Highclere Castle, the house the world knows as the real Downton Abbey, was built to look eternal. Its honey-colored stone towers rise from the Hampshire hills as though they have watched over 500 years of English weather. That impression is almost entirely an illusion. The soaring Victorian pile was created in the 1840s, when Sir Charles Barry, the architect then designing the new Houses of Parliament, remodeled an older Georgian mansion on the estate into a romantic fantasy of turrets and towers dressed in Bath stone.
The land had belonged to the Herbert family since the 1670s, but the dramatic building that carries their name is far younger than it pretends. Barry chose a Jacobean style, a Victorian invention that borrowed the strapwork of the Elizabethan age and mixed it with Italian Renaissance touches. The interiors took decades to complete, and by the time the fifth Earl brought his bride home in the 1890s, the great house with its 200 to 300 rooms was younger than some of the servants who kept it. That gap between the apparent age and the actual newness mattered because the entire power of such a house rested on the feeling that it had always been there.
That feeling was carefully engineered. And here is the first truth of Highclere: the public rooms were only half the building, and the smaller half at that. Behind and beneath them lay a second house built deliberately to stay out of sight, with separate staircases, service passages, and a basement world of kitchens and sculleries where an army of servants worked. Between the two worlds hung a single door covered in green baize cloth, designed to deaden the sound of the servants at work.
That door was the frontier between two lives. A house on this scale, however, did not run on illusion alone. It ran on money, and the strange thing about the earl who owned the splendor is that for years he did not really have any. George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, inherited Highclere and its 5,000-acre estate at the age of 23.
He was a sporting aristocrat who loved fast horses and fast motorcars at a time when motoring was still a dangerous novelty. His expensive tastes, however, were quietly draining away the family income. Like much of the British aristocracy, he was caught in a slow disaster. Cheap grain flooding in from America had collapsed British farm prices, and the agricultural depression drained the rents that had supported great families for centuries.
The house did not shrink to match the falling income. Three hundred rooms still had to be heated, the servants still had to be paid, the parties still had to be given. A great house was not a home in any ordinary sense; it was an institution, a business, and a theater of social power. The fifth Earl, master of one of the most magnificent houses in England, was in plain terms a man with a growing pile of debt and a shrinking bank balance.
His class had one standard solution for this predicament: marrying money. The bargain was simple. Cash-poor lords with ancient names married rich brides whose new fortunes bought their way into old blood. The fifth Earl made precisely that bargain, and the fortune that saved Highclere came wrapped in a secret that everyone at the wedding knew and no one said aloud.
On 26 June 1895, on his own 29th birthday, the Earl married Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. On paper she was the daughter of Captain Frederick Wombwell. In truth, she was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, the immensely wealthy and childless bachelor banker.
Alfred adored Almina and paid for the marriage on a scale that reset the finances of Highclere in a single afternoon. The marriage settlement was extraordinary. Alfred settled £500,000, worth something like £70 million today, into trust for Almina, and quietly paid off every one of Lord Carnarvon’s existing debts before the wedding. He also gave her a life annuity of around £12,000 a year.
In a single stroke, a struggling earl became a man who could restore his crumbling house, pay his servants, and keep the whole great machine of Highclere running without ever earning a penny of it himself. Alfred de Rothschild continued supporting the household for the rest of his life. When he died in 1918, he left Almina a further £50,000, his London house, and further sums to her husband and children. There was a quiet irony buried in all of this.
The most English of institutions, an ancient aristocratic country house, was being kept alive by one of the newest and most talked-about fortunes in Europe, the money of a Jewish banking dynasty channeled through a daughter who could not be openly acknowledged. Set that fortune against the wages of the people who actually did the work, and the gap between them tells the whole story. The mistress of Highclere had a private income of £12,000 a year to spend as she pleased. A scullery maid, who spent her days scrubbing mountains of pots, might earn as little as £5 a year.
£12,000 against five. That was the arithmetic of the great house. A house of 300 rooms did not clean or heat or feed itself. Two entirely separate populations shared the building at every hour.
There was the family and their guests, and there was the household, the servants, who ran into many dozens indoors and hundreds across the whole estate when outdoor staff were counted. At great houses of similar standing, around 43 indoor servants were kept; at Eaton Hall, more than 300 staff served indoors and out. Highclere sat firmly in that world, with gardeners, gamekeepers, grooms, chauffeured motorcar drivers, farm workers, and estate laborers all depending on the one house. The estate aimed to be a world unto itself.
The walled kitchen garden and home farm fed the household; the woods gave timber and game; the estate had its own workshops and water supply. A house like Highclere was closer to a small self-governing village than to a modern home. And the whole community was arranged in a single vast pyramid, with the Earl and Countess at the peak and the lowest maid at the base. The architecture held the two populations apart as deliberately as anything Barry drew.
