Baron Brooke of Warwick Castle
Following Robert Dudley’s death in 1588, the manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey reverted to the Crown, remaining part of the Royal Demesne for thirty-four years. King James I sold the manors in 1622 to a Warwickshire man who had spent a lifetime serving the English Crown under Elizabeth I and James I.
Fulke Greville was born in 1554 at Beauchamp Court near Alcester, the son of a prominent Warwickshire family with deep roots in the county. He had been educated at Shrewsbury alongside Philip Sidney, and the friendship formed there shaped the rest of his life, Sidney becoming the emblematic figure of Elizabethan chivalry and Greville his devoted memorialist. He served Elizabeth I as treasurer of the navy, represented Warwickshire in Parliament on four occasions, and under James I became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Commissioner of the Treasury. In 1621, after nearly half a century of faithful service, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Brooke, a title drawn from his paternal grandmother’s family, the Willoughbys of Broke. The following year, aged sixty-seven, he acquired Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey.
His arms were: Sable, on a cross engrailed Or five pellets, a bordure engrailed of the second, quartered with Willoughby and Beauchamp, reflecting the complex of claims and descents that ran through his maternal and paternal lines.
Arms: Sable on a cross engrailed Or five pellets a bordure engrailed of the second
Crest: Out of a ducal coronet Gules a demi-swan wings expanded and elevated Argent beaked of the first
Motto: VIX EA NOSTRA VOCO (I scarcely call these things ours)
He had already, in 1604, received a dilapidated Warwick Castle from James I, its walls crumbling, and spent the enormous sum of £20,000 on its restoration. Knowle, with its associated manors, was a complementary acquisition: a manor house rather than a fortress, a seat in the landscape rather than a monument above it. He commissioned a new hall at Knowle, attributed to Inigo Jones, the king’s own surveyor and the most celebrated architect of the age. Jones had by then completed the Queen’s House at Greenwich and was at work on the Banqueting House at Whitehall; a commission in Warwickshire from a trusted royal servant was precisely the kind of project that moved through his office. The hall Greville built at Knowle was described in a later account as having two magnificent oak staircases richly carved, an elaborately ornamented oak wainscot in the hall, and rich plasterwork in the ceilings comparable to that at Warwick Castle. Fragments of a Greville coat of arms were later found in the grounds.
Greville never married and had no children. He had adopted his cousin Robert Greville as his heir around 1611, and it was to Robert that the estate passed when Fulke was murdered in September 1628 by his servant Ralph Haywood, who believed himself cheated of a bequest. Greville’s physicians treated his wounds by filling them with pig fat; the fat turned rancid, the wounds became infected, and he died in agony four weeks after the attack. He was buried at St Mary’s, Warwick, beneath a tomb he had prepared for himself, inscribed with the epitaph he had chosen: Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.
Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke (1608-1643), was a man of different temperament entirely, a committed Parliamentarian in an age when that conviction was becoming dangerous. When the Civil War broke out, he took the field on Parliament’s side, and in March 1643 was killed during the Siege of Lichfield. He was thirty-five. The manor passed to his son Francis, 3rd Baron Brooke (1631-1658), and then in succession to his brothers Robert, 4th Baron Brooke (1638-1676), and Fulke, 5th Baron Brooke of Beauchamp’s Court, who died in 1710. Across these four generations the family held Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey, the manors passing with the title through a sequence of inheritances without the kind of personal connection to the land that Fulke Greville had briefly established. The family was becoming one of the great Warwickshire dynasties - the senior branch would eventually claim the bear and ragged staff crest of the Earls of Warwick, in addition to their own, on the fourth creation of that title. The manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey, however, were taking a different path.
Fulke, 5th Baron Brooke (1643-1710) gifted Knowle to his younger son, The Hon. Algernon Greville of Beauchamps Court, M.P. (1677-1720). When Algernon died the manors passed to his son Fulke Greville of Wilbury (1717-1806), a member of the younger branch of the family with no particular connection to the Warwickshire estates beyond inheritance. In 1743 he sold them to William Smith of Tettenhall (1705-1747).
Smith was the son of Francis Smith of Warwick, the most prominent architect and master-builder in the Midlands, the man responsible for rebuilding much of Warwick after the great fire of 1694 and for designing some fifty country houses across the region. William, a Freemason like his father, had continued his father’s practice after Francis’s death in 1738, specialising in the Palladian style Francis had refined, with commissions at Catton Hall in Derbyshire and Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire. That the son of the Midlands’ leading builder should acquire a hall attributed to Inigo Jones, the pioneer of English classical architecture, was perhaps more than coincidence. Whether the attraction was the architecture, the estate, or simply the opportunity, William Smith died four years later in 1747, and the manors passed to his widow Henrietta.
In 1754, Henrietta Smith sold the manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey to Benjamin Palmer of Olton End, Sheriff of Warwickshire (1711-1772). From Fulke Greville’s deliberate homecoming to the slow drift of inheritance through cousins and younger sons, the manors had moved steadily further from any rooted connection to the land. With Palmer, that began to change.
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