That is the cast but - no, not really - for the servants should not be forgotten. Henry Skipwith (who survived), Laurence Fitz Patrick (who did not), Giles Browning (who went to Tyburn) and .... well, with orgies, it is sometimes difficult to count.

The facts began to emerge in an odd way. Lord Audley, in the autumn of 1630, laid a formal complaint before the Privy Council alleging that his father planned to disinherit him. He stated that the Earl had given property worth £12,000 (quite a lot of money then) to Henry Skipwith, a servant, and that the Earl encouraged Skipwith and other servants to "service" the Countess. More was to be revealed. At the trial, the Earl was accused of sodomy with two other male servants, one of whom he had helped to rape his Countess. The Earl and the two servants were executed, but Henry Skipwith was not charged, even though his name featured many times in the evidence, not only as the Countess's regular lover, but also as the lover, with the Earl's connivance, of Lady Audley, then 15 years old, and also as one who slept regularly with the Earl.

In her book 'A House in Great Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2^nd Earl of Castlehaven,' Professor Cynthia B. Herrup, the author, argues that the Earl's death sentence was owed more to his dismantling of the social barriers of the time than to his sexual preferences. In a society in which so much still depended on the inheritance of land, privilege and obligations, such a flagrant flouting of its principles, especially in respect of the Earl's evident willingness to accept any offspring of the Countess as being his own, could not be countenanced. A measure of the horror it generated may be seen in the way in which Sir Bernard Burke sanitized the situation:

"MERVYN TOUCHET, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven and 12th Lord Audley. This nobleman being accused of certain high crimes, and ....... thereupon arraigned, had sentence of death passed upon him, and was executed accordingly on Tower Hill, 14 May 1631."