Once you’re 200 or so miles north of London, everything seems to be bigger and bolder, including the country houses. This is Yorkshire, the Texas of England.

Some of the houses are in fact palaces, with hundreds of rooms and thousands of acres, such as Castle Howard, the baroque extravaganza on which young aristocrat Charles Howard started construction in 1701, and Harewood House, a Palladian masterpiece begun by landowner Edwin Lascelles in 1759. Just slightly less grand is Sledmere, an immense Georgian house, where merchant Richard Sykes laid the first stone in 1751. Though portions of these properties are open to the public, a number of their descendants still call these unfathomably huge domiciles home.

These aristocratic dynasties have managed to keep the roofs on—and over magnificent collections of art and decoration—in large part thanks to primogeniture, whereby titles and estates pass from father to eldest son; when confronted with “only” a female heir, these establishments traditionally go “sideways,” to the nearest male cousin or nephew. Some of these properties still have legal entailments which mandate this succession.

Fairness to daughters, or younger sons, is the least of it, though. In 2020, Britain’s National Trust reported that almost a third of the some 300 historic houses it manages have direct links to colonialism or slavery—a disclosure meant to shed light on the sometimes “hugely uncomfortable” stories behind the properties. The 115-page report, commissioned amid the unrest of the pandemic and social movements that summer, put scrutiny on estates still in private hands.

What does succession look like in the age of social justice?

Take the case of Lascelles. After the death of his father, Henry, in 1753, Edwin and his brother, Daniel, inherited one of the largest fortunes in England (around 70 million pounds in today’s terms), including roughly 8,000 acres in Yorkshire. Edwin wasted no time assembling a dream team of architects, designers, and craftsmen—Robert Adam, John Carr, Capability Brown, Thomas Chippendale among them—to build Harewood. Arguably, Edwin’s most astute move was to hire Joshua Reynolds, the preeminent portrait artist of the day. Over 20 years, Reynolds painted highly staged likenesses of numerous family members, projecting the high status to which they aspired.

His efforts must have duly impressed King George III, under whose reign Edwin was created Baron Harewood; subsequently, his heirs were elevated to earldom. In 1922, Henry, the sixth Earl of Harewood, married Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V. By now, what had been the source of the family fortune had been obscured. The eminent 20th-century historian Nikolaus Pevsner was of the belief, according to one of his books, that Henry Lascelles’s wealth came “from the ribbon trade and the collecting of customs in Barbados.”

In fact, Henry Lascelles—who died by suicide—had been among the largest plantation owners and enslavers in the West Indies. Fast-forward to today’s heir of Harewood: David Lascelles, 72, the eighth Earl of Harewood, who grew up unaware of this history. “It wasn’t something my father ever talked about,” he said recently in a sitting room at Harewood, next to his wife of 33 years, Diane Howse, Countess of Harewood.

Most of the Lascelles family’s West Indian papers were housed in the London offices of their onetime partners and destroyed in a World War II bombing raid, recounts the earl. But in 1998, in a basement at Harewood, he discovered metal boxes full of documents—including ship manifests and deeds of plantations—that made plain his family’s past as enslavers.

“It was a catalyst—a turning point,” he recalls. “I said, ‘We’ve got to find out more about this.’ ”

Reeling, Lascelles leaned into his long-standing interest in Buddhism, which he believes helps people see things as they truly are. He traveled to Bhutan, visiting various stupas in the Himalayas. The religious monuments are often built with the intention of calming turbulent forces and bringing harmony to their environment. If he built a stupa at Harewood, Lascelles wondered, could it have a similar effect?

He brought a master stupa builder and three monks from Bhutan to Harewood. None of them spoke English; they had never traveled by plane before. The crew spent four months at the estate, building a stupa with a team of Yorkshire craftsmen, using stone from the estate. In May 2005, the monument was consecrated in a ceremony attended by a cross section of the local community, plus Prince Charles. (Lascelles’s godmother and first cousin once removed was Queen Elizabeth.)

As 2007 approached—the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act—the earl and countess went into action. The documents discovered in 1998 were conserved, digitized, and made available online. Members of the African Caribbean population in nearby Leeds—who had rarely visited Harewood before “because they knew the history,” according to Lascelles—were invited to participate in performances, educational workshops, exhibitions, and other programs. The Earl and Countess of Harewood emerged as the most vocal country house owners on the subjects of slavery and colonialism—to the discomfit of some of their peers who preferred to keep quiet. “They’re the most vociferous people in England,” an acquaintance said of the couple.

“It’s something so many people are terrified about,” says the earl. “Our feeling is, just keep talking about it.”

The walls of Harewood—adorned also with outstanding portraits by Old Masters, including Titian and El Greco—look different now too. The collection was “fantastic,” Howse says, but “it struck me they were all of wealthy white men,” the countess adds. “Suddenly, it seemed obvious we needed to do something to adjust that.”

