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‘Lady Astor’s back.’ In the silence of the main hall at Cliveden, now a hotel, this snippet of understairs gossip hangs for just a second in the air, then disappears before I can catch the intonation. Excited? Nervous? Indifferent? Puzzled? Simply reading the guest list for lunch? Does the cleaner, waitress or under-manager responsible for this sotto-voce broadcast even know which Lady Astor she is talking about?

Cliveden, this most famous – and twice this century notorious – of English stately homes, is today a shrine to its most celebrated inhabitant, Nancy, Lady Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. That was back in 1919, but in the timeless opulence of the wood-panelled hall decades and even centuries merge. In such a self-consciously impressive place, it is hardly a challenge to imagine the redoubtable Nancy sweeping in, all long skirts, fur collars and button boots, barking at her servants in the Virginian drawl that she never lost after almost a lifetime on the British side of the Atlantic, and greeting the houseguests assembled for one of the gatherings of what was mistakenly labelled the ‘Cliveden set’ of Nazi appeasers in the late 1930s.

Yet the Cliveden visitors’ book was far more eclectic than that. In the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s kings, prime ministers, world leaders and Hollywood stars came for the weekend to Cliveden to be entertained by this witty, sharp and unfailingly direct woman. Edward VII, Franklin Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin all fielded Nancy Astor’s barbs and bouquets over feasts in the ornate French dining room which once graced Madame de Pompadour’s chateau near Paris. Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to London in the 1930s, brought his brood to stay at Cliveden, linking across decades and thousands of miles one Camelot with another.

As if on cue, Lady Astor arrives. Not Nancy but Bronwen, her successor as mistress of this Palladian mansion which peers down imperiously from its hilltop over the Thames. As she comes through the main doors, she hesitates for a beat before she meets my eyes and walks over to the plush but anonymous hotel settee near the open fire. Later, when more relaxed, she admits that she had stopped in a lay-by near the main entrance to collect her thoughts and pray so that she could walk calmly into her old home. ‘I always used to do it before I lived here and was visiting – as a preparation to face my future mother-in-law.’

Nancy and Bronwen, both Lady Astors, overlapped for less than four years. Bronwen arrived in October 1960 as the third wife of Nancy’s son and heir, Bill. Nancy died in May 1964. Theirs was neither a long-lived nor a close friendship. They could hardly even be described as friends. Bronwen sought to placate her mother-in-law, who was unfailingly critical of everything she did. In her declining years Nancy was not the force she had once been, her wit extinguished and replaced by a certain brutality. Living mainly in London in exile from Cliveden, which she only visited by invitation, she grew bitter and resentful.

Bronwen’s treatment was not unique. Nancy had never been keen on any of her daughters-in-law: she resented them for usurping her place in the lives of her five sons. Strangely, for one whom history acclaims as a female pioneer, she took a perverse delight in making the lives of the women close to her a misery and virtually driving many of them to divorce. And she was particularly cruel to the women Bill, the third Viscount Astor, chose as her successors as chatelaines of Cliveden – though she did once grudgingly admit to her biographer Maurice Collis that Bronwen was ‘the best of the bunch’.

None of the other guests lounging in deep armchairs and sofas scattered around near the carved stone fireplace could have guessed from Bronwen’s demeanour that Cliveden had once been her home. Yet for all her self-effacement in the simple navy blue trouser suit she is wearing, there is an undeniable something about Bronwen Astor. Even in her late sixties, she still turns heads just as surely as she did when, in the 1950s, after a spell as a BB C television presenter, she became the public face of one of the most distinguished Parisian fashion houses.

Bronwen Pugh – her maiden name – was the forerunner of today’s supermodels and in her time was just as much a headline-maker and a household name as Kate Moss, Elle MacPherson and Claudia Schiffer are now. She was muse to Pierre Balmain at the height of his fame. He couldn’t pronounce Bronwen so he called her Bella and told the world that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.

