Selina Hastings recalls her visit in 1989 to Lady Beauchamp, mistress of Madresfield
Madresfield: the name is now almost as lustrous with literary association as Little Gidding or Adlestrop. To the admirers of Evelyn Waugh, Madresfield is hallowed ground: ‘It’s where Waugh stayed, you know, when he was writing Brideshead Revisited. In fact Madresfield is Brideshead, and the Lygon family is the absolute model for the Flytes, for Sebastian and Bridie and Julia and so on. I mean, look at Lord Marchmain living in exile abroad with his mistress: exactly the same as Lord Beauchamp — only it wasn’t a mistress in his case, of course.’
Well, yes and no. Mad World by Paula Byrne, reviewed last week, has further disentangled truth from fiction. It is true that Lord Beauchamp, married to the sister of that bad bully, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, was run out of the country by his powerful brother-in-law for homosexuality.
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