Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

Catherine Bailey

House of privilege, riches and secrets...

 

Wentworth is today a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just a hundred years ago is was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams - an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining.

 

Black Diamonds tells of the Fitzwilliams' spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumours of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism; a tragic connection to the Kennedys; violent death; mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape.