Frederick William John Augutus Hervey
15.IX.1954 - 10.I.1999
7th Marquess Of Bristol
"When God Created The Human Race, He Made Men,
And Women and Herveys!"
The Satanic Marquess:
Was The Knife-Throwing, Drug-Addicted John Hervey
Britain's Most Amoral Aristocrat Ever?
By: Marcus Scriven
On the face of it, he was a man who had the world at his feet. But the real life of John Hervey, the 7th Marquess of Bristol, was one of chronic addiction - to sex, drugs and alcohol. In the first part of our riches-to-rags tale, his true story is told for the very first time - by the people who knew and loved him best...
Nerves had picked away at Lord Nicholas Hervey all afternoon. They had to be on time; had to be there by 5.30pm, would have to wear suits for dinner. The litany of 'dos' and 'don'ts' was rehearsed over and over during the car journey from London to Suffolk
Lord Frederick William Charles Nicholas Wentworth Hervey
26.XI.1961 - 26.I.1998
Nicholas's passenger, an American friend from Yale University , was still being lectured on the niceties of British etiquette as the pair reached the picturesque East Anglian village of Horringer
There, with the church on their right and a thatched cottage on their left, they thrummed across the cattle grid and on to the drive. A sign, installed by the National Trust, instructed motorists to limit their speed to 20 mph; Nicholas obeyed.
The drive led on for three-quarters of a mile. Only then, from behind a screen of cedars and oaks, did the magnificent vista of Ickworth, ancestral home of the Hervey family, finally present itself.
Ickworth House
No matter that much of it had been signed over to the National Trust years before, with just a wing of the house leased to the Hervey family - it was still a stupendous neo-classical fantasy, its magnificent 600ft frontage and soaring rotunda guaranteed to take the visitor's breath away.
Even now Nicholas, second son of the family, did not relax. Further, urgent instructions followed: they would go to their rooms, shower, change and return to the drawing room, ready to meet Nicholas's older half-brother John, the family's heir, at 7.30pm precisely.
Happy to oblige, the American did just that. A butler appeared; drinks were brought. An hour passed. More drinks came. Evening turned to night.
It was around 11pm by the time John finally joined them. Relaxed, informal and casually dressed in what the Yale man would later describe as a robe rather than a suit, he cut a very different figure from his uptight, protocol-obsessed half-brother. At his side was an exotic-looking companion named Cecil.
Dinner began. Wine, then port, was in plentiful supply. Time blurred. Eventually, in the early hours, John felt that the moment had come for action. He was taking the helicopter up, he announced: everyone was to come with him. The flight seemed unlikely to involve communication with air traffic control.
Nicholas's Yale ally declined, as did Cecil. Nicholas possessed no such sense of self-preservation. At his half-brother's heel, he walked out into the night.
John, still in his robe, managed to climb into the pilot's seat with a little more ease than might be expected of someone who had just drunk two or three bottles of claret and a pint of port. His younger brother took the front seat beside him.
Rotor blades chopped into action. The helicopter - a Hughes 500 Defender - began a groggy, hesitant ascent, then veered forward and up, hovering no more than 80ft above ground.
As it did so, a light of immense power, fitted to its underside, cut a jagged pattern through the night sky before coming to rest on a section of the rotunda: a section, it was about to become apparent, occupied by an employee of the National Trust, owner of the house and estate.
Moments later, a squawking, demented cacophony erupted. Although indecipherable at first, ferocious repetition gradually allowed Nicholas's friend to piece together words, all of them being spat by John through a megaphone powerful enough to penetrate the noise of the helicopter: 'I hate you, you b*****d. You b*****d. I hate you, you f*****g b*****d - wake up, you b*****d.'
And so it went on. And on. Somehow, nobody was hurt. Another dramatic night at Ickworth was drawing to a close.
For John Hervey was the very antithesis of the studiously conventional younger sibling who was visiting for the weekend.
Even in a dynasty renowned for its colorful figures - the flamboyant It-girls Victoria and Isabella Hervey were his half-sisters - he stood out as one of the most outrageously decadent aristocrats Britain
Lady Victoria Hervey
Lady Isabella Hervey
Ultimately, his excesses were to cost him his life - just a handful of years after the helicopter incident, John was dead, his body destroyed by drug and alcohol abuse at the age of 44.
In a saga of riches to rags that horrified and intrigued the British public in equal measure, it was reported that in the years leading up to his death, he had spent around £7million on drugs. Some say the figure might have been even higher.
More than ten years have elapsed since his demise, but a crucial question remains unanswered: Why? Why would John, 7th Marquess of Bristol, a man born with riches beyond most people's imaginings, a man who, had he lived, would be 55 years old, throw it all away for nothing?
Was he genetically predisposed to self-destruction, as some have said, suggesting there is a particular strand of the Hervey family through which bad blood flows?
