Rediscovering the Boy King

TO look at Highclere Castle, an Egyptian sarcophagus is probably the last thing you’d expect to find inside. Yet, below Charles Barry’s tower and the Reynolds paintings inside lies a perfect replica of a 3,000-year-old coffin belonging to a pharaoh. Highclere Castle, six miles from Newbury, Berkshire, is now best known as the location of the Sunday-night toff-buster Downton Abbey, but, a century ago, it obtained fame of another kind. On November 26, 1922, its then owner George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, alongside his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert and the archaeologist Howard Carter, stood in front of the door of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

Since then, Carter has been celebrated as the great discoverer of Tutankhamun and Carnarvon reduced to merely the financier. In this