CURSE OF THE CAWDORS
It’s a dark tale of murder, lust and betrayal... an aristocratic clan torn apart by bitter rivalries, decades of hatred and an epic feud that would do justice to Shakespeare
WHEN the curtain rose on the first performance of Macbeth in the early 1600s, few could have accused the Bard of stinting on the drama. Pushing the envelope as far as he dared, Shakespeare’s Scottish masterpiece was a tale of witches, daggers, ghosts and bloodiest regicide.
Little could he have imagined how tame it would all seem in comparison with the dramas of King Macbeth’s descendants.
At the family pile in the Highlands the so-called Curse of Cawdor continues to haunt the lives of those connected with Cawdor Castle near Nairn. Only, these days, the tales are of Samurai swords, wife-beating, cocaine, alcoholism and blackest betrayal. Oh, and there is a dagger in there too.
Not that the curse confines itself to the castle. In a cell in Nairobi, Kenya, Jack Marrian, 31, nephew of the 25th Thane of Cawdor, is awaiting a further court appearance on charges of trafficking nearly £4.5million of cocaine into the country. It follows one of the biggest drugs seizures in the nation’s history.
‘He is a cool customer, Jack,’ said his father David this week, insisting his son is innocent. ‘But this is Kenya and we are terrified of the repercussions.’
It was in Kenya, too, that Jack’s mother Lady Emma Marrian listened in horror from another room as her lover was murdered in their holiday home by armed robbers. She later drove Giles Thornton 12 miles to hospital in Mombasa, cradling him in her arms as blood poured out over her clothes from a gunshot wound to his chest. He could not be saved.
Jack was 13 at the time. His mother had begged the robbers to spare her three sons. ‘I tried several times to get out but they threatened to kill me,’ she remembered. ‘I said, “My children are in the house”. I pleaded with them, “Please don’t hurt them.”’
IT was almost 30 years before that, in 1970, that the key ingredients for the modern Curse of Cawdor were stirred into the toxic brew. That was the year Jack’s grandfather, Hugh John Vaughan Campbell, inherited the castle and the earldom from his father John – and, according to his daughter Liza’s account – promptly went mad.
Outwardly the 24th Thane and 6th Earl of Cawdor was a typically eccentric aristocrat with many of the usual interests for someone of his breeding. Inevitably he had gone to Eton. Naturally he went up to Oxford.
An artist and writer with a fascination for Scottish history, architecture, geology, fine wine, modern art and trees, he also loved fast cars and was an accomplished helicopter pilot.
Other interests were much more unusual. He was a black belt in the Japanese martial art of aikido and was said to have blown much of the family fortune on cocaine. Furthermore, he became increasingly convinced his father’s second wife had put a curse on him.
In public, Hugh Campbell was a larger than life figure in velvet jackets and buckled breeches – an entirely fitting 20th century incumbent, most thought, to the title Thane of Cawdor which King Duncan famously confers on Macbeth in the play. Even when he divorced the mother of his five children Cathryn Hinde in the late 1970s and moved Czech-born Countess Angelika Lazansky von Bukowa into the castle there was no reason to suppose he had strayed too far from blue-blood convention.
Not until he died in 1993 did the aristocracy gasp at the scale of his rebellion. For he had left the castle to his second wife in his will rather than handing it down, as many centuries of tradition dictated, to his elder son Colin.
What on earth had he been thinking, his five children wondered.
But then, their own behaviour had occasionally raised eyebrows too. As a young socialite, Lady Emma had posed naked on the cover of Tatler magazine with her sister Lady Liza, then a model and ex-girlfriend of the actor Oliver Tobias. Lady Liza also did nude photo-shoots for her father’s close friend Lord Lichfield.
Nevertheless, the horror of the elder son being passed over for the ancestral seat in favour of the second wife created a huge rift in the family, resulting in years of legal wrangles. It also led to a public reappraisal of the 6th Earl – one principally conducted by his children.
It was his younger son Fred who first broke ranks in 2004, suggesting his father’s main reason for changing his will was guilt.
According to Fred, his father had embarked on an adulterous affair with a teenager when he was in his 50s and married to his second wife. It continued for around six months in hotels and estate cottages until the affair was exposed in humiliating circumstances. ‘I genuinely think he had a choice of going through an acrimonious divorce or trying to patch it up together, and he obviously chose the latter,’ surmised Fred Campbell 12 years ago.
He suspected his father changed his will in November 1987 as penance for his infidelity.
‘When the will was changed, Colin would have been 25,’ he said. ‘My Pa never had the courage to tell of it or explain it.’
If that portrait of the late earl seemed uncomplimentary, worse was to come from his sister.
In 2006, Liza’s autobiography Title Deeds was published. It was an astonishing character assassination of her late father, one boiling with rage. When a friend once asked her to sum up the book in a sentence, she said: ‘Papa was odd, but I got even.’
SHE claimed the onset of her father’s mania dated back to his earliest years as Thane of Cawdor when his stepmother Betty was still living in the castle. Her father kicked Betty out, she said, when he discovered she was plotting to hand the castle to the National Trust.