Or was it merely that, like so many of today's troubled young celebrities, he was given too much, too soon? Perhaps those best placed to answer these questions are the people who actually knew and loved John.
Telling his real story here for the first time are friends from his childhood and adult life, the ex-boyfriend whom John once described as 'the love of his life' and who has never before spoken about their relationship, and some of the staff in whom he inspired an unshakable devotion.
Perhaps the signs that John's life was not to be a conventional one were already there at his christening at St Peter's, Eaton Square
Few have godparents who later shoot themselves in the head (as one of them, Derek le Poer Trench, would do in 1978) and few, perhaps other than John, would have had a prospective murderer lurking by the font (Jeremy Lowndes killed his wife).
Victor Frederick Cochrane Hervey
6.X.1915 - 10.III.1985
6th Marquess Of Bristol
But then not many have a father such as Victor, 6th Marquess of Bristol - an aristocrat given to taking potshots at his house guests from the upstairs windows of Ickworth and known to have fired into the ceiling of a London pub; a man rumored to have been the last to be publicly flogged in Britain; an arms dealer during the Spanish Civil War who had once been imprisoned over links with a high-profile jewel heist. An unusual role model for any young man, it is fair to say.
The downward trajectory of John's life began at the age of just four when his mother Pauline left the family home to move in with horse trainer Teddy Lambton at Newmarket
'She didn't really want John because he got under her feet,' says a family friend. 'She had a new marriage and then a new child. She just wasn't interested; just didn't care.'
Of his father Victor, the boy also saw little. 'My father never did anything with me,' John recalled in later life. 'He was an extremely cold man. I was terrified of him because he commanded so much authority. He wasn't really a father; he was a demi-god.'
Childhood holidays, John later told one of his professional advisers, amounted to solitary confinement at various seaside resorts, with a nanny on guard.
'Victor wanted nothing to do with John,' confirmed a close friend. 'He was an embarrassment, surplus to requirements. He was usually palmed off to the Isle of Wight or somewhere like that.'
The pattern of parental absence would continue into John's school years, although John would become close to his mother later in life. One contemporary from his prep school, Heatherdown, near Ascot , recalls how Victor, by then married to his second wife, Juliet, would promise to come to see his son at weekends and then fail to turn up.
'A big car would turn up full of toys for him, to make up for it,' recalls Harry Wyndham. 'If I had been asked who was going to go wrong - or get into hot water - in adult life, John would have been the first name that sprung to mind.'
Art dealer Guy Sainty tells the story of how, one evening at Ickworth, John began confiding in him about his relationship with his father and mother. 'He suddenly burst into tears,' says Sainty. 'I remember feeling desperately sorry for him. He was mixed up and desperately wanted his father's love. I think his father did love John - but had no idea how to show it. John definitely needed help.'
But at hardly any stage of his growing up did John give an inkling of the gaudy life that was to come. By the time he left Harrow in 1972, he was, to the casual observer at least, nothing more than a sensible, unassuming, slightly effeminate-looking young man. Things were, however, about to get interesting.
On his 21st birthday in 1975, John inherited 8,000 acres of East Anglia
By the time he dispensed with the vessel five years later, he had added to its already luxurious specifications a 750cc BMW motorbike, a Honda Trail bike, a 125 horsepower speedboat and a clay pigeon trap. John, it appeared, was not a man who was going to do things by halves.
The same applied to his sex life, which took off with similar flamboyance. 'Anybody who didn't live through that period - from when he left school in 1972 until the early Eighties - doesn't really understand it,' says one of John's former partners. 'It was between the invention of the Pill and the onset of Aids."
'There was absolutely no problem about anything: if you wanted two girls, you had two girls; if you wanted a boy and a girl, you had them. It was absolutely extraordinary. The very nature of the decadence meant it was bound not to last.'
John, according to Peter Geiger, a Cambridge
In 1972, a trip to Eton to visit his younger half-brother Nicholas, then a pupil there, brought John into contact with the man he would describe as 'the love of his life': Robin Hurlstone [who between 1988 and 2001 would go on to become the partner of the actress Joan Collins].
Robin Hurlstone & Joan Collins
'John looked at me and told Nicholas: "That's the one I want," ' Hurlstone recalls. I was 18. He was 21. He was always a predator, always had to go after what he wanted. Anybody who went after him never got him. He loved the chase, the seduction.
'John was not physically attractive; he was very, very shy, which he covered up by talking about money. But he had three things I love: humor, charm and vulnerability.'
Together, the pair became a familiar sight on the London
As his 20s progressed, John's well-documented drinking habits - even as a teenager he hid bottles of crème de menthe in Ickworth's lavatory cisterns - began to escalate, leaving his friends in no doubt that there was serious cause for concern.
