The baron with eight daughters, his angry wife and a drama that makes Downton look tame
You don’t have to spend much time
wandering around the Audley End Estate just outside Saffron Walden in
Essex to realise that its owner Robin Henry Charles Neville, the 10th
Baron Braybrooke, drew a series of winning tickets in the lottery of
life.
Born into unimaginable wealth and privilege, the 80-year-old peer was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He served briefly in the Army before devoting his adult life to running the 6,000 rolling acres that have belonged to his family since the reign of Henry VIII.
As befits one of England’s most eligible aristocrats, Lord Braybrooke has married three times, divorced twice, and fathered eight children. He lives in a house stacked with antique furniture and priceless artworks, and has a cellar full of vintage claret.
At the bottom of his garden is Audley End, a stunning Jacobean stately home, with more than 100 rooms, which used to be the Braybrooke family seat. With picturesque gardens, and grounds designed by Capability Brown, it is now a major tourist attraction.
Next door sits a 1.5-mile model steam railway which the elderly landowner built on a whim in the Sixties. These days he allows the great unwashed to ride it, for £4.50 a ticket.
Yet for all his outward good fortune, there is one area of existence in which his lordship has not been blessed. Despite all that cheerful procreation, his collected wives have failed to produce a single son.
To most of us, this might be the subject of wry amusement. But in the rarefied world of the British aristocracy, these things matter.
For when the hereditary peer eventually dies, his failure to produce a male heir means that both his ancient title and beloved country estate must be surrendered to distant members of the family.
The 11th Lord Braybrooke will be the next-in-line male relative Richard Neville, Robin’s unmarried 35-year-old fourth cousin, once removed, who lives above a hair salon in Battersea, south-west London and works as an internet entrepreneur.
The title won’t bring him riches, however. For a special covenant laid down by the seventh Baron Braybrooke, Henry Neville, before his death in 1941, will result in Audley End Estate, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, passing to Louise Newman, a 53-year-old from Devon whose mother was Henry Neville’s daughter.
The unfortunate state of affairs burst dramatically into the public domain this week, when Braybrooke’s oldest daughter, Amanda Murray, used a newspaper interview to reveal her irritation at being deprived of the vast inheritance on account of her gender.
‘It boils down to this: if I was
a boy, I would be sitting pretty,’ complained Mrs Murray, a 50-year-old
interior designer. ‘My poor father had no son, just lots of daughters.
In this day and age, with supposed equality, why am I not allowed to
inherit my father’s title? It is discriminatory.’
Particularly galling, Mrs Murray added, was the fact that her recent life had been spent helping to safeguard the family’s landholdings — she keeps a desk in the Audley End Estate office. ‘I am managing the estate, including the steam railway, so I am already doing a man’s job,’ she argued.
The comments made headlines, for two very different reasons.
First, Mrs Murray’s plight eerily mirrors that of the fictional Lady Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham, in the hit TV show Downton Abbey. In Downton, it was cousin Matthew, played by Dan Stevens, who became presumptive heir, an issue that provided the main plotline in the first series.
Second, Murray’s remarks play into a contentious political debate: the Government is in the middle of attempting to update Britain’s royal succession laws, which currently give priority to male heirs, in advance of the possibility of the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — due in July — being a girl.
Left-wing reformists, including the
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, duly seized on Mrs Murray’s plight. Mr Clegg
told Parliament on Tuesday that he was now ‘sympathetic’ to attempts to
‘tackle the gender bias in hereditary titles’.
Yesterday, even genealogists — a generally polite breed — were furiously debating Mrs Murray’s plight and her complaint about gender inequality.
To William Bortrick, of Burke’s Peerage, the authoritative guide to the titled classes, she is a sort of feminist hero.
‘Think if the equivalent happened in a middle-class family: if everyone worked and did their bit, and then the children were one day told that they must give away their home. If it happened to them, it would be seen as tragic,’ he tells me.
