Kenilworth Castle

Geoffrey de Clinton, chamberlain and treasurer to Henry I, founded Kenilworth in the early 1120s; the king had made him sheriff of Warwickshire as a counterweight to Roger de Beaumont at Warwick. The rivalry with Beaumont and the years of the Anarchy delayed further work; the revolt of 1173–74 against Henry II took it fully into royal possession.

Clinton's hold on royal favour did not last. He was tried for treason in 1130 and acquitted, and when he died in 1133 his heir was still a minor; the quarrel with the earls of Warwick ran on through the next generation until the younger Geoffrey settled it by marrying Beaumont's daughter Agnes. By the time the crown took the castle over it amounted to the great keep, the inner bailey wall, a causeway across a lake smaller than the one that followed, and the chase.

King John rebuilt on another scale, spending £1,115 between 1210 and 1216 on the stone outer bailey wall, Mortimer's and Lunn's Towers, and the damming of the Finham and Inchford Brooks to flood the Great Mere. It gave Kenilworth one of the largest artificial lake defences in England — and John was then forced to cede it to the barons under the guarantee of Magna Carta.

The work was part of a wider programme. Excommunicated in 1208, John spent heavily on Corfe, Odiham, Dover and Scarborough as well as Kenilworth, and he put household knights such as Robert of Ropsley in as castellans rather than trust the place to a baron. What he bought was an unusual kind of strength: the outer bailey wall is long and low, heavily buttressed but carrying only a few towers, because it was meant to be held by water rather than by masonry. The Great Mere covered some hundred acres to the south and west, the Lower Pool lay east of the approach, and the dry way in ran along a walled causeway 152 metres long that was itself the dam holding the lake up, with the Brays — a thirteenth-century outwork of palisades, stone wall and gatehouse — guarding the road beyond it. Kenilworth has been described as one of two major castles in Britain, with Caerphilly, that may be classified as water-castles or lake-fortresses.

Henry III granted Kenilworth in 1244 to Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who made it the base of his operations in the Second Barons' War. After Lewes in 1264 the king's son, Prince Edward, was handed over as a hostage and held here in conditions the chroniclers thought harsh. Released in 1265, Edward defeated Montfort at Evesham, and the surviving rebels regrouped behind the Great Mere the next spring under Henry de Hastings, Montfort's constable.

Simon de Montfort the Younger promised in January 1266 to hand the castle over. Five months later he had not, and the feudal summons, already put back from December 1265, was answered on 21 June. Hastings had an exceptionally large garrison for an English castle — over a thousand men, usually put at twelve hundred — and it did not sit passive behind the water, having been contained inside since the previous autumn by the king's sons Edward and Edmund. Against it came the feudal host of England, with Henry III at its head.

Henry III laid siege on 21 June 1266, and the water defences held. Edward struck at the weaker north wall with huge siege towers and a night attack in barges hauled from Chester; the royal trebuchets stood so far off that heavier engines were sent for from London.

The royal camp tried every device it had. Stone-throwing engines were massed against the walls, wooden towers were raised against them, and a great timber machine with separate compartments for archers was built and called the Bear. The chronicler Rishanger describes one of the towers, built at Edmund's cost and of astonishing height and breadth, set against the wall with two hundred crossbowmen or more inside to shoot down on the defenders — until a mangonel mounted within the castle battered it with stones until it broke apart. The Bear was answered the same way, by a stone-thrower cleverly built inside the walls that struck at it until it could do no more harm. Archbishop William Freney came to negotiate with the garrison and was refused entry.

Time and hunger were what told. With food running out and disease among the defenders, the garrison came to terms. The papal legate Ottobuono broke the deadlock: by the Dictum of Kenilworth the rebels could buy back their confiscated lands if they surrendered the castle, and the siege ended on 14 December — probably the longest in English history, and the largest then fought in England in numbers of soldiers. The terms of the Dictum were later folded into the Statute of Marlborough, four chapters of which remain in force in English law. Eight catapult shots of 1 to 105 kg came out of the grounds in 2024, close to where they are thought to have fallen.

The walled causeway also served as the castle's tiltyard. Edmund Crouchback held many tournaments at Kenilworth in the late thirteenth century, the largest of them in 1279, when the royal favourite Roger de Mortimer presided over a Round Table in which a hundred knights competed for three days, in imitation of the Arthurian stories then in fashion. Edward II and Isabella of France kept Christmas here in 1323 amid major celebrations; three years later she deposed him.

Edmund Crouchback held the castle from 1267 and his son Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, from 1298, making it the chief Lancaster seat; Thomas built its first great hall between 1314 and 1317, and his opposition to Edward II cost him his head after Boroughbridge in 1322.

When Isabella and Roger Mortimer deposed Edward in 1326 the captured king was sent to Kenilworth, into the custody of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, chosen probably both as a major fortification and for its former owners' links to ideals of good government. Writs still went out in Edward's name until barons led by Bishop Orleton came to tell him he had been deposed, and he formally resigned in the great hall on 21 January 1327. With too many Midland nobles still loyal to him, he was moved by night to Berkeley Castle, where he died shortly afterwards.