Currently, a special exhibition, “Reframing Reynolds,” is examining those family pictures. As part of it, Edwin’s portrait has been taken down from its customary pride of place high above the mantel in the ornate Cinnamon Drawing Room and stripped of its regal gilded frame. The life-size bare canvas now is mounted directly onto a plain backdrop at eye level; labels highlight the various techniques Reynolds employed to construct a picture of wealth, status, and power. “We wanted to take a little of that power away from Edwin,” a curator told me.

Another program, “Missing Portraits,” is commissioning new artworks: portraits of people of African Caribbean heritage who have connections to Harewood.

Leeds-based photographer and filmmaker Ashley Karrell executed the first portrait, of Nevis-born Arthur France, a longtime community organizer in Leeds. His likeness now hangs in the Cinnamon Drawing Room adjacent to Edwin’s.

In September, a portrait of actor David Harewood (best known for his role in Homeland) will be unveiled.

Born in Birmingham to immigrants from Barbados, Harewood had visited Harewood in his youth. He thought it was a coincidence that he shared a name with the estate. A few years ago, through a genealogist in Barbados, he learned the truth: His paternal great-great-great-great-grandparents had been enslaved at a Lascelles plantation. In 2019, Harewood journeyed back to the estate. “The opulence, the grandeur. It’s like a monument to white supremacy,” he said as he arrived, in a documentary that recorded the event, 1000 Years a Slave.

“Do you feel any guilt or shame?” Harewood asked Lascelles.

“Not in a personal way,” Lascelles replied. “I don’t feel that feeling guilty for something that you have no involvement with is a helpful emotion. I think you need to take responsibility for your own actions. But in this, I don’t feel responsible—but I feel accountable…. There’s nothing you can do to change the past…but you can be active in the present.”

Though Harewood said that visit “left me feeling pretty wasted,” he will return to the estate this fall for the unveiling of his portrait, which will be accompanied by an exhibition exploring his life.

What will Harewood look like when Lascelles’s time is over? The earl has four children with his first wife, Margaret; the elder two, Emily and Benjamin, were born before the couple married in 1979 (they divorced in 1989). Thus, Benjamin is ineligible to inherit the family title. Lascelles’s second son, Alexander, born in 1980, is destined to become the ninth Earl of Harewood.

“I think it’s nonsense,” remarks the earl about primogeniture. “[But] family continuity in places like this is of great value.”

“Ben doesn’t inherit the title,” he confirms, then makes a distinction: “There’s the title and then there’s the job—and they aren’t necessarily the same. In my case, the two go together.”

Unlike the Lascelleses, who reached the peerage only after their country seat was completed, the Howards ranked long before Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle, broke ground on Castle Howard in 1701. His grandfather was created first Earl of Carlisle by King Charles II in 1661.

Howard was just 23 when he inherited his title and 10,000 acres, where a fire had just gutted Henderskelfe Castle, which was on the site of Castle Howard in 1697. He seized the opportunity to create one of the first great British houses of the 18th century. For its design, he turned, curiously, to a playwright, his friend John Vanbrugh, who then recruited Nicholas Hawksmoor, the leading architect of the day, as a collaborator. Their plan was so ambitious it took more than 100 years to complete, spanning the lifetimes of three earls. Along with the house, several monumental outbuildings were constructed. The massive mausoleum, built in the form of a round colonnaded Roman temple, looms large on the grounds.

“Every day, I see my final resting place,” the Honorable Nicholas Paul Geoffrey Howard, 71, told me over a delicious lunch of seared salmon and a nice white Burgundy in Castle Howard’s family dining room. Though Nick, as he’s called, was born and brought up here, he and his wife, Victoria Barnsley, only took over the reins in 2014, when she stepped down from her position as CEO and publisher of HarperCollins UK and International.

To Nick, it’s comforting to know that he will one day be among the seventh generation of Howards to be entombed here. Howard brides, he allows, haven’t always been as eager to spend eternity in this forbidding crypt. When he was a child, his mother was dead set against it, he remembers. (She was “far grander” than the Howards, being a daughter of the eighth Duke of Grafton, Nick adds.)

“But about 10 years before she died, she changed her mind,” he says. Castle Howard won her over.

“Do you want to be buried in it?” he asks his wife across the table. “I’m still thinking about it,” she replies briskly.

Genealogical note: The earldom and Castle Howard were split following the death of the ninth Earl of Carlisle in 1911. His firstborn son inherited the title and the family’s other vast and even more ancient castle, Naworth, in Cumbria. Castle Howard was passed to the sixth of the ninth earl’s 11 children, Geoffrey, when the earl’s sister, Lady Mary Howard, declined it.