‘Betty’s plot to wrest Cawdor from my father flipped a switch in Pa that never flipped back,’ said Liza. ‘He feared her intention was to possess him, like a succubus. He began to lay open scissors in strategic places around the house. He said they would act as hexes to keep Betty’s presence at bay.’
She said her father once threw a dagger at a guest because he was enraged the visitor had moved a chair. Another time, she said, he cornered her mother as he brandished one of his Samurai swords
and told her ‘I’m going to chop you in half.’ On another occasion, he gave his first wife an aikido chop which cracked her teeth, the daughter claimed.
When she was 16, she said, her father demanded she get into bed with him: ‘I did as I was told but as he reached to pull back the blankets he collapsed and I wriggled away as fast as an eel.’
For years, she said, he was an uncontrollable drunk, haemorrhaging money on cocaine and ‘crackpot’ business schemes and ‘hoovering’ up a string of women. In one damning passage, she said: ‘My father neither earned nor bought Cawdor. These possessions were entrusted to his care. This treasure survived 600 years of wild Scottish history but only took one drunken rake to p*** it away.’
In another twist of the knife, she said: ‘Not only did he shaft his son in the will, he shafted the previous 24 generations.’ Unsurprisingly, the book torpedoed any possibility of a friendship with her late father’s widow. Indeed, years later, Liza admitted the only way she could see the castle where she used to live is pay the £9.75 public admission.
For her part, Angelika dismisses both children’s portrayals of her late husband. ‘Macbeth was one of Scotland’s best kings,’ she said in 2006. ‘But thanks to Shakespeare he is known as this ghastly murderer. And Liza is doing the same to her father’s reputation.
She said: ‘I was married for 14 years and there were only short moments when he had a drink too many.’ The cocaine claims, meanwhile, were ‘ludicrous. Hugh was dead against drugs.’
As for the allegation that he ordered his daughter into bed, the Dowager Countess was momentarily silent before saying: ‘I have no reason to disbelieve Liza. Perhaps he was lonely, I do not know why his [then] wife was not there. But he did not have the slightest paedophile tendency.’
She added, revealingly perhaps: ‘I am sure he would not have remembered the incident in the morning.’
Liza was not the only one of her stepchildren with whom she was engaged in battle. Her wrangle with the dispossessed Colin was equally ill-tempered. ‘Colin has clearly forgotten that his father did talk to him about the will,’ she said once. ‘It rattled everybody. He did it for a reason he knew very well.’
That is not his family’s position. So aggrieved were they at being denied the castle that they decided to move in there while Angelika was in New York. She returned to fight a legal case to evict them which ended up at the Court of Session.
Ultimately, he agreed to move out but retains property on the estate and financial control of much of it.
But litigation between Dowager Countess and her Thane stepson was far from over. They argued over whether he should be allowed to grow genetically modified crops on the estate – she is avidly organic – and, in 2003, clashed at an employment tribunal. The case was sparked by the refusal of Angelika’s chef Martin Nelson to take orders from Colin.
The earl had ordered the underling to go to Inverness to buy food for himself, his wife Isabella – a former Vogue fashion editor – and his children. The stunned aristocrat had testified: ‘I was interrupted by him. He cut me off and basically said he worked for the dowager and wasn’t taking instruction from me.’
Against all expectations, an
apparent truce was agreed several years later when two of them hatched plans to transform Nairn into the ‘Brighton of the North’ with a new hotel and spa, 18 hole championship golf course, equestrian facility and heritage centre. Almost a decade on, work has not started yet.
Back in Kenya, the eldest of Angelika’s stepchildren, 58-year-old Lady Emma has succeeded in steering clear of most of the family controversies. Yet she is as affected as any by the so-called curse.
She moved to Nairobi in 1990, three years before her father’s death, after marrying artist David Marrian there in 1983. Divorcing in 1996, she began a relationship with wildlife conservationist Giles Thornton, whose violent death in 1998 was surely the most devastating Cawdor tragedy of them all.
Recalling the robbery, Lady Emma said her boyfriend confronted the robbery gang after as they broke in.
‘I heard him asking, “What are you doing?”’ she said. Then there was this huge noise. I knew at once it was a gunshot. I ran out of the room and two men came towards me with a machete. One of them hit me with the handle on the forehead.
‘He kept saying, “I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you unless you give me money”.’
She remembered handing over 100 dollars from her purse, begging the men not to touch her children, then driving her dying boyfriend along unlit, potholed roads to hospital. The desperate mission ended in failure.
Eighteen years on, it is her son Jack whose faces grave peril – this time, not at the hands of outlaws, but the Kenyan police and courts.
His family do not doubt his innocence for a second. ‘Obviously he’s innocent,’ says his grandmother Cathryn at Achneim Farm on the Cawdor estate, just a mile from the castle where she once lived.
‘I have telephoned his mother – my daughter – and she is very upset. It’s so unfair.’
The same has surely been said many times at Cawdor.
‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ chanted Shakespeare’s three witches in Act 1, Scene 1 of the Scottish Play. Perhaps they were on to something.