Initially, remembers his accountant Michael Chappell, there had been 'too much alcohol at dinner, then it started spreading backwards', until the first drink of the day would be taken at 11am (crème de menthe being ousted as solvent of choice by, successively, vodka and orange, then Cointreau on the rocks, then vodka and grapefruit juice; although none of this precluded sustained infusions of Bloody Mary).
'He was a chronic alcoholic, just couldn't go without a drink,' remembers one close friend. 'Bloody Mary’s at 11am, and then he'd be in a filthy temper, with an awful hangover.'
John would sustain his drinking as long as his liver would last. By the time it expired, however, he had for years been lifting his mood in a far more dangerous manner.
'He first experimented with cocaine in about 1973/4 when we all did,' remembers his childhood friend Imogen von Halle. 'Everybody was doing it - everybody in the circle we mixed in. It was readily available. Speed was the other big drug.'
'John struggled, from the summer of 1976 to the summer of 1977, to stop taking drugs,' says Hurlstone. 'I begged him to. At one point, I thought I was winning.'
Another friend remembers a party of John's in a private suite at Claridge's. 'All the cocaine was on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece, and all the heroin was on the right. In lines,' he says. 'You took whichever one you liked.'
Soothed by alcohol and stimulated by narcotics, John began to assert himself in a manner which would have been unimaginable from the shy young man a few years earlier.
'John could be funny, could be quick, poke fun at people,' says Imogen von Halle. 'He was a snob, but that was where he could be funny: he would stamp his foot in restaurants and say "I'm the Earl Jermyn" [his title before becoming the Marquess of Bristol on his father's death] and expect a table immediately. We egged him on.'
At Ickworth, John made a point of ushering his guests inside the rotunda whenever the mood took him, regarding it as his own property - even though it had been signed over to the National Trust years before - and voicing his disgust that it was open to the public.
'He was incredibly rude about National Trust visitors,' says von Halle, who recalls how John's blue-blooded entourage would goad him on to new heights of abuse. 'Everybody was rude about them in every way. We all swore like mad,' she says. 'A lot of people didn't like us.'
John's closest friends, however, saw a different side of him: a huge capacity for courtesy and generosity, sensitivity to others, traits completely at odds with the shrieking, bullying snob now frequently on public view.
'He always drew people who looked a bit lonely, who were not fitting in, or not talking to anybody, into the conversation,' says one. 'He was very good like that, very sweet; he had a very good side.'
From the mid-Seventies, Peter Geiger observed the growing compartmentalization of John's life at Ickworth. There were shooting weekends for his aristocratic friends, and drug weekends and sex weekends for a different sort of companion altogether - the 'drug addicts and queens phase', as he puts it.
The edge to John's behavior, already becoming evident in London restaurants and nightclubs, was exposed in style at one undergraduate party in Cambridge
By 1978, John had decided, like his father Victor before him, to become a tax exile in Monaco
Rupert Everett
'He was obsessed with Rupert for a bit,' says a female friend; another speaks of the sight of the handsome Everett Paris , while in Everett
His new acquaintance stipulated only one condition: that his sister should come, too. John assented, and soon they had 'piled into the four-poster', only for John's bravado to evaporate completely.
All four fell asleep until, a little while later, Everett was nudged awake by John, to find 'the brother and sister hard at it'.
A few hours later, pausing only to decant a bottle of port, John was in his Ferrari, driving at breakneck speed towards the motorway, naked beneath a fur coat, Everett Florence ,' Everett
'Finally, we sat - drinking coffee and laughing - but I could tell he was still upset about the boy. "I must admit," John had confessed, "I'm Mrs. Most Miffed."'
John's next move was to New York
'Everything was segmented,' says Imogen von Halle's brother, Tim. 'I, for instance, was in the category of "normality".' Also included in this bracket were the likes of Marianne Faithfull, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Christina Onassis. But in another compartment, according to one confidant, 'a coterie of the wrong friends was appearing'.
Accompanied by his new conquests, John now ventured into experimental areas, unseen by most of his friends, but leaving clues to be glimpsed by a Yale friend of his brother Nicholas, who had somehow managed to acquire a key to John's apartment.
This guest treated friends to guided tours of the flat. In John's closet there were sex toys and sex videos. John fantasized about one young actor who featured in one of the videos and asked a friend to track the boy down and have him flown to New York
John produced at least one sex video of his own, training the camera on himself. The footage that followed was comparatively brief but graphic. The aberrant had become routine.
On May 19, 1983, two members of the Drug Enforcement Agency arrived on John's doorstep at 7am. Moments later, he was handcuffed, accused of international drug trafficking. Hours of questioning at the Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn followed before he was allowed home.
