Constance Marten's family: The aristocrat's 'painful' eight year feud with her 'estranged' father - who also ran away

Aristocrat Constance Marten had been estranged from her family for a "painful" eight years before she went on the run - copying her father who disappeared himself years earlier.

Constance, known as “Toots” to friends, disappeared with her partner Mark Gordon and their newborn baby on January 7.

The pair went missing just two days after abandoning a burning car on the motorway in Bolton.

They travelled by taxi from Bolton to Liverpool, to Harwich in Essex, before heading to east London and finally Newhaven in Sussex, where they were seen near the ferry port on January 8.

The couple were arrested in Brighton on Monday amid a huge search for their missing baby.

Earlier this month her father Napier Marten released a heartfelt plea for his daughter to contact police.

At the time, he said: “Darling Constance, even though we remain estranged at the moment, I stand by, as I have always done and as the family has always done, to do whatever is necessary for your safe return to us.

“The past eight years have been beyond painful for all the family as well as your friends, as they must have been for you. And to see you so vulnerable again is testing in the extreme.

Constance Marten grew up at Crichel House in Dorset
geograph.org.uk

“Please Constance, find the courage to present yourself to the police as soon as possible.”

Constance was born in 1987 to Napier Constance and Virginie De Selliers and was brought up at Crichel House, which sits at the heart of a 5,000 acres of Dorset parkland.

It was once described by a historian as “so immensely enlarged that it has the appearance of a mansion of a prince, more than that of a country gentleman”.

The Georgian mansion has 50 cottages, four villages, a cricket club and an ornamental lake.

Napier inherited family home and a £115million fortune for his parents, and was famously a Page to Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1996, when Constance was nine-years-old, her father had a “awakening”, saying he felt “everything in my life materially was a completely empty shell”.

He later told how a voice in his head had told him to scrap the £115million family fortune, shave his head and fly to Australia.

Listening to the inner-voice, Napier fled the country.

While travelling, he claims to have had an out-of-body experience while standing on a cliff-top with a group of Aboriginal Australians.

In a now deleted interview on YouTube, Napier recalled several life-changing moments from the trip.

“I found myself looking down at my sleeping body,” he said of his out-of-body experience.

He also spoke about his encounter with whales that reportedly made him cry “almost nonstop” for seven days.

He later returned to the UK and reportedly lived in a lorry and trained in head message before later working as a tree surgeon.

Napier passed his estate on to his eldest son Max who sold the house and 400 acres of land in 2013 to Richard Chilton, an American hedge fund billionaire, for a reported £34million.

Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were arrested in Stanmer Villas in Brighton
GB News

Napier and his wife Virginie are thought to be divorced, with him moving to a home several miles from the Crichel estate and her reportedly re-marrying a man named Guy de Selliers.

On social media, Napier describes himself as a musician and Chairman of the board of the Mirthquake Foundation, which is involved with the culture and welfare of cetaceans.

Comments left on his social media posts includes questions about his whereabouts.

With one asking “Tod you look great, but where are you?”, while another reads “Where is this ? Your posts are always mysterious and left without captions”.

After being estranged from Constance for eight years, Napier then reached out to his daughter following her disappearance in a plea for her to return home.

Constance had enrolled onto an acting course at East 15 drama school in Essex but dropped out in 2016 when she started an “erratic” relationship with a man who is believed to be Mark Gordon.

Police are continuing their search of an area between Brighton and Newhaven to locate Constance’s missing baby who has not received medical attention since birth in January.