Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Esher, and an autobiographical novel. In 1993 Lees-Milne declined a CBE in the New Year's Honours list, having felt that a knighthood was his due. Personal life Lees-Milne was visiting Diana, Lady Mosley (Diana Mitford) in December 1936 when King Edward VIII abdicated. His purpose was to examine the 17th-century house that she and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley were renting. He wrote later how he and Diana (her husband was in London) had listened to the King's broadcast abdication speech with tears running down their faces. He had been a lover of her brother Tom Mitford when they were at Eton College together and was devastated when Tom was killed in action in Burma in 1945. Lees-Milne was friendly with many prominent intellectual and social figures of his day, including Nancy Mitford, Diana Mitford, Harold Nicolson (a former lover, of whom he wrote a two-volume biography), Clementine Hudson (a Banbury aristocrat), and Cyril Connolly. In 1951, Lees-Milne married Alvilde, Viscountess Chaplin, née Bridges, a prominent gardening and landscape expert. Both were bisexual. Alvilde is said to have had lesbian affairs with Vita Sackville-West, Winnaretta Singer and others. Alvilde Lees-Milne died in 1994. James Lees-Milne died in a hospital at Tetbury on 28 December 1997. The ashes of both were scattered in the grounds of Essex House. Residences After 13 years at Alderley Grange, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, and a brief spell in Bath, he and Alvilde lived after 1974 at Essex House on the Badminton estate, also in Gloucestershire, while he worked most days in William Thomas Beckford's library at Lansdown Crescent. While at Badminton he began a feud with his landlord, the 10th Duke of Beaufort, whose foxhunting and autocratic manner appalled him. After Alvilde Lees-Milne's death, however, the Beauforts offered to let him to live at Essex House rent-free. Lees-Milne was touched, but valued his independence, had the income to pay rent and did not accept the offer, nor that of his friends, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, to live as a permanent guest at Chatsworth. As a Trustee of the Bath Preservation Trust, he became a Founding Trustee of its Beckford's Tower Trust, founded in 1977 to maintain the building and its collection for public benefit. In popular culture A series of three plays inspired by Lees-Milne's diaries – Sometimes into the Arms of God, The Unending Battle and What England Owes