Newbury, England -- July 18, 2018. Tourists are lining up outside Highclere Castle, where Downton Abbey is filmed, for a tour.
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Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England, is now famous as the shooting location for Downton Abbey, but one of the estate's real-life lords funded the search for Tutankhamen's tomb. George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earrl of Carnarvon, was born on June 26, 1866 and inherited the title and the estate in 1890.
Like the fictional 7th Lord Grantham (and a lot of English peers in the 1880s and 1890s), the 5th Lord Carnarvon married rich to bail himself and the estate out of financial ruin. Shortly after his 1895 wedding to heiress Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell, her father, the millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, paid off Carnarvon's standing debts and bestowed a modest £500,000 (equivalent to about $81 million in 2019) settlement on his new son-in-law. Lady Carnarvon's fortune is, in part, how the Carnarvons funded archaeologist Howard Carter's excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings -- although he also spent a fair chunk of it on racehorses and fast cars, which makes it pretty easy to figure out how he got into so much debt in the first place. Arguably, several years of archaeology were a better investment than an ill-fated Canadian railroad venture.
Along with fast horses and faster cars, Lord Carnarvon loved ancient Egypt. He and Lady Carnarvon often spent winters in Cairo, buying antiquities for their collection back home (trading in what we would now call looted antiquities was perfectly legal in the early 1900s). Downton Abbey's writers gave a nod to Lord Carnarvon's passion for Egyptology in Season 6, when Lord Grantham names his new puppy Tiaa; when Lady Edith points out that the Downton dogs always have Egyptian names, he replies, "Tiaa was a wife of Amenhotep II and the mother of Thutmose IV. Don't you know anything?"
In 1907, Carnarvon hired a young archaeologist named Howard Carter to excavate the tombs of ancient Egyptian nobles at Deir el-Bahri, near the New Kingdom capital of Thebes, where the Egyptian government had just issued Carnarvon an excavation permit. Seven years later, in 1914, Carnarvon hired Carter again to search an unopened royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings -- but a few months into the work, World War I broke out, putting everything on hold until 1917. Back in England, Highclere Castle really did serve as a hospital during the war (like Downton and many other real-life estates), and Lady Carnarvon worked as both a nurse and an administrator.
Lord Carnarvon stands with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert and Howard Carter at the top of the steps leading to the tomb of Tutankhamun.
By Harry Burton (Photographer) - The Griffith Institute Archive.Harry Burton’s photos of Tutankhamun’s Tomb taken in 1922 are on the Griffith Institute Archive with the note:“This material is published with full and free access, providing a comprehensive online resource for all audiences.” See: http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63219055
By 1922, Carnarvon had decided to give up -- but a telegram from Howard Carter on November 4 changed everything, for Carnarvon and for generations of Egyptologists. With Carnarvon's financial backing, Carter had at last located the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The rest is history, but it's history that Carnarvon wasn't around to witness. On April 5, 1923, a few months after witnessing the opening of the 3,200-year-old tomb, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon died in a Cairo hotel (which sounds terribly depressing, but to be fair, it was a very luxurious Cairo hotel).
Despite nearly a century of eager speculation (and the fact that it makes a really good story), it wasn't King Tut's curse that killed Lord Carnarvon -- just a weak immune system and terrible luck. Thanks to his injuries in a 1903 car crash, Carnarvon had suffered from poor health for 20 years, and doctors later concluded that he was more vulnerable to infection than a healthy person would have been. In fact, he was so vulnerable that an infected mosquito bite dealt the final blow, after two weeks of fever, pain, and pneumonia.
The Dowager Countess Carnarvon kept pouring money into the excavation for two more years after her husband's death, when the Egyptian government essentially bought back the tomb's contents from the Herbert family for about £35,000 (equivalent to roughly $2.5 million today). But the family maintained a large collection of Egyptian artifacts. The basement of Highclere Castle doesn't contain Mr. Carson's pantry, Mrs. Hughes' sitting room, or the kitchens and servants' hall of Downton Abbey: it's an exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts brought to England by the 5th Earl and Countess, open to the public along with other sections of the house. No word on what Mr. Carson would make of that, but all those below-stairs scenes from the TV show actually took place on a London filming set.
Lord Carnarvon's final resting place is a tribute to both his love of archaeology and the early 20th century's reckless and often selfish definition of it. He's buried within the ditch-and-embankment boundaries of a 2,000-year-old Iron Age hillfort near the estate (and since modern archaeologists have never formally surveyed or excavated the hillfort, there's no way to know what he may have disturbed in order to achieve that). The grave lies among the buried ruins of huts, marking the site of what was once a bustling community of 2,000 or 3,000 farmers, who terraced the north slope of the hill for their crops.
The hillfort and the late Lord Carnarvon's grave overlook Highclere Castle and its grounds in the distance, where his great-grandson, George Reginald Oliver Molyneux Herbert, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, now runs the family estate. The current countess is a former fashion designer turned historian, who has written a biography of her predecessor, Almina.
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