British Manor’s Centuries of Wear Leave Its Lord a Hefty Repair Bill

The trouble with an Elizabethan mansion that has been in the family for nearly 450 years is that it can start to look a little down-at-the-mouth without proper upkeep. But then you do a little stonework on the north wing here, some reupholstery in a state dining room there, and suddenly the 100-room house is eating up a noble purse.

It’s a real dilemma.

“Something’s always cropping up that needs repair,” lamented Alexander Thynn, a.k.a. the 7th Marquess of Bath.

Fortunately, Lord Bath had a few surplus heirlooms lying about the place: some Dutch Old Master paintings and 15th century manuscripts inherited from a minor branch of the family. He has decided to sell the art and antiques at a Christie’s auction in June that is expected to yield $20 million to $30 million for the preservation of his stately Longleat House here in Wiltshire.

“There were rather too many things to get all of them on exhibit, and it was decided it was better to get that value working for the house,” Thynn said.

This sounds a sensible solution from an aristocrat who is generally described as anything but sensible. More often, the 69-year-old is called an eccentric, a hedonist or, as a patron of the Bath Arms pub said, “an amiable nutter.” He is best known for keeping a series of more than 70 mistresses, whom he calls “wifelets,” and for covering the walls of Longleat’s private quarters with floor-to-ceiling murals that his brother, Christopher, once described as looking like “pornographic pizza.”

Thynn has agreed to an interview and tour of his residence ahead of the auction, and his visitors find him reclining on a daybed with a left-of-center daily newspaper. He rises quickly on bare feet, wearing violet velvet pants, a floral vest and a rumpled Guatemalan jacket. With long gray curls and a gold hoop earring, the nobleman looks part pirate, part Ken Kesey.

He fancies himself an artiste, although he laughingly acknowledges that he never quite made a name for himself as one. Thynn has dedicated his life to writing his autobiography and to painting portraits of himself, his lovers and royal ancestors, all of whom end up looking remarkably alike on canvases thick with oil paint.

His unfinished autobiography is a chronicle of a life spent chronicling a life. Already six volumes, it is titled “Strictly Private” and is available on the Internet on his Web site, https://www.lordbath.co.uk.

Thynn moves from a drawing room covered in murals of “the ages of man”--conception, innocence, adolescence, maturity and decay--to another series of murals he calls his “formative footprints.” The style is a kind of gloppy, indigestible Chagall, and they are sandwiched between self-portraits.

“So, what room is this?” a visitor asked politely. It seemed safer than commenting on the art, but Thynn looked confused before replying that the expanse was no room at all. “It is the southwest corridor.”

“So that’s the library, then?” the visitor said in a book-lined room.

“That’s the study. There are a number of libraries around with different names.”

Thynn describes the next murals of various pimps and predators as “facets of my own identity.”

“Here I allowed my paranoia to run riot with things that go bump in the night,” he said. Then, with a nod to genteel 1930s portraits of his father and mother, Henry Frederick Thynne and Daphne Vivian, he added, “And at the center of it all is one’s greatest paranoia, one’s parents.”

He means this as a joke, but his paintings reveal the pain provoked by a father who admired the Nazis and a mother who failed to appreciate her son’s art. Neighbors and newspaper clips tell the rest--a feud and bitter break with his brother Christopher, and a deep sadness for the youngest brother, Valentine, who hanged himself over the Bath Arms bar.

Thynn moves on to a spiral staircase bedecked with portraits of his mistresses. “I call this Bluebeard’s collection. The heads go nearly all the way up, but I fear I’ll die before I get to the top. It’s upsetting to me,” he said.

Then there is the billiard room, the four-room nursery, more corridors, dining rooms, rooms of familial kings and queens and genealogical charts, an erotic bedroom complete with rhino horns and orgiastic murals, and a penthouse suite in 21st century decor. It is a far cry from the tasteful treasures on display in the public rooms of Longleat, and from the 400 antiques to be sold at Christie’s to pay repair bills.

Longleat was built in 1568 and became the first stately home thrown open to the public in 1949 when Thynn’s father needed $1.5 million to pay taxes. Dad soon added a safari park and other attractions that drew about 400,000 visitors a year until foot-and-mouth disease shut down much of the British countryside last year. Longleat’s income fell dramatically, driving home the need for a more stable source of money.

Thynn grew up in another house on the 9,000-acre estate and spent holidays in what was then his grandfather’s mansion. He lived in the style to which the family was accustomed.

“We were brought up to regard ourselves as superior sort of people, without it ever getting spelled out precisely what that superiority entailed,” Thynn wrote in his autobiography.

“There was some vague idea about us all having class, as if it must be something perceptible, like the color of our blood literally being blue. But we were made aware how this was a delicate subject that we couldn’t discuss with others . . . because they didn’t have class, so they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about, and might even be offended if they tried,” he wrote.

“The importance of who I was, and of what I was going to become, was never too far from my mind. When I was 7, a couple of our footmen put that very question to me: perhaps for the reason that they knew damn well I wasn’t going to reply that I wanted to be an engine-driver, a soldier, or even a prime minister. I informed them, as indeed I had been told, that I was going to be the Marquess of Bath,” he wrote.

Thynn went to Eton and Oxford, served with the Life Guards Regiment and studied art in Paris. He moved into Longleat in 1953, became a hippie in the 1960s and married a Hungarian actress, Anna Gael, who spends most of her time in Paris. They have two children, and Thynn has a third child elsewhere.

He inherited Longleat from his father when the 6th Marquess of Bath died in 1992 and, according to press reports and locals at the pub, puts up several of his present and former mistresses in cottages on the estate.

“I was at the chiropractor’s recently when one of the wifelets came out and said to the assistant, ‘Put this on Lord Bath’s bill. Account No. 2,’ ” one of the pub patrons said. “No wonder he’s skint.”

Broke he clearly is not, but Thynn is careful. He switches off the lights as he leaves each room and says he lives a relatively modest life--relative to other aristocrats anyway.

He says he is sad to sell off some of the extra family treasures--the core collection cannot be sold under terms of a trusteeship--but is resigned that the trustees are doing the right thing.

“It was the correct thing to do, to use the accumulated wealth to preserve the property,” Thynn said.