The claws come out at Longleat
The Marquess of Bath’s son is at war with his mother over a remark deemed as ‘ racist’ that she made about his half- Nigerian wife
LONGLEAT House, a beautiful Elizabethan stately home in Wiltshire, is the home of the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath, their son and heir Ceawlin, Viscount Weymouth, his wife Emma and their baby John.
As everyone knows, living in the same house as close relatives can be a recipe for bickering and feuding. But as the marquess and marchioness occupy a penthouse in one wing of the 130- room mansion, while the viscount and viscountess live in the other, you might have thought there was no danger of them getting on top of each .
Alas that is to reckon without a marquess who prizes his selfdaubed paintings of scenes from the ancient Indian sex manual the Kama Sutra and a marchioness who, aged 71, has very oldfashioned views about mixedrace marriages.
What is going on behind the walls of Longleat as we speak makes the most dysfunctional families in EastEnders and Coronation Street look like models of cohesion and decorum. The bare facts are these: Ceawlin is white, Emma is black. He is not talking to his mother because he claims she has made racist remarks concerning his marriage two years ago to Emma. The marchioness, in turn, is snubbing Emma whenever she comes across her in the grounds.
Neither the marquess nor the marchioness attended Ceawlin and Emma’s wedding – he because Ceawlin had taken down his erotic murals, she because her invitation had been revoked by her son. Father and son are now talking after Ceawlin agreed to put up the murals in a different part of the house. But Lady Bath is still in the doghouse and refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
EVEN 11- month- old John has been brought into the feud: Ceawlin has banned his mother from seeing her grandson for fear that she will “contaminate” him.
Stage One of the internecine war of Longleat dates back to 2010 when the marquess – who will keep his title until his death – handed over the running of the 9,000- acre £ 157million family estate to his son. When Ceawlin and Emma took up residence in his former nursery suite, the viscount decided that a little redecoration was in order.
“If, when pushing 40, you’re looking at the same walls you were looking at when you were four, you can understand that a moment can arise when you snap,” Ceawlin explained in an interview last year. “I need to make this space relevant to who I am now, not harking back to the four- year- old child.”
His father didn’t see it that way. Furious that his art had been rejected, he sent his son to Coventry. And the pair might still be estranged to this day if Ceawlin hadn’t made the fi rst move to restore the peace. “We’ve had something of a rapprochement and have had dinner a couple of times recently,” he said later. “It was just a case of swallowing a tiny bit of pride. My father was genuinely very hurt when the paintings were taken down. If I could go back and do it differently, I would.”
The rift with his mother sounds far more serious. The scale of the offence she has caused can only be fully understood if we look at the background to Ceawlin and Emma’s relationship. They fi rst met when she acted as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her half- brother Iain to Lady Silvy Cerne Thynne, a half- aunt of Ceawlin. Emma was four, Ceawlin was 16.
In the intervening years she became a frequent visitor to Longleat. “I’ve always loved it here and I would see Ceawlin at Christmas, Easter and family get- togethers,” she once said. When she was 18, she was suffi - ciently intimate with Longleat’s interior to write a dissertation on its state rooms for her history of art degree. The friendship between Ceawlin, now 41, and Emma, 29, became a romance in 2011 and 18 months later he proposed. The news of the couple’s betrothal did not go down well with her future mother- in- law.
When Ceawlin broke the news to her, she responded by asking: “Are you sure about what you’re doing to 400 years of bloodline?”
CEAWLIN was “gobsmacked”. Allegedly she repeated the response twice more and felt compelled to share it with his wife, who was devastated. “Emma is the least confrontational, least dramatic person, but I don’t think anyone could have that happen at least three times and not just say, well, f*** this,” he said. Ceawlin duly demanded that his mother return her wedding invitation.
For her part, the marchioness has said she had always pledged to tell her children her thoughts on “serious partners” and claimed she was unaware she had been prevented from attending the wedding. Lady Bath’s position so appalled her son that he forbade her any contact with the infant John on the grounds that: “I don’t want him contaminated by that sort of atmosphere and those sort of views”.
We can only hope that the marquess can talk some sense into his wife. Given that he once kept up to 70 lovers – or “wifelets” – in cottages on the estate, however, and she spent much of their marriage with her now dead French lover, it is not entirely clear how much infl uence those words would have. VETERAN heart- throb Robert Redford was honoured in Monaco this week when he received the Prince Rainier III Award for his accomplishments in fi lms.
The actor, 79, recalled how he was less effusively received on a previous visit to the principality – as an art student hitchhiking across Europe in 1959 – when he sought an introduction to the late Princess Grace.
“I never met her. I tried once, but I failed,” he says now. “I got to Cannes and then I decided I was going to Monaco and I was going to meet Princess Grace.”
Redford, pictured, even arranged for someone to photograph him as he approached the palace. “I walk up to the front door, I look back, and the guards at the front door said: ‘ Get out of here’.”
The princess, who made her name as Grace Kelly in Hollywood, died in a car accident in Monaco in September 1982. THE return of which much- followed TV show met with the gushing approval of Dame Joan Collins at the weekend?
The actress, 82, told her Twitter followers: “Was it a dream? Woke up to visions of fl ashing sequins, whiter than white teeth, and toned tanned legs. Ah, it was Strictly Come Dancing. Fabulous.”
Can you imagine what the viewing fi gures would be like if Strictly’s producers could persuade Joanie to star on the dancefl oor?