Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats by Rizzoli International Publications

ST. GILES HOUSE, DORSETT

mauled by animals, with just shreds of his Savile Row suit, was discovered five months later at the bottom of a remote ravine outside Cannes. The 66-year-old earl had been strangled, at the behest of a high-end prostitute of Tunisian-Moroccan descent whom he had married two years previously. Six months later, it got worse: Nick’s brother, Anthony, 27 years old, suffered a heart attack and died on May 15, 2005. A position he had never expected was thrust upon Nick. He was now the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, and he had a huge wreck of a house on his hands. Sad and sordid as elements of this tale are, it also became one of the great turnaround stories in the annals of the English aristocracy. Few people—Nick included—would have predicted that within several years he would orchestrate a stunning restoration of St. Giles House and bring it back to life. On March 23, 2012—fifty years after it had been vacated, following the death of the 9th Earl, his great-grandfather—the 12th Earl moved in, accompanied by his German-born wife of two years, Dinah, who was about to bear their second child. It was almost exactly 362 years to the day since his ancestor Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 1st Earl Shaftesbury, had recorded in his diary: “I laid the first stone of my house at St. Giles.” Descended from Dorset and Wiltshire gentry who had acquired wealth and land through services to the crown and advantageous marriages, he became a Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor, and the founder of the Whig party. A brilliant parliamentary debater who has been described as the first truly modern politician, he was one of a delegation who traveled to Holland to invite Charles II back to the throne after the death of Cromwell; the king subsequently rewarded him with an earldom. He also clearly had exceptional taste. St. Giles House was one of the first great examples of classical architecture in an English country house—a leap from the Elizabethan and Jacobean styles that had previously prevailed. The identity of the architect of St. Giles House is unknown, but he was clearly heavily influenced by the revolutionary innovations that had recently been introduced into England by Inigo Jones, who found his inspiration in the Italian villas of Andrea Palladio. The original brick structure, built around a quadrangular court, was added onto considerably over the next centuries by members of the family, who distinguished themselves in various ways. The quiet and studious 3rd Earl, whose tutor was John Locke, became an eminent philosopher. His son, the 4th Earl, who was a major patron of George Frideric Handel, instituted a major remodeling and expansion of the house, outside and inside around 1750. These improvements—which were in “the forefront of contemporary taste,” according to one historical account—included rich stucco ceilings, fine chimney pieces, and exceptional rococo furniture, much of which was probably commissioned from Thomas Chippendale. Under successive earls the house grew and grew, as new wings were built, reaching a point in the Victorian era when the house’s massive size verged on the “grotesque,” according to Nick. For the next generations, keeping up the property was just too much to handle. “My father’s generation was the one really caught in the middle,” explains Nick. “When his father was born in 1900, the estate was still in its heyday, with a household staff of forty. Then the world fundamentally changed, and a house like this didn’t fit into society. That’s the context in which my father inherited the place. He saw it through the lens of how things used to be, just a constant drain of resources.” A lack of a paternal figure further crippled Nick’s father, Anthony, who was born in 1938 to Anthony, Lord Ashley, the elder son of the 9th Earl and the French-born Françoise Soulier. (By Ashley-Cooper tradition, all heirs are christened Anthony—making any history of the family hard to follow.) In 1927, Lord Ashley had shocked London society by marrying the chorus girl Sylvia Hawkes. He died of a heart attack in 1947

The Eleventh Duke of Marlborough

Blenheim Palace, oxfordshire

For three hundred years, Blenheim Palace, seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, has awed all visitors, even the grandest among them. “We have nothing to equal this,” King George III said with a gasp to Queen Charlotte in 1786 as they caught their first glimpse of the Baroque behemoth, in Oxfordshire. Indeed, Buckingham House, as the sovereign’s dwelling was then called, was primitive by comparison. With seven acres under its roof, Blenheim arguably still eclipses in splendor and magnitude any of the British royal family’s residences, and it is the only non-royal, non-ecclesiastical dwelling in England styled a “palace.” Its grandeur registered even with Adolf Hitler, who according to wartime lore planned to move in after his invasion of England and thus ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb it. The palace’s cornerstone was laid in June 1705, less than a year after the first Duke of Marlborough’s pivotal victory against the French on the fields of Blenheim, in Bavaria. On behalf of “a grateful nation,” Queen Anne granted Marlborough and his heirs the 2,000-acre royal manor of Woodstock, and Parliament voted to provide funds to build on it a suitably magnificent structure. The problem was nobody thought to set a budget. To make a very long story very short, costs to build what was to be not just a home but a national monument had skyrocketed to £240,000 by 1711 (from the duke’s initial guesstimate of £40,000), leading Parliament to cut off all funds. Meanwhile, political intrigue prompted Queen Anne to dismiss the duke and duchess from court, sending them into self-imposed exile abroad for two years. Construction halted and did not recommence until 1716, now completely on the duke’s dime. Over the next few years he poured in £60,000, even as he and his formidable duchess argued vehemently over aesthetic decisions—between themselves as well as with their long-suffering architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, who finally stormed off in a rage, leaving Nicholas Hawksmoor to keep things going (though the project was not completed until around 1733, eleven years after the duke’s death). Its maintenance has been an albatross for every succeeding generation of the family. As a consequence, the Dukes of Marlborough have sometimes had to make sacrifices. On occasion that has meant marrying for money, not love—the most famous example being the 1895 union of the ninth duke and Consuelo Vanderbilt, the poster heiress of the Gilded Age. It was the ultimate “cash for class” deal. Consuelo’s socially ravenous mother, Alva, craved a duchess’s coronet for her family, while his family sought the $2.5 million dowry she would bring (about $66 million in today’s money). Consuelo, thanks to the fortune she brought, has often been seen as the savior of Blenheim. But arguably

