SUNDAY IMAGES ... "Death or Glory"

The once-broke 'Downton Abbey' writer who riles his Left-wing critics.'Snobs': The Nonworking Class. Fellowes of finite jest.

The once-broke 'Downton Abbey' writer who riles his Left-wing critics

Is Julian Fellowes, creator of 'Downton Abbey’, really Britain’s biggest snob?

By William Langley

7:00AM BST 18 Sep 2011 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8771132/The-once-broke-Downton-Abbey-writer-who-riles-his-Left-wing-critics.html

What do you say when the shiny-chopped chap seated next to you at lunch opens the conversation with: “My wife is Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Michael of Kent”?

There’s only one response: “You must be Julian Fellowes.” It isn’t as though the 62-year-old creator of Downton Abbey hasn’t been warned. Last week he was fingered as “the biggest snob in Britain”, and with the second series of ITV’s smash hit period drama arriving tonight, those critics of a certain persuasion – the ones Fellowes portrays as “socially insecure, Left-wing nitpickers” – are mustering for a new onslaught.

Downton tells of life at the fictional stately pile of the Earl and Countess of Grantham, but is heavily overlaid with the class attitudes of the Edwardian era. The look is lush and the dialogue clever, but it is Fellowes’s sympathetic view of the aristocracy’s treatment of the lower orders that has caused upset in the reliably liberal arts-and-media world.

“For all that Fellowes pays lip-service to the social revolution that will come with the Great War,” sniffed the New Statesman, “his working-class characters say things like: 'Just because you’re a lord, you think you can do what you like with me!’ The script oozes nostalgic approval for the days when people not only knew the difference between an Earl and a Duke, but cared about it, too.”

Fellowes makes no secret of either his big or small C conservatism. A lifelong Tory, he used to write speeches for Iain Duncan Smith, and earlier this year was elevated to the peerage by David Cameron. These achievements alone would make him something of a rarity in his profession, but it’s the way that he trumpets his old-fashioned toffishness that really gets up his detractors’ noses.

The lunch incident was reported by the veteran society columnist Taki, who wrote in The Spectator: “I burst out laughing, but in order not to be rude I said nothing. My first thought was, 'Is he bragging or complaining?’”

Quite possibly neither. Before he ascended to the title of Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, and became an habitué of St James’s dining clubs, he spent three lost decades adrift in outer-showbiz darkness. He toiled as a minor character actor, playing the parts of vicars, colonels and hospital consultants in provincial rep or, if he was lucky, the West End, sensing all the time that even these parts were only coming his way because he was perceived as a caricature buffer.

Almost everyone else in the theatre was dangerously Left wing, the entire trade taking its cue from the likes of the Redgraves and Pinters, and even if few actors really were working class, it was wise to pass as such. “I didn’t subscribe,” Fellowes has said, “to the kind of romantic version of socialism. I found it bogus then, and I find it bogus now.” Yet he suffered endlessly for the sin of being a Tory, and in the early 1980s, decided to abandon the struggle and head for Hollywood.

His thinking seems to have been that plummy-voiced English actors would always enjoy a certain cachet, and he wouldn’t have to put up with agitprop lecturing and backstage whip-rounds for striking layabouts. But although he landed a small role as Lynda Carter’s chauffeur in Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess, after two years, lonely and disillusioned, he returned home.

The irony of Fellowes’s career as a token toff is that, for most of it, he was broke. He recalls sleeping in rented rooms, “with damp coming through the walls”, and says he delayed getting married because he couldn’t afford to support a wife and family. If he crows a little too loudly now – as the husband of Lady Emma Kitchener, a descendant of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum – it is surely because his success is a sock in the eye for everyone who told him that the theatre wasn’t the right place for his sort.

But what sort is he? He comes from a comfortable background, the son of a diplomat-turned-oil-company executive. Educated by monks at Ampleforth, from where he went to study English at Cambridge, he drifted into the theatre after a stint at the Footlights. “I wasn’t handsome, titled or rich,” he says. “I was always the man who was asked along because they were short, or because someone had dropped out, and I think that allows you to be some sort of fly on the wall.”

It was in this way, thinks Fellowes, that he first developed a feeling for dialogue and character. His breakthough came when, in the mid-1980s, he decided to try his hand at writing.

His first 12 screenplays were rejected, and he struggled by doing sitcoms and a little acting, until, in the late 1990s, he was approached by the Hollywood director Robert Altman, who was toying with the idea of an English upper-class drama. Fellowes’s brief was to produce a story “set in a country house in the 1930s, and to have a murder in there somewhere, but for it to really be an examination of class”.

The result was Gosford Park, and its global success – $87 million grossed – catapulted the writer to unforseeable stardom. It also made Fellowes realise that just as the British are fascinated by class, so the rest of the world is fascinated by the British fascination with class. It has been a lucrative discovery.

The return of Downton will see a return of the critics who accuse him of glamorising snobbery. Fellowes isn’t worried. “You could only represent it to their satisfaction,” he says, “if everyone downstairs was writhing in a state of permanent torment while everyone upstairs was vicious, violent, horrible and dishonest. The idea that both groups were just trying to bash through their lives is alien to them.”

'Snobs': The Nonworking Class

By JONATHAN AMES

Published: March 13, 2005 / http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/books/review/013AMESL.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all&position=

This is what the world has come to: Now even the English are Anglophiles. Nothing is authentic any more. Everything is nostalgia. Everyone wants to live in the past. The present has no style. The present is ugly. The present is gross.

