I’ve never heard of LVH so I googled and came across this in the telegraph about her father
. I’ll link to the full article, which details the families mad history back to the whenever-00s, but have put the mentioned section behind a spoiler in case it’s paywalled (I think you get one free article?).CW - the full article is about alleged domestic abuse experienced by her sister, and ends with some really eye-roll worthy quotes from LVH about PA which I’d avoid if you cba feeling angry about that on this very blue sky, but freezing, day!
There followed a period of relative calm until the 20th century, when the 6th Marquess of Bristol, Victor Hervey, Victoria and Isabella’s father, brought the family roaring back into the newspapers.
A playboy aristocrat who married three times and was nicknamed The Reptile, he did much to undo the work the Victorian Earls had done in making the Herveys respectable again.
Born in 1915, Victor went to Eton and Sandhurst, but was asked to leave the latter for bad behaviour. As a young man, he developed a penchant for theft, which led to his becoming the ringleader of a gang of jewellery robbers from well-to-do families who were known as the Mayfair Playboys.
This was the era of Raffles, the gentleman thief, but there was nothing civilised about some of their activities.
In December 1937, four of the gang were arrested for the violent robbery of a Cartier boss, whom they had lured to a hotel in Mayfair before coshing him and stealing £13,000 worth of diamond rings.
While Victor was not involved in that incident, and would complain people unfairly associated him with it, in 1939 he was sent to prison for three years for stealing more than £5,000 worth of jewellery, rings and fur from two properties in Park Lane and Mayfair.
The Recorder at the Old Bailey described him as the “mainspring of the conspiracy”, adding that “the way of the amateur criminal is hard, but the way of the professional is disastrous”. On hearing the verdict, his upstanding father, the diplomat and politician Herbert Hervey, wept in court.
Unlike some gentleman thieves, Victor needed the money. In 1937 he had declared bankruptcy, with debts of £123,000, more than £8 million in today’s money, having come unstuck trying to sell arms to both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Eventually his arms trading came good – he was one of Franco’s leading dealers – and he amassed a fortune estimated at £50 million
The eccentric stories continued. A couple arriving for a shooting weekend in Suffolk in the 1960s at Ickworth, the family seat, noticed Victor leaning from an upper window. As they drove nearer, he opened fire, forcing them to run for cover.
A family friend recalled passing the Bag O’Nails, a pub on Buckingham Palace Road, in London, where they were told Victor had “emptied a revolver into the ceiling”. He told a friend, Moira Lister, that he had shot two men in a mutiny whilst treasure-hunting on Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica.
A photo later surfaced of Victor, from the incident in Cocos Island, “standing with his foot on four dead bodies”. In 1979, six years before Victor died, he moved his family to Monte Carlo, vowing never to set foot in the UK again.
Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, by his first wife, Pauline; another son, Nicholas, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam; and three, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly.
Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, by his first wife, Pauline; another son, Nicholas, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam; and three, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly.
A school friend of John’s at Harrow, Jamie Spencer-Churchill, said that Victor “created the monster that John became”. Openly gay and hedonistic, John was a fixture of the British tabloids in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to a stream of reported incidents: opening a champagne fridge by firing a shotgun at it; dodging a traffic jam on the M11 by driving at 140mph on the hard shoulder; constant cocaine and heroin use.
A friend remembered 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 said. “You took whichever one you liked.” He was jailed twice on drugs charges and died in 1999, having lost Ickworth as well as the rest of his fortune. His half-brother Nicholas had died by suicide the year before.
Victoria became famous in the 1990s, the heiress-apparent to Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in the pantheon of witty aristocratic blonde party girls. Speaking about John in a Guardian interview in 2001, Lady Victoria Hervey described him as “evil”.
“What happened to him was just awful,” she added. “When you see someone lose everything, it puts you off. I mean he blew everything.”
In recent years she has not shied from controversy. A sometime girlfriend of Prince Andrew’s, she backed Ghislaine Maxwell’s remarks that the notorious photo of him with his arm around then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre was “fake”.
“At the end of the day he says he’s never met her and he’s always stood by that,” she said. “If you look at everything, even when they did settle [out of court]... he didn’t apologise because why would he apologise?”
