The staggering luxury of Downtown Abbey’s turreted house and lush grounds have mesmerized audiences as much as any of the adventures of the Crawley family and their staff
The real Downton Abbey is Highclere Castle, located in Berkshire at a crossroads between Winchester and Oxford, Bristol and London. The property’s thousand acres of parklands include the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, and the current house stands on foundations that for roughly eight hundred years held up the palace of the bishops of Winchester.
Since 1679 the property has belonged to the Herbert family. Henry Herbert (1741-1811), a grandson of the eighth Earl of Pembroke, inherited the estate from an uncle in 1769 and shortly afterwards commissioned Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716-1783) to redesign the gardens, a project that included moving an extant folly and creating new ones.
In 1793 Herbert was granted the hereditary title of Earl of Carnarvon. His grandson, the third Earl (1800-1849) hired Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860), most famous for his Houses of Parliament, to replace Highclere’s modest Georgian manor with an exquisitely grandiose Jacobean style structure, on which construction began in 1842.
The earl did not live long enough to see the magnificent, gold-embossed, tooled-leather Spanish wall hangings of about 1631 that he had brought back from Cordova in situ in Highclere’s cathedral-inspired Saloon. Work continued until the early 1860s, with Thomas Allom designing much of the interior, including the dramatic entryway with its oak staircase.
Downton‘s creator and writer, Julian Fellowes, favored the choice of Highclere because its confident, exuberant mid-nineteenth-century design embodies the British Empire at its height. He has described its style as an architectural “trumpet blast,” in stark contrast to the challenges faced by its occupants in the early twentieth century. A longtime friend of the Carnarvons, Fellowes equally emphasizes the importance of the fact that Highclere continues to be occupied by the family that created it.
Downton‘s belowstairs scenes and (after season 1) bedroom scenes have been filmed in a studio outside London. Many of the castle’s treasures are removed during filming and stylists rearrange rooms to suit the storyline. Nevertheless, the essence of a house replete with ancestral portraits and mementos from a variety of periods but with a shared family history shines through, lending verisimilitude to the fictional story.
They hint at a past that is even more intriguing and glamorous than that of the fictional Crawley family. And indeed it is. Highclere’s current chatelaine, Fiona, the eighth Countess of Carnarvon, explores this in two recent books. The first, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, focuses on the fifth Countess of Carnarvon, née Almina Wombwell (1876-1969), who married into the family in 1895. Although slightly younger than Downton‘s Cora Crawley (Countess of Grantham), she, too, infused a great fortune into the estate, which allowed her in-laws to overlook their more snobbish tendencies. She was not American, but rather presumed to be the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild (1842-1918) and officially his goddaughter, whom he lavished with a generous dowry and continued to fund until his death, when she inherited the bulk of his estate.
Her presence can be seen in the sumptuous silk damask wall coverings and matching drapes that give Highclere’s Green Drawing Room its name. The fabric was a gift from her godfather, who also paid to electrify the house and install modern plumbing in many areas including the servants’ working and living quarters.
Almina and the Rothschild money took Highclere to its pinnacle of luxury. In her day, no fewer than eighteen male indoor servants reported to the house steward. This did not include the maids or the downstairs help or the extensive staff needed to run the stables, dairy, greenhouses, kitchen garden, orchards, brewery, sawmills, electricians’ workshop, barns, formal gardens, parks, and woodlands.
All this was not enough when Albert, Prince of Wales, visited in 1895 for a shooting party. The butler was sent to London for supplies and the loan of extra chefs and waiters from the Savoy.
Almina’s generosity did not end with entertaining the elite. As World War I began, she proactively transformed Highclere into an officers’ hospital where (unlike in the Downton version), patients occupied bedrooms, were waited on by footmen, and tended to by pretty Irish nurses in pink uniforms. As the war lingered on, she closed Highclere and opened an expanded hospital in London.