Yet Charles Mosley, the former editor-in-chief at Debrett’s, another specialist on the British aristocracy, is less sympathetic. ‘This woman has the whiff of a peerage in her nostrils and it seems to be aerating her,’ he says. ‘She presumably thinks that if she bleats loud enough some politician will decide — because they are generally idiots — to toss her a title.’
Fierce debate about this ‘real-life Downton dilemma’ (to quote one headline) has not been limited to the public arena, though. Among the Braybrookes of rural Essex, I gather the matter is already the subject of at least one unseemly family dispute.
At its centre is Lord Braybrooke’s current wife, Perina. She is understood to be upset that the issue of her family’s succession is being dragged into the news while her husband — who is physically robust, but suffers from Alzheimer’s — remains very much alive.
‘Amanda has known about the inheritance for years — as long as she’s been alive, really — so why’s she choosing to make an issue of it now?’ asked one relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
‘It’s incredibly upsetting for Perina to read about this in the papers, and would have mortified Robin, who is an incredibly nice old boy who has always accepted this situation for what it is: one of those things.’
When I called Lady Braybrooke, who is Amanda’s stepmother, she confirmed that this week’s coverage of the affair has been ‘rather horrid’.
Though Lady Braybrooke denied being ‘cross with anybody for the fact it has become public’, she was unable to shed light on why Amanda had chosen to share her complaints about her future prospects with the media.
‘I’m afraid,’ she told me, ‘that you will have to ask my stepdaughter, Mrs Murray, about that.’
But Amanda Murray declined to comment.
Any crack in family unity would be particularly ill-timed if it were to continue until the moment when the Audley End Estate passes to Louise Newman, a mother-of-four whose husband, Richard, is from a prominent landowning family in South Devon.
Mrs Newman’s claim on the property derives from her descendancy from the seventh Baron Braybrooke. Blessed with three children, but at that stage no grandchildren, the peer created a covenant stating that if any future Lord Braybrooke failed to produce a male heir, then the estate should automatically revert to his original family line.
Months later, in 1941, his younger son, George, was killed in action in World War II. Then, two years later, his elder son Richard — by then the eighth Baron Braybrooke — died on a battlefield in Tunisia.
Since Richard had no children, both the title and the estate passed to a first cousin, Henry Seymour Neville. He became the ninth Lord Braybrooke, and was the current Lord Braybrooke’s father.
Seven decades later, the death of the family patriarch will trigger the original Forties covenant and return the remaining estate to the seventh Baron’s original family line. Louise Newman, who will inherit, is the daughter of his only daughter, Catherine. The covenant makes no discrimination against a woman ultimately inheriting the estate.
But any such development would also leave a host of unanswered questions. Among them: what will Mrs Newman do with homes on the estate which are today occupied by members of the Braybrooke family?
But can we be completely sure no effort will be made to evict them? And what does the future hold for other, less lofty, estate tenants? It’s impossible to say: Mrs Newman has declined to comment.
Her ownership of the estate would also leave a pertinent question unanswered about the future of Audley End house, regarded as one of the greatest stately homes in England, which played host to both Elizabeth I and James I.
It was the home of every Lord Braybrooke from 1788, when the title was created, until shortly after World War II, when the family finances were crippled by two sets of death duties, in quick succession. To safeguard the building’s future, and avoid costly maintenance fees, the family sold it to the nation for £30,000. This allowed the Braybrookes to stay in control of almost all of their land.
The house became a tourist attraction. Painstakingly restored, and managed since 1984 by English Heritage, it has more than 135,000 visitors a year.
Yet while Audley End house is now publicly owned, its contents are not. Instead, I gather that the priceless art, antiquities, and perfectly restored furniture that fill its many rooms remain the property of the Braybrooke family.
A spokesman for English Heritage explained that the collection is held there on loan. On paper, it therefore appears there is nothing to stop whoever gains control of the estate from seeking to sell it.
‘We understand the collection at Audley End will be passed to Lord Braybrooke’s heir,’ said a spokesman for English Heritage. ‘We hope it will remain on display to the public at Audley End, which is, after all, the house for which the contents were amassed over several centuries.’
