DAN JONES: For me a great British castle is a fortress, a palace, a home.

And a symbol of power, majesty and fear.

For nearly a thousand years, castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.

These magnificent buildings have been home to some of the greatest heroes and villains in our national history.

And many of them still stand proudly today, bursting with incredible stories of warfare, treachery, intrigue, and even murder.

Join me, Dan Jones, as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.

This time, I'm at Warwick Castle.

This stunning palace has been home to medieval warriors, royal mistresses and Hollywood actors.

But for many of them, the castle has been too hot to handle.

Warwick's big and it's beautiful, but it has a nasty habit of bringing its owners to their knees... (MUSIC PLAYING FROM TABLET SPEAKERS) One of the last Earls of Warwick to live here in the castle went by the stage name Michael Brooke, but he was better known as the Duke of Hollywood.

Blink and you'll miss him, but he's here in a film from the 1930s starring alongside David Niven and Errol Flynn.

He lived an incredibly glamorous life out in Hollywood, but the reality was that underneath it he was scrabbling around to earn a crust, crippled by the cost of running this place.

When he was out in Hollywood, Brooke gave an interview to Life magazine which tells you everything you need to know about his situation as Earl of Warwick.

He says, "The earl's armor and art are worth $16 million, "this castle has 200 servants, 20 square miles of grounds "and 24 downstairs dining rooms."

That he was taking a movie job so he could afford the great expense of being earl.

He says, "If I made $5,000 a week that would not be sufficient.

"I hardly have pin money," he complained.

The Duke of Hollywood wasn't the first Earl of Warwick to feel that the castle was getting on top of him.

It's a massive fortress.

And it's always come with serious obligations.

Built on a natural cliff at a bend of the river Avon, this castle is pretty much bang in the middle of England.

Today it has neat lawns and picturesque gardens.

It's surrounded by a huge 500-meter curtain wall with a massive barbican gatehouse and seven great towers.

But it wasn't always this pretty.

The first castle was built here by William the Conqueror during the Norman Conquest in 1068.

Back then it was little more than a wooden fort on top of a hill known as a motte.

(SOLDIERS SHOUTING) (SWORDS CLATTERING) All the same, it was a crucial military base.

Commanding it was a big responsibility.

A thousand years ago, this was a place of vital strategic importance.

From Warwick, you could control Wales to the west, the roads to Scotland in the north, and England all around you from the midlands.

William the Conqueror knew that, which was why, as he moved north two years after the Conquest, he left his most trusted men here, as constables of the castle.

Eventually those men were rewarded for their loyalty with the title of earl.

So right from the start, the earls who kept Warwick Castle were expected to be trusted henchmen of the king.

At the end of the 13th century, Edward I made William Beauchamp Earl of Warwick.

His descendants became one of the most important and wealthy families in the land.

The Beauchamps' family mausoleum is just around the corner from Warwick Castle, in the church of St.

Mary.

And it shows how spectacularly well they did out of being close to the Crown.

You don't see many royal tombs as splendid and ornate as this.

This is Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the man who this whole place is about, really.

No wonder this is one of the richest people not just of his time, but of all time.

This was the guardian of kings, this was the friend of kings, this is one of the greatest soldiers of his day.

And it made him a fantastic amount of money.

The Beauchamp family kept the earldom of Warwick and the castle for seven generations, serving nine of England's kings.

As well as building themselves whacking great golden tombs, the Beauchamps piled money into Warwick Castle.

They put up that huge curtain wall, and added many of the enormous towers that still stand today.

It was all proof that in the Middle Ages, it paid to be a loyal servant of your king.

Because if he can count on your bravery, your loyalty, or even your duplicity, he'll reward you with all the wealth and the power you can imagine.

But all of this wealth and power could come at a cost.

For as one Beauchamp earl discovered, if you turned from being a king's friend into his enemy, then holding Warwick Castle wasn't a blessing, it was a curse.

Warwick Castle was built by earls who amassed their fortunes through friendship with English kings.

The tenth earl was Guy Beauchamp.

He lived at the end of the 13th century, and helped the warrior king Edward I fight his brutal wars with Scotland.

But in 1307 Edward died, and was succeeded by his feckless son, Edward II.

This Edward was idle, immature and politically naive.

Worst of all, he was obsessed with his best friend and confidante, a French knight called Piers Gaveston.

Gaveston was loathed by Guy Beauchamp, and Warwick Castle became the center of a covert plot to get rid of the King's toxic companion.

