History provides ample proof that blue blood offers no immunity from the failings of the ordinary man or woman. And yet Constance Marten’s descent from lady to tramp was as dramatic as it was sudden.
Her first 25 years comprised country pursuits and a private education, followed by foreign travels and the sort of champagne-fuelled antics that saw her crowned one of the society bible Tatler’s ‘Babes of the Month’.
Posing in a tasselled, 1920s-style flapper dress, the then 21-year-old looked every inch the trust-fund heiress. Fast forward to her arrest in 2023, and Marten was scavenging for food in bins, wearing a coat padded with stuffing ripped from an old sofa.
Police described her as smelling like a ‘homeless’ person.
At least she was still alive.
The corpse of her baby daughter, Victoria, whose grandfather was a page of honour to Queen Elizabeth II, had been dumped in a shed in a Lidl bag-for-life. On top of the body was an empty beer can and the discarded packaging of an egg mayonnaise and cress sandwich.
And, as was revealed during the court case, Victoria wasn’t the only child lost to the family. Since meeting Mark Gordon a decade ago, Marten has had four other children taken into care.
Mementoes of them were found among the belongings the couple abandoned when their Peugeot 206 caught fire on the M61 and they went on the run.
From the dock of the Old Bailey, Constance Marten (pictured in April 2012) repeatedly insisted that she and Mark Gordon were good parents
Commenting on this image on Facebook in 2012, Marten asks: ‘Am I trying to imitate Daffy Duck?’
There, carefully packed in a Tupperware box, were four used babies’ dummies.
They were not the only possessions the couple left behind that night, and these provide an extraordinary insight into their shambolic life.
For example, hidden among piles of paperwork was a bailiff’s letter, stating that they owed more than £25,000. The pair had been evicted from multiple properties, leaving behind unpaid bills and piles of rubbish.
One rented home had a collapsed ceiling, holes punched through the walls and faeces on the floor. Empty takeaway boxes littered the place.
Such a chaotic lifestyle might, typically, be associated with substance abuse. But other than one suggestion by a social worker that cannabis was being smoked at the family home – Marten claimed it was ‘herbal sage’ – no evidence was heard of drug-taking or even excessive drinking.
And while both claimed benefits – during legal argument it was revealed this included benefits for a child Marten was no longer even caring for – they were not short of cash.
The beneficiary of a trust fund, Marten was worth £2.4million, receiving a stipend of up to £3,400 a month from C Hoare & Co, the UK’s oldest private bank.
Also in the car was a bag containing hats and a wig – disguises, one imagines, given that in the past Marten had posed as an Irish traveller when trying to throw the authorities off her scent.
Marten’s grandmother, Mary Sturt (fifth from left) with the future Queen (fourth from left) and Princess Margaret (second from left) in 1935
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On that occasion she had been pregnant with her first child, living with Gordon in a fetid tent littered with bin-bags of damp clothes and bottles filled with their own urine.
The authorities’ concerns about the new parents were heightened when Gordon assaulted two female police officers in hospital just hours after the birth of the child. They learned he was a convicted sex offender who had served 20 years in prison for a violent rape when living in America.
Their fears escalated further still when Marten was pregnant with their third child and ‘fell’ 18ft from the window of their first-floor flat, rupturing her spleen and having to spend eight days in hospital. The couple’s two other children were in the flat at the time.
Gordon, the court heard, would not let paramedics into the house and was suspected of pushing her out of the window. However, Marten insisted she had fallen while adjusting a television aerial.
A family judge would later rule that it represented an incident of domestic violence, a catalyst for proceedings that would eventually lead to all their children being put up for adoption.
One of the reasons for that decision was ‘the risk of harm to the children being exposed to serious physical violence between the parents’.
All of which begs a number of questions.
Why did Marten give up the life she was born into – isolating herself from friends and family – to set up home with a violent convicted criminal 13 years her senior?
Constance Marten’s aunt, Victoria Marten (right), with Princess Anne in 1960
And why, when with him, did she adopt a lifestyle that gave social services no option but to take her children into care?
Her family are in little doubt about where the blame lies – Mark Gordon.
While her parents are long divorced, both are said to hold him responsible for what happened to their daughter and their grandchildren, describing the moment she met him as a ‘cliff edge’.
‘Gordon is the most vile, vile individual,’ one family friend told me, describing him as both a ‘controlling predator’ and an ‘odious creep’.
He added: ‘Constance was the most beautiful, fun, lovely girl you could imagine. She was clearly quite a catch for him and he clearly got his claws into her.
‘She has had the money and the wherewithal to settle down to family life like anyone else. Instead, she has preferred what is effectively a life on the run.’