But nobody has ever liked the present, as far as I can tell. In the current zero-decade, we look back fondly on the 90's and the 80's; in the 90's, it was the 70's and the 60's. Hell, during the Jazz Age they were all moaning about what it was like before 1914.

It's part of the human condition to look to the past, because if you look to the future you have to look toward your own death. The sands of time are always doing their sands-of-time routine and the clock is always ticking. It's relentless. It's enough to drive a person crazy.

So the past is where we all want to be, and we shouldn't feel bad about it. A lot of great thinkers concur -- Proust, for one, and look at the last lines of ''The Great Gatsby'': ''So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.''

This brings me -- since this is a book review and not a flippant essay on time -- to the novel ''Snobs,'' by Julian Fellowes, which is about a people that is dying out, the English upper class, and the arrivistes, the middle class, who want to be just like them -- glamorous and rich, though not dying out. But the odd twist is that the upper class wants to be like the upper class. They've all watched the great British TV shows ''Upstairs, Downstairs'' and ''Brideshead'' and countless movies, perhaps even ''Gosford Park,'' written by the very same Julian Fellowes, and so the upper class find themselves imitating the imitators. It's sort of what I imagine has been happening to members of the Mafia ever since the emergence of ''Godfather'' and on through ''The Sopranos.''

Furthermore, as we learn in ''Snobs,'' the English upper classes know they're on the verge of extinction, so it makes them try to hold on to the old ways all the more -- those who can afford it, anyway. Because what's killing off the upper class is how expensive it is. Nobody can afford to be that rich any more. Well, a few aristocrats can, but their numbers are dwindling, which is completely understandable -- to heat a castle in damp, chilly England takes great financing.

''Snobs'' concerns itself with a middle-class girl named Edith Lavery and an earl named Charles Broughton. The Broughtons still have their money and their land; they're one of the few families who still manage to live like nobility. Edith wants that lifestyle and a title, which means she'd like to marry Charles. In essence, it's a very old-fashioned story: girl marries for money, not love. But why do girls keep doing this? It never seems to work out. And why can't a girl get money and love? Why is it always one or the other? And poor Edith -- love aside, even the sex is no good. Charles, furthering an unfortunate rumor about English men, is absolutely terrible in bed.

''Snobs'' is Fellowes's first novel, and, to be snobby for a fleeting moment, it's a good book but not a great one, though it has many great passages. It's sort of a field guide to the behavior of the English aristocracy, which Fellowes, seemingly, has had access to -- he's the son of a diplomat and went to the right schools. For years, he's been a character actor in English films and television, and he's also a director and a screenwriter (he won an Oscar for writing ''Gosford'').

Fittingly, the unnamed narrator in ''Snobs'' is a character actor of upper-class background, and his voice is what I admire most -- the effortless hyper-articulation and erudition. We Americans tend to think all people with an English accent sound intelligent; well, it's the same with their prose practitioners -- they come off so terribly smart and worldly! And I love it! I've been accused of being an Anglophile myself, and it's because I love the way the English write, and Fellowes certainly scribbles with the best of them.

Edith's quest to marry into the aristocracy is the frame for Fellowes's observations on the upper class, as well as the middle class, with a few tangents thrown in about the world of actors, which, I guess, is a nod to the lower class. The book is rife with these bons mots, and they're ultimately more interesting than the actual story of Edith and Charles. Here's one on the middle class and their attendance at the famous horse race Royal Ascot:

''For a day or two every year these working people allow themselves the luxury of pretending that they are part of some vanished leisure class, that the world they mourn and admire and pretend they would have belonged to if it still existed (which as a rule they would not) is alive and well and living near Windsor.''

And on the upper class:

''I have always been uncomfortable with the jejune pseudo-informality implicit in the upper-class passion for nicknames. Everyone is 'Toffee' or 'Bobo' or 'Snook.' They themselves think the names imply a kind of playfulness, an eternal childhood . . . but they are really a simple reaffirmation of insularity, a reminder of shared history that excludes more recent arrivals.''

The Broughton matriarch is one Lady Uckfield. Why she's called Uckfield, I can't decipher; the Brits are like the Russians when it comes to names. Still, she's the most interesting character in the book and also, of course, known by her nickname, Googie.

''For her there was no merit in the changes the 20th century had wrought,'' Fellowes writes. ''Time had blurred her memory. . . . She could think of nothing harsh or mean in the England of her beginnings. . . . She had that absolute faith in the judgment of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914.''

So we're back to idealizing the pre-1914 years. It does seem that the world has been steadily falling apart since then, but weren't things also a mess before 1914? And this makes me realize there is nowhere to turn: the present is lousy, the future is morbid and the past is a sham.

But there are books. When you read a book, you're lost in time. All the more reason to read ''Snobs.'' It will distract you pleasantly. It's like a visit to an English country estate: breezy, beautiful and charming.

Jonathan Ames's most recent book is a novel, ''Wake Up, Sir!''

Fellowes of finite jest

Julian Fellowes' Snobs should have been a rip-roaring satire on the upper classes. Alas, it misses all its targets, says Rachel Cooke 

Rachel Cooke   

    The Observer, Sunday 4 April 2004/   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/04/fiction.features

Snobs

by Julian Fellowes

Weidenfeld & Nicholson £12.99, pp320

Because I am always in search of the new Nancy Mitford - this is a kind of literary holy grail with me - I had high hopes of this novel. Not only does its author, Julian Fellowes, have form (he won an Oscar for the screenplay of Gosford Park); he also has suitably U credentials. He is one of those robustly fat posh types, the kind of man who always packs a jar of Gentleman's Relish when he goes on holiday, and whose wife, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael, parades in outré velvet numbers matched with red Hunter wellies.

