The Backstory: The Real Downton Abbey and King Tut’s Curse

Imagine endless money and the life it offers you. But then . . imagine the downside. Countess Almina Rothschild was the wife of the Earl of Carnarvon. Marrying her gave him millions . . but that money made him a victim of the curse of King Tut’s tomb.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Okay, imagine a world with unlimited access to whatever you want.
It's the Gilded Age, and your legal father is a
retired British Army officer and successful banker. Your mother is
a French beauty, and it turns out you are allegedly
the illegitimate but much adored child of one of the

(00:21):
richest men in the world. Sounds like a life of
ease and very little drama, right, However, the life of
Almina Rothschild Herbert was anything but lacking in drama. I'm
Patty Steele, from limitless money to life as a countess
at high Clear Castle to the curse of King Tuck.
That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. The

(00:49):
final saga of the Downton Abbey franchise has just arrived
in theaters and is a huge success with like a
ninety two un Rotten Tomatoes. But the drama in the
film has nothing on the real life drama of Almina Rothschild.
In eighteen ninety five, at the age of nineteen, she
married George Edward Stanhope Mullin Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon,

(01:12):
whose family estate was and is High Clear Castle of
Downton Abbey Fame High Clear is a five thousand acre
estate built in sixteen seventy nine. It's been the family
seat of the Earl of Carnarvan for almost three hundred
and fifty years. So how did Almina and high Clear
get tied up in the curse of King Tut's tomb. Well,

(01:35):
let's go back a little bit. Despite her questionable paternity,
Almina's birth father, Alfred Rothschild, lavished her with love and money,
though he never married her mother even when she was
a widow, and he was always a bachelor. He never
married to anybody. He enjoyed the bachelor life. But for
Almina's fifth birthday, Rothschild gave her a pony and a

(01:56):
private firework show. The gifting and mun for her lavish
lifestyle went on throughout her childhood. When she turned eighteen,
she was presented to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace wearing
spectacular diamonds. There was talk in the palace of the
possibility of her huge dowry, which has no doubt how
the Earl of Carnarvon got interested. As was often the

(02:20):
case in those days, marriage was a business transaction. In
this case, the Earl needed a male heir to inherit
the title, and as importantly, he needed vast amounts of
money to get the castle in shape and keep it running.
Plus he had other interests as well as for the bride.
Due to whispers about her being illegitimate, Almina needed to

(02:41):
get some respectability out of the bargain. Marrying an earl
with a giant castle and turning yourself into a countess
did the trick, but it was her dowry that sealed
the deal. Alfred Rothschild gave them a five hundred thousand
pound trust for the marriage. It's about one hundred and
fifteen million dollars today. Plus when Alfred died, she got

(03:04):
another seventy five thousand pounds almost four million dollars today,
along with his magnificent home in London and his massive
art collection worth hundreds of millions. More So, High Clear
is where the young Countess Almina finds herself running the
show for her husband, the Earl, when she's still a teenager.

(03:25):
Her family money made sure the castle was outfitted with
all sorts of modern luxuries, and Almina was this glamorous countess,
beautiful elegant, educated, but behind the scenes her marriage was miserable. Again,
it was a business deal. Almina quickly had two children,
in eighteen ninety eight, a little boy who would become

(03:46):
the sixth Earl, and in nineteen oh one a daughter.
Her husband was away frequently fascinated with ancient Egyptian culture.
He'd go on these long trips to that part of
the world, his wife's money back the expeditions. Meantime, during
World War One, Almina transformed High Clear Castle into a

(04:07):
hospital for wounded officers. She began giving speeches to women's
groups and hosting political fundraisers. All this while her husband
continued to chase antiquities in Egypt with her money. Occasionally
Almina would go to Egypt with him, but she wasn't
there with her husband when Howard Carter, the archaeologist he backed,

(04:28):
discovered King Tutankhammon's tomb. The Earl was not only Carter's
financial backer in the search for Tut in the Valley
of the Kings. He was by Carter's side at the
opening of the tomb in November of nineteen twenty two,
and that's where the King Tut curse kicked in. After
the tomb was opened, a writer in New York shared

(04:49):
a story about what was called the Pharaoh's Curse, alleging
that anyone who violated the King's tomb would die a
terrible death. The story became a sense everywhere. Then, four
months after the opening, in March of nineteen twenty three,
Almina had to travel to Egypt to be with her husband,
who was horribly sick with blood poisoning after being bitten

(05:13):
by a mosquito. The Earl died on the fifth of
April nineteen twenty three, and Almina took his body back
to Britain for burial. Then, a friend of Carter's who
was given a mummified hand from the tomb, had his
house burned down and his replacement house flooded out, and
George Gould, son of robber Baron J. Gould, visited the

(05:33):
tomb and died of a fever that may. In addition,
the doctor who x rayed tuts Money, another member of
the team, and the Earl's half brother all got sick
and died within seven years, and Howard, Carter's personal secretary
was murdered during the same time period. Meantime, Almina continued
to financially back Carter's excavation of the tomb until nineteen

(05:57):
twenty five. At that point, she reached a settlement with
the Egyptian government where she gave up any claim on
the contents of the tomb in exchange for around fifty
thousand dollars or about a million dollars today. But the
curse still seems to have impacted Almina's life, at least
to a certain extent. Six months after the Earl died,

(06:18):
she married again, this time to a man who was
going through a messy divorce. She had to help him
battle back in court. They won, but it cost her
hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her second husband died just
fifteen years after they were married, and from there Almina's
life got less fabulous. During her life, she had gone

(06:39):
through tens of millions of dollars, and by nineteen fifty one,
when she was seventy five, she had to declare bankruptcy.
She lived the last eighteen years of her life in
a small row house with a housekeeper companion. Almina Rothschild
Herbert died in nineteen sixty nine at the age of
ninety three, a tarnish ending to a life that had

(07:01):
glittered in the Gilded Age. Hope you like the Backstory
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(07:27):
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
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is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
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(07:50):
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.