As we reveal elsewhere in this newspaper, some have suggested that Marten’s time spent as a teenager with an evangelical Christian church in Nigeria could have left her vulnerable to manipulation. Its controversial leader, TB Joshua, has since been accused of running a cult where he mentally and sexually abused his ‘disciples’.
That Marten and Gordon’s relationship was unusual there can be no doubt.
Constance Marten had a gilded upbringing and the brightest of futures, but chose a life of isolation and squalor
When the pair were arrested, the Mail has learned, police recovered a dictaphone with hours of recordings made by Marten.
On it she chanted phrases such as ‘I am a strong, powerful woman,’, ‘I love Mark’ and ‘Mark is my maje [South American slang for “man”]’.
Gordon’s family see things very differently. They say that Marten fell in love but that her relatives did not approve and tried to separate them.
‘They are making it like Mark has kidnapped her and taken her off and that is not the way,’ said a close relative. ‘I feel like they do not think he is the right class for her. She is sticking by her man and wants to be left alone.’
It was a point expanded upon by Marten in her own evidence.
During both trials she claimed that she had long-standing grievances with her family, who had cut off her funds and employed private detectives to track and harry them.
‘I had to escape my family because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and they wouldn’t allow me to have children with my husband,’ she told the court. ‘They’ll do anything to erase that child from the family line, which is what they ended up doing.’
She went on to say that having spoken out about ‘severe abuse’ by a family member, she had been accused of having children to ‘sell on the black market’ and of being a drug addict.
Marten as an infant with her mother, Virginie
Her all-powerful family, she claimed, then colluded with social services to have her children taken into care. It all meant that when Marten had her fifth baby, she was determined the same fate would not befall the child.
What is also abundantly clear is that Marten is no pushover. She told police she was ‘strongminded’ and that Gordon was her ‘soulmate’.
Detectives who investigated the case admit to being baffled by the ‘power dynamic’ between the couple.
Marten, they say, was clearly the more intelligent and articulate of the two. In court, she seemed delighted to see Gordon, excitedly talking to him, exchanging notes and even hugging him in the dock. Further, sources say that the prison experience has left Marten largely unfazed.
Since her arrest, she has been held at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, home to a number of high-profile prisoners including Lucy Letby and Islamic State supporter Safiyya Shaikh, who plotted to bomb St Paul’s Cathedral.
Soon after her arrival there, a fellow inmate asked Marten what she was ‘in’ for.
‘What the f*** has it got to do with you?’ she replied. She also stood out because of her ‘posh’ accent and frequent demands for crossword and colouring books.
In the midst of her latest trial Marten took the highly unusual step of authoring an article for an online publication dedicated to women prisoners.
Marten embraces the New Age vibe at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2012
In it she moaned that the daily transport arrangements to and from court were so poor she had been left tired and without time to consult her lawyers, denying her the right to a fair trial.
While inmates at Bronzefield have their own ensuite cells, complete with toilet and shower, the surroundings are a stark contrast to those of Marten’s upbringing.
She is the granddaughter of Toby Marten, a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy and equerry to George VI. His wife, Mary Anna, also had close links to the Royal Family, attending the Brownie pack at Buckingham Palace alongside Princess Margaret.
Her godmother was the late Queen Mother.
The couple lived at Crichel House, an 18th century Dorset manor house that featured in the 1996 film of Jane Austen’s Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow.
They had five daughters and one son, Napier Marten, who was a page to Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1986 Napier married Belgian-born Virginie Camu, daughter of the Marchesa d’Ayala-Valva, and the following year Constance, the first of four children, was born.
Photos from the time hint at an idyllic upbringing. In one a curly-haired Marten poses with her mother and a goose.
In 2009, she posted ‘Classic Toots’ on a photograph of her holding an iced coffee in the Egyptian desert
‘Those were the days of naked picnics, siestas amid hay bales and tractor scoops,’ she later wrote in a caption beside the picture on her Facebook page.
But in 1996, when Marten was just nine years old, her father left the family.
While recollections differ as to how long he was absent – six months or six years, according to conflicting versions – it signalled the start of a bitter matrimonial break-up which inevitably had an impact on the children.
‘It was like a guillotine coming down on his relationship with his family,’ is how one friend put it. Guided by a voice in his head, Napier had chosen to take himself to .
‘Even with small children, I had to leave the house and go pretty much overnight,’ he would later say.
He added that, despite ‘great privilege’, he felt his life was ‘an empty shell’.
He first flew to the Hawaiian island of Maui where he shaved his head as ‘two fingers’ to his old existence.
