As she sits in prison awaiting sentencing for her part in the death of her newborn baby daughter, Constance Marten will have plenty of time to dwell on some history.
Her grandmother, Mary Marten, was a goddaughter of the Queen Mother, and her father, Napier, was a page to Queen Elizabeth II.
But you do not need to go much further back to lurch from royal favour to some truly scandalous behaviour.
Marten’s great-grandfather, the 3rd Lord Alington, was said to be the most dissolute man ever to enter the House of Lords.
Also called Napier, he indulged in wild same-sex orgies while keeping a mistress old enough to be his mother.
He spent money like water, encouraged drug taking and illegal behaviour, and was constantly searching out novel ways to slake his prodigious sexual thirst.
Napier Senior perhaps found a mentor in the naughty King Edward VII, who came to stay at Crichel with his mistress Alice Keppel.
Napier – Naps to his friends – sent his girlfriend, the oversexed (or, as she described herself, ‘ambisextrous’) actress Tallulah Bankhead, to seduce the boys at his old school, Eton. One was just 14.
Aristocrat Constance Marten is in prison awaiting sentencing for her part in the death of her baby daughter
Marten’s great-grandfather, the 3rd Lord Alington, was said to be the most dissolute man ever to enter the House of Lords, writes CHRISTOPHER WILSON. His lover was the actress Tallulah Bankhead (right)
The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, ordered MI5 to investigate ‘this extremely immoral woman’ – but the school refused to co-operate, and the boys in question were expelled for ‘motoring offences’ (Bankhead had taken them to a hotel in her car).
Bankhead, a lively bisexual, introduced herself to Alington with her famous line, ‘I’m a lesbian. What do you do?’
What didn’t he do? Invited to a ball in Paris, he managed to shake that unshockable city with his behaviour.
His lover would later say of him: ‘I was irked by his nonchalance, his cynicism, his flashes of cruelty.
‘He wasn’t good looking, he had an almost repulsive mouth, but he lived recklessly.
‘He scorned the conventions, loved to gamble and, when it pleased him, had great wit and charm.’
In his book The Fatal Englishman, author Sebastian Faulks related one particular story that revealed Naps’ character in a flash.
‘One of the most remorseless pleasure-seekers in Europe, Naps went dressed as the Sun King, his costume consisting of a number of rays attached to his gilded skin.
‘As the evening progressed, he gave away the rays, one by one, until even his Louis XIV mask and his golden stockings were gone.
Despite his sexual preferences Naps married – not Tallulah Bankhead, though they talked about it – but Lady Mary Ashley-Cooper (above), daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury. Their only child was Mary Anna – Constance Marten’s grandmother. Above: Lady Alington with her baby daughter, Mary Anna, in 1929
‘When he returned to the Ritz Hotel at dawn the old ladies in the Place Vendome were taking their poodles out for an early morning walk.
‘The manager of the hotel rushed out to wrap him in a blanket – but not before Alington, on the steps of the hotel, had removed his golden fig-leaf and presented it to the Ritz as a souvenir of his night out.’
That sounded like fun, but there was a much darker side – in part, perhaps, because his anguished elder brother Gerard, who should have inherited the title and lands, committed suicide on Armistice Day in 1918.
He had been grotesquely wounded in the first months of the war and paralysed from the waist down. Throughout his tragic last days, his father bullied him unmercifully.
‘The whole family is vicious,’ wrote the diarist and MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon.
‘Too aristocratic ever to feel the fetters of position or morals or standards. They love low-life and sexual experiments.’
Quite as unruly was Alington’s sister Lois – a drug-addled, needy, woman who flaunted her royal connections but was constantly in need of money to feed her habit.
She became the mistress of Reggie Pembroke, a crusty old earl and the owner of nearby Wilton House.
Marten’s grandmother, Mary Sturt (fifth from left) with the future Queen (fourth from left) and Princess Margaret (second from left) in 1935
Constance Marten’s aunt, Victoria Marten (right), with Princess Anne in 1960
Although he was old enough to be her father, she sponged off him and encouraged him to be her sugar daddy.
She then had a fling with Prince George, Duke of Kent, before becoming engaged to a number of different men.
When she finally married, to the exclusively homosexual Viscount Tredegar in a swish ceremony at the Brompton Oratory, it was said there wasn’t a single person in the congregation that the couple hadn’t slept with.
Back to Naps though. Chips Channon confessed he too had slept with him.
‘Unbelievably handsome,’ he recalled, ‘with a smile that nobody has ever resisted.
‘He carried the world before him but he was not quite human.
‘He was a centaur, a satyr without morals, stability or ambition. He was an enchanting companion but one who sadly squandered his charm, his health, his fortune, and his time.
‘He could never rest, drank all night, was surrounded by sycophants, and went to bed with anyone and everyone he met.’
Marten as an infant with her mother, Virginie
Bankhead would later say of her lover: ‘I was irked by his nonchalance, his cynicism, his flashes of cruelty’
Bankhead, a lively bisexual, introduced herself to Alington with her famous line, ‘I’m a lesbian. What do you do?’
Despite his sexual preferences Naps married – not Tallulah Bankhead, though they talked about it – but Lady Mary Ashley-Cooper, daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Their only child, Mary Anna – Constance Marten’s grandmother – inherited Crichel, which then passed to her son, the younger Napier.
Though outwardly more conventional than his namesake grandfather, it was in 1996 – when Constance was just nine years old – that this Napier had a so-called awakening.
A voice in his head told him to quit his Crichel inheritance, shave his head, and fly to Australia.
Leaving his small children behind at home, he adopted a life of whale-watching and spiritual discovery.
He became a tree-surgeon and later admitted, ‘I do recall having a recognition of myself that I was exhibiting some sort of courage, but of course, in many other people’s minds I was exhibiting some sort of cowardice.’
He recollected an out-of-body experience on a clifftop, and how an encounter with whales made him cry ‘almost nonstop’ for seven days.
‘I found myself looking down at my sleeping body,’ he said.
In 2009, Marten posted ‘Classic Toots’ on a photograph of her holding an iced coffee in the Egyptian desert
Marten complained that her wealthy family didn’t like her lover Mark Gordon, and claimed they used their wealth and influence to get social services to intervene to take away their children
Marten pictured during a police interview after her arrest
Constance Marten had a gilded upbringing and the brightest of futures, but chose a life of isolation and squalor
Marten embraces the New Age vibe at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2012
‘The next thing I know, I’m flying out into the ocean into the dark waters and swimming with the whales.
‘I’m being pulled along by them and there is this conversation going on… it was a complete clearing out, a transmission of energy.
‘These days of expansion unfortunately can’t be repeated, but when one’s in it, it is the most exciting part of your life.’
Constance’s father claims he does not know how long his exile lasted.
He eventually returned to the UK, but not to his old life at Crichel House – he lived in a lorry, worked as a chef, then trained in a form of head massage called craniosacral therapy.
He passed his estate on to his eldest son Max, who was studying environmental science and geography at Oxford Brookes University at the time.
In 2013, Max sold the house and 400 acres of its land to American hedge fund billionaire Richard Chilton for a reported £34 million.
All this high life and big money is very far from a cramped cell in a Surrey women’s prison where prisoner A9624X Constance Marten now awaits sentencing on charges of manslaughter by gross negligence, concealing the birth of a child, perverting the course of justice by not reporting her death, and child cruelty.