Narrow service passages threaded through the house so a footman could carry a laden tray the length of the building without stepping into a room a guest might see. Down in the basement lay the kitchens, sculleries, larders, and the servants’ hall. Up at the top of the house were the cramped, cold bedrooms where the staff slept, with men and women kept strictly apart. The green baize door hung between the bright world and the hidden one, and a servant crossed that threshold many times a day, changing worlds each time.
The great houses expected their servants to be unseen and, when seen, silent. In many houses, a housemaid who met a member of the family in a corridor was expected to stop, turn, and face the wall until they had passed. Servants were to do their work in the early hours before the family came down, so that fires appeared already lit and meals already on the table as if by magic. The magic was people working in the cold and the dark, trained to vanish.
Below the stairs lay a second society as ranked and rigid as the one above. At its top stood the butler, who ruled the male staff and kept the keys to the wine cellar, and the housekeeper, who ruled the female staff and the linen. Below them ranged footmen, often chosen for their height and looks, the valet who dressed the Earl, the lady’s maid who maintained the Countess’s wardrobe, and then the great body of housemaids, kitchen maids, and scullery maids. At the very bottom were the hall boys and the youngest girls, children in many cases who did the roughest work for the smallest wage of all.
The wages told the story of that ladder in hard figures. At the top, a butler might earn around £70 a year. A housekeeper might have something over £40. A scullery maid might receive as little as £5 a year, with board and lodging found on top.
The butler, the summit of a lifetime in service, earned in a year rather less than the cost of a single lavish weekend when great guests came to stay. Even below the stairs there was an upstairs and a downstairs. The senior staff often took their meal apart from the rest, withdrawing to the housekeeper’s room, while the lower servants ate in the servants’ hall under a strict order of rank. Junior servants were often known simply by their function or given a single house name chosen by the family, a small daily reminder of where they stood.
And yet service was also a living, a roof, a place in the world, and a ladder that could actually be climbed. A hall boy could become a footman, a footman a butler, a housemaid a housekeeper. The maid climbing the back stairs in the dark rose before 6:00 in the morning. The first work of the day was the fires, and it was brutal, filthy, and endless.
In a house of two or three hundred rooms warmed entirely by coal, every grate had to be raked out, cleaned, blacked, relaid, and lit before the family came down. The maid carried coal in heavy scuttles up and down the back stairs, on hands and knees at each hearth, so that every fire should be burning brightly and every grate spotless by the time the family appeared. The whole point of the labor was that none of it should ever show. Through the whole day, everything that made the house comfortable had to be carried by hand.
There was no running hot water to the bedrooms; cans of hot water were heated below and carried up to the washstands, and the dirty water carried down again. Meals were cooked in the basement kitchens and carried up long passages and stairs. Chamber pots were emptied, slops were carried, and the grates lit at dawn had to be fed with coal all day and evening. The laundry alone was an operation on the scale of a small factory, washed by hand, boiled, scrubbed, pressed with heavy flat irons heated on a stove.
All of it fell to the laundry maids, whose hands were raw and whose days were spent in heat and steam. The family summoned all of this by a system of bells. Every room had a bell pull connected by wires threaded through the walls to a great board hung in the servants’ passage below. When the master rang from his dressing room, a bell jangled on the board and told a footman or maid exactly where they were wanted.
There was, in the phrase of the time, no such thing in the servants’ hall as being off duty. A servant’s day ran from before the family woke until after the family had gone to bed, which in the great weeks of entertaining could mean past midnight, and then began again at five the next morning. The life of a great house followed the turning of the year. In spring and early summer the family went up to London for the Season, the round of balls and dinners by which the aristocracy conducted its marriages and its display.
When summer turned to autumn, society came back to the country for the shooting. It was the shooting season above all that showed Highclere doing exactly what it had been built to do. The single most dazzling occasion of these years came very early in December 1895, only months after the Earl’s marriage. The guest was the Prince of Wales himself, the future King Edward VII.
The preparations alone were reckoned to have cost the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds today. Chefs and waiters were hired from the Savoy Hotel in London, decorators and florists transformed the rooms, and a single royal weekend could cost more than a footman would earn in his entire working life. The shoot itself was a vast piece of choreography. The gamekeepers had worked all year to rear the birds; on the day, an army of beaters drove the pheasants up over the line of waiting guns.
At the height of the Edwardian craze for the big bag, the greatest estates could account for thousands of birds across a few days of shooting. When the Prince of Wales shot at Highclere, eight guns took the field, and afterwards the birds were counted and shared out according to a careful etiquette of rank, with the prince receiving the largest portion. At the center of the sporting day sat the shoot lunch, a feast carried out into the open and served on linen with silver. When the light failed, the house turned to the evening ritual.
