Diamonds at Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page A

and Croome Court alone had a total of 167. The cost of running the estate – let alone making any more improvements – was rising dramatically. Partly as a result of this, few, if any, new works were started at Croome after the 6th Earl’s death. His descendants were, in any event, happy to enjoy the magnificent house, pleasure gardens and estate just as he had created them. But such tranquility as Croome offered was not reflected in the family’s fortunes.
    Throughout the 19th century the Coventry’s fought amongst themselves, suffered tragic accidents and bankruptcies and generally behaved in a way that my own ordinary, working-class family would have viewed with shame and disgust: the 6th Earl loathed his eldest son – who carried the hereditary title Viscount Deerhurst – and banned him from Croome Court for much of his adult life. Deerhurst was, from all accounts, rather ‘fast’: he eloped to Scotland with his lady love, thus causing a scandal that his father would never forgive. The 6th Earl also effectively disinherited his youngest son for apparently falling in love with and marrying a lowly woman, who was probably a servant at Croome. He died in obscurity and poverty, estranged from his family and all their privilege.
    By the time Viscount Deerhurst came to his inheritance, he was 51 years old and had been blinded in a riding accident while out hunting with King George III.Apparently, the Viscount was a thoroughly impetuous man – he had already managed to shoot himself in the leg – and had forced his poor mount to jump a difficult five-bar gate. The horse slipped and fell on top of him with such tremendous force that – according to reports in the newspapers – his right eye ‘was beat into his head, his nose broke and laid flat to his face’. As a result, he completely lost his sight and, by the time he ascended to the title 7th Earl of Coventry and returned to Croome, he was completely unable to enjoy the visual feast that his father had created on the estate. Perhaps this was one reason he caused so much anger – in the family and with his tenants – by ordering the felling of a huge number of trees on the estate. He further alienated the poor ordinary people who lived and worked at Croome by doubling their rents.
    The other parts of the Coventry family spent much of the early and middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign mired in scandal – more elopements, bankruptcies and a scandalous court case in which the mother of a suitor for one of the 7th Earl’s daughters sued the Coventrys in the High Court in London for the Earl’s refusal to allow the marriage. Meanwhile, his son, styled Lord Deerhurst and the future 8th Earl, had carried on the family tradition of a dissolute early life before eloping to Scotland with his paramour – Lady Mary Beauclerk, a descendant of King Charles II and Nell Gwynne. She appears to have been justas wild and irresponsible as her husband, having not one but two affairs shortly after their marriage – both with the future Earl’s own brothers.
    He promptly had a nervous breakdown, followed by Lady Mary embarking on yet another adulterous affair with one Colonel Sanders of Lee Bridge in Kent. Sanders decided to blackmail Deerhurst over his wife’s philandering – a situation made even worse when Lady Mary gave birth to an illegitimate child. The upshot of all of this was a very public divorce, something truly scandalous in Victorian times. In the 19th century husbands and wives were expected to stand by each other in public, whatever either of them got up to in private.
    Divorces did happen but it’s certainly true that they were essentially reserved for the nobs and snobs: certainly no one of my family’s class would ever have entertained the thought of divorce because of the very real social stigma that came with it. I suppose the very fact of being an aristocrat somehow insulated the gentry from this stigma.
    The 8th Earl then developed a very odd