Gaveston and Edward were lifelong friends.

We don't know if they were lovers, if they were blood brothers or if they were something else.

What we do know, is Gaveston annoyed the hell out of the other English nobles.

(PEACOCK CRIES) He was rude, he was obnoxious and he made up funny nicknames for them.

His nickname for Guy Beauchamp was the Black Dog of Arden.

Gaveston occupied all of Edward's time and attention.

Instead of crushing the Scots on the battlefield, as his father had done, Edward simply hung out with his best mate, wasting time and taxation.

To men like Guy Beauchamp, who had built his name, and his castle, on fighting in royal wars, this was incredibly frustrating.

But worse than anything else, Gaveston distracted the King at a time when England needed strong leadership.

Eventually, Beauchamp and a group of other nobles decided that something had to be done.

In 1311, a group of earls, lead by Guy Beauchamp and the King's cousin, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, drew up an incendiary document they called the Ordinances.

These were a set of rules designed to rein in the young king and to get rid of Gaveston, the man they described as his most evil counselor.

If you want to get an idea for just how much the English earls hated Gaveston, it's here in the ordinance that relates to him.

So they say, "Piers Gaveston has led the Lord King astray, "counseled him badly and persuaded him deceitfully "in many ways to do evil."

And it goes on, "He's gathered to himself all the King's treasure, "he's made the King take bad ministers, "and he does all of this treacherously "to the great disgrace and loss of the realm "and the manifold destruction of the people."

And here's Gaveston's punishment, he has to leave England and all the King's realms forever and without return.

The problem was, it wouldn't be long before Gaveston was back and England's earls were having to consider an even more drastic solution.

And Warwick Castle would be the key to it.

In 1312, Gaveston broke the terms of his exile.

He came back to England.

He thought the King could protect him from his enemies.

He was wrong.

As he passed through the village of Deddington, just 25 miles from Warwick, Beauchamp and his men kidnapped Gaveston and took him back to the castle.

Gaveston was imprisoned in preparation for a trial.

Now, it was dressed up to look like justice but obviously it was nothing of the sort.

He was brought to the great hall of the castle to face his judges.

On one side was Gaveston.

Across the room were his enemies, Guy Beauchamp, the King's cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, and many of the barons he had spent so much time insulting.

This was a kangaroo court.

As soon as he was brought in, Gaveston's fate was sealed.

After a short hearing, in which he was not allowed to speak in his own defense, he was convicted as a traitor and sentenced to death.

(GRUNTING) Gaveston was taken from Warwick Castleto nearby Blacklow Hill.

He was dragged kicking and screaming, begging for mercy.

He would receive none.

"In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, "on the first day of July, 1312, by barons lawless as himself, "Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall."

I love that, "Barons as lawless as himself."

We know exactly who we're talking about here, Lancaster, the King's cousin, but also Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick.

When the King found out about Gaveston he was apoplectic and he swore revenge on the men who had done it.

Lancaster was dead within 10 years, Beauchamp was dead within three, and it looked as though the family name was ruined forever.

But not for long.

Just 12 years later, Edward II had himself been deposed and murdered.

His son, Edward III, took over.

And Guy's son, Thomas, soon had the new king's ear.

The earls of Warwick and their castle could rise again.

This is the tomb of someone who was very close to kings.

This is Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and you can see he's dressed here in his chainmail and his plate armor.

This is a man who fought the French in the Hundred Years' War.

And the fact he's been buried, or represented after death as a soldier, tells you how he would have thought of himself.

Here he's lying hand in hand with his wife, but in life he'd have gone hand in hand with the king.

Edward III transformed England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe.

-(SWORDS CLASHING) -(SOLDIERS SHOUTING) Thomas Beauchamp and his family helped to smash the French, and you can still see the rewards they earned today.

Thomas Beauchamp fought at some of the most famous engagements at the Hundred Years' War, Crecy, Poitiers, the siege of Calais.

He was known as the Devil Warwick.

And entire French towns would surrender or flee in terror when they heard he was coming.

For his loyalty and his bravery, the King rewarded him with money, land and titles.

The booty the Beauchamps earned while fighting overseas was pumped back into their castle in England.

In the 14th century,they added a heavily fortified gatehouse and barbican on the north-east wall.

The 12-sided, 40-meter tall Guy's Tower, and the even taller and more imposing Caesar's Tower.

