseers which passes through Warwick Castle, the sumptuous volumes in which Lady Warwick has recorded its history ¹ may serve as a permanent memorial of a pleasure, to some almost painfully keen, because perforce so brief. The Castle, indeed, is in many ways chief among those historic houses which in their beauty, as much as in their grandeur, are the peculiar glory of England. Its story and that of its masters must of necessity include an epitome of English history during a thousand years, and as to legend and romance, one can go back into the wonderland of a dim past with John Rous, the worthy fifteenth-century Warwickshire antiquary, who asserts that Warwick was founded about the time of “ the birth of King Alexander the Greek conqueror.” Lady Warwick writes in a straightforward, unaffected style, and her work being in its nature largely that of a compiler, she selects and uses her material with excellent judgment and a due sense of proportion. She gives space enough, and not too much, to a consideration of the legendary chronicles, and the authentic but rather scanty records of the Saxon and Norman earls. The first figures that can really be vitalized are of the house of Beauchamp, especially its greatest son, Richard, of whom the Emperor Sigismund declared that he had not his equal in Christendom “ for Wisdom, Nurture, and Manhood, — if all Courtesie were lost, it might be found in him again; ” and whose noble monument in the centre of the beautiful chapel he founded has kept him in remembrance even to this day. The career of this all - accomplished knight’s more famous son-in-law, the king-maker, is clearly and well described, and with him the old order passes, his hapless grandson, the Plantagenet earl, being the most pitiful victim of the new rule.

The outlines, at least, of the history of one of the most notorious instruments of that new rule, Edmund Dudley, and of his son and grandsons, are tolerably well known to most readers. Lady Warwick, in a very good summingup of the characteristics of the most conspicuous members of the family that held the earldom under the Tudors, says : “ Their ambition was overweening and outran their talents. . . . But they figured impressively on the stage, and realized the pageant of life better than any of their contemporaries.” By the aid of The Black Book of Warwick she is able to revivify some of this splendor of life, and the whole varied story of the house of Dudley is well told. But why is the little son and heir of Leicester — the child of the Countess Lettice — passed over in the narrative, and his identity confounded with that of his elder half-brother ? All visitors in the Beauchamp Chapel linger at the tomb of “ the noble imp,” and one can imagine the hopeless perplexity of the earnest tourist when he finds this childish designation, and even the boy’s monument, given to Sir Robert Dudley, who died and was buried in Tuscany more than threescore years after the effigy of his small brother had been placed in the Lady Chapel. There is no lack of interest in the annals of the house of Rich, or of contrasts in character;—witness that altogether evil man, the Lord Chancellor ; his grandson, for no personal merit made Earl of Warwick, and of whom “ Stella ” was the unwilling bride ; their son, the sturdy Puritan admiral, whose saintly daughter - in - law, Mary Boyle, is sketched at full length, a most living picture with her little foibles and great virtues. Then, in the eighteenth century, the family obscurely ending, the earldom came to the house of Greville, who had possessed the Castle since the passing of the Dudleys.

“ Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney,” — thus he wrote his epitaph, — made future generations his debtor by his admirable restoration and enlargement of the halfruined Castle, which he also “ beautified with the most pleasant gardens.” Two hundred years later, George Greville, the second earl of his house, restored and supplemented his predecessor’s work, and gathered from far and near those treasures of art with which the world is familiar. A word of appreciation must be given to the author’s spirited and sympathetic sketch of that Lord Brooke, the Parliamentary leader, who was slain at Lichfield, and was in his short life an exemplar of all that was best in the Liberalism of his time. One regrets that more space could not have been given to descriptions of the Castle and St. Mary’s Church as well. Architecture in such a connection is by no means so “ dull ” a subject as the writer fears it to be. Space fails to do justice to the illustrations which are given in lavish abundance and are excellently well selected. There are portraits, from the illuminations of the Rous Roll to the photographs of to-day, relics of every kind, and views without number of the Castle and its surroundings, indicating, so far as pencil and camera may, not only the “ grey magnificence,” but something of the dreamlike charm of the place. In a few wellchosen closing words, the author shows how she and Lord Warwick have striven to blend the old and the new, and to fulfill in various ways the duties of their stewardship. Surely one of these duties has been fulfilled in the preparation of these chronicles.