The New Murrey and Blue blog

Well, there I was, seeking information about Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, the “Kingmaker”, and whether of not he made any ghostly appearances. I know, I know, ghosts don’t exist, only the gullible and gormless believe in them, etc. etc. But the supernatural simply will not go away and leave us alone, and I’m not prepared to say such things don’t exist until someone proves non-existence beyond all shadow of doubt. Eerie things do happen!

Well, for some reason or other it occurred to me to wonder if the Kingmaker (https://richardiii.net/richard-iii-his-world/his-family/the-making-of-the-kingmaker/) ever made metaphysical appearances. Forgive me, but my grey cells are often inclined to wander along odd paths, and in this instance the merest soupçon about the Kingmaker would have done.

This time the path took me to a 2022 article: https://www.historyhit.com/feuds-and-folklore-the-turbulent-history-of-warwick-castle/. As the author of the article about Warwick Castle is historian and writer Matt Lewis, who is also the Chairman of the Richard III Society, I knew I could trust what I read. Not that he sets out to be controversial in any way, it was simply an excellent factual outline of Warwick Castle’s history.

The castle has a mythical hero, Guy of Warwick (my insertion: https://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/article/guy-warwick-english-hero) who is “….on a par with King Arthur….and who falls in love with Felice, the daughter of the Earl of Warwick….[Guy] kills the Dun Cow, a huge beast of unknown origin, a bone from which was kept at Warwick Castle (though it turned out to be a whale bone). Next, he kills a giant wild boar before moving on to slay a dragon in Northumberland before continuing his adventures abroad. Guy returns to Warwick and wins the hand of his lady, Felice….” 

There’s no happy ending, I fear, because Guy cannot live with his conscience about the violence of his life. He undertakes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is required to slay a giant named Colbrond, returns to England and becomes a hermit in a cave. He and Felice are brought together again shortly before his death. Oh, dear. Not something to read at bedtime in the hope of going off to sleep enveloped in that warm, fuzzy feeling.

But the rest of Matt Lewis’s excellent article is true history, going through the various families that have held the earldom of Warwick over the centuries.

So I had to keep looking elsewhere in the hope of finding that the Kingmaker did indeed have a ghost or two to his name. But no. There is a famous apparition at the castle, just not the one I want! It seems the 17th-century ghost of Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, reigns supreme, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulke_Greville,_1st_Baron_Brooke.

Other links I went to in my fruitless search were here https://www.spookyisles.com/warwick-castle-ghosts/, here https://ghosts.fandom.com/wiki/Warwick_Castle and here https://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/warwick-castle. No sign of the Kingmaker’s elusive spirit.

Other entities do indeed make themselves known. There’s a “Presence” in the castle dungeon 😧, a great black beast with fiery red eyes wandering the grounds, and the sound of soldiers marching in the passages. 😨 The shadow of a woman sometimes follows visitors through the castle, and there are dreadful wails from a woman believed to have been walled up alive with her baby! 😱

Well, the castle didn’t produce anything supernatural for me when I went there. I longed to come face-to-face with the Kingmaker, but he must have been on one of his trips across the Channel, or having a nap. It was daylight and perhaps he does his haunting after dark?

Would I go on a night-time ghost hunt there? No! Not even for the Kingmaker. But I did invent his ghost in a very definitely fictional story from Easter last year, called Picking the Bones. See this link https://murreyandblue.org/2023/04/08/picking-the-bones/. Here he is, in the snow with his equally fictional pet greyhound, Tobias. (Yes, I know the Kingmaker wouldn’t have had a beard, but you have to read the story to find out why he has one in this image.)