Blanche of Lancaster brought Kenilworth to John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III and the second richest man in England after the king. His building of the 1370s gave the castle a grander great hall, the Strong and Saintlowe Towers, state apartments and a kitchen twice the size of those in equivalent castles. William Wintringham's roof of 1376 spanned the widest pillarless hall then standing in England, work the historian Anthony Emery calls "the finest surviving example of a semi-royal palace of the later middle ages".

Gaunt's second marriage, to Constance of Castile, gave him a claim to that kingdom and he styled himself its king; the building he put up at Kenilworth between 1373 and 1380 was designed to carry that claim, on one of the most important of the thirty or more castles he held in England. When he was not campaigning abroad he divided his time between Kenilworth and Leicester, and after 1395, as his health failed, he used Kenilworth more; his last years went on repairs across the whole complex. His son took the throne as Henry IV in 1399 and brought the castle back into royal hands.

Most royal castles were left to decay in the fifteenth century; Kenilworth stayed in use, and from 1456 to 1461 the Lancastrian court of Henry VI divided almost all its time between Kenilworth, Leicester and Tutbury.

Henry V used Kenilworth heavily but preferred to lodge outside it, in the Pleasance he raised in 1414 on the far side of the Great Mere: a banqueting house built as a miniature castle, ringed by two diamond-shaped moats with a dock of its own and reached by boat. It was John Strecche, a chronicler at the neighbouring Kenilworth Priory, who recorded the famous and possibly apocryphal insult of that same year, when the French were said to have sent Henry a gift of tennis balls to imply he was better suited to games than to fighting — an incident Strecche says prompted the campaign that ended at Agincourt, and which Shakespeare took for a scene in Henry V.

Castles decided little in the Wars of the Roses, which were fought mainly as pitched battles between the rival factions, but Kenilworth mattered as a base. With Henry VI's mind broken, Queen Margaret drew on the Duchy of Lancaster lands in the Midlands for her military support and took the king out of London in 1456 for his safety. Kenilworth remained a Lancastrian stronghold for the rest of the war, often acting as a military balance to the nearby castle of Warwick. Henry VII, victorious at Bosworth, visited frequently and had a tennis court built for his own use; Henry VIII kept Kenilworth as a royal castle, abandoned the Pleasance and had part of its timber moved into the base court.

The castle went to John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, in 1553, who built the stable block and widened the tiltyard before Mary I had him executed. His son Robert, Earl of Leicester, restored to it in 1563, employed William Spicer to rebuild it into what has been termed an English Renaissance palace, and in 1575 received Elizabeth I for an exceptional nineteen days — thirty-one barons and four hundred staff, pageants, fireworks, bear baiting and hunting, at a cost reputed in thousands of pounds though probably under £1,700. It was a last attempt to persuade her to marry him, and it failed.

An inventory of the castle's furnishings taken in 1583 runs to fifty pages of paintings and tapestry, eight of the hangings bought from Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, on subjects including Josias, Demophon and Achilles, and the history of Noah. Kenilworth was valued at £10,401 in 1588, the year Leicester died without legitimate issue and heavily in debt. By his will it went to his brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, and on Ambrose's death in 1590 to his illegitimate son Sir Robert Dudley, who failed to establish his legitimacy before the Star Chamber and left for Italy in 1605. Dudley arranged in 1611-12 to sell the castle to Prince Henry; Henry died before the purchase was complete, his brother Charles finished it, and on becoming king Charles gave Kenilworth to his queen, Henrietta Maria.

Kenilworth served Charles I as a base for raids before Edgehill in 1642, then passed to a Parliamentary garrison, and in 1649 Parliament ordered it slighted: one wall of the great tower, the battlements and much of the outer bailey came down, though not before William Dugdale surveyed it, publishing in 1656. Colonel Joseph Hawkesworth, who carried out the demolition, took the estate for himself and turned Leicester's gatehouse into a house, until the Restoration evicted him in 1660.

The garrison years were uneasy. In April 1643 the castle's new governor, Hastings Ingram, was arrested as a suspected Royalist double agent, and it was only by January 1645 that the Parliamentary forces at Coventry had firmly secured their hold, Royalist attempts to dislodge them from Warwickshire having failed. After the slighting the ruin was worked as a farm, its remaining buildings stripped for material and the King's Gate cut through the outer bailey wall for the farm workers' use; at the Restoration Henrietta Maria briefly regained it, and after her death Charles II granted it to Sir Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon.

The Clarendons held Kenilworth until 1937, when maintenance costs led Lord Clarendon to sell it to the industrialist Sir John Siddeley, created Baron Kenilworth, who handed its running and a charitable donation to the Commissioner of Works. His son gave the castle to the town of Kenilworth in 1958, and English Heritage has managed it since 1984; it is open to the public, a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument. Between 2005 and 2009 the Elizabethan garden was rebuilt at a cost of more than £2 million, drawing on the Langham letter and recent excavation, work some archaeologists criticised as a matter of simulation as much as reconstruction, and in 2008 proposals were put forward to flood the Great Mere again.