Some faces only last a season. Time and fame take their toll. But Bronwen Astor still has it. ‘It’ is something to do with the combination of her height (just under six foot), her bearing (purposeful, haughty, distant) and a certain freedom from conventional restraints. There is, Balmain believed, a Garboesque quality about her. And then there are her eyes – greeny blue, piercing, wild and Celtic, set in a long, elegant, bony face, framed now by strong, wavy grey hair.

Our preconceptions of models today are of visually stunning but empty-headed women. The gloss was taken off Naomi Campbell’s attempt to write a novel when it was revealed that the text had been put together by a ghost-writer. In that sense, a vast gulf separates contemporary fashion superstars from Bronwen Pugh – or ‘our Bronwen’, as the press dubbed her, turning her into a mascot as potent as the Union Jack or the national football team. ‘Our Bronwen leaves them gasping’, the Daily Herald reported proudly from the Paris fashion shows in 1957.

Being a ‘model girl’, a phrase she prefers to the word model, which in her time carried a tawdry undertone, was never more than a distraction – ‘tremendous fun’, as she invariably puts it. By day she worked with Balmain – or a distinguished procession of designers from Charles Creed to Mary Quant who chart the transition from one fashion epoch to another. But in her spare time she was devouring spiritual and psychological writings like the Russian P. D. Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way (published in 1947), which explored new ways of thinking about consciousness, or the books of the French Jesuit and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who brought Christianity and science closer together than perhaps any other authority this century.

The contrast between Bronwen’s two worlds could not have been greater – one to do with a skin-deep worship of the body and the creations that cover it, the other probing deep and complex matters concerning the mind and the soul. It made for a curious and ultimately untenable double life. A career in the most material of worlds thrived while her mind was fixed on spiritual concerns. Perhaps that accounted for the distant look that Balmain recognised.

The inter-relation – indeed often competition – between these two elements dominates her life story. She loved her husband in a conventional way but also felt guided towards him by God. At Cliveden she was pulled in opposite directions, acting the chatelaine of a great house but unable for the most part to talk of her inner life even to her husband. Occasionally someone would reveal him- or herself to be on a similar wavelength. Alec Douglas-Home is one name she recalls, but usually she preferred to keep quiet. Only in more recent times has she found fulfilment as a practising psychotherapist and a devout, sacramental, if otherwise unconventional Catholic.

It is not until she settles down next to me on the sofa that Bronwen allows herself a proper look around the Cliveden hall. ‘The tapestries are still the same,’ she says, gesturing with those eyes at three great wall-hangings that face the main entrance. ‘But everything else is different. New.’ She strokes the sofa arm. Her tone is almost casual. Almost. ‘It was all sold, you see. Each of Bill’s brothers got to choose a picture and I took some things for my new home, but everything else was sold.’ Her life with Bill went under the hammer – 2,000 lots snapped up by eager collectors.

On Bill’s premature death in 1966 – from heart failure brought on by the strain of his public disgrace as, allegedly, a player in that landmark of the sixties, the Profumo scandal – the Astor trustees, acting on behalf of Bronwen’s stepson and Bill’s heir, then a minor, decided to relinquish the lease on Cliveden. They handed it back to the National Trust, to which Bill’s father had bequeathed it in 1942. In August 1966 Bronwen Astor and her two daughters, aged four and two, left Cliveden with unseemly haste. In the thirty-three years since, she has only been back inside twice.

When I was a small child I used to have a recurrent nightmare. My parents would move out of our family home and other children would take over the nooks and crannies, hiding holes and secret places in the garden that were properly mine. I would be hiding behind the hawthorn hedge watching them play on my lawn, put their toys in my cupboards, climb the narrow stairs to my playroom, take my cup and saucer out of my special cupboard in the kitchen. They would spot me and ask me to join them. I didn’t know how to respond. I always woke up at that stage.