The thought occurs that in this, the age of the people carrier, there could hardly be anyone more qualified to turn out a volume both waspish and wise, something a little bit Nancy, a little bit Evelyn and, if I am honest, just a little bit National Trust guidebook.

But - oh, misery - Snobs turns out to be none of these things. Yes, it is about genuine, hardcore toffs, with a bit of social climbing thrown in for good measure (though we are talking half a rung on a delicate library ladder at most). And yes, the action, if you can call it that, takes place in a stately in Sussex.

But waspish and wise? Pah! To be truthful, I found this novel completely bizarre. I was baffled by its pious tone; by its dreary preoccupation with dismantling 'truisms' that I, for one, had never considered to be indisputable facts in the first place; and, most of all, by its cardboard cut-out characters, a bunch so entirely uninteresting I was longing for Jago the butler to come over all revolutionary and torch the lot of them.

Snobs is narrated by a 'journeyman actor' who, like his creator, was born into a world of big houses and silly buffers but who is also, thanks to several wholly educational years in repertory theatre, able to stand apart from it and thus illuminate its foibles for our benefit. One day, at Ascot, our actor introduces his friend, Edith Lavery, a Sloane who works in a Chelsea estate agent, to his vague acquaintance, Charles Broughton, heir to the Marquess of Uckfield. Charles, who is straightforward but stupid, rapidly falls in love with Edith.

Tired of answering telephones and not averse to the idea of becoming a countess, beady-eyed Edith encourages him in this affection. He takes her for dinner at Annabel's, kisses her with his mouth shut and soon afterwards asks her to be his designated brood mare.

Fellowes presents this marriage as a mistake, not merely because Edith is not really in love with Charles, but because she is unable to cope with life on a planet where everyone went to school with everyone else. In other words, she is simply too common. Unfortunately, the majority of readers will be hard-pressed to find much evidence of this vulgarity. Granted, her father is a businessman, not an earl. But it is hardly as though she swans round in a shellsuit, bag of chips and saveloy in one hand, copy of the Mirror in the other.

She, too, came out (don't panic - I mean as a deb) and she likes Alice bands and sweaters that feature little rabbit motifs. Then again, perhaps my failure to grasp - or even to care about - the apparently myriad subtle differences between the upper middle classes and the upper classes in twenty-first century Britain is just another sign that I'm unlikely ever to be a countess myself.

But back to the bat-squeak of a plot. Edith, unfathomably, elects not to sleep with Charles before their wedding night (though he doesn't seem terribly keen either, rearing up like a prudish ninny every time her hand so much as brushes his fly), only to find that he is an in-and-out merchant who opens his mouth solely to issue a clipped: 'Thank you, darling' before he begins snoring.

So when a film crew pitches up at Broughton Hall and she catches sight of Simon Russell (an actor reputed to be - wait for it - the new Simon McCorkindale) in breeches and frilly shirt, the stirrings in her undies are entirely understandable. The question is: will 'taking a lover' quell these urges? Or will she mistake sex for substance and ditch the servants and the house parties and the shooting talk forever?

I can't say I was bothered one way or the other, though I will not be so unsporting as to reveal all here. What does interest me is that no one at the author's publisher saw fit to wrestle with his material before it snuggled between hard covers. Fellowes can certainly write a decent sentence; his prose is as refined as his vowels.

But what is the point of his book? However rarefied their realm, novels must speak of the wider human condition, of universal truths. The characters in Snobs don't even run the gamut of emotions from A to B; they start at A and then, distracted by the sight of dear old Googie guffawing at the other side of the room, they hiccup to a standstill.

Which would be fine were this a biting satire. It is not. One can can only assume that a kind of snobbery also played its part as a deal was struck at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The kind that takes a shiny gold statuette and the dropping of a few grand-sounding names a bit too seriously for its own good.

The real-life Jeeves revealed

The real-life Jeeves revealed: Inspiration behind P.G. Wodehouse's enduring character was county cricketer who was killed fighting in the Somme

Percy Jeeves was a bowler for Warwickshire at a match in 1913

One of the crowd was young humourist P.G. Wodehouse

He took the cricketer's name for his most famous creation

Jeeves died on the Somme and never knew he inspired the writer

By SAM WEBB

PUBLISHED:16 July 2013 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2365175/The-real-life-Jeeves-revealed-Inspiration-P-G-Wodehouses-enduring-character-county-cricketer-killed-fighting-Somme.html

 

Inspiration: Percy Jeeves, whose name P.G. Wodehouse used for his most famous comic creation Reginald Jeeves, the valet of Bertie Wooster

He was the unflappable valet who artfully rescued his well-meaning yet embarrassment-prone upper class twit of a master from various sticky social situations.

Yet the story behind the naming of Jeeves, who featured alongside Bertie Wooster in the beloved comedy books, has its roots in the sporting world.

For it was a talented bowler who died fighting for his country in the First World War that was the inspiration for one of British humour's most enduring characters.

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of a cricket match between Gloucester and Warwickshire at Cheltenham, where Percy Jeeves was bowling for the visiting opposition.

