Britain’s stately homes are invariably linked to the great men who built them. Blenheim Palace, for example, stands still as a monument to the 1st Duke of Marlborough, and his pivotal victory against the French on the fields of Blenheim, in Bavaria. Yet, over the centuries, as the men have gone off to battle–or, more often, to hunt, shoot, and carouse–who’s kept these stupendous ancestral houses in one piece? The wives, of course.
Taking the reins of one of these massive properties is not unlike turning a battleship around, as Emma Manners found out two decades ago when her husband, David, inherited his hereditary title, becoming the 11th Duke of Rutland. The couple and their five children settled into Belvoir Castle (pronounced “beaver”), a turreted 356-room, more than 900-year-old behemoth on 16,000 acres in Leicestershire. Although the place came equipped with “loads” of butlers who had long worked for her parents-in-law, that wasn’t as nice as it might sound. “Have we broken her yet?” Emma recently recalled overhearing one staff member say to another. “I sobbed the entire way down the rest of the corridor,” she said.
Even with the large staff, Emma has often had to muck in. On one of the family’s first nights in the castle, water came cascading from the library ceiling, forcing Emma to climb onto the roof in a driving rainstorm to remove the dead pigeon that was clogging the drainpipe.
Entertained as we are by frothy tales of British royal and aristocratic life, we’ve rarely gotten the real story from the inside. Now, thanks to Emma—properly known as Her Grace, the Duchess of Rutland—we can listen to it, in her new podcast series, Duchess, debuting this month.
Delightful yet gritty at times, the project was the brainchild of Emma’s eldest child, Lady Violet, 27. The idea came to her during a year she spent in Los Angeles, studying for a business degree at UCLA. “A bit of distance gives you some perspective,” Violet explained. “I saw the view that Americans have of the British aristocracy, which is romanticized…. It occurred to me that this story has never been told by the very people who actually inhabit and manage these estates.”
“She came home and said, ‘Mum, you’ve got to do it,’” Emma recalled. “I didn’t really know what a podcast was, but I thought it was a brilliant idea…. It’s about bringing alive what it’s like to run one of these places in the 21st century. Yes, you do have to put on your tiara at times, but we’re not floating around with a string of staff hanging onto the tails of our coats. We’re working girls.”
To tell the tale, Emma enlisted a group of 10 fellow British country house chatelaines, with each episode devoted to a different woman’s story. Contrary to what you might think, they don’t all know each other, and not all of them were to the manor born—among them Emma, who is the daughter of a Welsh farmer. “A hundred years ago, we would have all known each other,” Emma said. “Nowadays, one of my greatest mates is the rabbit catcher.”
Among the podcast participants is Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the late 11th Duke of Marlborough. While never a duchess herself, Henrietta has been, according to Emma, the “backbone” of Blenheim over three generations. Then there’s the California-reared Countess of Devon, the former A.J. Langer, whom American audiences might recognize: Before marrying the 19th Earl of Devon and arriving at 600-year-old Powderham Castle, she played Rayanne Graff on My So-Called Life.
Other Duchess participants are sharing details of their lives for the first time. “Lady Derby was really nervous—she had never done an interview, but hers was one of the most charming,” Emma said, referring to Caroline Stanley. As the wife of the 19th Earl of Derby, she is Countess of Derby. But she doesn’t stand on ceremony. “Call me Cassie,” she says in her episode.