Although all the charges were later dropped, John shortly afterwards announced that he was never going to take heroin again. He was, he told one friend, going to return to Britain, 'find a suitable wife and prepare for a parliamentary career'.
The girl he chose was the beautiful Francesca Fisher, a teetotal free spirit barely out of her teens, who had lived in Andalusia since the age of seven and had been invited to Ickworth one weekend by a mutual acquaintance. She was 'a really lovely girl', in the estimation of John's accountant, Michael Chappell.
The couple's engagement in April 1984 was greeted with skepticism by press and public alike. But many of John's friends thought differently. 'I think he really did love her,' says his solicitor Roger Lane-Smith.
'He surprised himself,' says another. 'In the old Victorian sense, John wanted to do a good marriage.' A female friend goes further. 'He adored her,' she says.
Would Francesca be the one who could help John conquer his demons? His friends could only hope and pray.
To the world at large, he was a man with everything. But the real life of John Hervey, the 7th Marquess of Bristol, was one of chronic addiction - to sex, drugs and alcohol. In the second part of our riches-to-rags tale, his friends describe how they looked on helplessly as his self-destructive streak spiraled out of control - crashing his helicopter because he ignored the fiuel gauge, or driving at 140mph on the hard shoulder of a motorway. His inevitable demise caused much rueful shaking of heads among acquaintances, but - perhaps surprisingly in view of his appalling behavior - also real sorrow among employees and locals ...
The guest list was as glittering as one might expect for the wedding of 29-year-old John Hervey, one of Britain
Eighties icons Bryan Ferry and Wayne Sleep mingled with John's society friends, Jasper Guinness and Dai Llewellyn among them, plus a selection of his former lovers - both male and female. George Melly and Joe Loss led the music.
This was, without doubt, going to be an occasion to remember - although not, perhaps, in the way the young bride, Francesca Fisher, had hoped.
John & Francesca
The wedding ceremony earlier in the day had passed off uneventfully; the evening would add another lurid chapter to John's extraordinary reputation - even if memories differ as to what exactly happened as the 400 guests began to drift away from Ickworth, John's spectacular Suffolk mansion, towards the sanctuary of bed.
One version of events suggests that, at around 3am, the groom and what one guest calls his 'inner circle' had migrated to his private quarters in the east wing of the house - without the bride - for some unspecified purpose.
Francesca herself recalled, 20 years later, that after searching frantically for her new husband in the small hours of the morning she had finally tracked him down to an upstairs room, where she found him inhaling cocaine with a group of friends.
One of John's former male lovers remembers a slightly different sequence. In the early hours, he says, he and another close friend had joined John in the morning room. John locked the door behind them.
There they remained, talking; there were no drugs. Eventually they heard the door being thumped. Francesca appeared. John was the first to speak. He kept it brief. 'F*** off,' he had said.
'I want to go to bed now, John,' said his bride.
'Go to bed then,' he replied.
'John, it's my wedding night,' Francesca had protested.’ I love these two more than I'll ever love you,' John cackled - a sound his former lover had heard so often before. Then there were just two other sounds - Francesca crying and her retreating footsteps.
Perhaps the omens had been clear during John's stag weekend a week earlier. The groom-to-be had, it was said, spent around half an hour in his private helicopter hovering above Ickworth in the company of a picturesque young man - thereafter assuring his friends that this would be 'absolutely the last time' that he would go in for 'that kind of thing'.
It was not to be, however. Neither did John - even after he became the Marquess of Bristol on his father Victor's death in 1985 - find the inner strength to be able to conquer the demons of drink and drug abuse that had plagued him for years, as he had vowed to do.
Within two years, the marriage was over. Yet John's friend Tim von Halle remembers Francesca to this day as 'a great woman' - the person who 'almost turned John' around.
'I can remember her going through rooms [at Ickworth] chucking out drugs and all sorts of things,' says the wife of another of John's friends.
Francesca herself recalls an especially productive sweep which ended with her putting 'three kilos of cocaine down the loo'.
After his wedding, John had initially appeared to be in better shape, says one friend, 'always very polite, correct. Arguably, that was his facade'.
But in other company, cracks had begun to appear. He was now beginning to attract a new strain of hanger-on in addition to his usual entourage: those craving a fix of his notoriety.
Francesca particularly remembers 'a little guy with black hair, called The Rat, and his sidekick, Wiggy'. This pair was occasionally joined by another friend, Paddy McNally, at whose Verbier residence Francesca endured a difficult weekend.
John, it seems, took against McNally's house in some way - 'he ripped it apart, and then we left' reports Francesca.
But he continued to see his new circle of friends in London , particularly over lunch at one Chelsea
Despite these lapses, she knew her husband was fighting a battle he was desperate not to lose.
In an interview shortly before his wedding, he spoke of his desire to have children, and of his wish that they should have a happier, more conventional upbringing than his own.
