Who needs a divorce? Scots aristocrat in legal row over marriage split ‘ties the knot’
AS close friends and family raised their champagne flutes and toasted the happy couple standing before them, it must have seemed to casual onlookers as if a wedding had just taken place.
After all, for the genteel gathering, the bride wore a white summer dress and the two-tier cake on a stand embossed with the letters ‘H and C’ – for Heidi Innes and Charles Villiers – was adorned with scented pale roses.
But appearances can be deceptive and the joyful celebration has actually been billed mischievously as a ‘union party’ – one where Miss Innes, an opera singer, decided to officially take the surname of Mr Villiers, a relative of the Duchess of Cornwall, as neither can wed legally until he obtains a divorce.
We told in November how the 57year-old aristocrat is at the centre of the UK’s longest-running ‘divorce tourism’ maintenance row with his estranged wife Emma, 61.
Last month, after seven years of being at loggerheads with each other, he lost a landmark legal battle at the Supreme Court in London to have the entire case heard in a Scottish court.
He was told that a dispute over the couple’s finances and her £10,000-a-month maintenance claim must be resolved in England, where she now lives.
This Tuesday, the latest stage of the divorce case is due to resume at the sheriff court in Dumbarton, a few miles from Milton House, the eight-bedroom Georgian mansion with its own private loch which the couple shared for most of their 18year marriage.
Undaunted by the new turn of events, however, Mr Villiers and his fiancée decided last week to cement their love and commitment to each other rather than continuing to live in limbo.
Organising a large garden party for their nearest and dearest at their home in Tyninghame, East Lothian, the couple held an official name-changing ceremony, with Miss Innes signing and registering her new surname – known in Scotland as a statutory declaration – before witnesses, including Mr Villiers’ cousin, Sir Hew Dalrymple, and long-standing friend and Conservative peer, Lord Jonathan Caine.
Last night, a defiant Mr Villiers, who first met Miss Innes, 42, a talented mezzosoprano, in Edinburgh in March 2017, said: ‘I feel very fortunate to have met lovely Heidi who is so full of the joy of life. I’m very happy.
‘Our “union party” was to celebrate that we are in a committed relationship for the future.’
But there was no exchange of ‘wedding’ rings – they will wait until they can celebrate their big day properly.
Mr Villiers added: ‘It wasn’t a marriage ceremony and that is because I am still the only man in Western Europe who is not allowed to get divorced.’
He said he was hopeful his divorce action would now be granted at this week’s hearing, which will be held via teleconference.
Mr Villiers said: ‘Whatever Mrs Villiers is doing in England is now adjudged by the Supreme Court to be entirely unrelated to me seeking my divorce in Scotland, so I will be calling for the sheriff to grant it immediately.’
The warring couple – who have a daughter, Clarissa, now 24 – separated in 2012 and Mrs Villiers moved to London, where she asked for the divorce settlement to be heard.
A judge based in the family division of the High Court in London began considering the dispute in 2015. Mrs Justice Parker said any fight over the division of money should take place in England and, in 2018, three Court of Appeal judges in London upheld that decision, saying divorce proceedings in
Scotland and a financial dispute in England were not ‘related actions’.
Mr Villiers, a former publisher and racehorse owner who suffered bankruptcy in 2013, has publicly accused his estranged wife of ‘trying it on’ as a divorce tourist because judges south of the Border are seen to be ‘more generous’.
Under Scottish law she might have received support from her husband for only three years after the divorce and with much lesser amounts of money.
Last month’s Supreme Court ruling means that for the first time a husband or wife can have their divorce legalised in Scotland while the money and property is settled by judges in England.
Mr Villiers, who is related to the Duchess of Cornwall through his mother Elizabeth Keppel, has the right to a share of his family’s £3.5 million trust fund.
‘I feel very fortunate to have met lovely Heidi’