In June 2011 police were called to Longleat House, the Marquess of Bath’s stately home near Warminster, in Wiltshire, to break up a fight: two of the polygamous peer’s “wifelets” were arguing over whose turn it was to sleep with him. The eccentric aristocrat boasted of having slept with hundreds of women, known as the “wifelets of Bath”, and he immortalised dozens of them in garish papier-mâché portraits that hung, in order of conquest, on the spiral staircase leading to his apartment in his 16th-century ancestral pile.
Alexander Thynn, as the marquess preferred to be known, was a writer, artist, founder of the Wessex Regionalist Party and entrepreneur, who transformed Longleat into one of the most visited stately homes in the country, complete with a