But they didn't just expand the castle upwards.

They went down, too.

Deep below Caesar's Tower lies a dungeon that once held prisoners captured during England's war with France.

It was one of the most feared dungeons in Europe.

In fact, it was such a rotten, filthy place to end your days that the French came up with a special name for it, the oubliette.

Oh God... Well I can see a very small hole.

Tell, what's the thinking behind this?

MIKE EDWARDS: Well, it's as the name implies.

Derived from the French oublier, "to forget."

They would take a prisoner and they'd put him down this hole and literally forget about him.

JONES: Absolutely terrible.

From the look of it, I reckon I could just about fit down there.

Well, let's give it go then.

I'm going to take my jacket off if you take that grill away.

It is absolutely tiny, I mean, I can fit my feet down there.

Oh dear.

God, it gets colder as soon as you squeeze in.

EDWARDS: It's a tight squeeze,watch yourself.

JONES: I'm just trying to fit my shoulders in and if you pass me my torch... Thank you.

Oh.

Well, it's cold, it's dark.

I mean, this is just about as grim as it gets.

You're right here at the very base of the castle.

And what's weird is just that silence.

You know, you've got feet upon feet of rock all around you.

I can see up here what I guess would have been the latrines, so God knows what would have come flying down here and rolling down.

So I'm basically imprisoned in a sewer down here.

EDWARDS: Exactly right.

God, that's disgusting.

EDWARDS: And in complete darkness.

JONES: And that must drive you mad eventually.

EDWARDS: If you look at prisoners who have been kept in confined spaces for, uh, greater lengths of time, a lot of them will develop complete character disintegration.

They'll be hyper-sensitive to stimuli of any sort.

Violent hallucinations are not uncommon.

JONES: I think I'm getting some of those already, actually.

Um, oh dear.

So how long do you think you'd last?

EDWARDS: Well, if you'd truly been forgotten, and you weren't fed or watered, maybe you would have lasted anything from three weeks to a couple of months.

JONES: So in a way it would probably be worse to die of starvation than to be fed and kept in here going madder and madder?

EDWARDS: You try to cry but you can't cry because you've got no tears.

JONES: My God.

EDWARDS: Your mucus membranes would break down and you'd bleed from your nose and mouth.

You break down in sores, you bleed.

Eventually you start to get more physiological effects like renal failure or the heart shuts down.

So once you're down in the oubliette it's a one-way ticket, you're not coming out.

EDWARDS: That's absolutely right.

JONES: In the 1440s, the long line of Beauchamp male heirs ran out.

The Warwick title, and the castle, now passed by marriage to one of the most notorious men of the whole Middle Ages, Richard Neville.

Or as he's better known, Warwick the Kingmaker.

Neville was the central player in The Wars of the Roses, a bitter conflict between the rival English royal houses of Lancaster and York.

Both of them claimed the crown for themselves.

Their long and bloody struggle for supremacy tore England apart.

And one of its most dramatic episodes was played out here at Warwick Castle.

For more than 30 years, royal authority in England collapsed, and the Crown was fought over by factions each aiming to put their own king on the throne.

And in the middle of them all was Richard Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker.

Richard Neville was clearly a very ambitious man who'd done very well, he'd married into a great earldom.

He was also a very calculating, manipulative sort of guy who always backed himself to play factions off against one another and come out with the best possible result for himself, for his family and for the dynasty he was trying to create.

And that relentless, ruthless ambition meant that Neville would go to any lengths to achieve his ends, including high treason.

In the 1450s, Neville and a small group of other noblemen rebelled against King Henry VI, a weak, vacillating monarch who was simply not cut out for kingship.

They succeeded in deposing Henry.

In his place, Neville helped to put a new king, Edward IV of the house of York.

As a reward for helping Edward take the throne, Neville expected almost limitless power, territory and titles.

But before long, Edward and Neville had fallen out, and the Kingmaker had taken spectacular revenge.

In Warwick's Machiavellian mind, Edward was going to be the sort of king he could push around, a puppet if you like.

But it didn't work out like that.

At the beginning of his reign, Edward married in secret and Neville was forced to watch as power drained away from him towards the King's new in-laws.

He was never gonna put up with that.

In a bid to regain the power he'd lost, Neville masterminded another rebellion.

In 1469 he led an army against Edward.

Edward's forces were defeated in battle and the King was taken prisoner.