'I was acutely aware,' John explained, 'that when I was growing up my father was quite old and was never able to do any of the things with me that I'd like to have done as a child.'
Randle Siddeley, a friend from Suffolk
He recalls, for example, John receiving 'the bollocking of a lifetime' one Sunday lunchtime, while the guests in the Ickworth dining room sat in appalled silence.
'Victor just humiliated John in front of everybody,' he says. 'It was cruelty personified.'
'He wasn't really brought up by anybody - staff excepted,' says Imogen von Halle. 'For a lot of the time, he brought himself up.'
But by the mid-1980s John had convinced himself that he was ready for parenthood. Francesca, however, was not - at least not until confident that John had got the better of his addictions.
'I wanted him to clean up for a few months,' is how she puts it. As long as John was at Ickworth, that seemed possible.
"He was fine the first year,' she says. 'It was when he went back to New York
She did not accompany him. 'He was only going for a few days, but then he stayed quite a long time: long enough to do himself a lot of harm. A major binge.'
Nearly 20 years later, she reflected that she had been lucky to have John 'on pretty good form' for as long as she had, a time when she felt loved and happy. She reiterates the point today, describing John as 'amazing'.
Without her, John's life speedily unraveled. On October 6, 1988, John was jailed for a year for possession and importation of drugs. He emerged on April 28, 1989, released early for good behavior, apparently unscathed.
Announcing that he had made £4 million 'buying and selling property in the North of England' while inside, he said it felt fantastic to be free and when asked what he had learned about drugs, he replied: 'Don't carry them on your person.'
By now John was entering the final stage of his brief and tragic journey.
By then, say friends, it was nothing out of the ordinary to find him banging against the roof of their cars with the undercarriage of his helicopter. 'You just accepted it,' says one. 'That was normal.'
It was normal, too, that John should feast on cocaine, grab a shotgun and repeatedly fire it into the air while howling abuse at those members of the public who had paid to visit Ickworth's gardens ('****ING PEASANTS, ****ING NATIONAL TRUST'), and just as normal that those lunching with him should not bat an eyelid.
His friend Henry Wodehouse describes how as a 17-year-old he attended a never-to- be-forgotten shooting weekend at Ickworth.
In the first drive after an 11 o'clock break for alcohol, he says, John had swung his gun enthusiastically at a hare, fired and instead hit Wodehouse just below the right knee, 'four pieces of shot, like four hornet stings'.
'Bugger, missed it,' John said.
'No, you bloody didn't. You got me instead.'
'Oh, sorry, old boy, better luck next time.'
Fizzing with pain and rage - but aware that John, still drunk from the previous night, was past the point of rational communication - Wodehouse spent the remaining three drives 20 yards behind the line of guns, out of immediate danger.
Many years on, such reckless behavior was eating away at him. It seemed normal that John's movements should become jerkier as his alcoholism and addictions caught up with him, making 'his appearance sinister, his hair longer and oilier'.
It seemed normal that he should have 'five suits made each week in materials more suited to soft furnishings'; and that he should entertain 'frantically, seven days a week, as though he could not bear his own company'.
It became normal that disdain for the fuel gauge should send his Hughes 500 helicopter plummeting from the sky into a ploughed field, as it did with John's secretary Angela Barry on board: ('Where's the ****ing telephone?' shrieked John on reaching the nearest farmhouse, through which he stamped mud, oblivious of its owners); normal that a visitor (George Milford Haven) should be greeted by the news that John had blown the door off the fridge the night before (courtesy of the shotgun once more); normal that he should habitually smash up the furniture at Ickworth, some of it priceless; normal, too, that he should become the object of police attention and should, in consequence, suffer periodic seclusion in clinics and a second custodial sentence in 1993.
A terrible toll was being taken on his body. His nose, remembered his friend Nick Ashley, appeared 'to have assumed a life of its own' and his hands had become 'gnarled and twisted'.
His body clock adhered to a nocturnal pattern or no pattern at all. What nobody knew was that in 1986, the year his marriage fell apart, he had been told that he was seriously ill.
Like many promiscuous men of that era, he had contracted HIV Aids - though it was never publicly acknowledged.
'He was too proud to talk about it,' says Nick Ashley, who would not learn of the diagnosis until much later.
'I think a lot of the drug-taking, the massive drug-taking, was denial,' says another friend, James Whitby.
A third reflects that John 'knew he was not long for this world'.
Cocaine and heroin were no longer a pleasure but had mutated into crutch and cradle, life becoming insupportable without them. 'He was usually in bed, asleep or with cold turkey; he just didn't want to be bothered,' remembers Whitby
John's driving had always been erratic. Roger Lane-Smith, John's solicitor, recalls how over the years he had often received urgent phone calls from John seeking advice. 'He was always in trouble,' says Lane- Smith. 'He rang one day and said: "I've just had an incident with the Ferrari."
