By Claudia Joseph for MailOnline. Gold digger: Jamila M'Barek, third wife of the Earl of Shaftesbury was jailed for 20 years for murdering her husband. So when he fled to the French Riviera and, in , he married a gold-digging prostitute, second son Nick despaired of ever restoring the proud Shaftesbury reputation. But there is one final task Nick has deemed vital if he is to resurrect the Shaftesbury reputation.
My father. Technically, she is the Dowager Countess, because Dinah, my wife, is the Countess. But she should not even have that. That to me says it all about the type of person she is. She pretended she was pregnant, which was a great card to play. You know, the old trick. So they married, and it was all a complete lie. Then it was just one thing after another really. She came to St Giles House and wanted to see everything.
That would have been quite a reality check for her, this fallen-down house. Those are in trust for the children. He was beaten and strangled and his body dumped in a ditch. The 7th Earl Lord Shaftesbury was the renowned 19th Century social reformer and philanthropist, who fought for the abolition of slavery. But his fall from grace and untimely death brought the title into disrepute. He inherited the estate in , when it was suffering a slow decline after a run of death duties, and spent the next 40 years trying to save it, spending the family fortune in the process and turning to alcohol to cope with the stress.
Restoring the legacy: Nick Ashley-Cooper, the new Earl of Shaftesbury, is reclaiming the family's reputation and restoring the ancestral pile in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. In he divorced his second wife Christina, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador in West Germany, and fled the country, leaving behind his four children, Anthony, Nick, their stepsister Cecilia, an attorney in New York, and stepbrother Fred, a TV producer.
I think his way was just denial, you know, bury it with everything else. Dubbed a playboy, he was, in reality, a lonely man. That November, Nick received a call to say his father had disappeared. Her sentence was reduced on appeal to 20 years. It was because she was going to inherit all this land and she felt that if he was going to divorce her, she was going to get far less.
