‘I dumped Camilla’s cousin because he ISN’T a gentleman’

He is embroiled in one of Britain’s longest-running divorce cases which has so far played out in five different courts and before 12 judges.

Scottish aristocrat Charles Villiers has spent eight years warring with his estranged wife, Emma, in a legal battle over maintenance payments, in the hope that he could remarry the new love of his life.

But now the 58-year-old, a distant cousin of the Duchess of Cornwall, has been dumped by his fiancée, Heidi Innes, who says she has fallen out of love with after the ‘scales fell from her eyes’.

It is only 18 months since the couple, in a mischievous show of defiance to his estranged wife, pledged their devotion to each other before close friends and family in a ‘union ceremony’ in the garden of their home in East Lothian.

Wearing a white summer dress, as the genteel gathering toasted the happy couple standing before them, they even had a two-tier cake on a stand embossed with the letters ‘H and C’ and adorned with scented pale roses.

But last night, Miss Innes, 45, an opera singer who has been with Mr Villiers for nearly five years, said: ‘It’s over for good. I’m glad I didn’t marry him officially. He’s not the man I thought he was all this time.

‘He’s supposed to be a gentleman but I don’t think he has behaved very well.’

The couple were forced to leave their rented cottage in Tyninghame in November after a tribunal ordered them to pay £18,000 in rent arrears, run up during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Miss Innes lays the blame for the arrears squarely with Mr Villiers, alleging he initially promised to pay the rent, while she covered other bills.

When the owner of the property pursued them for the sum owed last year, Miss Innes used most of her personal savings to repay the debt.

But she says Mr Villiers had promised to pay back his half-share as soon as practical but, to date, has not paid back a penny.

Last night, she said: ‘I’ve told him there is no future for us and that the scales have dropped from my eyes. I feel I’ve been used and I don’t think I will ever see my money again.. I think he has acted like a chancer.’

Just a few weeks ago, Mr Villiers begged judges once more during the latest court hearing to allow his ’empty shell of a marriage’ to be ‘finally’ ended.

The lengthy dispute between Mr and Mrs Villiers, who during their 18-year marriage lived in a Georgian mansion near Dumbarton, Dunbartonshire, has racked up huge legal fees.

Mr Villiers has publicly accused his estranged wife of ‘trying it on’ as a divorce tourist because judges south of the Border are seen to be ‘more generous’.

Following the end of the marriage in 2012, Mrs Villiers moved to London, where she applied for maintenance in the English courts and staked a claim on her husband’s half share of a £3.5 million family trust fund.

In 2015 the High Court in London ordered him to pay his estranged wife £5,500 a month but he refused. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled she could proceed with her application for maintenance in England.

Mr Justice Mostyn, of the High Court’s family division, ruled last month that Mr Villiers is heavily in debt and should not be required to pay maintenance.

The judge acknowledged in his ruling that the case had hurt Villiers’s finances and ‘attracted much lurid publicity. That has been a product of an exceptionally strong mutual antipathy. This has been a case where love has turned to hatred to an extraordinary degree.’

The divorce is expected to be settled at Dumbarton sheriff court, where his lawyers hope to argue that his marriage should be annulled without order of a financial settlement.

Speaking previously of his devotion to Miss Innes, a talented mezzosoprano whom he met in Edinburgh in March 2017, he said: ‘I feel very fortunate to have met lovely Heidi who is so full of the joy of life. I’m very happy.’

But last night, Miss Innes said: ‘I know he’s gone through hell with this divorce and I’ve watched the toll it has taken on him and his finances. However, somewhere deep down inside he feels privileged, and I just think ‘Who the Hell do you think you are?’

She added that she had tried to make the relationship work, despite him ‘owing her a large sum of money and constant rowing over his failure to pay her back’.

Following their departure from East Lothian, they moved to Budapest, in Hungary, where she had bought a small flat in 2020 with a view to it becoming a holiday let.

She said: ‘He had nowhere else to go so I agreed that he could come with me to Budapest.

I knew I was already feeling by then that I had fallen out of love with him. It was confirmed to me one day when I was walking along a bridge in Budapest with my dog and I caught someone’s eye.

He stopped to take photographs and I started chatting and I felt an attraction. I immediately thought “oh oh” and realised that I no longer saw Charles in the same light. I saw him as a much older man and not someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.’

Last night, despite a number of attempts to contact him, Mr Villiers, who is understood to be still living in Budapest, was unavailable.