One of the crowd on that summer day in 1913 was the young writer P.G. Wodehouse, who was already thinking of a series of stories about the peerless valet and his hapless employer

Wodehouse was toying with the name Jevons for the exceedingly competent manservant, but the bowler's name stuck in his mind. So too did the much-loved sportsman's immaculate appearance and quiet confidence.

And so Jeeves was born, going on to star in 35 short stories and 11 novels - alongside his foppish master Bertie Wooster - that still capture the imagination of readers worldwide.

The stories recount the improbable and unfortunate situations in which Bertie and his equally ridiculous friends find themselves and the manner in which his ingenious valet Jeeves is always able to quietly extricate them.

Sadly, Percy Jeeves, who had been tipped to play for England before the Great War, was killed fighting on the Somme just ten months after the first Jeeves and Wooster short story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post - never knowing that he was the inspiration for such a famous literary icon.

Murray Hedgcock, a Wodehouse scholar, said: 'We was a very tidy, methodical, clean-cut chap and hugely popular.'

Writing team: The Authors XI featured P.G. Wodehouse (back row, third from left) and Arthur Conan Doyle (sixth from left)

Comic genius: P.G. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel Wayman in this picture from the 1940s

Norman Murphy, the author of A Wodehouse Handbook, told The Times: 'Jeeves had much more of a ring about it. Wodehouse was schooled in Greek and Latin and the feeling he learnt for what sounds good when spoken never left him'.

A new book about the cricketer, The Real Jeeves, has been written by Brian Halford, who will join 100 members of the Wodehouse Society to celebrate the centenary of the landmark match tomorrow at Cheltenham.

Wodehouse, who died in 1975 aged 93, often took real-life inspiration for his characters and stories from the world around him.

A friend of Wodehouse once said that the writer's servant Eugene Robinson possessed all Jeeves's attributes of quick wits and intellect, and may have been the template for Jeeves.

He certainly wasn't alone in basing names on cricketers. His friend Arthur Conan Doyle, who he also played cricket with, named his famous detective Sherlock Holmes for two cricketers named Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock.

The two writers played in the Edwardian cricket team, the Authors. There were a number of literary cricket teams around at the beginning of the twentieth century but the Authors was the only one made up entirely of writers.

They would play at Lord’s each year, against sides of Publishers and Actors, with Conan Doyle and Wodehouse sometimes opening the batting together. A.A. Milne, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, was reportedly the best fielder in the side

In April 2012, the team was revived by a new generation of writers. The ranks include Birdsong Author Sebastian Faulks, history writer Tom Holland, author of Rubicon, and Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens.

Horst: Photographer of Style runs from 6 September 2014 - 4 January 2015 at the V&A. Tickets on sale from 12 May.

Horst: Photographer of Style runs from 6 September 2014 - 4 January 2015 at the V&A. Tickets on sale from 12 May.

6 September 2014 – 4 January 2015

This autumn the V&A will present the definitive retrospective of the work of Horst P. Horst (1906-99), one of the 20th century’s master photographers. In a career that spanned six decades, Horst photographed the exquisite creations of couturiers such as Chanel, Schiaparelli and Vionnet in 1930s Paris, and helped to launch the careers of many models. In New York a decade later, he experimented with early colour techniques and his meticulously composed, artfully lit images leapt from the magazine page.

The exhibition will display Horst’s best known photographs alongside unpublished and rarely exhibited vintage prints, conveying the diversity of his output, from surreal still lifes to portraits of Hollywood stars, nudes and nature studies to documentary pictures of the Middle East. It will examine his creative process through the inclusion of original contact sheets, sketches and archive film footage.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-horst-photographer-of-style/about-the-exhibition/

 V&A to showcase UK's biggest ever Horst P Horst collection

Exhibition set to explore German photographer's 60-year career including famous Dietrich portraits featured in Vogue

Mark Brown

The Guardian, Friday 2 May 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/02/v-and-a-horst-exhibition-photography

 

Portrait of model Muriel Maxwell putting on lipstick. Photograph: Horst P. Horst/Vogue

He is best known for some of the finest fashion photography of the 20th century and for his astonishing, arresting images of stars of stage and screen, but there is a lot more to Horst P Horst, the Victoria and Albert Museum will argue.

The museum will announce today that it will stage the biggest ever UK retrospective of Horst's photography, exploring a career that lasted 60 years and one which took in fashion, art, reportage, design and high society.

The show will include some of his most famous photographs for Vogue including the Mainbocher Corset and his fabulous image of Marlene Dietrich.

"We've written a whole chapter in the book just about that one image of Dietrich," said Susanna Brown, the V&A's curator of photographs. "There is so much going on in that photograph that I love. The chair is one of several different pieces of furniture that he created still-life photographs for, in order for them to be translated into embroidery. It is quite amazing."

Horst was born in Germany but worked predominantly in Paris and New York and the V&A said it planned to explore many aspects of his life and work. "We tend to think of him as a fashion photographer when actually there is so much else going on in his work," said Brown.

The surprises in the autumn show will include lesser-known nude studies, his Patterns from Nature pictures of flowers and shells and his "incredible travel pictures" from the Middle East, said Brown, including images he took from Iran where he travelled in the late 40s to be with the man he fell in love with before the war, the British diplomat Valentine Lawford who was stationed in Tehran.