But that will be up to the heir. And what are Mrs Newman’s plans for her future inheritance? Do they dovetail with those of English Heritage? Again, she has declined to comment.
The uncertainty, and potential scrutiny it will bring Audley End is causing further discontent to a family who, for all their aristocratic seniority, have only occasionally come to public attention over recent years.
It has, for example, been almost four decades since Lord Braybrooke announced his scandalous divorce from first wife Robin, mother of Amanda and four of her sisters (one of whom tragically died in a riding accident as a teenager).
He was promptly remarried, to Linda Norman, the family’s former nanny and the daughter of a local barber She gave him three more daughters, but was replaced by Perina in the late Nineties.
‘Robin is a ladies’ man,’ is how one old friend puts it. ‘He’s good- looking, well-dressed, great fun, very dashing, and of course incredibly rich. I mean, his hobbies used to include flying Cessna planes from his own private airstrip.
‘If he’d wanted, he could have had plenty more wives, and the newspapers would have lapped it up. But he has mostly managed to keep his private life private.’
All his daughters were educated at expensive private schools, have largely married well and avoided major scandal.
Even in 1994, when his second daughter Caroline ‘Cazzy’ Neville briefly became front-page news (the ‘Posh Essex Girl’ was reported to have become the newly single Prince Andrew’s latest blonde), excitement was short-lived: a few months later, she announced her engagement to the Earl of Derby.
Friends of Caroline say that, like her stepmother, she has been unsettled by this week’s renewed public interest in her family. But they caution that she believes elder sister Amanda’s widely reported comments about the inheritance are being taken out of context.
‘She believes things have been misinterpreted,’ said the friend. ‘Amanda has no wish to become a poster-girl for reform of the inheritance laws. So she would rather like the public, Press and politicians to forget all about the Braybrooke family, and its fortunes.’
Perhaps, given the storms ahead, that should be misfortunes.
Born into unimaginable wealth and privilege, the 80-year-old peer was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He served briefly in the Army before devoting his adult life to running the 6,000 rolling acres that have belonged to his family since the reign of Henry VIII.
As befits one of England’s most eligible aristocrats, Lord Braybrooke has married three times, divorced twice, and fathered eight children. He lives in a house stacked with antique furniture and priceless artworks, and has a cellar full of vintage claret.
At the bottom of his garden is Audley End, a stunning Jacobean stately home, with more than 100 rooms, which used to be the Braybrooke family seat. With picturesque gardens, and grounds designed by Capability Brown, it is now a major tourist attraction.
Next door sits a 1.5-mile model steam railway which the elderly landowner built on a whim in the Sixties. These days he allows the great unwashed to ride it, for £4.50 a ticket.
Yet for all his outward good fortune, there is one area of existence in which his lordship has not been blessed. Despite all that cheerful procreation, his collected wives have failed to produce a single son.
To most of us, this might be the subject of wry amusement. But in the rarefied world of the British aristocracy, these things matter.
For when the hereditary peer eventually dies, his failure to produce a male heir means that both his ancient title and beloved country estate must be surrendered to distant members of the family.
The 11th Lord Braybrooke will be the next-in-line male relative Richard Neville, Robin’s unmarried 35-year-old fourth cousin, once removed, who lives above a hair salon in Battersea, south-west London and works as an internet entrepreneur.
The title won’t bring him riches, however. For a special covenant laid down by the seventh Baron Braybrooke, Henry Neville, before his death in 1941, will result in Audley End Estate, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, passing to Louise Newman, a 53-year-old from Devon whose mother was Henry Neville’s daughter.
The unfortunate state of affairs burst dramatically into the public domain this week, when Braybrooke’s oldest daughter, Amanda Murray, used a newspaper interview to reveal her irritation at being deprived of the vast inheritance on account of her gender.