When Geoffrey died two decades later, the estate passed to his eldest son, George—Nick’s father. George had little time to enjoy it. In 1940, a fire gutted much of the castle. Over the next decades, George led heroic efforts to restore it. A pillar of the British establishment (he served as chairman of the BBC), George put ownership of the estate into a company in which family members are among the directors. “A great, revolutionary thing,” as Barnsley describes it.

Revolutions are never easy. Over the next 30 years, as Simon Howard, Nick’s younger brother, ran the estate, things grew increasingly strained. Around 2000, Simon left his first wife to marry Marks & Spencer heiress Rebecca Sieff. Some of Castle Howard’s most important works of art were sold, reportedly to finance the divorce. A Michelangelo sketch went for $8 million, an Il Guercino for more than $2 million, and Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai for $14.6 million.

Since leaving Yorkshire, Mai has been much in the news. Its subject, the second Polynesian to visit Britain, arrived in London in 1774. With intelligence, charm, and dignity, Mai became a celebrated figure. George III received him; Reynolds painted him in his studio—and kept the portrait. After the artist’s death in 1792, the fifth Earl of Carlisle bought and hung it at Castle Howard, where it remained until 2001.

The buyer, Irish businessman John Magnier, eventually considered selling it, but by then it was recognized as one of the greatest masterpieces of British art, as well as one of the most important early portraits of a person of color and member of a tribal society in British art history. The British government placed export bans on the painting while various UK cultural institutions sought to raise the 50 million pounds needed to purchase it. Finally, in April, London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Getty Foundation jointly agreed to pay the asking price—citing “the myriad artistic, historical, and cultural issues that Mai’s portrait raises for 21st century viewers.” Mai has been the star attraction of the NPG since it reopened after a major renovation. The portrait, since renamed Portrait of Mai (Omai), is set to be displayed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for the first time in 2026.

But returning to the main narrative: Late in 2014, amid reports of significant deficits, Simon was asked to resign from the company board. Along with Sieff and their twins, he relocated from the castle to a manor house nearby. In 2021, a “finding of fact trial” found Simon guilty of abusing a six-year-old girl in the 1980s and of the attempted rape of a woman who was an overnight guest at the castle decades ago. In 2021, York Crown Court declared he was unfit to face a criminal trial due to a brain injury caused by a fall the previous year. A diabetic and epileptic, he died in 2022 after a hospital gave him an incorrect dosage of insulin.

As Nick and Barnsley assumed charge at Castle Howard, it was left to them to contend with the mounting financial pressures. Unlike some other comparable dynasties, the Howards don’t own a big swath of London real estate. A sizable part of Castle Howard’s income—double-digit millions of pounds—comes from tourist visits in normal years. With COVID lockdowns, that revenue cratered, even as they faced a 3-million-pound shortfall (met by a combination of government support through the furlough scheme and a very timely filming contract with NBC) and a projection that they will need to spend around 70 million pounds in the years ahead for capital repairs (about 20 million for the mausoleum alone). Some necessary redecoration projects in the east wing are already underway, overseen by bright young American interior decorator Remy Renzullo.

Over the years, various film productions—Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton, most notably—have brought in much-needed cash. But when producers of the latter called, the family was skeptical. “I knew the books, because they had been published by Harper Collins,” says Barnsley. “This wasn’t Evelyn Waugh, put it that way.”

But she’s been won over by the TV adaptation with its historically diverse cast. “After all those rather tired BBC period dramas, it was witty and fun.” Still, some people are “terribly snobby” about the production, she says, alluding to Castle Howard’s curators.

During the two-week shoot, those staffers had to be on set at all times—even during the many “rumpy-pumpy scenes,” as Nick calls them—to ensure that no priceless artifacts were harmed. They nixed a copulation scene on top of an ancient Pompeiian mosaic-topped table, for example. Much of “the action” was shot in the Archbishop’s Bedroom—quite a change of pace from Brideshead, where Laurence Olivier’s Lord Marchmain died in the elaborate four-poster there, Nick notes.

As executive chairwoman, Barnsley is running the show at Castle Howard, certainly from the financial side. In view of the situation, her executive experience couldn’t be more useful, it seems. But it’s been an adjustment for some.

“Nobody called it a business before. Everybody who worked here called it an estate,” she says. “It’s a mindset we’ve slowly tried to overcome. But we try to do it gently. We have people here whose families have worked on the estate three or four generations.”

When Nick and Barnsley’s time ends, a new system to choose future custodians will be introduced. Anybody who’s interested can apply, much like any other job. Whoever is best qualified will be selected by the directors of Castle Howard Estate Limited (the board of which is composed of five family members and two outsiders) and serve for a 10-year term. Oh, and applicants don’t necessarily have to be Howards. (In the running presumably would be George, 38, Nick’s son from his previous marriage, and Blanche, 28, Nick and Barnsley’s daughter, as well as members of the extended family.)