The solicitor sought elaboration.
'Oh, I was coming up the M11,' said John, 'and there was a lot of traffic in front of me, and I got very, very irritated with all this traffic. I floored the accelerator, I just overtook everything, must have got up to 140 mph, then the police stopped me.'
Lane-Smith had heard worse. "That's bad, John, but you know ...' he began. 'You don't understand,' John explained. 'I was on the hard shoulder.'
Negotiating gridlocked traffic via the hard shoulder at twice the legal speed limit had obvious appeal, but even this dimmed in comparison with the special challenge that unfailingly greeted John at Ickworth, once the cattle grid had been crossed and the National Trust's 20mph signs confronted.
A friend recalls the experience: 'The drive at Ickworth - he'd do 100mph with me in the car, screaming. In a Ferrari. This was during the day, with National Trust visitors wandering around, not at 4am. People with dogs and children. He was completely bonkers a lot of the time. The more you screamed, the more he liked it.'
Another friend recalls the triumphal phrase habitually uttered after each return to Ickworth: 'I did the last stretch at 120mph.'
Speeding, particularly when taken to potentially suicidal or homicidal extremes, was a cause for satisfaction, a reminder to himself, and a demonstration to others, that rules were for little people.
By the 1990s - and when not banned from the road - John's driving took on a terrifying new dimension, especially when at the wheel of his Aston Martin, which had been 'tweaked' by Formula 1 specialist Cosworth.
'Every time he had a rush of heroin, the car would slow down from 180mph to 30mph; every time the coke dribbled down the back of his nose, he went from 30mph to 180mph,' says James Whitby.
'You felt you were in a sort of steam catapult on an aircraft carrier, permanently being pulled backwards and forwards.'
In his helicopter, a delay followed each lift-off while John paused for cocaine (snorted off his flight map), a stimulus thereafter regularly supplemented by shots of vodka Collins.
In 1998 John sold the remaining lease on the east wing of Ickworth to the National Trust, reportedly for just under £100,000. The Trust was now outright owner of the whole property. 'I want a totally financially hassle-free life,' John explained.
It was not to last long. His fortune dissipated and his body ravaged by disease, he died on January 9, 1999, surrounded by long-time members of his staff, in whom he had inspired extraordinary levels of devotion.
Local coroner Bill Walrond announced that John's system had contained a cocktail of legal drugs and cocaine, leading to multiple organ failure.
Recording a verdict of 'dependence on drugs', he said: 'This is a particularly tragic case. But I suspect that Lord Bristol is as deserving of sympathy as he is of censure.'
Many of the residents of his village would agree. At the time of John's death, one of them, a retired bank manager and former church warden, then in his 90s, spoke to the village's new rector, Brian Raistrick.
'If you'd known how he was treated as a child, how he was expected to behave as a child, you would understand,' he said.
It was a sentiment, Raistrick learned, shared by all 'who had known John for years, from childhood, not his friends, but ordinary people'.
When John's will was published, his beloved half-brother George issued a brief statement to the Press.
'We all know he was quite a flamboyant character and he pretty much lived the way he wanted to,' it read.
'He made the most of his life - he packed more in his 44 years than most people do in their whole lives.'
Others close to John disagree with this generous and loving verdict. In the words of John Knight, who had known the family for 50 years, the tragically early death had been 'a dreadful, wicked waste: something that should not be'.
It seems that John himself had understood something of this. 'You can buy something that is self-gratification,' he had once said poignantly to an interviewer. 'But self-gratification does not last long enough and it does not turn into happiness.'
But enlightenment had come too late. He was succeeded by his younger half-brother upon his death
The Hervey Heirs
26 .XI.1961–26.I.1998
Was the only child born to the 6th Marquess of Bristol by his second wife (m. 1960) Lady Anne Juliet Dorothea Maud Wentworth-FitzWilliam.
Lord Nicholas's mother was the only child of the wealthy 8th Earl Fitzwilliam; she was 13 years old when her father died in a small aircraft crash that also killed his intended second wife Kathleen Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington, sister of John F. Kennedy, in 1948. Lady Juliet was the sole heir to her father's estate, then estimated at £45 million. As an adult, she ran a family stud farm.
Nicholas' father was Victor Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol. He also had significant inherited wealth, which he invested into new, albeit minor, businesses. He was once tagged "Mayfair 's No. 1 Playboy," in a series of "life story" articles he authored after he served a gaol sentence for jewel robbery, wherein he was convicted as a "cat burglar" of wealthy women in his youth.
The Hervey family has many notable and notorious members, including bank robbers, bigamists, politicians, arts patrons and memoirists, and has a noted history of homosexuality and bisexuality extending back hundreds of years.