Sprawling Audley End House in Saffron Walden, which the family owns, became a tourist attraction
Particularly galling, Mrs Murray added, was the fact that her recent life had been spent helping to safeguard the family’s landholdings — she keeps a desk in the Audley End Estate office. ‘I am managing the estate, including the steam railway, so I am already doing a man’s job,’ she argued.
The comments made headlines, for two very different reasons.
First, Mrs Murray’s plight eerily mirrors that of the fictional Lady Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham, in the hit TV show Downton Abbey. In Downton, it was cousin Matthew, played by Dan Stevens, who became presumptive heir, an issue that provided the main plotline in the first series.
Second, Murray’s remarks play into a contentious political debate: the Government is in the middle of attempting to update Britain’s royal succession laws, which currently give priority to male heirs, in advance of the possibility of the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — due in July — being a girl.
The next-in-line is Richard Neville, seen with a friend, who will inherit the Lord Braybrooke title
Yesterday, even genealogists — a generally polite breed — were furiously debating Mrs Murray’s plight and her complaint about gender inequality.
To William Bortrick, of Burke’s Peerage, the authoritative guide to the titled classes, she is a sort of feminist hero.
‘Think if the equivalent happened in a middle-class family: if everyone worked and did their bit, and then the children were one day told that they must give away their home. If it happened to them, it would be seen as tragic,’ he tells me.
Yet Charles Mosley, the former editor-in-chief at Debrett’s, another specialist on the British aristocracy, is less sympathetic. ‘This woman has the whiff of a peerage in her nostrils and it seems to be aerating her,’ he says. ‘She presumably thinks that if she bleats loud enough some politician will decide — because they are generally idiots — to toss her a title.’
Fierce debate about this ‘real-life Downton dilemma’ (to quote one headline) has not been limited to the public arena, though. Among the Braybrookes of rural Essex, I gather the matter is already the subject of at least one unseemly family dispute.
At its centre is Lord Braybrooke’s current wife, Perina. She is understood to be upset that the issue of her family’s succession is being dragged into the news while her husband — who is physically robust, but suffers from Alzheimer’s — remains very much alive.
‘Amanda has known about the inheritance for years — as long as she’s been alive, really — so why’s she choosing to make an issue of it now?’ asked one relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
‘It’s incredibly upsetting for Perina to read about this in the papers, and would have mortified Robin, who is an incredibly nice old boy who has always accepted this situation for what it is: one of those things.’
When I called Lady Braybrooke, who is Amanda’s stepmother, she confirmed that this week’s coverage of the affair has been ‘rather horrid’.
What does the future hold for other, less lofty, estate tenants? It's impossible to say
‘It’s all a bit sad for me because my
poor husband isn’t particularly well, and this whole story is obviously
all about what will happen when he dies,’ she said. ‘It’s rather horrid,
you know, to have people going on and on and on about it.’Though Lady Braybrooke denied being ‘cross with anybody for the fact it has become public’, she was unable to shed light on why Amanda had chosen to share her complaints about her future prospects with the media.
‘I’m afraid,’ she told me, ‘that you will have to ask my stepdaughter, Mrs Murray, about that.’
But Amanda Murray declined to comment.
Any crack in family unity would be particularly ill-timed if it were to continue until the moment when the Audley End Estate passes to Louise Newman, a mother-of-four whose husband, Richard, is from a prominent landowning family in South Devon.
Mrs Newman’s claim on the property derives from her descendancy from the seventh Baron Braybrooke. Blessed with three children, but at that stage no grandchildren, the peer created a covenant stating that if any future Lord Braybrooke failed to produce a male heir, then the estate should automatically revert to his original family line.
Months later, in 1941, his younger son, George, was killed in action in World War II. Then, two years later, his elder son Richard — by then the eighth Baron Braybrooke — died on a battlefield in Tunisia.
Since Richard had no children, both the title and the estate passed to a first cousin, Henry Seymour Neville. He became the ninth Lord Braybrooke, and was the current Lord Braybrooke’s father.