“There’s got to be a Howard at Castle Howard!” one traditionalist, who owns another of Yorkshire’s ancient estates, exclaimed during a dinner party there. While Nick gently made the point that “the genius” of one generation is not necessarily transmitted to the next, “the people of Yorkshire want a Howard in Castle Howard,” the traditionalist claimed.

People want to see the estate survive, Barnsley countered, and it doesn’t matter if they’re called Howard or Smith.

Some might argue that Sledmere, as the seat of mere baronets, hardly qualifies as a great house,” posits Christopher Simon Sykes, 75, a great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew of Richard Sykes, builder of the aforementioned estate.

The gray stone exterior of the house is fairly austere. But once inside, there’s nothing plain—or small—about it, and it sits on just under 9,000 acres.

When Christopher was growing up here in the 1950s and ’60s with his brothers, Tatton, Jeremy, and Nicholas, and sisters, Arabella and Henrietta, the house was still run by their parents on an Edwardian scale. Mr. Clarke, the chauffeur, and Mr. Potter, the groom, resided in the village. According to accounts, the rest of the household staff lived in: Pennington, the butler (never Mr.); Mrs. Wignall, the cook; two footmen; a pantry boy; a pantry maid; two scullery maids; the housekeeper; the nanny; a nursemaid; a French governess; and his father’s secretary.

Ancestor Richard, who created the family fortune in trade, died childless in 1761. The estate then passed to his younger brother, Mark, the first Baronet Sykes. From him, six generations of Sledmere owners descend—a colorful line of sportsmen, connoisseurs, politicians, socialites, writers, artists, and eccentrics.

In 1978, Tatton inherited the estate as well as the title, becoming the eighth Baronet Sykes. He made the house even more impressive. One of his first acts was to replace the gold paint in the 120-foot-long library with gold leaf.

“Who is this unbelievably glamorous person?” Plum Sykes remembers thinking about Tatton the first time she met him, when she was a small girl. “At breakfast, he was wearing pink-tinted sunglasses and his mother’s diamond brooch on the lapel of his velvet smoking jacket,” adds the Vogue contributor and novelist, whose father, Mark, was first cousins with Tatton and his siblings.

“He had impeccable taste and was absolutely devoted to the house. He wanted it to be alive and full of people. But he didn’t have just toffs staying. He had intellectuals, scientists, artists,” she remembers.

She also vividly recalls Tatton’s forays to the city: “He would drive to London in his gold Cadillac, wearing cowboy boots.”

“He lived his gay life in London, but not in Yorkshire,” Christopher recalls. “My parents could never accept it. They were of a different generation. So, he had a very difficult time.”

In recent years, Tatton’s gregarious personality has been much diminished by Alzheimer’s. As his 80th birthday approaches, Sledmere’s future is uncertain. Christopher is the only one of the four boys in the family who had children. One of them is a son. (Christopher’s two sisters have three boys and two girls between them, but the title “would all be through the male line,” he notes.)

So, crisis averted? Succession assured? It seems not.

“He’s told us definitively that he doesn’t want it,” Christopher recounts, referring to his son, Joseph, a 32-year-old Londoner.

Shocking as it may be to Downton Abbey fans, not everybody longs to inherit an absolutely fabulous and enormous ancestral seat. Joe is “very left-leaning,” explains his father. Apparently, country house ownership doesn’t align with his politics or his professional life. He’s a successful podcast executive and producer.

Where does this leave Sledmere?

“People are constantly asking me, what’s going to happen next?” says Christopher. “I don’t know, and we won’t know until my brother passes to the next world. Until then…we’re in limbo.”

Unfortunately for Joe, he “can’t avoid being the next baronet—he’s stuck with the title,” says Christopher.

One extended family member expresses hope that Joe might eventually move in, however: “I am praying that Joe will change his mind,” says Plum. Based on her observations at a recent family reunion at the house, she thinks there could be a chance. “He seemed to be having a whale of a time,” she recalls.

Meanwhile, Sledmere carries on in high style. Tatton’s siblings host large house parties several times a year. Over coronation weekend, for example, Christopher invited 16 to stay, including Plum and her daughter, Tess, and his goddaughter, Catherine FitzGerald, who came with her husband, Dominic West, and their four children. West, who recently played King Charles in his later prince era on The Crown, handed out the prizes in a crown-making contest.

“It was the most wonderful weekend,” says Plum. “There were huge breakfasts. We all watched the coronation on telly with Champagne. Then the most amazing tea was laid out in the Music Room…. Such giggles. This is a house that makes you feel like you’ve got to have a glass of Champagne, be in black tie. But it feels so comfortable and loose.” Yet, like the other custodians of these Yorkshire estates, members of the Sykes family are keenly aware that an ancestral home needs to move with the times if it is to survive.

As the Earl of Harewood put it, “We’re not here to make sure everything looks the same as when we arrived.”