Philandering peer is allowed back home
WHEN Lord Brabourne, the Queen’s cousin, returned to his ancestral seat after an affair with a fashion designer in the Bahamas, his wife, Penelope, banished him to a converted stable block next door.
Now, however, I can disclose that Prince Philip’s close friend Lady Brabourne has relented and let her husband, Norton Knatchbull, heir to the Mountbatten dynasty, back to live in the famous 60-room Palladian mansion Broadlands, in Hampshire.
‘Penny is happy for Norton to be back home,’ a friend tells me. ‘Norton is in poor health and ailing and it didn’t seem right for him to be away from his family home.’
Brabourne, 69, the grandson of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, moved to the Bahamas in 2010 to embark on a new life with Lady Nuttall, 60. However, their affair fizzled out and he returned in 2014 to Broadlands, where the Queen began her honeymoon.
At that time, Brabourne gave up all public duties and his estranged wife took over many of his responsibilities.
Norton, who was a friend and mentor to Prince Charles, married Penelope two months after the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten, which also killed three others, including Norton’s youngest brother, Nicholas, and his grandmother, the Dowager Lady Brabourne. In 2010, Penelope, 64, who is Prince Philip’s regular carriage-driving companion, told staff at the 5,000-acre estate that her husband had left and she would be running the estate.
Lord Brabourne, a descendant of Queen Victoria, was living in the Bahamas with Eugenie Nuttall, glamorous widow of former Guards officer Sir Nicholas Nuttall.