My Wellington booty!
Earl wins battle with his stepmother over £15m of heirlooms – including portrait of the Iron Duke
‘Strained relationship’
IN A saga more suited to Downton Abbey, a countess has lost a High Court case against her estranged stepson over whether she can inspect the family’s £15million collection of treasures.
Gloria Wesley, the Dowager Countess Bathurst, had tried to assert what she believed was her right to enter the 9th Earl Bathurst’s home and spend days making an inventory of its contents.
These include a £6million, almost life-size painting of the Duke of Wellington on his horse by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
The Earl, son of the countess’s late husband, the 8th Earl, Henry ‘Barmy’ Bathurst, objected and the matter went to court.
Yesterday, a judge ruled against the 89year-old Dowager Countess.
The judgment is unlikely to improve relations between the feuding aristocrats at the 15,000-acre, £45million Bathurst Estate.
The Earl’s side claimed that the US-born Dowager Countess had tried to gain entry to his Gloucestershire home, Cirencester Park, on the ‘flimsy pretext’ of making an inventory of its contents, really intending to trample her way into his personal life.
The dispute dates back to 1963, when the 8th Earl split the estate, with the current Earl’s half in trust. The other half, also in trust, went to the Dowager Countess for the rest of her life after her husband died.
She was granted Manor Farm on the estate, a home in 3,000 acres on which she has ‘the sporting rights for game and deer’, along with the ‘use and enjoyment’ of the contents of Cirencester Park.
But this became problematic after the 8th Earl’s death in 2011 when the main house became his son’s home and she no longer lived in it.
Her half of the estate will revert to the family after she dies.
The Earl, 56, said the trust fund of which his stepmother is the beneficiary ‘has rent paid in exchange for the chattels’ – meaning she is being paid by him to let him enjoy the family heirlooms in peace.
But things came to a head when her trust made an extensive inventory of all the goods in the house.
‘It was very intrusive,’ the Earl said last year. ‘They opened every drawer and cupboard, and it took days.’ The Earl, a friend of Prince Charles, who lives with his second wife Sara, said he did not want to let his stepmother in to catalogue the estate’s antiques collection.
A report by Christie’s said it contained 326 valuable ‘pictures, drawings and prints, miniatures, furniture, sculpture, porcelain and glass, and books and manuscripts’.
But in the legal case between the trusts that run the two halves of the estate, High Court Judge Simon Barker has now said that the Dowager Countess has no right to inspect the treasures in the house.
Instead she will have to make do with the artworks worth £3million in her own home – and she will only be able to see valuables in the main house on video if the Earl allows it. Judge Barker said: ‘The barrier to personal inspection or involvement by Lady Bathurst is the strained relationship between herself and the 9th Earl and the Earl’s refusal to allow Lady Bathurst to cross the threshold of Cirencester Park.
‘If Lady Bathurst’s case is correct, her life interest would confer on her the power to remove all chattels owned by the 8th Earl at his death from Cirencester Park for the remainder of her lifetime.
‘It is common ground that Lady Bathurst could not house and enjoy anything like all the chattels.’
The 9th Earl’s position can perhaps best be summed up by a comment he made after the court case started last year, insisting: ‘She can’t just barge in and turn the place upside down again.’