The Castle Howard Mausoleum, a building so beautiful 'you'd almost want to be alive when buried in it', is facing its own demise

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.

Nothing came of either suggestion, but, two years later, Hawksmoor sent Carlisle a design based on yet another funerary monument. This was the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, just outside Rome, a cylindrical structure resting on a square podium. He then went on to supply alternative elevations of a round temple with a shallow cupola and either an encircling arcade or a colonnade. The latter option, Hawksmoor acknowledged, owed something to the Tempietto of Donato Bramante in Rome, begun in about 1502 to mark the site of the Crucifixion of St Peter.

These proposals, however, were also informed by his earlier plans for a memorial library at Oxford, the Radcliffe Camera (although the commission eventually went to James Gibbs), as well as — generically — by the circular garden buildings that were appearing in landscapes across England from the late 1720s, as at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and Duncombe Park, North Yorkshire.

Begun in 1728, work to the Castle Howard mausoleum was dogged with difficulties — failing foundations, a shortage of suitable stone and an intervention by a triumvirate of gentleman architects: Carlisle’s son, the future 4th Earl; his son-in-law Sir Thomas Robinson, an amateur architect; and their friend the 3rd Earl of Burlington. The final version, completed after Hawksmoor’s death in 1736, included the steps on the eastern side, modelled on those at Burlington’s villa in Chiswick, and the bastion wall, added by his protégé Daniel Garrett in the early 1740s, thereby obscuring the intended effect of the building rising directly out of the hilltop.

The scale of the building is extraordinary, the two-storey core outwardly encircled by 20 Doric columns that support a weighty entablature. Above this rises an eight-window clerestory capped by a shallow cupola. Inside, eight fully recessed Corinthian columns support a coffered dome that rises 70ft above the floor.

The dome is modelled on that of the Pantheon and contains 144 radiating bosses inset with flowerheads. Their extraordinarily crisp detail is all the work of Yorkshire mason Edward Raper.

The patterning is repeated on the floor below with flowerheads set in a Greek-key border.

The Mausoleum is a building in conversation with the past. On the one hand, it is a Classical temple in the middle of the 18th-century Yorkshire countryside, but it is also part of a unique assembly of other monuments and buildings in the landscape that evoke the ancient world. Nor is it the only monument here with intimations of mortality. Vanbrugh’s parterre, south of the house, was once filled with obelisks, vases, urns and a column, leading one visitor in 1749 to feel it had‘a monumental air of repose for the Dead’.

Hawksmoor’s large Pyramid of 1728 is a tomb of another sort, based upon the great monument to Caius Cestius in Rome. The pyramid is hollow (like its model) and inside is a bust of the 3rd Earl’s three-times great-grandfather, Lord William Howard (d.1640). This was Carlisle’s way of remembering his Tudor ancestors, leaving the Mausoleum as a symbol of fresh dynastic departure.

The Mausoleum is still the burial place of the Howard family. Beneath the chapel is the crypt, with a central vaulted chamber linked to a perimeter corridor, leading to four small chambers; the catacombs contain 63 niches, or loculi, less than half of which are filled. In 1827, Prince Puckler Muskau likened the ordered tranquillity of the vault to a gigantic beehive. A few years earlier, in 1778, Sir Richard Sullivan was impressed by how the 3rd Earl had established ‘conveniences for the dead as well as for the living’ and imagined how younger generations might retire to the mausoleum ‘to muse with their progenitors’.

Dynasty is as much a mental construct as it is a physical pedigree. At Castle Howard, it is made manifest as much by the Mausoleum as through the array of family portraits that line the walls of the house. Indeed, these ancestral afterlives both constitute a kind of social existence and ensure that, with the passing of each generation, the Howard presence endures. In the same way, the surrounding landscape filled with an eclectic architecture inspired by the example of Antiquity, echoes the contents of the house with its assembly of Roman antiquities and capriccio paintings by Paolo Panini.

If the Mausoleum is to continue its dialogue through time and place, its physical future must be secured. Sadly, it is in a challenging condition and listed on the Historic England at Risk Register. This is despite major work undertaken in the early 1980s. At that time, the £1.2 million grant funding was exhausted after restoring the external Doric columns, each of which was taken down and painstakingly rebuilt. Unfortunately, as a result, the entablature and steps remained untouched.

Today, the Mausoleum continues to suffer from the effects of water ingress through open joints and failing lead-work. Although re-pointing and lead repairs can be relatively straightforward to deal with, the difficulties of restoration are compounded by the presence of so much structural ironwork. The expansion of rusting cramps is breaking open blocks of masonry and weakening the structure. There is, however, a more profound issue as well. In 1737, Sir Thomas referred to two iron chains wrapped around the central drum. These could be preventing the building from bursting outwards, but it is difficult to be certain of their condition.

In 2024, the Castle Howard Foundation was established, a charitable structure to allow the estate to seek funding from multiple sources for its many restoration challenges. This was partly prompted by welcome support for the Mausoleum by the World Monuments Fund, which included funding towards a series of surveys. The question of funding, whether from public or private sources, serves to highlight the dual identity of the Mausoleum: as a private burial place and also as a cultural monument of European importance.

In 1772, in his much-quoted eulogy on Castle Howard, Horace Walpole, famously declared how the Mausoleum would tempt one to be buried alive in it. By his juxtaposition of the words ‘buried’ and ‘alive’, he captures the paradox that makes the Castle Howard so powerful: it is both a memento mori and memento vivi of the family buried here.

Christopher Ridgway's new book ‘Castle Howard: A grand tour of England’s finest country house’ , published by Flammarion, is out now.