The dream was never realised, but it took me years to recognise that memories are more than bricks and mortar. For Bronwen Astor, the scale is increased tenfold – she was an adult; this was her marital home where she spent five and a half years with the man who was the love of her life; and Cliveden is considerably grander than my suburban house.

After Bill’s death she had hoped to stay on for at least part of the year, so that her children and her stepson, who had lived with them at Cliveden, could remain together as a family; but she was informed by the trustees that she had to leave. It was a traumatic time. ‘For many years,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t bear to come here, but now it is like looking in on another person’s life.’

Again there is that ability to withdraw to another level of consciousness. I sense she is watching herself disinterestedly as she did on the catwalk as she wanders around the grand entertaining rooms that lead off the hall – rooms where once she played hostess to Bill’s friends from the worlds of politics, international charity work, racing and society. ‘I trod a tightrope,’ she recalls. ‘I tried to live a life among people who came from a different class to me but also to remain who I was. The class system was much stronger then. There was a distaste – always in the background. I was not upper class. My husband’ – and her laugh banishes a darker memory – ‘didn’t like the way I said “round”. He used to try to teach me to say “rauwnd”.’

Her diction, though, is perfect. As a young woman she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama as a teacher. However much she makes herself sound like Eliza Doolittle, her upbringing was solidly middle class, the privately educated daughter of a Welsh county court judge. Indeed, Lord Longford, an old friend of both Bill and Bronwen Astor, is fond of remarking that, such was her poise when greeting him at Cliveden, his practised eye always took her for the daughter of a duke.

The wool-panelling of the library has been treated, she notices, to make it lighter. She stands close and sniffs it. Amid the formality of a smart hotel it is a curiously relaxed gesture, as if this is still home. Yet one of the smells that she associates with Cliveden has gone.

Outside the window of what was once her drawing room – now the hotel’s dining room – she points out the metal cups set in the balustrade around the terrace that looks out, in Cliveden’s most celebrated view, onto the Thames as it meanders down to London. ‘We used to put an awning up there and eat out in the summer.’

It must, I suggest, have been like living in a huge museum cum art gallery. Even the balustrade had been brought by Bill’s grandfather from the Villa Borghese in Rome. ‘My first impression, I think, was that it was all very cosy. It sounds strange now, but all the rooms lead off the hall and off each other and Bill had a flair for making them, well, cosy.’

Bronwen took on not only Nancy Astor’s tide but her study too. Nancy, a southern belle, had called it her ‘boudoir’. As Bronwen leads the way in, she is halfway through a sentence when she notices a group of hotel guests talking and sipping coffee in there. She pulls up short and turns to leave but one woman calls out in a proprietorial way: ‘Do come back, dear. There’s a wonderful view you should see.’ For a moment Bronwen looks ill at ease. She knows the view only too well. She smiles nervously, as if a fly is about to land on her face. It is the closest she comes to any display of emotion.

Upstairs a footman shows us into her old bedroom – again inherited from her mother-in-law. ‘THE LADY ASTOR ROOM’ the plaque on the door announces. A copy of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of a youthful Nancy on the wall makes plain which Lady Astor is being commemorated. Bronwen Astor, for all the fame that surrounded her when she arrived at Cliveden, does not merit a mention. Her period here, you feel, is regarded as something best forgotten.

Yet on the day of her marriage to Bill a press pack every bit as large and insistent as that which hounded Diana, Princess of Wales, had camped out at the pub that faces the gates of Cliveden in the hope of getting a glimpse of its heart-throb, ‘our Bronwen’, as she married her lord. The previous night, tipped off that a ceremony was in the offing, they had chased her, her mother and father across London in a taxi until the cabbie had somehow given them the slip. It was another of those headline-grabbing matches – supermodel marries one of the richest men in the world, even though he was old enough to be her father.

