Earl sells up for £10m after family feud
MOST stately home owners are worried about security but the Countess of Carnarvon, chatelaine of Highclere Castle, where Downton Abbey is filmed, seems blissfully unconcerned. Fiona Carnarvon has written at length about the property’s security systems on her public blog. She discloses the names of staff who carry the keys, the keys’ locations — including up a tree — and even photos of them. She also reveals that combination locks match the dates of historic battles, such as Waterloo. Lady Carnarvon explains: ‘I tend to put some of them somewhere safe — under a carpet or flower pot, perhaps.’ Has Lady C gone potty?
WHEN the Earl of Durham refused to share his father’s fortune with his sisters, including t he broadcaster Lucinda Lambton, it provoked a furious row that ended up in the Italian courts.
It was claimed that the he colourful earl, Ned Durham,m, needed the money to keep his family’s estates intact, but now he has quietly put Fenton House, a 19thcentury white Gothic hunting lodge in Northumberland, on the market for offers ‘in excess off £10 million’.
Fenton may not even be kept i n one piece as s an advertisement says it is forr sale ‘as a whole or in up to four lots’.t ’ Th The add describes it as ‘a wonderful opportunity to enhance a stunning traditional landed estate’. The house has 12 bedrooms and a ‘trampoline room’.
Country singer Ned, 53, inherited 2,000-acre Fenton after the death of his father, former Tory minister Tony Lambton, in 2006. It is where Ned’s uncle Roderick shot himself dead in 1941, the blood staining the snow on the lawn.
Tony Lambton, as he was known having renounced the earldom to become an MP, was caught in bed with two prostitutes while smoking a joint by the News Of The World in 1973.
After the sex scandal, the peer went into exile with his mistress Claire Ward at Villa Cetinale, his 17th-century home in Tuscany. He revelled in his role as ‘King‘K of Chiantishire’, turningtu the villa into a Shangri-LaSh for his aristocraticcr friends.
AfterA his death, three of his five daughters, Lady LucindaLuc Lambton, Lady Anne Lambton and Lady Beatrix Nevill, launched a legal action againstagain Ned in Italy, disputing B Britain’sit i ’ lawl of primogeniture. They argued that the estate should be subject to Italian law, in which inheritance is divided equally between siblings.
In 2014, Ned, who is married to former model Marina Hanbury, 20 years his junior, settled the dispute, with each sister receiving £1.5 million. That was mostly covered by the £3.5 million sale of an erotic painting of their late mother Belinda by Lucian Freud, with whom she once had an affair.
Last year, I reported that Ned, who was once engaged to Marina’s younger sister Rose, faced bills of up to £3 million after dry rot was found at Fenton.
He said: ‘It was quite difficult because my sisters’ unseemly demands for money happened at a time when I could least afford to deal with it.’