Her husband, George, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon (1866-1923), nicknamed “Motor Carnarvon” for his love of fast cars, also adored horses and airplanes. However, his true passion was Egypt and archaeology. Having first visited in 1889, he went virtually every year from 1902 onwards, and in 1909 engaged the aspiring Howard Carter to supervise digs. By 1922 he had expended £50,000 on the project (approximately $16.5 million today) and was on the brink of giving up when Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.
The discovery immediately yielded hefty press fees and international renown, but if one believes the “Curse of King Tut,” it cost the earl his life. Shortly after unsealing the tomb’s inner sanctum, he succumbed to a fever. The entire city of Cairo went dark at the moment of his death due to an electrical outage, and, simultaneously at Highclere, his beloved dog awoke the housekeeper with a howl before also passing away.
The sixth Earl of Carnarvon (1898-1987), nicknamed Porchey (from Lord Porchester, the honorary title accorded to the Earl of Carnarvon’s heir), inherited Highclere and a massive debt. Lloyd George’s super tax had seen his father’s tax bill rise to more than 60 percent of his income by 1919. In addition, death duties on the estate were a whopping £500,000 (equivalent to between $30 and $40 million today, depending on what calculator you use). Unfortunately, at least for Porchey, his father had left his precious Egyptian collection and most of his racehorses to Almina.
That story and what followed are the focus of Lady Carnarvon’s second book, Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey. Although the sixth earl had a distant and difficult relationship with his mother, he turned to her for help. Lady Almina obligingly gave him proceeds from the sales of the Egyptian collection and the horses as well as much of her Rothschild inheritance.
However, a great deal of Highclere’s best furniture and pictures got auctioned off at a highly publicized sale at Christie’s in 1925. The famed Carnarvon pearls had already been sold to Cartier. Nevertheless, they can still be seen adorning the neck of Anna Sophia, the first Countess of Carnarvon (d. 1695) in her portrait by Van Dyck, which hangs in Highclere’s dining room along with two others by the artist, including a version of Charles I on horseback.
Highclere had been rescued for another generation. Staff cutbacks occurred and extravagances had to be reduced, but Porchey entertained lavishly. Novelist Evelyn Waugh, a frequent guest who twice married Carnarvon cousins, referred to any country-house weekend he deemed grand as being “very Highclere.”
Porchey married Catherine Wendell (1900-1977) the year before his father’s death. An American with East Coast heritage but small fortune, who had been raised in London from the age of twelve after the death of her father, she was beautiful, vivacious, and charming, as well as a great favorite of Prince George, another Highclere guest.
However, the sixth earl had an incurably wandering eye. When Lady Catherine finally moved out and filed for divorce in 1935 several longtime staff members followed her and Highclere’s butler diplomatically retired. Porchey’s second marriage to Viennese dancer Tilly Losch proved an unmitigated disaster.
Nevertheless, he successfully navigated Highclere through the ensuing travails of a house fire in 1937 and World War II, during which machine-gun fire from low-flying planes destroyed the leaded windows by the Great Oak Staircase and bombs left huge craters across the estate. He sold off small parcels of land until a profitable investment in 1954 allowed him to reestablish himself properly.
Shortly after he died in 1987, his son the seventh earl and longtime butler Robert Taylor discovered a cache of Egyptian artifacts that Porchey had sealed into the walls between two rooms, presumably to hide them from his mother. They are now exhibited in a display exploring Highclere’s Egyptian connections.
The seventh earl, a notable racehorse breeder and the queen’s racing manager, focused his attentions on rebuilding the estate’s farms and agriculture. Nevertheless, Highclere’s future remained uncertain until the phenomenal success of Downton Abbey.
In spite of renting the house out for events and photo shoots, the current Lord and Lady Carnarvon had struggled to find funds for urgent repairs and upkeep. The show has not only brought substantial location fees to the estate but also a drove of visitors. Although she might have been a bit shocked to see the house open to the world, one cannot help but think that Lady Almina would approve of the resourcefulness and commitment with which they have devoted themselves to securing Highclere’s future.