When once asked just how he happened to become the sort of chap he is, 41-year-old John Robert Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, airily replied: "I wasn't raised to be a gentleman, you know." Of all Britain's cash-strapped peers whom death and taxes have forced to open their estates to the public, none has done so with such tradition-shattering flamboyance as the duke. On the 3,000 acres of Woburn Park, just 40 miles from London, and in the gold-and-damask rooms of Woburn Abbey, things go on these days that would have made the first twelve Dukes of...
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