The dressing gong sent the guests up to their rooms, where valets and maids waited to dress them for dinner. A dinner of many courses followed, served by the footmen under the eye of the butler. After the meal, the men remained for port and cigars while the women withdrew to the drawing room. Every hour of it rested on the labor of the people below the stairs.
The world that made such evenings possible had less than twenty years left to live. When war was declared in the summer of 1914, the whole bright world of the country-house weekend stopped. Few responded as swiftly or as completely as Almina, Countess of Carnarvon. She looked at her enormous house and saw not a stage for entertaining but a hospital waiting to be born.
She acted at once, on her own money, which was to say the Rothschild money. She turned Highclere into a hospital for wounded officers. The rooms that had held a future king’s shooting party were fitted with hospital beds. She equipped the house with an operating theater and an X-ray machine, that new and expensive marvel of medicine, funded in part by her father.
She brought the best surgeons down from London and staffed the place to care for men brought straight from the horror of the front. And Almina did not merely organize it and stand back. She nursed. By the accounts of the men she cared for, she was a gifted and fearless nurse, tireless at the bedside, unflinching before wounds that would have turned many away.
She spent lavishly on her patients’ comfort, on good food and wine and small kindnesses. Officers who came to her shattered by the trenches wrote afterwards of the extraordinary woman who had turned her home into a place of healing. Some dreaded the day they would be pronounced fit, because fit meant a return to the front. As the war ground on, Almina moved her operation to London, running a private hospital there through the later years of the war, closer to the trains that brought the men home from France.
She carried the work on into the 1920s and beyond at premises named Alfred House after the father whose fortune had made it all possible. For her wartime service she was offered an honor in 1919, and in a gesture entirely in character, she declined it. While his wife nursed broken soldiers, the Earl was thousands of miles away digging in the sand. The road that took George Herbert to Egypt began in Germany.
In 1901, the reckless motorist was driving near Bad Schwalbach when his car left the road. He survived, but his health was permanently broken, and his lungs in particular could no longer bear the cold and damp of the English winter. His doctors advised him to spend the cold months in a warm, dry climate, and so he began to spend his winters in Egypt. What began as a cure became the ruling passion of the rest of his life.
Carnarvon was not a trained scholar; he was an amateur with a genuine eye and, far more importantly, the money to hire the best. The best was a prickly, gifted, self-taught excavator named Howard Carter. From 1907 onward, Carnarvon financed Carter’s excavations season after season, and for a very long time the money bought almost nothing. By 1922, the Earl had grown weary and had all but decided to stop.
He agreed to fund one final season and no more. It was in that last grudging season that Carter’s workmen uncovered a single cut step in the floor of the Valley of the Kings. More steps followed, then a sealed doorway, and behind it lay the discovery of the century: the almost intact tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun, the first pharaoh’s tomb ever found with its treasures still inside. Carter had the discipline to cover the stairway again and send for Carnarvon in England rather than break in alone.
When Carter at last made a small breach in the corner of the sealed inner doorway and held a candle to the hole, Carnarvon asked whether he could see anything. Carter gave the answer that went around the world: “Yes, wonderful things. ”
The tomb yielded 5,398 cataloged objects, the greatest single treasure ever recovered from the ancient world. For a few months, the sickly, restless master of Highclere was one of the most famous men on earth.
But the triumph carried its own poison. Egypt was moving toward independence, and the sight of an English lord treating the tomb of an Egyptian king as his personal property was inflammatory. The Earl’s exclusive deal with a London newspaper enraged the rest of the world’s press and Egyptian opinion alike. Disputes multiplied over who owned the treasures and who controlled access to the tomb, and the quarrels grew bitter even between Carnarvon and Carter themselves.
The end came with a strange smallness. Around 19 March 1923 in Egypt, the fifth Earl was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. Some days later, shaving, he nicked the bite, and the wound became infected. In an age before antibiotics, such a thing could kill, and it did.
Blood poisoning set in, and pneumonia settled on his already damaged lungs. On 5 April 1923, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, master of Highclere and discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun, died in Cairo at the age of 56. The world could not accept it. A man had opened the sealed tomb of a god king, and within months he was dead.
The legend of the curse of the pharaohs was born. It was said that at the very moment of his death, every light in Cairo failed, and that at the same hour back at Highclere the Earl’s little dog howled and dropped dead. The power failure was real enough, though outages in Cairo of that time were far from rare, and the stories of the darkened city and the dying dog should be seen for what they are: powerful tales the world told itself rather than facts of history. The curse was one of the first great creations of the global newspaper age.
The plainest refutation of the whole legend is that the family did not die out. The Earl’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, who had been among the very first people to enter the tomb, lived until 1980. The earldom passed down the generations, and Highclere is owned to this day by the Carnarvon family. What was not a story was the bill.
