A normal room at Durrants in Marylebone prices round £300 an evening.
Charles Villiers booked into that institution final month realizing it was one invoice he’d by no means be required to pay.
The lifeless physique of the previous publishing magnate — a distant cousin of the brand new Queen Consort — was discovered by a housemaid on the London resort on August 18.
It's understood the 59-year-old, who had not too long ago declared chapter and damaged up together with his associate, opera singer Heidi Innes, had taken his personal life.
A number of cross-channel papers reported the passing of this fallen scion of an aristocratic household, not least due to his ties to the then inheritor to the throne’s partner.
He was already well-known to the nationwide press, nonetheless, courtesy of his involvement in one of many UK’s longest-ever divorce battles which had left him penniless.
Of “no fastened abode”, he had been sleeping on associates’ sofas; that is your archetypal ‘riches to rags’ story.
It was extensively reported that, based mostly on his final owned property, Mr Villiers “hailed from Scotland”.
This is able to little question have rankled with a person who at all times regarded himself as “a proud native of Northern Eire” and who co-owned the Portadown-based Morton Newspapers group within the mid-Nineties.
Furthermore, on the time of his dying, had simply completed a ebook concerning the vibrant and typically controversial historical past of his Co Down household.
Born in Newtownards on April 4, 1963, Charles Alastair Hyde Villiers was the son of stockbroker Alastair Villiers and Elizabeth Keppel.
It was the Keppel facet of the household Elizabeth was the daughter of Viscount Bury, and granddaughter of the ninth Earl of Albermarle that related him to Camilla.
The primary place he referred to as “house” was maternal grandmother Mairi’s residence — the enduring Mount Stewart mansion on the Portaferry Street, deal with of the fabulously rich land-owning, coal-mining Stewart household from 1744 till it was donated to the Nationwide Belief in 1977.
He described his beginning in Northern Eire as “a contented accident of religion”, together with his dad and mom having relocated right here following the sale of their enormous London residence, Londonderry Home on Mayfair’s Park Lane which, at one time, wanted 44 servants to run it.
The denomination Grandma was quite a bit simpler for Charles to recollect than Mairi Elizabeth Vane-Tempest-Stewart aka Viscountess or Girl Bury, daughter of Lord Charles Stewart, seventh Marquess of Londonderry and influential unionist politician who was additionally a second cousin of Winston Churchill and, like his daughter, an aviation aficionado and achieved pilot.
Younger Charles was stated to be the imposing Mount Stewart chatelaine Mairi’s favorite grandchild, and he often spoke of his and sister Charlotte’s time within the nice ancestral house because the happiest of his life.
He additionally insisted that Kazou Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Stays of the Day, later tailored for the film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, was based mostly on experiences at Mount Stewart.
And he liked that the large neo-classical home was at all times “filled with vital folks”, a private favorite of which was Harford Montgomery-Hyde, one-time Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast North and — of infinitely extra curiosity to Charles — biographer of Oscar Wilde, and a person deselected by his occasion in 1959 after campaigning for homosexuality to be legalised.
Regardless of his unionist background and royal lineage, Charles Villiers was a religious Catholic.
His expertise and cognisance of Northern Irish bigotry, nonetheless, taught him to not promote this, a philosophy he continued at Eton – an institution he despised, and which he felt was illiberal in the direction of Catholicism. When requested the place he was educated, he would at all times reply with a imprecise “in Berkshire.”
Impressed by common conversations with Harford Montgomery-Hyde, who was a prolific author, he turned fascinated by journalism and publishing.
And in his twenties, this one-time Metropolis fund supervisor used a beneficiant household belief to put money into provincial newspapers, together with the Lurgan Mail, Portadown Occasions, Londonderry Sentinel, Ulster Star and Ballymena Occasions.
A eager horse proprietor like his grandmother, he was comfortably off when he met divorcee Emma Goodall in 1991.
The pair married three years later, had a daughter, Clarissa, in 1995 and lived an apparently blissful life in Milton Home in Dumbarton, a seven-bedroom Georgian manor, set in ten acres of prime Scottish land with its personal non-public loch.
Based on court docket reviews, the bliss started to disintegrate in 2011 when Clarissa left for boarding college and Charles recommended ‘downsizing’ on the 18th century mansion — the mere considered which horrified Emma, who later claimed she felt “extra married to the home” than to her husband.