Warwick brought him to the castle, threw him in Caesar's Tower, and began to rule England himself.

Neville thought he had power in England all sewn up, but he was wrong.

He'd reached the limits of his ambition.

The other English nobles refused to accept Neville ruling over them.

As England dissolved into chaos, disorder, and lawlessness, Neville realized he had no choice but to let Edward go free.

But the struggle for the English throne, was far from over.

Six months later, Edward was back with troops supplied by the Duke of Burgundy.

He met Neville at the Battle of Barnet.

Their armies clashed in the fog, and in the confusion, Neville's army attacked itself.

Neville tried to flee on horseback but he was captured and cut down.

Neville's death wasn't enough for Edward.

No one locked up kings of England in their castle and got away with it.

He had Neville's corpse brought to St.

Paul's Cathedral in London so that everybody could see what happened to kingmakers in the end.

For generations, earls of Warwick had benefitted from being close to the Crown, but Richard Neville had taken it too far.

He'd juggled kings like they were oranges.

He'd tried to run England as the power behind the throne and eventually his ambition had got the better of him, leaving him lying dead and naked on public display at St.

Paul's Cathedral.

During the century and a half that followed Neville's death, the castle fell slowly into disrepair.

But it remained at the center of British history.

Its towers and chambers held everyone from princes to poets.

And with them came drama, including a murder that would shock the entire nation.

In the early 17th century, Warwick Castle was in a sorry state.

The walls and the gardens were slowly falling into disrepair.

One of the mightiest castles of the Middle Ages looked like it was drifting into scruffy retirement.

Then, in 1604, the castle was given as a gift by James I, to a politician called Fulke Greville.

But that gift would become a curse.

Fulke Greville wasn't just a politician, he was a poet, an author, a friend of Shakespeare and Bacon, and a favored courtier of Elizabeth I. When he was given Warwick castle as a reward for his loyal service, it was basically a dump.

He had to throw £20,000, that's £4 million now, into refurbishing it.

But he set Warwick Castle on the road to becoming what it is today.

Fulke also used his time at the castle to produce a string of acclaimed plays and books.

They included a biography of Sir Philip Sidney, another famous poet who may have been one of Fulke's lovers.

He continued in Crown service, and earned himself and his family the title of Baron Brooke.

But if Fulke's life at the castle sounds tranquil, it certainly didn't end up that way.

Fulke Greville lived to the ripe old age of 73, but he didn't die peacefully in his bed.

One evening, as he was coming back from the toilet, his manservant was doing up his trousers.

But unfortunately for Fulke, the manservant bore a grudge.

He'd just found out how much money he was being left in his master's will, and it wasn't very much.

The manservant's name was Ralph Haywood, and he'd expected to be handsomely rewarded for his long service to the lord of Warwick Castle.

He wasn't just disappointed.

Haywood was boiling with rage.

Drawing a long blade, Haywood stabbed his master twice before turning the blade on himself.

Fulke was seriously wounded.

But he was also seriously rich.

As one of the most powerful men in England, he had access to the best medical care the 17th century had to offer.

Exactly what that treatment was is detailed in a letter written at the time by another English nobleman.

It offers an extraordinary insight into the grisly world of 17th century A&E. Let's work out what was going on here.

"Greville was coming from stool," he's just been to the loo, "and his servant was trussing up his lord's point," he was doing his trousers.

"He drew a knife and stabbed Greville twice in the left side, "once a flesh wound, a lower blow, "and once between the lower ribs and the back, perhaps mortal."

Anatomically, talk me through what this means.

Well, I think what we have to do is take ourselves back and, uh, look at the weapon that inflicted the injury.

This is the sort of knife that would have been used, right?

EDWARDS: Right, well, it's a good starting point.

Obviously this is a ballock knife.

-Okay?

-And, uh, it's made for one purpose and one purpose only.

That's to penetrate as deep as possible, do as much damage as possible with stab wounding.

And if we go to the, uh, model here I can just demonstrate.

-So we've got one low flesh wound.

-Yep.

The low flesh would I think would have been more towards the back, striking bone or just not penetrating tissue.

Then he has another go, entering perhaps about here.

-Hmm.

-Tickling the bottom of the spleen, and maybe going into, uh, transverse colon which is here.

-Mmm-hmm.

-And this layer of fat is called omentum, and this is small bowel.

What may well have happened is that part of the bowel, or some of this omentum, may have even protruded through, uh, the stab wound.