‘When I arrived here, I didn’t change a thing,’ Bronwen says, walking past the chambermaids, who are making the bed. ‘It was the way Bill wanted it. It was like Rebecca and I was the second Mrs de Winter. I literally didn’t move an ashtray – apart from here and in the boudoir. And even then it was a friend of Bill’s – John Fowler – who helped me.’ She says the name as if I should recognise it. When I stare back blankly, she adds: ‘You know, Colefax and Fowler. Wallpaper.’

I was two when the Profumo scandal that destroyed Bill and Bronwen Astor’s life hit the headlines in July 1963. ‘Steamrollered’ is the word Bill’s younger brother David, celebrated editor and owner of the Observer, uses to describe their experience at the hands of the popular press, society gossips and erstwhile establishment friends. It all began in Cliveden’s swimming pool on a hot weekend in July 1961, when War Secretary Jack Profumo and Soviet official Yevgeny Ivanov frolicked with Christine Keeler, watched by her mentor Stephen Ward. During the Cold War a British minister sharing a girl of ill-repute with a Russian agent had major security implications.

When it leaked out, the sex and spy scandal cost Ward his life, Profumo his career and heralded the end of Harold Macmillan’s government. To the list of victims should also be added Bill and Bronwen Astor. Advised by his lawyers to maintain a dignified silence as allegations of orgies at Cliveden abounded, Bill saw his health was destroyed and he died of a broken heart in March 1966, his reputation in tatters. He is one of the forgotten victims of Profumo. He was labelled a seedy playboy, an adulterer, a coward who abandoned Ward in his hour of need in court, and a fool. He became the symbol, however mistakenly, of a world of lascivious ministers and aristocrats with double standards, who, in the mock-Edwardian Macmillan era, had lectured the public on morals while in private hosting poolside romps and attending sado-masochistic parties.

When Keeler’s sidekick, Mandy Rice-Davies, was told in court during Ward’s trial for living off immoral earnings that Lord Astor denied ever having been sexually involved with her, she chirped up: ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ It earned her immortality and damned him for ever. It has been Bill Astor’s most enduring public legacy, though Rice-Davies’s own detailed account of the assignation soon unravels.

In May 1999 the Independent newspaper, in a profile of one of the ‘accidental heroes of the 20th century’, described Christine Keeler as having been ‘procured for Lord Astor’s Cliveden set’. There was no ‘set’ and Bill Astor was not a man to procure women. Yet the myth is apparently set in stone.

John Profumo redeemed himself by good works among the needy of the East End of London. For Bill Astor, whose philanthropy was on a vast but almost invariably ‘no publicity’ basis and who played a central role in the founding of such inspirational international bodies as the British Refugee Council and the Disasters’ Emergency Committee, there was no such redemption.

Though cleared of any guilt by Lord Denning’s subsequent enquiry into the affair, Bill Astor died feeling himself a social leper. Almost four decades on, it is hard to understand what he and Bronwen were meant to have done wrong, what crime it was that brought such vilification on their heads. The most that can be said about them was that they were too indulgent of Stephen Ward, allowing him to live in a cottage on the Cliveden estate and thereby giving him some kind of respectability. ‘I warned Bill about Stephen,’ Bronwen recalls. ‘From the first time Bill introduced us, I didn’t want him at my dinner table.’ Bill agreed to that but, tragically, did not recognise the deeper unease behind his new wife’s demand and so continued to see Ward elsewhere.

For a man who believed the best of most people, it was a small sin. However, those who had been happy to accept Bill and Bronwen’s lavish hospitality before they heard the rumours of high jinks at Cliveden decided that there was no smoke without fire and shunned them. Bronwen recalls being cut dead at parties and grand gatherings at race tracks, while the writer Maurice Collis, a regular guest at Cliveden, recorded in his diary after a weekend there in 1965: ‘The house was completely empty, the great hall without a soul and nobody coming or going. The silence and emptiness were somehow ominous.’