Horst and Lawford were a couple for more than 50 years, living in an amazing house in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

Brown said Horst was one of the true greats of photography. "What is really extraordinary about him and quite rare within the 20th century is that he really straddles prewar and postwar fashions. There aren't many photographers who produced such excellent work on both sides of the war and also managed to make the transition so successfully from black and white to colour."

There will be more that 250 photographs on display as well as his diaries, film footage and magazines. Because the V&A has such a fine costume archive there will also be haute couture frocks by leading couturiers who were his friends and collaborators, people such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.

The show will also examine his legacy. "It is hard to overstate his influence really," said Brown. "Every subsequent generation of photographers – not just fashion – have looked to him for inspiration."

Horst P Horst: the king of fashion photography in pictures

Straining corsets, daring swimsuits and Marlene Dietrich in full glamour mode ... Horst P Horst was one of the 20th century's master photographers, and this autumn the V&A will celebrate his life and work. As well as his iconic fashion shoots, expect unpublished vintage prints, portraits of Hollywood stars, nudes and pictures from his travels. Model Muriel Maxwell putting on lipstick. American Vogue cover, 1 July 1939. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Dinner suit and headdress by Schiaparelli, 1947. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1942. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Dress by Hattie Carnegie, 1939. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Round the Clock, New York, 1987. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Corset by Detolle for Mainbocher, 1939. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate View of ruins at the palace of Persepolis, Persia, 1949. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Reclining model in white swimsuit and bathing cap, balancing large red ball on feet. American Vogue summer fashions cover, 15 May 1941. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Salvador Dali's costumes for Leonid Massine's ballet Bacchanale, 1939. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Patterns from Nature, photographic collage c.1945. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Male nude, 1952. Photograph: Conde Nast, Horst Estate Horst P Horst directing lights and cameras before a fashion shoot with Lisa Fonssagrives, 1949. Photograph: Roy Stevens/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Images

SUNDAY IMAGES ... LIMBS ...

The Lord ... and his many Ladies ...

The mystic Marquess and the minx who wants his millions: How Lord Northampton's fifth marriage came to an earth-shattering end

By BARBARA DAVIES

PUBLISHED:  6 July 2012  / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2169894/How-Marquess-Northamptons-fifth-marriage-came-earth-shattering-end.html

 

The Marquess of Northampton with Pamela Haworth

The first time the Marquess of Northampton suspected that his wife was having an affair with one of his closest friends was when she returned home from New York without her wedding ring.

It was May 2009 and 60-year-old Lady Pamela Northampton told her husband that the outgoing flight had caused her fingers to swell and so the offending band had been cut off.

This incident was followed by frequent trips abroad and the appearance of a Roland Cartier triple-coloured gold and diamond necklace, one of several pieces of precious jewellery bought for her by her secret lover.

But the final nail in the coffin of the couple's 20-year marriage — Lord Northampton's fifth — was undoubtedly the emergence of secretly-taped phone conversations between age-defying blonde Lady Pamela and her 87-year-old father, Jim Haworth.

The tapes, which friends say came to the Eton-educated peer as a 'bolt from the blue', are subject to a legal injunction and their contents cannot be revealed.

But what can be said without doubt is that they confirmed the Marquess's worst fears — that the Marchioness was having an affair with his friend, balding Romanian Dan Stoicescu, a multi-millionaire scientist and entrepreneur who made his fortune in the pharmaceutical industry. He was dramatically unveiled as Lady Pamela's lover in court last week.

The tapes are now at the centre of what looks set to become one of the most expensive divorces in English legal history.

The High Court hearing is scheduled for January and is set to cost more than £2 million in legal fees as the estranged couple battle over the cuckolded marquess's £120 m fortune.

Spencer Northampton — one of Britain's wealthiest aristocrats and affectionately known as 'Spenny' to his friends — has already offered Accrington-born, half-Italian Lady Pamela a £15 m settlement, including a £4 m home in Pimlico, West London.

Lady Pamela, a toolmaker's daughter who began life in a Lancashire council house, wants £10 m more.

'He has now come to terms with the fact that Pamela  seems to have fallen in love with someone else,' a close friend of the heartbroken marquess told the Mail this week.

'He realises that can happen in life. But what he finds really upsetting is that he feels she is trying to get more money from him than is fair and reasonable.

'As Lady Northampton, she had everything she ever wanted, never having to get a job, having no children of her own to look after and a husband who was always faithful to her.

'He was sure, after 20 years, that Pamela was the one.'

Certainly, with marriages to five beautiful women under his belt — more of whom later — the marquess, whose family has resided at Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire since the 12th century, could have been forgiven for hoping that his days of romantic high drama were a thing of the past.

Acrimonious: Lord Northampton and Lady Pamela Northampton, who split in 2010 after a 20-year marriage, are currently in the midst of a bitter divorce battle

He met Pamela Kyprios, as she was then named, in the late Eighties through their mutual interest in spiritualism after her second divorce from a wealthy Greek-American shipping financier.

She had been planning to open a holistic healing centre when the pair were introduced by friends. He later claimed that she turned up on his London doorstep demanding to talk to him about her project and never left.

They married in December 1990 at Stratford-Upon-Avon register office, with the marquess speaking movingly of his love for her.

'She is the centre of my life. I call her “stregissima” — great white witch,' he said at the time. 'She is a healer, very good at relaxing me.'

And tucked away in the romantic surroundings of Compton Wynyates for the past two decades, the couple seemed blissfully happy.

