Castle Howard

The land came into Howard hands in 1577, when Lord William Howard, third son of the 4th Duke of Norfolk, married his step-sister Elizabeth Dacre, youngest daughter of the 4th Baron Dacre. She brought with her the Henderskelfe estate in Yorkshire and Naworth Castle in Cumberland. Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, a male-line descendant of Lord William, commissioned a new house on part of the Henderskelfe estate, on a site including the former castle. He first spoke to William Talman, a leading architect, then gave the work to John Vanbrugh, a fellow Kit-Cat Club member. It was Vanbrugh's first foray into architecture, and he was assisted by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Design work began in 1699.

Vanbrugh's design evolved into a Baroque structure of two symmetrical wings either side of a north-south axis, the crowning central dome added at a late stage, after building had begun. Construction started at the east end and ran from 1701 to 1709, the Central Block and its dome going up between 1703 and 1706. Many of the interiors were decorated by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini.

The complete design was published in the third volume of Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus in 1725, but the West Wing had still not been started when Vanbrugh died in 1726, despite his remonstration with the Earl. The house was incomplete when the 3rd Earl died in 1738. Remaining construction started at the direction of the 4th Earl, and Vanbrugh's design was not completed: the West Wing was built in a contrasting Palladian style to a design by the 3rd Earl's son-in-law, Sir Thomas Robinson. Most of the roughly 130 ancient sculptures and inscriptions were acquired before 1745 by the 4th Earl.

At the 4th Earl's death in 1758 the new wing had neither first floor nor roof. A roof had been added by the time Robinson died in 1777, but the interior remained undecorated. Rooms were completed stage by stage over the following decades, and the whole was not finished until the decoration of the Long Gallery in 1811, under Charles Heathcote Tatham.

At the time of the 7th Earl of Carlisle the estate covered over 13,000 acres (5,300 ha) and took in the villages of Welburn, Bulmer, Slingsby, Terrington and Coneysthorpe. It had its own railway station, Castle Howard station, which served the estate from 1845 until the 1950s.

While at Girton College in the early Edwardian years, Lady Dorothy Georgiana Howard, daughter of the 9th Earl and the "Radical Countess" of Carlisle, befriended six fellow students, among them the future archaeologist Gisela Richter and Anna Abrikosova, later a candidate for Roman Catholic sainthood; all six were invited to Castle Howard in the holidays. When the 9th Earl died in 1911 the house passed to his fifth son, Geoffrey Howard, later earls keeping Naworth Castle as their northern country house. The diarist Henry "Chips" Channon, visiting in August 1923, recorded that "the house is uncomfortable in the extreme and is badly kept up. Everywhere there are signs of decaying magnificence."

A large part of the house was destroyed by fire on 9 November 1940. The dome, the central hall, the dining room and the staterooms on the east side were entirely destroyed, and Pellegrini's ceiling decoration, the Fall of Phaeton, was lost when the dome collapsed. Twenty pictures, among them two Tintorettos, and several valuable mirrors were lost. The Malton and York fire brigades took eight hours to bring it under control.

Some devastated rooms were restored over the following decades. The dome was rebuilt in 1960-61, and in the couple of years after, the Canadian artist Scott Medd recreated Pellegrini's Fall of Phaeton on its underside.

Castle Howard was opened to the public in 1952 by its then owner, Lord Howard of Henderskelfe, a younger son of Geoffrey Howard. The house was listed Grade I on 25 January 1954. It is owned by a Howard family company, Castle Howard Estate Limited, and managed by the Hon. Nicholas Howard, second son of Lord Howard, and his wife Victoria; the Carlisle branch of the Howard family has held it for more than 300 years.

The East Wing remains a shell, though re-roofed. The gardens are Grade I listed on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, and many other listed structures stand on the estate, several on the Heritage at Risk Register. An underwater ground-source heat recovery system installed under the lake in 2009 halved the heating bill. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions recorded over 269,000 visitors in 2019.