Countess calls time on marriage to £900m Guinness heir
MARRIED to the head of the Guinness family, the Countess of Iveagh would appear to have it all. Clare’s husband, the Earl of Iveagh, has a reputed fortune of more than £900 million, and she lives with their two teenage children at magnificent Elveden Hall estate in Suffolk, where dramas including Netflix hit The Crown and the movie Eyes Wide Shut were filmed.
However, I can reveal that all is not well behind the scenes and Reading-born interior designer Clare, 46, has filed for divorce from the earl, Edward Guinness, after 20 years of marriage.
‘Clare and Ned were a great couple but she has been unhappy for several years and doesn’t feel their marriage has been a priority for him for a long time,’ a friend close to the couple tells me. A person familiar with the running of the 22,500-acre Elveden Estate claims: ‘His lordship is often seen in the company of women. Word in the village is that he hosted one of them in the local pub.’
It could be one of Britain’s largestever divorces. The 51-year-old earl’s Elveden Hall constitutes the biggest farm in the country.
In Ireland, the Guinnesses are the closest thing to royalty and Ned, whose direct ancestor invented the stout in 1759, grew up at the family mansion, Farmleigh, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, which was sold to the Irish state for £18.9 million in 1999.
The Benjamin Iveagh library was separately donated to the state in return for a tax break of £3million in 2008. Experts call it the world’s best collection of old Irish bindings, and it includes first editions of Ulysses by James Joyce, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and works by Samuel Beckett.
The couple declined to comment.