While much of Lord Northampton's time has been spent managing his family estates and charity work, Lady Pamela has assisted him with interior design as well as devoting herself to the Dogs Trust, of which she is a former president.

Then came the couple's ill-fated 2006 meeting with Dr Dan Stoicescu at a Freemasonry convention in Cyprus.

Affair: Lady Northampton's secret lover Dr Dan Stoicescu, a Romanian scientist and entrepreneur

At first it seemed that Lord Northampton, once dubbed 'the Mystic Marquess' for his preoccupation with spirituality, Freemasonry and alternative religions, had much in common with the fabulously rich Dr Stoicescu, 60, who describes himself as a 'transhumanist' with a deep-seated interest in immortality and anti-ageing therapies.

Described as 'charming' and 'self-effacing', the divorced scientist became only the second person ever to have his human genome mapped.

The procedure, which can reveal genetic diseases which could help you take action to delay their development, cost him £220,000.

He later forked out double that sum to pay for both the marquess and Lady Pamela to undergo the same process at a US clinic. In the weeks and months that followed their first meeting, divorced father-of-one Stoicescu became a firm family friend and a regular guest at Compton Wynyates. Stoicescu also lavished gifts upon Lady Pamela — in addition to the Cartier necklace, which came with matching earrings, he bought her a diamond-encrusted watch.

He has homes in Switzerland, Cyprus, Finland, the US and Australia, and was equally generous to her relatives. Her father Jim was presented with a £1,300 bottle of wine from Harrods and a Rolex watch, and taken to dinner at Claridge's.

Stoicescu's huge fortune was first built on a business selling cancer-care products, and he even paid for private treatment for Jim when he had bowel cancer.

He also provided a private jet to fly Lady Pamela and her father from London to Zurich en route to San Diego, where they spent Christmas 2010. 'Looking back, Dan seemed to infiltrate every aspect of their lives,' says the marquess's close friend.

'He even invested a six-figure sum in one of Spenny's businesses, almost as a way of proving his friendship. At first Spenny took it at face value, but after a while he decided to cool the friendship.'

But by 2009, Lady Northampton had begun working for Stoicescu, telling her husband that she had been made president of one of his biopharmaceutical companies, Asterion.

This new role meant frequent trips to the US and lengthy absences from Compton Wynyates, where Spenny was left alone and increasingly suspicious about his wife's behaviour.

'He began to realise that Stoicescu wasn't all that he seemed in late 2008,' says the marquess's friend. 'He came to Spenny's birthday party in Tenerife in 2009 and Spenny was concerned then at how close Stoicescu was becoming to Pamela.'

Undoubtedly, as his marriage collapsed around him, Lord Northampton's thoughts must have turned to Lady Pamela's colourful past.

It is fair to say that her rise to the upper echelons of British society has been nothing short of meteoric.

When the Marchioness was born in 1951, her parents — Jim, then a toolmaker, and Martina, an Italian dressmaker — were living in a council house in Accrington, Lancashire. The couple later ran a B&B called La Gondola in the Kent seaside resort of Margate.

Wealthy: Lord Northampton has an estimated £120 million fortune, owns two stately homes and is regarded as one of Britain's richest aristocrats

Warring: The Marquess, born Spencer Compton, has accused his wife of having an affair with a close friend

Much of Pamela's childhood was spent in what was then Rhodesia where her father worked for a while in a gold mine in Bulawayo. Pamela and her younger brothers Nigel and Neil attended boarding school and she later worked briefly for Sri Lankan Airlines.

Then, aged 18, she married wealthy Scottish businessman Gerard Macklin, flying to London just before the ceremony so she could buy a wedding dress from Harrods.

Her second marriage in December 1983, to Greek-American shipping financier Emanuel Kyprios, took place in the lavish St Sophia's Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London's Bayswater.

They set up home in a luxury £2 million flat close to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington — a property that Pamela was allowed to keep when she ended her marriage in the late Eighties.

Despite Lord Northampton's vast wealth, their 1990 registry office wedding was, by all accounts, a rather more modest affair.

But her new lover's wealth puts even that of the marquess into the shade.

'Dan has charmed her entire family, her father, her mother, her brothers,' says a source close to Lady Pamela's family. 'He is fabulously rich, even richer than Lord Northampton and his money has turned all their heads because Dan is looking after them.'

In another bizarre twist, it emerged in court that the damning 'Northamptongate' tapes which exposed Lady Pamela's affair were made by Suzanne Shipwright, a 62-year-old former beautician who has lived with Pamela's father Jim for the past 27 years, since his divorce from her mother, Martina.

Her motive for making the tapes is said to be her own troubled relationship with Lady Pamela.

'She has always blamed Suzanne for the end of her parents' marriage even though they were already divorced when she met Jim,' says the source.

Costly divorce: Lord Northampton apparently fears he will have to sell a £6 million portrait of Queen Mary I, painted in 1554 in order to reach a settlement with his estranged wife

In fact, at the time they met, he had been briefly married to a Lebanese woman.'

Ms Shipwright, who used to run Suzanne's Hair and Beauty Salon in Staines, Middlesex, is said to have been 'shocked' at what she heard during the conversations.

Pamela's father, Mr Haworth, who is hard of hearing, spoke with the speaker-phone turned on at full volume, enabling Ms Shipwright to record both sides of the conversation from the modest pebble-dashed bungalow in Addlestone, Surrey, which she still shares with him.

She then passed the tapes to Lord Northampton, who threw his wife out of the 84-room family home just days before their 20th wedding anniversary in 2010.