More recently she has embraced conspiracy theories, saying in 2021 that the Covid vaccine was part of a play by Bill Gates “to depopulate the world”.
A playboy aristocrat who married three times and was nicknamed The Reptile, he did much to undo the work the Victorian Earls had done in making the Herveys respectable again.
Born in 1915, Victor went to Eton and Sandhurst, but was asked to leave the latter for bad behaviour. As a young man, he developed a penchant for theft, which led to his becoming the ringleader of a gang of jewellery robbers from well-to-do families who were known as the Mayfair Playboys.
This was the era of Raffles, the gentleman thief, but there was nothing civilised about some of their activities.
In December 1937, four of the gang were arrested for the violent robbery of a Cartier boss, whom they had lured to a hotel in Mayfair before coshing him and stealing £13,000 worth of diamond rings.
While Victor was not involved in that incident, and would complain people unfairly associated him with it, in 1939 he was sent to prison for three years for stealing more than £5,000 worth of jewellery, rings and fur from two properties in Park Lane and Mayfair.
The Recorder at the Old Bailey described him as the “mainspring of the conspiracy”, adding that “the way of the amateur criminal is hard, but the way of the professional is disastrous”. On hearing the verdict, his upstanding father, the diplomat and politician Herbert Hervey, wept in court.
Unlike some gentleman thieves, Victor needed the money. In 1937 he had declared bankruptcy, with debts of £123,000, more than £8 million in today’s money, having come unstuck trying to sell arms to both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Eventually his arms trading came good – he was one of Franco’s leading dealers – and he amassed a fortune estimated at £50 million
The eccentric stories continued. A couple arriving for a shooting weekend in Suffolk in the 1960s at Ickworth, the family seat, noticed Victor leaning from an upper window. As they drove nearer, he opened fire, forcing them to run for cover.
A family friend recalled passing the Bag O’Nails, a pub on Buckingham Palace Road, in London, where they were told Victor had “emptied a revolver into the ceiling”. He told a friend, Moira Lister, that he had shot two men in a mutiny whilst treasure-hunting on Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica.
A photo later surfaced of Victor, from the incident in Cocos Island, “standing with his foot on four dead bodies”. In 1979, six years before Victor died, he moved his family to Monte Carlo, vowing never to set foot in the UK again.
Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, by his first wife, Pauline; another son, Nicholas, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam; and three, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly.
Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, by his first wife, Pauline; another son, Nicholas, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam; and three, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly.
A school friend of John’s at Harrow, Jamie Spencer-Churchill, said that Victor “created the monster that John became”. Openly gay and hedonistic, John was a fixture of the British tabloids in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to a stream of reported incidents: opening a champagne fridge by firing a shotgun at it; dodging a traffic jam on the M11 by driving at 140mph on the hard shoulder; constant cocaine and heroin use.
A friend remembered 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 said. “You took whichever one you liked.” He was jailed twice on drugs charges and died in 1999, having lost Ickworth as well as the rest of his fortune. His half-brother Nicholas had died by suicide the year before.
Victoria became famous in the 1990s, the heiress-apparent to Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in the pantheon of witty aristocratic blonde party girls. Speaking about John in a Guardian interview in 2001, Lady Victoria Hervey described him as “evil”.
“What happened to him was just awful,” she added. “When you see someone lose everything, it puts you off. I mean he blew everything.”
In recent years she has not shied from controversy. A sometime girlfriend of Prince Andrew’s, she backed Ghislaine Maxwell’s remarks that the notorious photo of him with his arm around then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre was “fake”.
“At the end of the day he says he’s never met her and he’s always stood by that,” she said. “If you look at everything, even when they did settle [out of court]... he didn’t apologise because why would he apologise?”
More recently she has embraced conspiracy theories, saying in 2021 that the Covid vaccine was part of a play by Bill Gates “to depopulate the world”.
The shocking photographs and the aristocratic family cursed by violence
Claims made by Lady Victoria Hervey are awful in their own right, but the dynasty has been dogged by tragedy for hundreds of years
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