Nicholas Hervey's parents married in 1960, his father for the second time, his mother for the first. He was the only surviving child of that marriage, his only full sibling, Lady Anne Hervey was born and died in 1966. Lord Nicholas was a descendent of William the Conqueror on both his mother's and father's side and his consanguinity index is .1%.
He was heir to the title Marquess of Bristol from his elder half-brother John, the 7th Marquess, the only child of his father's first marriage. His father was noted for being cruel to his eldest son but having good relations with Nicholas. "He treated his son and heir with indifference and contempt," said Anthony Haden-Guest. This brother was a tabloid fixture, known for his heroin and cocaine addictions, lavish parties, purported homosexuality and use of male prostitutes; he served two gaol terms for drugs offences and went through an estimated excess of 30 million pounds, comprising both inheritance and investments, and died at 44 with only £5,000 left. Nicholas and his elder brother John were fond of one another.
When Nicholas was eleven years old, his mother divorced his father and married his 60 year old friend, Somerset de Chair (d. 1996), with whom she had a daughter, Helena de Chair, five years later. In 1996 she married a third time, and is now known as Lady Juliet Tadgell.
Nicholas's father's final marriage was to his private secretary, Yvonne Sutton. The couple had three additional children, such that Nicholas's other half-siblings were Fred, the 8th Marquess, at whose Catholic christening Nicholas stood godfather, and the media personalities Lady Victoria Hervey and Lady Isabella Hervey (the face of Playboy UK
Nicholas was known as a keen traditionalist. He was educated at Eton, Yale and the Royal Agricultural College Eton he was "an industrious boy with plenty of initiative"; he took part in the House debate, and during his last two halves (terms) was in the House Library (i.e., a prefect). He founded and was president of the Burlington Society, a fine arts society with an emphasis on modern art. He was also a member of the Agricultural and Political Societies, leaving Eton at Christmas 1979 with A-levels in French, Spanish and Economics. At Yale he took a degree in the History of Art and studied Economics in depth.
In 1981 he founded the Rockingham Club, a Yale social club for descendants of royalty and aristocracy, which was later modified to allow membership to the children of the "super-wealthy". The Club and Nicholas Hervey were profiled in Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine but was dissolved shortly thereafter in 1986. (Nicholas' older half-brother John was posthumously reported to be a friend of Andy Warhol.) He was a member, through his mother, of the Turf Club, a gentlemen's club in Carlton House Terrace in central London Bristol University
He was a leading member of the International Monarchist League. He was elected President of its International Youth Association (under 21s) in February 1979 and recruited numerous new members. In 1985 he became a Vice-Chancellor of the League proper, and made the formal toast to the guests, The Prince and Princess of Lippe, at the League's Annual Dinner in the Cholmondeley Room, the House of Lords, on April 1, 1986. In later years he allowed his membership and vice-chancellorship to lapse.
Through the League, which his father had subsidised for many years, he became friendly with Gregory Lauder-Frost, who introduced him to numerous right-wing conservative activities. One such event, on September 25, 1989, was the Western Goals Institute dinner at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, chaired by Lord Sudeley, for El Salvador
In 1983 Lord Nicholas was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia; in 1986 he graduated from Yale University
He was forced to declare bankruptcy due to his owing £38,000, which the trustees of his trust refused to fund, to lawyers of the defendants following the failure of the lawsuit he and his elder half-brother brought against the principal beneficiaries of the will of their father, i.e., his third wife and their young children. His mother, while on the Sunday Times Rich List (in 2003 her wealth was estimated at £45,000,000), did not act to prevent the bankruptcy, which immediately preceded his institutionalization. She subsequently declared that "he was never himself again" after the clinic stay.
He suffered from severe depression and became increasingly reclusive. His landlady said that he "drew no shred of comfort from the high rank and great riches to which he was born" and that "he was a recluse, in the sense that he was heavily sedated and slept all day - a typical schizophrenic. He was very quiet, very Old Etonian. He was a nice guy, but very 'out of it'. Nobody visited him here, except sometimes we would hear someone come and take him out to dinner."
His own inheritance, which was under the auspices of trustees, was rigorously controlled and this led to increased financial stress for someone raised in an upper class life-style. This increased his depression. He was found dead in his Chelsea
Frederick William Augustus Hervey
19.X.1979 -
8th Marquess Of Bristol
Lord Bristol became heir to the 7th Marquess in January 1998 upon the death of his half-brother, Lord Nicholas Hervey. The 8th Marquess is the only son of the late 6th Marquess by his third wife, the former Yvonne Sutton. He is the brother of media personalities Lady Victoria Hervey (born 1976) and Lady Isabella Hervey (born 1982).