When the fifth Earl died, his death brought down upon the estate the full weight of the death duties introduced in 1894. To meet them, the Earl’s personal collection of Egyptian antiquities was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1926. The gold a curse was supposed to have guarded so jealously was in the end sold off by an English family to pay a tax bill to the British government. The Earl himself was brought home and buried on the summit of Beacon Hill, on his own land, within sight of the house that had been the center of his world.
Almina remarried within months of the Earl’s death. Across the following decades she spent her way through the great Rothschild fortune that had underwritten everything until, in 1951, she was declared bankrupt. She died in 1969 at the age of 93. The money that had saved Highclere, run its household, funded its parties, paid for a war hospital, and financed the discovery of a pharaoh’s tomb had in the end run entirely out.
But not everything the fifth Earl had gathered in Egypt sailed to New York. Some of it never left Highclere at all. After his death, part of his private horde was placed into small cupboards built into the thickness of the walls between a set of double doors off the drawing room. Then the cupboards were blocked up and in time forgotten.
They came to light again in 1987. Valuers were going carefully through the contents of the castle, and the seventh Earl asked the retired butler, a man named Robert Taylor, whether the valuers had found everything in the house. The old butler answered that they had everything, he said, except the Egyptian things. He then led them to the blocked-up cupboards between the drawing room doors.
There, forgotten for decades, lay part of the fifth Earl’s Egyptian collection: small figures, beads, carvings, including a fine carved and painted wooden head of an ancient king. The finds were small treasures the fifth Earl had kept back for himself, hidden in his own house, and then forgotten by everyone but the servants. The family had forgotten. The records had lost it.
The experts had to be told. And the one person in the world who still knew where the treasures lay hidden in the walls was the butler, a servant, a man from below the stairs. The people who had spent their lives moving unseen through the passages of the house were the ones who truly knew it in its bones. Today those rediscovered objects form an Egyptian exhibition housed in the cellars of the castle, down in the very below-stairs world where the servants once ruled.
Visitors come in their thousands. In the years after the old world ended, Highclere found an entirely new kind of fame. By 2009, the castle was reported to need something like £12 million of major repairs. In 2010, Highclere was rescued by becoming a television set.
The house was chosen as the filming location for Downton Abbey, and the program became a global phenomenon watched in dozens of countries. The stream of visitors and the filming fees together did what the old rents and the Rothschild fortune once had: they paid to keep the roof on. But there is a strange and perfect irony in the house’s new fame. The grand rooms of Downton Abbey are the real Highclere, filmed on location.
The exteriors are real, the state rooms are real. But the below-stairs of Downton Abbey, the servants’ hall and the kitchens where so much of the drama unfolds, was never filmed at Highclere at all. Those scenes were built and shot on a sound stage at Ealing Studios in London, because the real service quarters at the castle were no longer suitable for filming. The servers’ world that audiences came to love was a stage set in another city, while the real kitchens and attic bedrooms where the maids slept remained off camera, hidden exactly as they had always been meant to be.
The servants themselves were invented for the screen as well. There was no real Carson or Mrs. Hughes. The characters the world took to its heart were creations of a writer’s imagination.
The real people who had lived those lives at Highclere had been trained their whole working lives to leave no trace, and they had succeeded. The girl on the back stairs in the dark lit the fires that warmed the rooms the world admires. She left no diary that survives, most likely no photograph, very possibly not even a recorded name. She left only the warmth in the rooms and the shine on the silver and the impression, so carefully built, that the grandeur simply happened by itself.
That impression was the true product of Highclere more than any dinner or shooting party. The magnificence and the servitude were never two separate stories; they were the same story seen from the two sides of a single door. The permanence the house was built to promise turned out to be the greatest illusion of all. Those Victorian towers were raised to say that the family had always been here and always would be, and that the whole way of life inside them was the natural and unchanging order of the world.
It lasted in its full glory barely two generations. It was undone by taxes, by a world war, and above all by the simple refusal of ordinary people to go on living invisible lives in the service of others. The girl on the stairs in the end had more power over the fate of the great house than any curse. When she and the hundreds like her decided they would no longer climb those stairs in the dark, the whole world of the country house began to fall.
The end of the great house, seen from below the stairs, was not only a loss; it was also a liberation. The maids and footmen who left service after the war left for shorter hours, better pay, and the simple dignity of being seen. Highclere still stands in its Hampshire park, still owned by the Carnarvon family after more than 300 years. Each year the visitors come and walk the bright half of the house and photograph the tower and the cedars.
Almost none of them descend, even in imagination, into the other half, the cold stone world behind the green baize door, where the real life of the house was lived and where its truest keepers spent their days unseen. The grandeur upstairs was only ever the visible half of the truth. The other half, the one that made it all possible, was and remains the world below.