| Nationality | David Robin Francis Guy Greville eighth earl of Warwick and eighth Earl Brooke (1934–1996), art and property divester, was born on 15 May 1934 at Warwick Castle. Known as Lord Brooke, he was educated at Summerfields School, St Leonards, Sussex, and at Eton College. On 28 June 1956 he married Sarah Anne Chester Beatty (b. 1934/5), model, daughter of Alfred Chester Beatty, copper mine owner. In an echo of his baptism, the wedding was self-consciously untraditional, taking place with little warning at a register office on King's Road, Chelsea, London. The couple had two children, Guy and Charlotte, but separated in 1963 and were divorced on 24 April 1967.
Brooke moved into Warwick Castle in October 1968 after eight years in which no member of the family had been resident. As at other historic properties, visitor numbers had increased during the 1960s and by the end of the decade the castle was attracting up to 200,000 people a year. Brooke seemed at first intent on emulating the showmen-peers who were as much attractions as the houses they exhibited, notably Lord Montagu at Beaulieu, the marquess of Bath at Longleat, and the duke of Bedford at Woburn. He took over management himself from his agent, raised admission fees, staged son et lumière displays, opened the castle dungeons (in 1970), and restored and exhibited forgotten items such as suits of seventeenth-century armour. However, the impression was misleading, as after a few years Brooke appointed agents to manage the castle and the remainder of the estate. By 1972 mention of the living members of the Greville family had disappeared from the castle guidebook. In April 1975 Brooke left for Paris and failed to return after the promised two months, apparently resolving to go into tax exile to avoid the expropriative taxation which he anticipated from Britain's Labour government. Despite the extension of exemptions from capital transfer tax, in the interest of historic houses and their owners, he did not return.
The mid-1970s saw public expressions of anxiety over threats to historic buildings and collections in private hands. The disappearance of four Canaletto paintings of the castle from Warwick that year alerted the art world to Brooke's scheme of selling selected items from his collection. This had been going on for some time, but the Canalettos were the first major works with a close association to the castle to be sold, having been bought by a dealer for £1,000,000. The government was unable to deny an export licence to one painting and the fate of another remained vague, though public appeals, charity donations, and limited Treasury support saved two works subsequently acquired by Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. It transpired that more than twenty other paintings by masters had already been sold and exported. Brooke had the Warwick portrait of Elizabeth I auctioned at Sothebys in December 1977, when it was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery for £38,500. The disappearance of the monumental Roman Warwick vase, given to the second earl by his uncle Sir William Hamilton in 1778, led to its discovery in a warehouse in Wimbledon, en route to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An export licence was refused and the vase was acquired in 1979 by the City of Glasgow for the Burrell collection.
Despite the picketing of the castle by demonstrators, the petitioning of the House of Commons by campaigners, offers of financial or management support from local authorities, and close scrutiny from public museum and gallery professionals, and journalists, Brooke refused to negotiate. He refused to acknowledge that the dismantling of the Warwick collection was anything but a private matter for himself as its owner, in so doing cutting across the unspoken compact which allowed landed aristocrats to exist in a supposedly social-democratic age. For generations the Grevilles had presented themselves as conservers of the treasures of the past, but the disposals, 'on a scale which dwarfs any requirement for the upkeep of the castle itself' (The Times, 17 July 1978), celebrated cash value over the idea that the landed nobility held treasures of art and architecture as an informal public trust. Brooke's secrecy and invisibility left a drama without its main actor. In what seemed to be a final blow, in October 1978 Madame Tussaud's, owners of the waxworks in London, who had been advising on the development of the castle as a visitor attraction, announced that they had bought the property and park for £1,500,000.
Despite fears that the sales had left Warwick Castle without many of its most appealing attractions, visitor numbers exceeded 500,000 in 1978. It had been recognized for some time that Lord Brooke's strategy for the castle depended more on the immersive theatricality of costumed banquets and the use of the castle as a backdrop for spectacular re-enactments of medieval and early modern combat, than on public interest in the fine arts. Tussaud's and its parent company, Pearson, provided an equivalent sum to the purchase price to spend on repairs to the fabric of the castle and ironically made more of Greville family history than had either the seventh earl or his son. Brooke, meanwhile, completed the dismemberment of the estate by selling the castle archives and his remaining farm to Warwickshire county council. Like his father, he became an exile among the international wealthy.
The seventh earl—who had expressed dissatisfaction with his son's sale of the castle and art collection, if only for its speed and the price—died at his home in Rome on 20 January 1984, and was survived by his wife, son, and daughter. He was buried at St Mary's Church, Warwick, on 27 January. Brooke succeeded as eighth earl, and without the castle his activities attracted little interest from the British press. He died in near-obscurity of pneumonia at Mijas, Malaga, Spain, on 20 January 1996, and was buried on 19 February at St Mary's, Warwick.
The Greville family motto, (Vix ea nostra voco (‘I scarcely call these things my own’)), was much cited by commentators on the careers of both earls. Unlike most of their contemporaries among stately home owners they had inherited a tourist attraction as a going concern, and both demonstrated preoccupations at odds with social assumptions of public obligation. In selling first the major part of their land and art collection, and then Warwick Castle itself, they finally and successfully rebelled against a pseudo-medieval romanticism that had bedevilled their family at least since Fulke Greville had acquired the castle in 1604. The seventh earl's disposal of most of the estate allowed the castle to stand on its own merits, probably to the benefit of its future as a commercially viable historic property. Both earls became private individuals of a kind that had been impossible while they owned the castle. However, the manner of the Grevilles' retirement from Warwick was a blow to civic duty as widely understood, and contributed to changes in the statutory and financial regime governing state support for historic houses and collections enacted in the early 1980s. |