An encounter with whales made him cry ‘almost non-stop’ for a week, and in he said he had an out-of-body experience with indigenous people on a clifftop.
After eventually returning to Britain, Mr Marten worked as a chef before training in craniosacral therapy, a form of head massage. Now aged 66, he works as a tree surgeon and lives in a converted shipping container on a smallholding near Salisbury.
As for the family inheritance, that was split between him and his siblings following the death of their mother in 2010. A sale of the contents of the house raised £12.5million.
Then three years later they sold the house and its land to an American financier for an unknown price. It had originally been put on the market for £100million.
Discretionary trust funds were also set up for the grandchildren. These provided Marten with both a regular income and the potential for additional funds on request, something she was not shy of doing.
Indeed, almost £50,000 was paid into Marten’s bank in the five months leading up to her disappearance – including £13,500 for camera equipment and £15,500 for a new car, neither of which were ever purchased.
Sources close to the case have questioned why the trustees released the money, which she then used to fund her time on the run. Hundreds of pounds were spent on taxis alone as the pair criss-crossed the country.
Back to Marten’s childhood, and, in their father’s absence, she and her siblings were raised by their mother.
Two years after Napier left she married Guy de Selliers, a wealthy investment banker with homes in London and Dorset. Mrs de Selliers, 65, later trained as a psychotherapist.
Marten complained that her wealthy family didn’t like Gordon, and claimed they used their wealth and influence to get social services to intervene
She was present in court throughout her daughter’s first trial, but, like her ex-husband, she is said to have had little contact with her for years.
Constance, meanwhile, attended the £30,000-a-year former St Mary’s Roman Catholic boarding school for girls, near Shaftesbury.
Nicknamed ‘Toots’ after one of her younger brothers failed to properly pronounce her name, she posted a school photo on Facebook showing her pulling a face as more demure classmates looked on. She captioned it: ‘Mrs McSiggan said she was going to edit my face out and charge my mother for the editing! Furious!’
It was typical behaviour – friends say that from a young age Marten was one of life’s ‘rebels’, always challenging authority.
Other photos from the time show her enjoying country house dinner parties with family and friends, attending teenage parties and clay-pigeon shooting.
Having left school, Marten would travel extensively.
In 2006 this included months spent at a Nigerian church run by the self-proclaimed prophet TB Joshua. Some family members believe that the experience had a profound impact on her, creating vulnerabilities that could have left her open to manipulation later in life.
But after returning from Africa she quickly resumed her former life, graduating with a 2.1 in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies from Leeds University in 2012.
While there, she spent a year in Egypt and also featured in Tatler, posing under the name Toots Marten.
Her answers to a Q&A interview suggest her life of privilege continued unabated.
Asked to name her favourite place, she said it was the ‘top of the Matterhorn, which I climbed this summer’.
As for her ‘best party’, she replied: ‘Viscount Cranbourne’s party in Dorset – the theme was the Feast of Bacchus. There was a gambling tent and bunches of grapes hanging from the wall. It was like a debauched feast from ancient Greece.’
Photos on social media showed her traversing the globe, from the Middle East to America, where she attended the week-long bacchanalian Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.
Workwise, she showed an interest in photography and journalism, completing a journalism course in 2014 before deciding to train as an actor. Using her trust-fund money, she signed up with the East 15 drama school in Essex, commuting there by car from east London.
‘She was just beautiful, full of life, full of kindness … and she was very, very talented,’ a classmate said.
But in 2016, almost without warning, she dropped out of the course – and out of the lives of her friends and family.
Marten pictured during a police interview in an image released today
The reason? Mark Gordon, whom Marten had met a year or so earlier.
To say it was a ‘sliding-doors moment’ is an understatement.
‘I met him in a shop in east London selling incense and stuff,’ Marten would say of the moment their paths crossed.
‘I knew the shopkeeper there and someone had left their handbag, and she said, “Can you watch that guy over there [Gordon] and make sure everything is all right?” while she ran to give it back.
‘We laughed about it and went for coffee. We were good friends at the start and then we went travelling.’
While it’s easy to see what might have attracted unemployed Gordon to this vivacious heiress, the reverse is harder to fathom.
One thing is now clear – at that point she had no knowledge of his dark past, only learning he was a convicted rapist after she gave birth to their first child.
The upshot of that fateful first meeting was that Marten’s life changed dramatically. Soon after, the pair travelled to Peru where they ‘married’ one another. In her evidence, Marten admitted the ceremony was not recognised in the UK.
Sources have told the Mail that while there, the couple are believed to have taken part in ceremonies involving the hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca.
