Things have changed a bit since Edward IV’s day. Britain’s first Plantagenet king would probably not have had the end of his loo roll folded into a smart point as ours is. Nor, in what the Middle Ages euphemistically called a “garderobe”, was Edward likely to have had the benefit of a complimentary spa manicure kit (“time for nails”). And while taps by Heritage Bathrooms (founded in 1924) might usually confer an air of architectural originality, in this bathroom (founded c1330) they feel daringly modern.
This is the Rose Suite in Warwick Castle, former seat of the Earl of Warwick, defensive stronghold of William the Conqueror and, for several weeks in 1469, the place where Edward IV is thought, the castle says, to have stayed as guest (or rather, as the history books have it, “prisoner”). And tonight, it is where I am staying too. Because, from this month, Warwick Castle is offering guests the opportunity to sleep in the same rooms in the tower where Edward slept. The castle is, perhaps inevitably, promising a “royal welcome”.
In many ways, the passing of 700-odd years has left relatively little mark. Edward, when he was here, would have climbed the same spiral staircase as I did and slept beneath the same vaulted stone ceiling. Perhaps most pruriently, as Aaron Manning, the castle’s head of historical interpretation explains, the modern toilet is plumbed into the medieval plumbing, so Edward “would have sat in exactly the same place as guests would today”. A happy thought.