Unlike most political scandals, the Profumo affair has outlasted the avalanche of headlines, the court case and the ministerial resignations. It has even outlasted most of its principal players. And it lives on in the public imagination as a watershed in the 1960s, the turning point between the stuffy, buttoned-up and sometimes hypocritical post-war world and the more liberated age of the Beatles, the King’s Road and the pill. In 1988 the film Scandal brought the whole business to a younger audience. Visitors to Cliveden today still make for the swimming pool rather than the classical treasures that adorn the house and grounds.

Part of that enduring Profumo myth has been to degrade Bronwen Astor. To the list of victims of the affair should also be added her name, as well as those of Bill Astor’s four children, the youngest just two when her father died.

In the film Bronwen is all pouts and shopping trips funded by Bill, an upmarket version of Keeler. ‘Keeler used to call herself a model,’ Bronwen says, ‘and I think at the time some people, some of our friends even, didn’t know the difference between a model and a model girl. And Stephen [Ward] at the very end, when he was desperate, started telling people that he had introduced Bill to me even though I had never met him until I came to Cliveden.’

It is a slur that still riles Bronwen. In July 1963 Paris Soir published her photograph alongside Keeler’s as one of the women Ward was supposed to have trained to secure rich husbands. Once implanted in the public consciousness that idea has refused to go away, despite the evidence. In Honeytrap, a 1988 best-seller by Anthony Summers weaving a Cold War espionage drama into the Profumo scandal, Bill Astor is described as having been introduced to Bronwen through Ward’s good offices.

After lunch we wander through the grounds. Though it was many years before she could face coming back to the house itself, Bronwen used to return occasionally to see Frank Copcutt, the head gardener who stayed on when first Stanford University and later the hotel took on the lease of Cliveden from the National Trust. And there was her husband’s grave – next to those of his mother, father and grandfather in the Cliveden chapel, an octagonal temple, lavishly decorated with mosaics, set away from the house. ‘I used to come back there regularly on anniversaries, but I don’t feel the need now. Bill’s spirit isn’t there. It’s …’ And she gestures as if to mean everywhere.

‘I think I’d like to be buried in Jerusalem. It’s at the centre.’ Her remark comes out of the blue. Initially I’m not entirely sure what it means but Bronwen Astor, I begin to realise, sometimes moves on a different plane from the rest of us. For one thing she talks unembarrassedly about God in everyday conversation. And then every now and then she throws down a line and you have to seize it. I struggle to take my chance – Jerusalem is more a state of mind than a city. For 5,000 years the Old City has had a legitimate claim to be at the centre of the world. The Islamic Dome of the Rock sits on the spot where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, where Muhammad ascended to heaven on a white horse, where the Jews built their Temple, and where Christ died and rose from the dead.

Bronwen has made me think, stretched me. I like that, her capacity to say startling things, her involvement in exploring the frontiers between body, mind and spirit. She is an adventurer who attracts others on to her treks. She has come a long way since her days at Balmain.

After Bill’s death she moved with her two young daughters to a eleventh-century manor house in what feels like a hidden valley outside Godalming. It has not been a conventional widowhood. Free to live her life on her own terms, she converted to Catholicism in 1970 – ‘it was an odd thing for an Astor to do because my mother-in-law hated Catholics’. For four years she ran a charismatic Christian community at her home, open to all comers. Few of her friends and acquaintances had realised that while working as a model or welcoming friends to Cliveden she had been on a secret spiritual journey – ‘most people would look puzzled if you mentioned God’ – so they were horrified to discover that Bronwen had suddenly ‘got God’. They tried to warn her and feared that, in her grief, she was being sucked into what to them had all the signs of a cult.

The community had its crazier moments, she now realises, and its collapse perhaps saved her from further exploitation. Her fellow members had wanted her to give up the remaining trappings of her former life – like the chauffeur or the housekeeper. ‘They meant nothing to me, but I was determined that I was going to bring my girls up as Bill would have wanted, as Astors.’ The spiritual and material once again clashed.