The flimsy tent the couple were staying in while on the run with their baby
The substance can be legally consumed in Peru. Traditionally used by indigenous cultures, ayahuasca has acquired a reputation amongst New Age individuals for its ability to provide insight and self-awareness in those who consume it.
Prince Harry revealed he had taken ayahuasca to treat mental-health issues that he traces back to the death of his mother.
Adverts for Peruvian ayahuasca marriage packages proliferate online and can cost as little as £1,500 per couple.
On returning to the UK, Marten made it very clear that everything had changed.
‘Completely out of the blue, everyone in Constance’s life, friends, family, everyone, suddenly got a text from her saying she had chosen to live her life in a different way,’ the family friend said.
‘She said that it was her decision and hers alone, freely made and she did not want anyone to try and contact her again, not to try and meet up with her, and she wanted everyone to respect that, for better or worse.’
The couple started to move between short-term rentals and Airbnbs, often failing to pay the rent and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.
At one point they moved into a campervan, but even then managed to rack up some £6,000 in parking fines and summonses for driving offences.
Marten, 38, and Gordon, 50, dumped their baby in a soiled nappy inside a Lidl bag for life
‘They had been sent to her old home address,’ said a source. ‘There were hundreds of them. Some showed Constance claiming to be driving when Gordon, who I don’t think can drive, was clearly pictured at the wheel.’
Alerted to what was happening, the trust provided funds for a solicitor to handle the case while private detectives were hired to track her down.
While Marten would maintain that she was continually harried by private investigators, in fact her parents hired them on only a handful of occasions to locate their daughter, and not at all when she went on the run at the end, as she would claim in court.
A showdown in a cafe in East Anglia ensued, and allegedly ended with Gordon threatening Napier Marten before leaving abruptly with his lover.
By then Marten’s family had obtained the shocking details of Gordon’s criminal record in the United States. ‘No wonder he always wanted to keep her moving on,’ said the source.
Fears grew that Gordon was controlling every aspect of Marten’s life – including her phone and email communications. Message after message requested more money, or for possessions belonging to Marten to be sold.
Months after meeting, Marten became pregnant with the first of five children the couple would have together.
But what should have been the happiest of times for them would quickly turn into a bitter battle with the authorities.
Marten would later claim that the state ‘stole’ her children from them.
A court sketchy of Constance Marten appearing at the Old Bailey in London
But documents released by the Family Court, details of which are published in the Daily Mail today, reveal that the couple’s behaviour left social services with no option but to intervene.
As a result, in early 2022 all four children were put up for adoption. Undeterred, within a matter of months Marten was pregnant again. And this time she was determined to evade social services.
The first the authorities knew of baby number five – Victoria – was when they found the couple’s car abandoned on a motorway with a placenta in the back of it.
Marten said they had intended to bury the bloody 1lb organ and grow a tree on top of it.
She also claimed that the vehicle, and others they owned, had been purposefully tampered with ‘on [the] order of her family’, who also, she said, placed GPS trackers on them.
According to Marten’s evidence from the first trial, the plan had been for her to nurture Victoria for up to six months and then hand her over to a carer who could ‘bring her up without social services’ involvement.
She would then move abroad with Gordon before the carer brought Victoria to them.
In essence, Marten would find a stranger on Gumtree to look after the baby and then smuggle her abroad. She somehow believed that she could get a fake passport for the child in the name of the ‘recruited’ nanny.
Mark Gordon in a newly released mugshot
Instead, they ended up living in a tent in freezing conditions on the South Downs, an attempt to ‘lie low away from prying eyes’. And it was in that tent, on January 9, 2023, that Marten claims Victoria died after she fell asleep with the baby cocooned inside her jacket.
‘I took her out of my jacket. I believe I woke Mark up and said “Baby, something’s wrong”,’ she told the court. ‘He didn’t believe me and we tried to resuscitate her, but… she wasn’t alive.’
The corpse was placed in the bag-for-life, so that it could be taken with them when they moved camp.
Days later, Marten bought petrol from a garage with the apparent intention of cremating the body, something that ultimately she could not bring herself to do.
‘I did nothing but show her love,’
Marten would insist of her treatment of the child, refusing as ever to admit doing anything wrong.
Pushed on the wisdom of living in a tent with a newborn in the midst of a British winter, she argued that Bedouin children are raised in the outdoors.
‘Jesus survived in a barn, didn’t he?’ she added.
He did indeed. But, then, the South Downs in January are not Bethlehem. And Gordon was no Joseph, nor Marten anything like Mary.
For a special episode of the Mail’s award-winning The Trial series breaking down the Constance Marten verdict, search for ‘The Trial of Constance Marten & Mark Gordon’ now, wherever you get your podcasts.