He was educated at St Maur School in Monaco , Sunningdale School , Eton, and Edinburgh University
Lord Bristol has expressed bitter disappointment at the sale of the right to residence in the East Wing of Ickworth House, the family seat since the 15th century, by the 7th Marquess in 1998 and has vigorously criticized the National Trust for not reselling what would have been the remaining term of that leasehold to him on the death of the 7th Marquess.
The National Trust has converted the East Wing into a hotel for the public. However, in 2009, Sir Simon Jenkins, the newly appointed chairman of the National Trust, stated his interest in allowing Lord Bristol to live somewhere on the property as part of his intended program to enliven National Trust properties with residents who have a family connection. "He's a young chap and he's desperate to move back to Ickworth ...," Sir Simon stated, adding, "I believe he has a huge interest in re-establishing a link between a major public attraction and his family that built it, I think it is in our interest for the Marquesses of Bristol to be living there."
Lord Bristol's godparents include King Fuad II and his former wife, Queen Fadila of Egypt , Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia , Prince Nikita Romanoff of Russia
He is patron of several organizations, such as Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust, and the Athenaeum, Bury St Edmunds. He is trustee of General Sir William Hervey's Charitable Trust, and Trustee and Chairman of The Ickworth Church Conservation Trust.
I'd Also Like To Be
Lording It Over Ickworth House
By Tom Utley
29 Aug 2001
FREDERICK, the 8th Marquess of Bristol, is "very angry" - and understandably so. It must have been extremely galling for him to have to stand by and watch while his dissolute half-brother, from whom he inherited the title in 1999, squandered the Hervey family's fortune on fast cars, heroin and cocaine.
In particular, we can all imagine Frederick 's acute dismay when his half-brother sold the family's right to live at Ickworth House in Suffolk
No wonder the new marquess is cross. The odd thing, though, is that he is directing his anger not at his late half-brother, who brought all this misery upon him, but at the National Trust. He seems to think that the trust has treated him very badly by refusing to let him live in the east wing, and that it has a duty to sell him the lease on the sort of terms that were enjoyed by the 7th Marquess. In this, he betrays a woeful ignorance of the laws of property, from which his family profited handsomely for more than half a millennium.
In the latest issue of Suffolk Magazine, the 21-year-old marquess, an undergraduate at Edinburgh University
I sympathize with the marquess, because I, too, would like to live in Ickworth House. It is a beautiful building, and the 60 rooms of its east wing would give my four children plenty of space in which to run around on rainy days. But Ickworth does not belong to me, any more than it belongs to the 8th Marquess of Bristol. It belongs to the National Trust.
Perhaps it should be explained to Lord Bristol that this is what happens when somebody sells something to somebody else: the thing sold becomes the property of the buyer - and it is no good whining about it after the sale has gone through. (Lord Bristol was misleading us, by the way, when he said that his family had "given" Ickworth to the trust. The trust accepted the house in lieu of death duties, thereby saving the family an awful lot of cash. Not quite the same thing as a gift.)
Nobody seems to dispute, either, the 7th Marques’s right to sell his lease on the east wing to the trust, or the trust's right to buy it. Instead, the new marquess rests his claim to the right to live at Ickworth on a very peculiar proposition. "It is sometimes very hard to have the title and not have the big house," he tells Suffolk Magazine. "People expect that if you have an impressive title like this, you will also have the big house and the land."
I can understand that there was once a case for saying that the holders of grand titles should have grand properties to back them up. But that was in the days when noblemen were expected to perform many duties, not only in the areas where they lived, but in the affairs of the nation at Westminster Britain
If all that he is saying is that people are disappointed when he takes them back to his bedsit, because they expect better of a marquess, then all I can say is, "tough". He should count himself lucky that he has the title at all (and he has it only because his elder half-brothers died without sons).
Ever anxious to help, however, I think I may have the solution to the marquis’s woes, which would suit both him and the trust very nicely. I am sure that the trust will acknowledge that it adds something to the attraction of a stately home if a real live toff is still living on the premises. I suggest, therefore, that the trust should offer Lord Bristol a job, with a room in the attic at Ickworth thrown in.
The trust should dress him up in period costume, and get him to act out for the tourists some of the many colorful episodes in his family's history. There was the time when the 4th Earl of Bristol, who built Ickworth as it now is, threw a tureen of hot spaghetti over a procession of the Blessed Sacrament in Rome
The marquess could also play the part of his ancestor the 3rd Earl, who boasted of deflowering a dozen Portuguese nuns, and whose countess was accused of holding up a banker at gunpoint in Rome Frederick
I see magnificent opportunities for keeping the tourists entertained, while keeping the 8th Marquess at Ickworth. But if Lord Bristol feels that acting out the antics of his ancestors is beneath him, perhaps he should just count himself lucky to be a lord, and stop whining at the National Trust.
NR
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