Yet for Bronwen the whole community experience was a great liberation, the first of several subsequent attempts which ultimately gave her life a coherence. After the community was wound down, her spiritual exploration became less public – though she did, in one grand theatrical gesture, hire the Royal Albert Hall in 1983 for a prayer meeting.

Later she trained as a psychotherapist and has achieved a distinction in her chosen field that has attracted eminent academic institutions like the Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford University. Her appointment as chairman of its support body emphasises how far she has travelled since her days on the Paris catwalk.

Her own spiritual life is now at the heart of each and every day. She prays for half an hour in her private chapel, reads the scriptures and attends communion as often as possible. She is permanently aware of the presence of God, feels close to Him and guided by Him, and she carries with her a spiritual air. She is shy of the word usually employed to describe such people – mystics. In the Christian tradition mystics are the great and the good of the church – John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich. Bronwen is not in their league. In secular terms the word ‘mystic’ carries with it overtones of ‘Mystic Meg’, stargazers and fraudulent eccentrics on Brighton Pier.

If mysticism is stripped of its trappings and seen as something unusual but not unheard of in everyday Christians, the mark of those who have had some direct revelation from God, then she is undeniably a mystic. No priest or religious who has come into contact with her has ever doubted her sincerity.

Yet in spite of these spiritual blessings, that sense of injustice, for herself and for her late husband and his children, has never gone away. With her daughters married, she has finally decided to talk about her own part in the scandal of the century in a final effort to set the record straight.

Our walk round the garden at Cliveden is almost over. The door to the swimming pool hasn’t changed, she remarks as we go through. The pool, however, is smaller than it was on that fateful weekend in July 1961 when Profumo, Ivanov and Keeler met. The reduction is somehow appropriate since the pivotal event of the Profumo scandal was scarcely, for any of the participants, of earth-shattering importance. Only later was it blown out of all proportion as a result, Bronwen now believes, of a complex and profoundly evil conspiracy.

Her own memories of the weekend are mundane. ‘It was very hot and we came over from the house on the Saturday night with the guests and found Stephen Ward and some of his friends here. It was nothing. And then on the Sunday, some of the other guests – Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, was here and Lord Mountbatten – wanted to go down to the stud and I remember looking in on the pool, seeing Jack and Bill and thinking, “Oh well, they’re all enjoying themselves, that’s fine, I can go.”’

Two years later this ‘weekend took on serious political implications. The papers were alleging that all manner of odd and perverse activities were going on, while the Astors’ friends took care to avoid the pool and Cliveden itself. Teams of photographers in helicopters were flying over the house at all times of the day to try and snatch that visual shot that would prove that Bronwen was running a house of ill-repute. Trapped inside with her child and her ailing husband, she was under siege.

‘You only have to look to see it couldn’t have been true,’ Bronwen says, a note of indignation in her voice as she points to a row of windows overlooking the pool. ‘Taylor the groom and Washington the butler lived there with their families. Nothing could have gone on with them so close.’ Her tone is one of bemusement. After all these years she is still puzzled as to how the whole affair got so out of hand.

We head back to her car. When she lived here, a chauffeur was forever at her beck and call. Guests’ vehicles would be taken off to Cliveden’s own garage, valeted, polished and filled with petrol, ready for the journey back to London. Bill’s fortune and generosity with it meant that Cliveden operated in a style and on a scale that had not been seen in other grand country houses in England since 1939. With his disgrace that life came to an end. Bronwen’s Cliveden was almost the last in the line of the great stately homes.

She is suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by an air of sadness as she prepares to leave, but I sense it’s not for the house or the lifestyle. After so long, it is not even to do with the unhappy memories attached to the second half of her period here. It is for the things she lost in those years – her husband, her reputation. ‘It seems like another life now,’ she sighs, adding, almost with relief, ‘finally.’ And with that Lady Astor takes her leave.