Wentworth is today a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just a hundred years ago it 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 way that literally ripped apart the local landscape.
The demise of Wentworth and the Fitzwilliams is a riveting account of aristocratic decline and fall, set in the grandest house in England.