‘Wifelet’ starts court battle for share of Bath’s £23m legacy
NO OTHER aristocrat has shrugged off convention quite like the late and libidinous Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath. During the course of a 51-year marriage to his Hungarian-British wife, actress Anna Gael, Lord Bath enjoyed the favours of 74 lovers or ‘ wifelets’, immortalising his entanglements with them in a series of lurid murals which he prominently displayed at Longleat, the fabulous family seat and safari park in Wiltshire.
But his relentless pursuit of pleasure meant that he bequeathed not just a £23 million personal estate but also a legal and emotional quagmire, as is made plain by a High Court claim.
It’s been brought against Alexander Bath’s trustees by Amanda Doyle, a former music producer estimated to have been wifelet 69.
Doyle insists that she was ‘entirely financially dependent’ on ‘the Loins of Longleat’, as Bath was popularly known, for 21 years — a period which, she says, ended only with his death, aged 87, in April 2020. Like all her fellow wifelets, Doyle went unmentioned in Bath’s will, in which he left everything to Anna, their daughter Lenka and son Ceawlin, now the 8th Marquess. He is married to Strictly star emma Weymouth. Anna died in September.
Doyle first encountered Bath at a Tommy Hilfiger launch party in the late 1990s, and is now seeking ‘such reasonable financial provision as the court thinks fit’.
She went to live in a cottage on the 10,000-acre Longleat estate in 2004 and will hope that The Inheritance ( Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 will aid her case. It states that those who were financially dependent on the deceased can, in certain circumstances, claim for ‘financial provision’.
Shortly after Bath’s death, Doyle insisted that she mattered more to the lusty old aristocrat than any other wifelet.
‘I’m the one who had the long relationship, the emotional relationship, the sexual relationship,’ she said. ‘We were twin souls, two peas in a pod. He was my life.’