Warwick Castle

"Fetchez la vache!" says the french knight after taunting King Arthur and his silly English Ka-niggets before he catapults a cow over the wall of a castle wall in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Well we weren't too far off from that scene when a spontaneous invitation came along to join three of my colleagues on a road trip to Warwickshire to visit Warwick Castle which rumour has it was the castle in that scene of the film. Well, even if it wasn't, the grand castle, home of the Earls of Warwick for over 800 years, did feel a tad like wandering around that movie with lots of people pretending to be medieval lords, ladies, jesters and the like.

This stately home seemed to have been redone by Disney and clearly trying to appeal to a pre-adolescent audience by milking poor parents 7.50 pounds extra to go through the Dungeon (all done up like a haunted house) and "the Princess Tower" in which young girls could wear princess costumes for while. Sigh! I made the best of it and focused on the more interesting bits, like the state rooms and the private apartments. However, these too were dressed up as tableaux with wax figures in costumes of various periods doing things in various rooms. So there was good old Henry VIII and his six wives in one room. Regency era women in another. And, heaven help us, an awful likeness of HRM Queen Elizabeth II, standing in the state dining room because she came to visit the castle once in 1996! Oy!

The private apartments depicted the edwardian era where the figures were of the past Earl and Countess of Warwick entertaining friends for a country house weekend. Here things got a little more "Upstairs, Downstairs" since we learned about the servants and the exotic goings-on between Lady Daisy and her many male liasons. I'm not sure what we were to make of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire sipping tea or the Earl's butler eternally pouring water from a copper kettle into his bath (basically a fountain like you'd have in your yard). Ah well, there were still some interesting things to see. There was plenty of armor in the great hall and as you can see in the picture above, there were a couple of men in armor on horseback that drew alot of picture taking from the crowds.

A little further on, there were some splendid rooms with lovely paintings. The ones that you see here are of past Earls and Countesses of Warwick of course. However, there were also several Van Dyck paintings, some of Charles I and Charles II, portraits of Queen Anne, and many others. One room was Queen Anne's and it had her bed and three of the most amazing medieval tapestries I have ever seen. In fact, one covered the full length of the wall behind me as I was focused on the bed and until I heard a tour guide walk past and mention this rarity to his group, I would never have turned around to look at it.

In the picture below, which was taken from on top of the mound that is the last remnant of the original castle build shortly after the Norman Conquest on orders from William the Conquerer. The view of the landscape that follows is the view from the old battlements to the southwest. Although it can't quite be seen here, they had a giant ("the world's biggest") catapult that they apparently flung things with for the benefit of the tourists every two hours or so. Sadly we never got to see if they flung a cow!

I've included a picture of my traveling companions who are pictured gallantly trying to remove a baby sword from a stone, also on top of the old battlements. In the background, you can see the spire of St. Mary's Church, Warwick, founded by the Beauchamp family and later became the burial place for the Grenville family (the Warwicks). There were some rather more interesting things there to be honest. There was a Lady chapel that still had alot of its 14th century stained glass, the base of a dunking stool which had been in the crypt of the church for over 200 years, and the tombs of the Dudley family from the Elizabethan era. If you saw any of the many movies made about Elizabeth I, you may remember that Robert Dudley. Earl of Leicester, was the Queen's favorite, often depicted as her secret lover, despite the fact that he was married.

The last view shows the back side of the castle with the river and the mill wheel which provided the electricity for the castle when it that became possible in the early 1900s. The old mill house, that you can't see to the right of this picture, became the engine house, and there was quite a good exhibit discussing the transition to gas lighting and then to electricity in the castle. The electric lights were such a novelty, the Earl and Countess hosted a "Bal Poudre," or a Powder Ball, where all the guests dressed as if they were at the court of Marie Antionette with great powdered wigs and of course plenty of jewels.