JONES: So this is... EDWARDS: This is animal fat, this is, in fact, a length of bowel and this film-like material here, perforated with blood vessels and fat, is omentum.

Or kell.

So, you're a 17th century surgeon, what are you gonna do with this animal kell here?

Probably what they did was to take some of this, not necessarily with the bowel, but pack it into the wound or around the area where the bowel had been prolapsing.

For the day, this is top-level medical science.

What's the thinking behind it?

Well, the thinking is that if you have omentum that's prolapsed out and has necrosed, you want to replace it with something.

And if there's a perforation in the bowel, you want to cover the bowel and stop it drying out.

So what better thing to use than what looks like what's come out?

Which is this sort of stuff.

"They put corrupted fat around the wound in the belly, which putrefied."

What did... Talk me through that.

This has no blood supply, this is foreign material.

It would cause a reaction and, uh, it would get infected.

He's in terrible pain and he remains in increasing pain up until the day he dies 30 days later, in abject misery.

So if there's a message here, number one, watch out for your manservant when you're just coming off the loo.

Number two, if you do get stabbed, don't put animal fat on it.

I think that's pretty accurate, yes.

JONES: And as a medical man, I'm pretty sure you're not surprised by that.

JONES: Fulke never married, but his title of Baron Brooke passed to his cousin and adopted son, Robert.

Warwick Castle would stay in the Greville family for generations.

So it was the Grevilles who held the castle during the English Civil War, which broke out in the 1640s.

Robert Greville, the new Baron Brooke, was a key commander for Oliver Cromwell's parliamentarians in their fight against King Charles I. Robert turned Warwick Castle from a country house into a bristling military garrison, packed with men and weapons.

The windows in Guy's Tower were enlarged so that the defenders could fire hand-cannons out of them.

When the castle was besieged by royalist forces in 1642, it held out.

Robert also transformed the castle into a prison to hold captured royalist prisoners.

And inside its rooms there are poignant reminders of the Civil War literally carved into its walls.

JONES: What have we got over here?

AARON MANNING: A very, very potent symbol of the 17th century.

-That's a fleur-de-lis, right?

-The fleur-de-lis, exactly.

And essentially what you're seeing here is the symbol of the king, you know, the symbol of Charles I, and this is very much a way of prisoners who were locked in here during the Civil War, of letting everybody know that they are a royalist and they serve the king.

This is kind of, if you like, the visual reminder of those prisoners being here.

So what fascinates me about this is, I mean, the rock isn't hard, but look, it would take a long time to scratch something like that.

And you can just imagine a bored prisoner sitting maybe in this window seat, just scratching away.

This would have taken hours, wouldn't it?

Absolutely, you can really tell these prisoners have got a lot of time on their hands to really be able to get those beautiful curves of that fleur- de-lis.

And actually, if I take you into the next room we have some other -really, really incredible pieces.

-Sure, lead the way.

Just inside here we had this one name in the other room, we didn't think too much about it, and that was until a few months ago when we came into this room.

And we came into this corner and we shone a light on the wall, and essentially what we found was this here.

So, you can see a really wonderful date just there.

JONES: We can see 1642 and what's this name underneath?

William Stanley.

William Stanley, absolutely.

And then directly underneath is another very recognizable name.

JONES: Edward Disney.

MANNING: The Disneys originally, it is believed, came from a little village in Lincolnshire called Norton Disney.

Edward Disney, we believe, was at the battle of Edgehill.

For all the towers and all the rooms and all the fantastic entertainment here, you can tell so much about the history of the castle just from this square foot of space.

So probably the greatest symbol I think we have of, kind of, a stand against Warwick Castle is actually in this room here.

So what we've got here is graffiti by a Scottish prisoner who's been fighting on the royal side in the Civil War.

"William Sutherland, prisoner here taken at Worcester "in the defense of King Charles II, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, "defender of the faith whom I pray God long preserves."

With the beautiful date there, anno 1651.

It's amazing isn't it?

That it's still survived, what, 450 years, and this is as clear as if it was scratched in yesterday.

So in a way, it's because Warwick Castle was a parliamentarian stronghold that all of this still survives, otherwise it would just have been rubble on the ground.

Absolutely, it is pure luck that we are still here today.

The Greville family had profited handsomely from being on the winning side in the Civil War.

And little by little they began to restore Warwick Castle to its former glory.

But not as a fortress.

