Howards' end

The Castle Howard Mausoleum, North Yorkshire

- Christopher Ridgway

This celebrated Mausoleum is a dynastic monument to the Howard family, as Christopher Ridgway explains. It needs further restoration if it is to survive

In the mid 1720s, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, opened the draft text of his will with the emphatic declaration: 'I do design to build a burial place near my seat of Castle Howard, where I desire to be layed.' He envisaged it as incorporating 'a little chapple to hold about 40 or 50 people with a Cupola or Tower upon it'. His ideas for a funerary monument were prompted not only by the thought of his mortality—although he lived until 1738, when he was 69—but by discussions with his architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, whose interest in funerary architecture is attested by the tombs and monuments in the English cemetery at Surat, India, that he famously drew from memory in 1711.

After Vanbrugh’s death in March 1726, the task of designing the mausoleum devolved on Nicholas Hawksmoor. In September, Hawksmoor wrote to his patron citing two famous tombs from antiquity, known only from description, that might serve as inspiration for the task. One was the huge mausoleum at Halicarnassus in modern-day Turkey, erected to the memory of the Emperor Mausolus by his wife, Artemis, in 353BC. Hawksmoor would famously go on to create his own visualisation of this in the spire of St George’s Bloomsbury, London, built in 1729–31. The other was the tomb of the 6th-century BC Etruscan king, Lars Porsenna, which had previously been reconstructed both by John Greaves, in his Pyramidographia (1646), and Robert Hooke.