The marquess's friend added: 'She swiftly returned with removal vans to take her things and took the opportunity to get the artworks hanging on the walls photographed for her solicitors.'

Among them is a £6 million 1554 portrait of Queen Mary I, which Lord Northampton fears he will have to sell if his estranged wife's demands for more money are backed by the High Court.

Ironically, the family motto of five-times-wed Lord Northampton is 'I seek but one', and his union with Lady Pamela has turned out to be the most acrimonious of all five of his doomed marriages.

He first sauntered up the aisle aged 21 in 1967 with Henriette Bentinck, the daughter of Baron Adolph Bentinck, the Dutch ambassador to Paris.

The ceremony, at St Margaret's in Westminster, was one of the society weddings of the year with the bride wearing a Dior dress and Princess Alice, the Queen's aunt, among the guests. The couple had two children, Daniel, now Earl Compton and heir to the family estates, and Lady Lara.

But the marriage broke down after six years after Henriette's affair with a London businessman.

She married twice more and ran an equestrian estate near Seville in Spain until her death in 2010.

The marquess's second wife was 24-year-old Annette Smallwood, the daughter of a retired oil company director from Sussex. The couple met in 1972 while Annette was a secretary at KIDS, a charity for deprived children set up by Lord Northampton, and married at Chelsea Register Office in 1974.

Happier times: The couple kiss for the cameras during a photo-shoot in 1999

She divorced the marquess in 1974 on the grounds of his adultery with Rosie Dawson-Damer, a close friend of Princess Michael of Kent.

Rosie became wife number three in July 1977, with the marquess telling one newspaper: 'Third time lucky!'. They had a daughter, Lady Emily, but divorced in 1983 when she was just two, on the grounds of Lord Northampton's adultery with an unnamed woman.

The marquess's burgeoning interest in spiritualism and what he described as 'psychic and esoteric philosophies' led him to wife number four — married German former topless model Fritzi Erhardt, or 'Lady Fourthampton' as she became known.

She left her then-husband, Viscount Cowdray, and married Spenny in 1985. Their daughter Lady Louisa was born the same year, but the marriage was over by 1988 and Fritzi moved to Ibiza, where she still lives.

Despite the financial burden placed on him by four divorce settlements, Lord Northampton has proved to be adept at keeping together his vast inheritance.

He owns 18,500 acres of land in Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Surrey and London.

For the past few years, he has opened the doors of another of his homes, Castle Ashby, for wedding parties and conferences.

As well as being in possession of one of the most valuable collections of artworks in private hands, he is also the owner of the controversial Sevso Treasure, the world's most valuable collection of Roman silver which cannot be sold because of arguments over its provenance.

According to his friend, the marquess feels his £15m offer to Lady Pamela is more than generous. 'It's worth £750,000 for each year of marriage, tax-free,' says the friend.

'He is devastated at how she has behaved. They had been married a few weeks short of their 20th wedding anniversary when this blew up and he had thought she was his life-long partner.' Lady Pamela, meanwhile, is dividing her time between her husband's £4 million flat in Pimlico and Stoicescu's various properties.

She is a frequent visitor to his San Diego ranch, which is in a road called Lady's Secret Court.

Her mother is also staying at the property, which is next to a home owned by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

Despite her lover's fabulous wealth, Lady Pamela is showing no signs of giving up her fight for a bigger portion of her husband's inheritance.

Yesterday, her solicitors Finers Stephens Innocent did not respond to calls. Dr Stoicescu has also declined to comment on the affair.

But, privately, Lady Pamela has complained to friends that she is being treated like a 'common criminal' and says her lover's riches are irrelevant because she has no plans to marry and values her independence.

As for Lord Northampton, friends point out that he is in extraordinarily good shape for his age — 6ft 4in tall with not a grey hair in sight.

'He isn't frightened of being alone, but it's certainly not what he would have chosen at 66,' says the source.

But once the end of his tumultuous marriage to his 'great white witch' is finalised, he might be advised to embrace life as a bachelor for the forseeable future.

The Lord, the Lady, her lover and the £17m divorce

Lord Northampton has agreed to pay his wife £17 million after their 20-year marriage ended in divorce, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

By Robert Mendick, Chief reporter: 20 Jan 2013 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/divorce/9813556/The-Lord-the-Lady-her-lover-and-the-17m-divorce.html

It was by far the longest lasting of his five marriages. And now easily the most expensive of his five divorces.

After an acrimonious, two-year legal battle, the 7th Marquess of Northampton has called a truce with his soon-to-be ex-wife. The divorce – prompted by Lady (Pamela) Northampton’s affair with a Romanian multi-millionaire – will cost him in the region of £17 million.

Lady Northampton, 61, will receive a £4 million apartment in Pimlico in central London as well as cash and possessions worth about £13 million.

But the vast majority of Lord Northampton’s fortune – put conservatively at £120 million and including two stately homes, tracts of land, valuable paintings and furniture and even a controversial Roman treasure hoard – will remain intact.

The decision to settle will spare the couple the £2 million cost of a two-week divorce trial, which was due to start in the High Court tomorrow . Both are now bound by confidentiality clauses that prevent them speaking about the failure of their 20-year marriage.

Lord Northampton’s solicitor, Simon Bruce of Farrer and Co, said yesterday: “We are pleased to confirm that the case has now been settled without the need for further court proceedings.

"Under the terms of the parties’ agreements there will be no further comment.”

