English aristocrat, politician and socialite William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp was BOTD in 1872. The eldest son of the 6th Earl Beauchamp, he was raised at Madresfield Court in Worchestershire, educated at Eton College and Oxford University, inheriting the earldom after his father’s death in 1891. He became mayor of Worcester and was appointed governor of New South Wales in Australia. A star of the Liberal Party, he became a senior cabinet minister, supporting workmen’s compensation, social housing, a minimum wage and reduced working hours for miners. In 1902, he married Lettice Grosvenor, sister of the Duke of Westminster, with whom he had seven children. As Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, he had access to Walmer Castle in Kent, where he threw orgiastic parties with a his aristocratic friends and working-class men. In 1930 he visited Australia, accompanied by his attractive young valet/lover. A local newspaper quipped “Lord Beauchamp deserves great credit for his taste in footmen”, igniting a scandal. His brother-in-law (and political nemesis) the Duke of Westminster engaged private detectives to gather evidence about Beauchamp’s sex life, insisting to King George V that he be arrested. (In response, the King reputedly said “I thought people like that always shot themselves”). Beauchamp fled to Germany, dissuaded from suicide by his homosexual son Hugh. His wife had a nervous breakdown at the news and sued for divorce, citing Beauchamp as “a man of perverted sexual practices, [who] has committed acts of gross indecency with male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy.” Beauchamp’s children refused to testify against him, and continued to visit him in exile abroad. Meanwhile, Westminster worked to make the family social outcasts, writing to Beauchamp “Dear Bugger-in-Law, You got what you deserved. Yours, Westminster”. Following King George VI’s accession to the throne in 1937, Beauchamp’s arrest warrant was lifted. He returned to England, painted his wife’s image out of a fresco in their personal chapel and threw her bust into the moat. He died in 1938, aged 66. His son Hugh was the classmate and lover of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford University, and one of the inspirations for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, while William was the probable model for Brideshead‘s withered patriarch Lord Marchmain.