In April 1940, John Henry Montagu Manners, the ninth Duke of Rutland, spent his final days working in the small rooms in the servants’ quarters of Belvoir Castle, where his family’s archives were housed. Although he spent most of his life carefully preserving his family’s history, the duke spent the end of his life expunging the family records of three specific time periods from his life. After his death, the duke’s son and heir, Charles, ordered the archive rooms sealed. The rooms and their contents remained untouched until they were reopened in 1999. Historian Catherine Bailey brings this story to light in her captivating new book The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess and a Family Secret.
While Bailey was researching a book on World War I, she came across some curious gaps in the family’s archives and began to question what was missing. Why would someone have removed those specific sections from the family’s otherwise meticulous records? She worked steadfastly, researching and piecing together the scandalous family secrets that John Manners worked so hard to hide. In this case, the truth sounds like the plot of an epic BBC miniseries, and the answers she finds are more dramatic than most fiction. The Secret Rooms is part Downton Abbey, part Gothic mystery and entirely irresistible. This story is narrative nonfiction at its best.