Seven decades later, the death of the family patriarch will trigger the original Forties covenant and return the remaining estate to the seventh Baron’s original family line. Louise Newman, who will inherit, is the daughter of his only daughter, Catherine. The covenant makes no discrimination against a woman ultimately inheriting the estate.
But any such development would also leave a host of unanswered questions. Among them: what will Mrs Newman do with homes on the estate which are today occupied by members of the Braybrooke family?
The house became a tourist attraction.
Painstakingly restored, and managed since 1984 by English Heritage, it
has more than 135,000 visitors a year
It seems unlikely she would ask Lady
Braybrooke, who lives at Abbey Farm, opposite the main house, to leave a
property she has inhabited for years. The same presumably goes for
Amanda Murray, who lives at nearby Nunn’s Farm.But can we be completely sure no effort will be made to evict them? And what does the future hold for other, less lofty, estate tenants? It’s impossible to say: Mrs Newman has declined to comment.
Her ownership of the estate would also leave a pertinent question unanswered about the future of Audley End house, regarded as one of the greatest stately homes in England, which played host to both Elizabeth I and James I.
It was the home of every Lord Braybrooke from 1788, when the title was created, until shortly after World War II, when the family finances were crippled by two sets of death duties, in quick succession. To safeguard the building’s future, and avoid costly maintenance fees, the family sold it to the nation for £30,000. This allowed the Braybrookes to stay in control of almost all of their land.
The house became a tourist attraction. Painstakingly restored, and managed since 1984 by English Heritage, it has more than 135,000 visitors a year.
Yet while Audley End house is now publicly owned, its contents are not. Instead, I gather that the priceless art, antiquities, and perfectly restored furniture that fill its many rooms remain the property of the Braybrooke family.
A spokesman for English Heritage explained that the collection is held there on loan. On paper, it therefore appears there is nothing to stop whoever gains control of the estate from seeking to sell it.
‘We understand the collection at Audley End will be passed to Lord Braybrooke’s heir,’ said a spokesman for English Heritage. ‘We hope it will remain on display to the public at Audley End, which is, after all, the house for which the contents were amassed over several centuries.’
But that will be up to the heir. And what are Mrs Newman’s plans for her future inheritance? Do they dovetail with those of English Heritage? Again, she has declined to comment.
The uncertainty, and potential scrutiny it will bring Audley End is causing further discontent to a family who, for all their aristocratic seniority, have only occasionally come to public attention over recent years.
It has, for example, been almost four decades since Lord Braybrooke announced his scandalous divorce from first wife Robin, mother of Amanda and four of her sisters (one of whom tragically died in a riding accident as a teenager).
He was promptly remarried, to Linda Norman, the family’s former nanny and the daughter of a local barber She gave him three more daughters, but was replaced by Perina in the late Nineties.
‘Robin is a ladies’ man,’ is how one old friend puts it. ‘He’s good- looking, well-dressed, great fun, very dashing, and of course incredibly rich. I mean, his hobbies used to include flying Cessna planes from his own private airstrip.
‘If he’d wanted, he could have had plenty more wives, and the newspapers would have lapped it up. But he has mostly managed to keep his private life private.’
All his daughters were educated at expensive private schools, have largely married well and avoided major scandal.
Even in 1994, when his second daughter Caroline ‘Cazzy’ Neville briefly became front-page news (the ‘Posh Essex Girl’ was reported to have become the newly single Prince Andrew’s latest blonde), excitement was short-lived: a few months later, she announced her engagement to the Earl of Derby.
Friends of Caroline say that, like her stepmother, she has been unsettled by this week’s renewed public interest in her family. But they caution that she believes elder sister Amanda’s widely reported comments about the inheritance are being taken out of context.
‘She believes things have been misinterpreted,’ said the friend. ‘Amanda has no wish to become a poster-girl for reform of the inheritance laws. So she would rather like the public, Press and politicians to forget all about the Braybrooke family, and its fortunes.’
Perhaps, given the storms ahead, that should be misfortunes.
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