The acrimonious matrimonial cut up, a yr later, in the end sparked a exceptional, elongated and poisonous authorized battle over a £1.75m belief fund Charles had been left by Grandma Mairi, who died aged 88 in 2009 and is buried within the household plot at Mount Stewart.
Unfold throughout eight years, 5 courts, two jurisdictions and 20 judges from 2014 onwards, the seemingly interminable wrangling had Emma being accused of being a spendthrift who was “extra in love with the trimmings of wealth than her husband”.
Her counterclaim? That Charles had been a “dishonest, manipulative, vindictive and bullying” associate.
Milton Home, in the meantime, was repossessed in 2015, and Mr Villiers, who additionally had his remaining belongings seized, was later evicted from a rented cottage in East Lothian for falling £18,000 behind on his funds.
His dying has introduced a tragic finish to a battle — stated by some to be a real-life model of the Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner divorce film Conflict of the Roses — that had proven little signal of decision and had inflicted monetary break on each events.
Mr Justice Mostyn, one of many judges concerned within the dispute, described it as “a case the place love has turned to hatred to a unprecedented diploma”.
We might by no means know for certain what led to his suicide however one idea is that, having turned to writing with a purpose to increase money, he was left devastated by a writer turning down his proposed ebook. Mockingly, contemplating his undoubted affection for his maternal grandmother, the rejected tome had been impressed by Charles’ childhood “discovery” that Mairi was the final British lady to have met the Nazi hierarchy previous to the outbreak of World Conflict II.
Between 1934 and 1938, Girl Mairi Bury and her father had often flown their non-public airplane from their Newtownards air strip to Berlin, the place the Marquess attended unofficial, high-level conferences with probably the most senior officers of the Third Reich, together with the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop.
The younger, inquisitive Charles — whose favorite novel was Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop — believed he had potential literary dynamite in his palms when he opened a trunk in Mount Stewart and located pictures of his grandmother with among the vilest males in historical past.
Mr Villiers didn’t act upon this acquired information till he was on his uppers, conscious that it might properly discredit his late grandmother however, as he instructed associates, may additionally present his well-known great-grandfather in numerous and unflattering mild.
London-born Charles Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, who died in 1949, was one of many founding fathers of Northern Eire, having accepted an invite from inaugural Prime Minister James Craig to turn into training minister and chief of the senate.
He additionally served as British Secretary of State for Air between 1931 and 1935, however his unilateral, unsanctioned — and in the end unsuccessful — makes an attempt at appeasing the Germans gained him little favour with Churchill.
Though the Marquess’s late great-grandson believed he was onto a serious scoop, his kinfolk’ pre-war relationship with the Nazis’ excessive command was already well-known.
Certainly, within the Mount Stewart archive there's a letter from Hitler to Girl Bury’s mom Edith, the Marchioness of Londonderry, thanking her for “the gorgeous Irish roses” she despatched again to Berlin with German international minister von Ribbentrop, who’d holidayed on the magnificent stately house on two separate events previous to the outbreak of struggle.
The ‘Bury’ aspect of Mairi’s identify got here in 1940 when, aged 19, she married Derek William Charles Keppel (Viscount Bury). The couple, who had two daughters, Elizabeth and Rose, divorced in 1958, not lengthy after the Stewarts donated the legendary landscaped gardens of their 80-acre property to the Nationwide Belief.
When the mansion went the identical means within the Nineteen Seventies, Girl Mairi moved into an on-site condominium.
Throughout her half century of operating Mount Stewart, she established Northern Eire’s first thoroughbred racehorse stud and, as a famend stamp collector, constructed up a set of Penny Blacks that was the envy of the philately world.
A vociferous opponent of the 1998 Good Friday Settlement, this one-time tireless supporter of the Ulster Unionists switched her allegiance to the DUP in her last decade and have become agency associates with future occasion chief Peter Robinson and his spouse Iris.
Her late grandson Charles, stung by the rejection of his biography of Mairi and her shut kinfolk, instantly turned his consideration to a different mission — a historical past of English divorce regulation.
It was one thing that, in his last, miserably impoverished years, he’d turn into all-too-well acquainted with.