John Howard was directly descended from both King John and Edward I, and Suffolk liked to joke that he was “the last of the Plantagenets and the real King of England”. He was proud of his family history, the House of Howard having been founded by John Howard, who was created Duke of Norfolk by Richard III (with whom he was slain at the Battle of Bosworth) in 1483. At the time of his birth he was styled Viscount Andover. Michael John James George Robert Howard was born on March 27 1935, the eldest of three sons of Charles Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk, and Mimi, née Forde Pigott, a Chicago-born ballet dancer. Though whether I was ever as wild as him I couldn’t say. Suffolk admitted that he and the character had followed similar paths: “Both of us had our youth, but settled down in the end.

None the less, Jilly Cooper has recalled that whenever Suffolk phoned her he would announce: “It’s Rupert here,” insisting, when she reminded him there were two more: “Yes, but I’m the real one.” He was, she said “all the best of Rupert, but without the awful parts”.

The colourful, thrice-married Lord Suffolk, who once featured on a Nigel Dempster list of the country’s most prominent playboys, told Peterborough that he had been disappointed to find that he was not the only prototype for one of the most notorious cads in popular literature: “I suppose I realised, once I had actually read Riders, that it couldn’t really have been just me. She was careful to add, however, that Rupert’s “s-tiness” was entirely her own invention. “They were a wildly dashing and exciting group,” Jilly Cooper told the Telegraph’s Peterborough column in 2002, “and their bravery and charisma were the essential elements of Rupert’s character.” The character, by her account, was inspired by three men, all friends in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire – Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, the former husband of the Duchess of Cornwall David Somerset, the 11th Duke of Beaufort – and Suffolk. The 21st Earl of Suffolk, who has died aged 87, succeeded his father at the age of six and described his career in Who’s Who as “owns 5,000 acres” his reticence was, perhaps understandable, since he was one of the models for Jilly Cooper’s hard-riding serial seducer Rupert Campbell-Black, but it hardly did justice to his achievement in creating, at his family seat, Charlton Park, near Malmesbury, one of the finest and most beautifully cared-for estates in England.Ĭharming, spirited and always entertaining company, “Mickey” Suffolk loved the good life and was delighted to be associated with Rupert Campbell-Black, who first bounded into the pages of fiction in Jilly Cooper’s novel Riders.

Jilly cooper riders series