In 1895, a nineteen-year-old heiress named Almina Wombwell walked up the aisle of St Margaret's, Westminster, and into the history of one of England's most beautiful country houses. She was, the society pages whispered, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, the bachelor banker whose immense fortune had no other natural heir. Her dowry was reputed to be the largest of the Edwardian age. Half a million pounds in cash. Two hundred thousand pounds in settlement. A blank cheque for the rest of her life. The young man waiting at the altar, George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was charming, sickly, and quietly bankrupt. The house he brought her to, Highclere Castle in Hampshire, was crumbling under the weight of debt and damp.
This is the story Highclere does not put on its postcards. It is also the story of the people who actually kept the house standing. Robert Streatfeild arrived at Highclere as head butler in 1900, the year Almina's son Henry was born, and he stayed for twenty eight years until 1928. He ran a staff of forty four indoor servants at the height of the Edwardian era, oversaw the conversion of the state rooms into a wartime hospital, and was still answering the front door when the body of the 5th Earl came home from Egypt in a sealed coffin. Ethel Heatley was the nurse-in-charge of that hospital. Almina, who had no formal training but a Rothschild's appetite for organisation, turned Highclere into a military convalescent home in September 1914 and ran it personally until 1918.
There is more to the Highclere story than the curse and the cameras. Almina herself was made of harder stuff than the gentle Edwardian portraits suggest. After the 5th Earl's death she remarried within seven months, to a man named Ian Dennistoun, and the marriage collapsed in one of the most scandalous society divorce cases of the 1920s. Dennistoun's first wife sued Almina personally, in open court, for the maintenance arrears her new husband owed. The case ran for weeks in the London papers in 1925. Almina paid, settled, and walked away. She lived another forty four years, dying in a Bristol nursing home in May 1969, almost forgotten and almost penniless, having spent her entire Rothschild inheritance on Highclere, on Egypt, on her wartime hospital, and on a second hospital she opened in Bryanston Square in London.
British Manors investigates the histories that the guidebooks soften and the heritage boards prefer to forget. We work from primary archives, parish registers, household accounts, census returns, and the private papers of the families themselves. We name the servants. We name the architects, the builders, the gardeners, and the nurses. We follow the money, the marriages, and the burials. Every episode is researched from documented sources and presented without the costume-drama gloss that has come to define how the English country house is remembered.
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Sources
Lady Fiona Carnarvon, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, Hodder 2011.
Lady Fiona Carnarvon, Lady Catherine and the Real Downton Abbey, Hodder 2013.
Lady Fiona Carnarvon, At Home at Highclere: Entertaining at the Real Downton Abbey, Preface 2016.
Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Volume 2, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1999. Used for Alfred de Rothschild's banking career, his bachelor household at Seamore Place, and the Christopher Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun, Faber and Faber 1992.
Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamen's Curse, Profile 2012.
Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile, Westview 2004. Used for the wider context of Egyptian archaeology during the 5th Earl's working years.
Christopher Hibbert, Edward VII: A Portrait, Allen Lane 1976. Used for Highclere's place in the Edwardian house-party circuit and Alfred de Rothschild's social world.
Sally Bedell Smith, Elizabeth the Queen, Random House 2012. Used for the 7th Earl's long service as racing manager to Queen Elizabeth II.
Highclere Castle Visitor Guidebook, 2023 edition.
Primary sources.
The Times, obituary of George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, 6 April 1923.
The Times, obituary of Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, 24 May 1969.
The 5th Earl of Carnarvon's Egyptological notebooks, the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.
Howard Carter's excavation diaries and journals, the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. The primary contemporaneous record of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun on 4 Downton Abbey series production notes and location records, ITV and Carnival Films, 2010 to 2015, with the feature films of 2019 and 2022.
The Royal Archives, Windsor, racing correspondence of Queen Elizabeth II with the 7th Earl of Carnarvon.