A spokesman for Lady Northampton said: “She does not wish to make any comment at this time.”

The divorce had been a messy one. At a pretrial hearing in the summer, Lady Northampton’s lover was named as Dr Dan Stoicescu, who is said to be even wealthier than her husband.

The couple also became embroiled in a separate privacy action, now ended, over secret recordings of Lady Northampton’s phone conversations, discussing her private life with her 87-year-old father.

Bizarrely, the recordings were made by her stepmother, a hairdresser from Staines in Middlesex, and passed on to Lord Northampton.

Their contents prompted Lord Northampton, 66, to throw his wife out of their 84-room country estate at Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire.

Lady Northampton had demanded about £25 million and Lord Northampton had offered £15 million. It is reckoned, although unconfirmed, that she will in the end receive about £17 million – almost £1 million for every year of their marriage.

Lord Northampton, born Spencer Compton and known as “Spenny” to friends, is one of Britain’s most colourful aristocrats, once dubbed the “Mystic Marquess” for his fascination with Freemasonry and spirituality.

He had already been wed four times in 23 years when he married Pamela Kyprios in 1990 at a register office in Stratford-upon-Avon, following her divorce from a wealthy Greek-American shipping financier.

While his family has aristocratic roots dating back 500 years, Lady Northampton, born Pamela Haworth, is from altogether more humble stock, having been born into a working-class family in Lancashire.

The pair were introduced by friends in the late 1980s and married shortly after. “She is the centre of my life,” Lord Northampton said at the time, “She is a healer, very good at relaxing me.” He has told friends that she was the love of his life and certainly none of his other marriages lasted anywhere near as long.

Lord Northampton became friends with Dr Stoicescu in about 2006 after they met at a Freemasons’ gathering.

Dr Stoicescu, who lives beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland and made his money through a pharmaceutical business, describes himself as a “transhumanist”, convinced life can be “extended through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence”.

He became only the second person to have his genome mapped, at a cost of £220,000, and later paid for Lord and Lady Northampton to go through the process. He also gave Lord Northampton expensive gifts before embarking on an affair with his wife in about 2009.

The taped phone calls, made over three months in 2010, confirmed Lord Northampton’s worst suspicions.

A friend of his said: “Spenny feels betrayed by Dan Stoicescu, whom he once regarded as one of his closest friends.

"At a time when he thought his marriage was solid, he and Pamela holidayed with Stoicescu and he showered them with expensive gifts.

"Stoicescu even gave Pamela a job with one of his organisations, which meant they travelled the world together.

“Although it looks obvious now what was developing, Stoicescu’s role in the end of his marriage was a complete and utter shock.”

A friend of Lady Northampton defended her.

“Spenny has had a chequered past and Pamela has had to put up with a great deal. It’s fair to say that … the marriage was already faltering a considerable time before the relationship began with Dan.

“Since Spenny decided to divorce her, she feels she has been treated like a common criminal – thrown out of Compton Wynyates and never allowed back. She resents the claim she is being portrayed as a gold-digger.

"After a 23-year relationship and after the contributions Pamela has made to Spenny’s properties, business and life, she is entitled to a good settlement.”

Lord Northampton married four times between 1967 and 1988, selling a painting by Andreas Mantegna for a then world-record £8.1 million in 1985, two years after divorce number three.

English divorce law largely protects inherited wealth and two stately homes, Compton Wynyates and Castle Ashby, will remain in the family and be passed on to his heir.

Other assets include the Sevso Treasure, which consists of 14 large decorated silver vessels and platers, which cannot be sold because of a long-running dispute over their provenance.

A painting of Mary I, painted in 1554 and worth about £6 million, may have to be auctioned to help pay for the divorce.

'Mystic Marquess' marries yoga teacher with 'keen interest' in sex addiction

The Marquess of Northampton has quietly married for a sixth time, just months after his £17million divorce was settled.

By Tim Walker7:30AM BST 13 Sep 2013 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/10305803/Mystic-Marquess-marries-yoga-teacher-with-keen-interest-in-sex-addiction.html

He has been married five times before, and his last divorce cost him around £17 million, but the Marquess of Northampton refuses to abandon his quest for enduring love.

Mandrake hears that the “Mystic Marquess”, as he is known because of his fascination with Freemasonry and ancient mysticism, has quietly married for a sixth time.

The new Marchioness of Northampton is Tracy Goodman, a glamorous young psychotherapist and yoga teacher with a “keen interest in working with love and sex addiction related issues”.

Tracy, who works at the Recovery Centre in Knightsbridge, is currently on honeymoon with “Spenny”, as Lord Northampton, 67, is known to his chums, after their wedding in London. “She is delighted,” says one of her friends.

The marquess, whose assets include Compton Wynyates, his family seat in Warwickshire, and Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire, agreed a settlement with his fifth wife, Pamela, in January, the day before their divorce trial was due to be held at the High Court.

Pamela left him for a Romanian businessman, Dr Dan Stoicescu, whose fortune is even larger than the peer’s estimated £120 million.

Lord Northampton, one of whose daughters is Lady Emily Compton, the socialite who courted the rock star Bryan Ferry, divorced his fourth wife, Fritzi Erhardt, the former wife of Viscount Cowdray, in 1988.

His third wife was Rosie Dawson-Damer, while his second was Annette Smallwood, his former secretary. He was first married to Henriette, daughter of the late Dutch ambassador to London, Baron Bentinck.