The state rooms were refitted and filled with the most expensive furniture and art of the day.

By the end of the 17th century, the castle was quite literally fit for a king.

William III paid a visit in 1695.

The Grevilles built new guest rooms and a stunning conservatory, refitted the chapel, and added a new stable block.

By the 18th century, things had moved on.

So the Greville family landscaped the gardens, raised the level of the courtyards, and invited Canaletto to come and paint the place.

This wasn't a military garrison anymore, bristling with soldiers, it was a country pile, somewhere to invite your mates up from London for the weekend.

Warwick was a castle built on the spoils of war.

But in peacetime, it would overwhelm the Grevilles.

At the turn of the 18th century, the family was £115,000 in debt.

Today that would be about £9 million.

By the start of the 1800s, the cost of running this place had left the Greville family teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

They must have felt that Warwick Castle was a poisoned chalice draining their resources.

And perhaps they even cursed the name of their ancestor who'd been awarded the place back in 1605, Fulke Greville.

So as the Victorian era beckoned, the Greville family's fortunes hung in the balance.

Warwick Castle was still one of the most lavish country retreats in the land, but beneath the glamour lay a truly scandalous story.

By the late 19th century, Warwick Castle was one of the most dazzling aristocratic homes in Britain.

It was packed with fine art and decorated in the most fashionable styles, all at vast cost to the Greville family who owned it.

And one family member was determined to enjoy it.

She was the wife of the fifth earl,Frances Evelyn Greville, Countess of Warwick.

Better known as Daisy.

She was the "It Girl" of her day, a famous beauty who was connected to royalty.

But beneath her glamorous lifestyle, things weren't quite as they seemed.

Daisy and her husband were members of the elite Marlborough House set.

This was a gathering of the great and the good of Edwardian high society, led by the Prince of Wales, the future king, Edward VII.

Daisy drank with them, socialized with them and in many cases, slept with them.

(DAISY BELL PLAYING) Some of her amorous conquests were played out here in her Blue Boudoir at Warwick Castle.

And if her name reminds you of a certain song, it's because that song was actually written about her.

Daisy was a woman of many affairs.

For nine years she was mistress of the Prince of Wales.

She was so indiscrete she was known as "Babbling Brook."

And she was so broke, she tried to sell her memoirs of sleeping with the heir to the throne.

In 1928, Daisy was persuaded to submit her memoirs to an editor before publishing them.

At the time, her book still seemed like a scandalous kiss- and-tell, but it has since been regarded as one of the best accounts of Edwardian high society.

Like so many who lived here, Daisy found the castle and the lifestyle she was expected to maintain, an impossible drain on her resources.

In later life Daisy abandoned her wilder excesses and became a passionate socialist and philanthropist.

But Warwick Castle's connection with high society would live on.

In 1928, Daisy's 16-year-old grandson, Charles Greville, became the last earl to live at Warwick Castle.

Not that he spent much time here.

Charles wanted to be a film star.

And he went to Los Angeles to crack the movies.

He used the stage name Michael Brooke, although he was better known by nicknames like the Duke of Hollywood and Warwick the Filmmaker.

But his film career tanked.

And so did his fortune.

The cost of the castle forced him to sell family heirlooms and much of his armor collection.

Eventually, in 1978, the castle itself was sold, to one of Britain's most famous entertainment companies, the Tussauds Group.

The castle is still going strong.

But the earls of Warwick are long gone.

(PEACOCK CRIES) These days, Warwick Castle is a tourist attraction, open to the public 364 days a year.

But for all the family fun, the games and the entertainment that goes on in Warwick Castle today, the greatest legacy remains the notorious and outrageous stories of its thousand-year history and the earls who lived here, and rightly so.

You know, in their own way, all the owners of Warwick Castle have been close to the Crown.

You've got Fulke Greville, a senior politician, but a man who could also make the Queen laugh.

Over the other side of this church you've got the Beauchamps, guys who slaughtered their way around France at the side of the King, but who would also kill the King's favorites when it needed to be done.

And in between them you've got the ultimate, Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, the man who wasn't just friends with kings, but would play them off against each another.

Powerbrokers, agents of intrigue,tragic heroes or glamorous socialites, many of the inhabitants of Warwick Castle have paid a high price for its ownership.

Quite a few of them even paid with their lives.

But ironically it's their memory and their stories which keep the turnstiles turning today.

For every famous or infamous character that's been through here, the castle has outlived them all.