The Duke, the Duchess, her lover and a Brazilian
The aristocratic owners of Belvoir Castle have a very modern marriage: him in one wing with his South American girlfriend and her in the other with the estate manager
IT IS hardly Downton Abbey. At the launch of his new book this week, Resolution, the Duke of Rutland is joined by his wife, his five children… and his Brazilian girlfriend. The only person missing from this cosy image of upper-class domestic bliss is his wife’s lover. Unfortunately he couldn’t make it, so stayed at home in the castle they all share.
If the arrangement sounds peculiar to those of us not to the manor born, for one of Britain’s most distinguished aristocratic families, it is all perfectly normal.
The Duke – or to give him his full title, David Charles Robert Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland – lives in one wing of the fabulous Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire with girlfriend Andrea Webb, while wife Emma Manners, Duchess of Rutland, occupies another wing, along with her partner, Phil Burtt, (who also happens to run the 15,000 acre estate) and sons Lord Hugo, 13, and Charles, Marquess of Granby, 17.
Their daughters Lady Violet, 23, and Lady Alice, 21, live in London, while Lady Eliza, 19, is studying at Newcastle University.
It is a set-up that seems to suit all concerned. “We may live in a historic building,” remarked the Duchess, “but that’s no reason to be bound by outmoded traditions.”
However, she concedes that sharing a home with husband, lover and husband’s lover can make for the occasional awkward encounter. “The arrangement is not without farcical moments,” she said. “For one thing my clothes are still up in the tower where David lives – the only place where they all fit. So I find myself popping up there from time to time, coughing loudly and saying in a stage whisper: ‘Just getting my suit for Ascot!’”
But if the couple have stayed under the same roof for the sake of their children, the fact is that their ménage-a-quatre has also proved to be an extraordinarily canny business move. Belvoir Castle is one of the country’s most beautiful and successful grand houses.
Home to the family for nearly 1,000 years – the land was a gift from William the Conqueror to his standard bearer Robert de Todoni, the first Baron of Belvoir – the present castle was built in the early 1800s, and is a vast, fairytale concoction of towers, turrets and spires.
As well as being home to the Duke and Duchess and their respective partners, it plays host to a range of hunting and fishing activities, corporate events and wedding parties, as well as appearing in films including the Da Vinci Code and Young Victoria. Guided tours of the grounds are hugely popular and ensure that the estate operates as a healthy and profitable business. But it was not always so.
When David inherited the family seat after the death of his father in 1999, Belvoir Castle was in dire straits. With some £9million owing in death duties, the estate was not only failing to pay its way, the building itself was falling apart around them.
David and Emma had been married seven years by then, after meeting at a party in 1990 – upon being introduced to Emma, he remarked, “I like the cut of her jib,” and handed her his card. She, meanwhile, the daughter of a Quaker family and brought up on a farm in Wales confessed that she had little idea what she was letting herself in for. “Many were cynical,” she said later. “Had I understood what joining this family entailed? More importantly, could I breed?”
The couple answered the second of those questions within a year, when eldest daughter Violet was born – followed soon after by Alice and Eliza – but it wasn’t until 1999, when David officially became the 11th Duke of Rutland, that the real impact of marrying into the family became clear.
“I’ll never forget the shock of moving the family into Belvoir Castle,” said Emma. “My motherin-law handed me this enormous black box of keys, wishing me luck. But there’s no manual to prepare you for being a duchess. The castle, we’d soon discover, was in chaos. It employed far too many people, the properties were not managed efficiently and there was no other sustainable revenue stream.
“It was losing tens of thousands of pounds a year. Grey-suited land agents would descend upon Belvoir carrying report after report, each encouraging us to spend more money without actually addressing any of the issues.”
The Duchess took charge, becoming chief executive of Belvoir, and exploiting its potential as a venue for game fairs, weddings, conferences and film locations. She was also extraordinarily hands-on. After being woken in the night on one occasion to be told that water was cascading into the library, she climbed on the roof in nightdress and wellies to remove a dead pigeon that was blocking the drain.
“I slid down the lead roof on my bottom and dug it out with my bare hands,” she said. “That dead pigeon taught me a lot.”
HER hard work began to pay off and Belvoir Castle started to turn a profit. However, that same year, just after the birth of eldest son Charles, she discovered David had been having an affair. He moved out of the castle for a short time before the couple agreed to patch things up and try again.
Although they were to have another son, by Emma’s own admission they had lost trust in each other, and in 2009, after a lavish party to celebrate his 50th birthday, David admitted that he had been seeing Andrea, who lived on the estate. And so the Duke and Duchess arrived at their unusual arrangement.
“Looking at the bigger picture,” she said later, “I could see that our family enjoyed good health, the children were blossoming, the castle’s fortunes were finally improving. The idea of David or me moving out of Belvoir seemed unthinkable. So after much discussion with each other, we found a compromise.”
That compromise was to extend still further in 2015, when Emma began her relationship with estate manager Burtt. But if their unique domestic set-up has raised eyebrows among the lower orders, it seems that it is the next generation of Rutlands who are now setting society tongues wagging.
David and Emma’s three daughters – beautiful, connected, fabulously wealthy – have gained the nickname “The No Manners Girls” for their wild behaviour, including raucous parties at the family’s Fulham townhouse.
The Duke and Duchess of Rutland may have one of the most unusual living arrangements in the country but for one of Britain’s oldest and wealthiest dynasties it is an arrangement that seems to be working – for the family, and for the castle itself.
“The children know we are fallible and the world is not perfect,” says the Duchess. “But we are still here. Still involved in their daily lives. No longer arguing – in fact, we are now getting on better than ever.
“I still have immense feelings of sadness and failure at the breakdown of my marriage – feelings, I know, that are fully and deeply shared by my husband. But I am no longer craving to hold on to it. The bitterness has gone and the future at Belvoir Castle looks bright once again.”
But would Lord Grantham approve? and Lady