Emma Manners leads a life few of us could imagine. She lives in one tower of a historic, sprawling stately home while her husband, the Duke of Rutland, who repeatedly cheated on her, lives in another. Both have relationships with new partners but an extraordinary accord between each other and remain, legally, married.
Hers is a story in which heartbreak, pragmatism, money, family, love and inheritance are bound like threads in a rope. It is a profoundly modern story of aristocracy. And yet it is not a world of which she was ever born to be part. She was just a pony-mad daughter of a Welsh farmer until she fell in love with a man who was heir to one of the most senior hereditary titles in the land.
She married David Manners in June 1992 and seven years later, on the death of his father, became the Duchess of Rutland and chatelaine of Belvoir Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Rutland, one of the UK’s grandest stately homes and a location used as a stand-in for Windsor Castle in the celebrated TV show The Crown.
