Born at Grosvenor Square, London, Carnarvon was the eldest son and heir of Henry Herbert, 3rd Earl of Carnarvon (d.1849), by his wife Henrietta Anna Howard, a daughter of Lord Henry Howard-Molyneux-Howard, younger brother of Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk.

He attended Christ Church, Oxford, where his nickname was "Twitters",[1] apparently on account of his nervous tics and twitchy behaviour, and where in 1852 he obtained a first in literae humaniores.

Later that year, he resigned (along with Lord Cranborne and Jonathan Peel) in protest against Benjamin Disraeli's Reform Bill to enfranchise the working classes.

The situation in southern Africa was complicated, not least in that several of its states were still independent and so required military conquest before being confederated.

"[8] He sent colonial administrators such as Theophilus Shepstone and Henry Bartle Frere to southern Africa to implement his system of confederation.

Shepstone occupied and annexed the Transvaal in 1877, while Bartle Frere, as the new High Commissioner, led imperial troops against the last group of independent Xhosa in the Ninth Frontier War.

Carnarvon then used the rising unrest to suspend the Natal constitution, while Bartle Frere overthrew the elected Cape government, and then moved to invade the independent Zulu Kingdom.

Francis Reginald Statham, editor of The Natal Witness in the 1870s, famously summed up the local reaction to Carnarvon's plan for the region: He (Carnarvon) thought it no harm to adopt this machinery (Canadian Confederation System) just as it stood, even down to the numbering and arrangement of the sections and sub-sections, and present it to the astonished South Africans as a god to go before them.

If it should happen to be too long in the sleeves, or ridiculously short in the back, I may be able to shift a button a few inches, and I am at least unalterably determined that my name shall be stamped on the loop you hang it up by.

His short period of office, memorable only for a conflict on a question of personal veracity between himself and Charles Stewart Parnell, as to his negotiations with the latter in respect of Home Rule, was terminated by another premature resignation.

Furthermore, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1875, confirming, in addition to his work as a statesman, his interest in innovation, geometry, the Enlightenment, science, the Scientific Revolution and the world.

"BURGHCLERE – Considerable amount of interest has been excited in this locality on the subject of Cheap Dwellings for the Working Classes, owing to a report that the Earl of Carnarvon was about to start the new system of building houses in concrete.

His Lordship has already commenced the erection of a block of three cottages at Burghclere Bottom, and no doubt the result will be anticipated with much interest both by landed proprietors and tenant farmers.