mews house in Dublin, where he began casting about for something to do. In contrast to many of his Guinness relatives, who became more English than Irish, Browne was always passionate about his native culture, especially its traditional music. But it was fast disappearing-a loss he traces to Ireland’s switch from Gaelic to English around 1850. By the late Fifties, there were not more than a handful of traditional pipers left, for example. Around that time, Browne made the rounds of the international record companies, trying to get them to issue a recording of the uilleann pipes-a bellows-blown bagpipe that evolved from the Irish war pipes in the eighteenth-century. After being laughed off, Browne arranged to finance an LP himself-a forty-minute recording of a virtuoso piper. Once he came of legal age, he chartered Claddagh Records. The label subsequently sparked a renaissance not just for traditional music but also for poetry, through its recordings of such celebrated writers as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves and John Montague. Browne also conceived of and sponsored Claddagh’s most successful group, the Chieftains. After their first recording in 1962, the band went on to collaborate with Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Sting and Joni Mitchell, among others, and arguably paved the way for contemporary Irish musicians (U2 and Sinead O’Connor among others), as well as for world music. But it was an uphill battle in the beginning. “Nobody wanted to hear about this old stuff,” says Browne. The hostility he encountered often came from the so-called intelligentsia. In1965 Erskine Childers, then a government minister and subsequently president of Ireland, harangued him: “Why are you making gramo-

bulations through great English houses, glimpsed the house almost exactly as it had appeared centuries before. “It lies rather low, and its woods and pastures slope down to it,” he wrote in 1877. “It has a deep clear moat all round it, spanned by a bridge that passes under a charming old gate-tower, and nothing can be sweeter than to see its clustered walls of yellow-brown stone so sharply islanded while its gardens bloom on the other side of the water.” The water in the moat remains remarkably clear. A coveted lot at a local charity auction is a swim in it with Martin (tea and a tour of the castle are thrown in). An American currently holds the record time for swimming its circumference—seven minutes. Martin does it at a more leisurely pace. “I’m a twenty-minute man,” he says. One can vividly see the march of time inside Broughton. In the Groined Passage, Martin points out the unique scratches on various stones in the walls. “Each stone mason had his own way of hatching, so these are signatures.” But marks can be deceptive. A few indentations in a sixteenth-century elm table in the undercroft are of relatively recent vintage, dating from the shooting of the 2011 movie Jane Eyre. “They were using this room as a dining room, and one day I came in and found the crew slicing a loaf of bread on it. ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘It’s the oldest thing in the house!’” Broughton has been used as a set for a number of other films, including Shakespeare in Love, where it served as the home of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character. Her co-star, Joseph Fiennes, was in real life much more familiar with the property, however: he (and his brother and fellow actor, Joseph) are cousins of Martin’s family. Even as the interiors of the house have remained remarkably unchanged, lifestyles have evolved. The family fortune was more or less blown during the early nineteenth century, principally by the libertine 15th

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Debo, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire

OLD VICARAGE, CHATSWORTH

After living in a house with 297 rooms for almost half a century, anything is going to be a comedown. But for Her Grace, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the longtime chatelaine of Chatsworth, there was a bright side to downsizing. In December 2005, after moving just down the road to a cottage known as the Old Vicarage, she rediscovered what it’s like to be able to just pop into the kitchen or the garden. Both, she said, were “miles away” at Chatsworth. “The luxury of having everything so small-it’s simply amazing!” she marveled (though, with eight bedrooms, the Old Vicarage was hardly small). Following the death in May 2004 of her husband of 63 years, Andrew, the eleventh Duke of Devonshire, their son, Peregrine assumed the title and inherited the 1,000-acre property in rural Derbyshire. According to British law of primogeniture (by which the first-born son inherits an estate when his father dies), it was a given that Deborah, or Debo, as she is widely known, would have to vacate. Still, many observers just couldn’t imagine Chatsworth without her. After all, when Andrew inherited the property in1950 - then a white elephant saddled with huge debts-it was her imaginative and diligent efforts that brought the house back to its glory days. But the Dowager Duchess, who died in 2014 at the age of 94, took up the task of moving with her customary enthusiasm and style. Although her good friend David Mlinaric, the eminent English designer, gave her some technical help, this was a do-it-yourself job. “I can’t live with someone else’s ideas,” explained the Duchess, during a chat in March 2007. Fifteen months after she had installed herself, the place was only now nearing completion, especially the garden. On a mild early-spring morning, a hill of violet crocuses was abloom as the lady of the house bounded out the door. Shod in green Wellingtons, she wore a knee-length skirt of glove-soft black leather with a leopard-print cashmere cardigan. As a colorful pheasant rushed by, she remarked drily, “As the keeper would say, ‘needs shooting.”’ Chuckling at the thought, she added, “I love the idea of needing shooting.” That Debo’s wit was still so sharp was not surprising, considering her genes. The youngest of the six fabled Mitford sisters, she grew up in a family renowned for its eccentricity and humor, as well as its controversy. Upon the death of her sister Diana, in 2003 at age 93, she became the last of the lot. With the looming spire of an impressive church and its adjoining cemetery just in the background, the bucolic property was surely a page out of a Jane Austen novel. “My bedroom is bang-on the graveyard. I love it,” said Debo with glee. The house itself-the Old Vic, for short-is a handsome stone building, begun