A 41-year-old Earl’s son accused of raping a teenager told jurors yesterday “I thought she was grooming me”.

James Murray, whose father is the Earl of Mansfield, gave evidence on day four of his trial at Oxford Crown Court, as he repeated his denials that he raped a 16-year-old girl in his north Oxford flat in June 2010.

Under cross-examination, prosecutor Tom Clarke asked the defendant about the lead-up to the incident: “Isn’t the reality here you had been grooming this teenage girl?”

Murray replied: “I thought she was grooming me.”

He had earlier told the court he first met the girl when she was 15 but did not allow her into his home until she was 16.

He said she moved into the flat about 10 days before the alleged incident and they had consensual sex at least three times in that period.

Describing the night in question, Murray told jurors: “She went through into the spare room and got into bed. She asked me to (come in). She said ‘are you going to come in and tell me a story?’.

“I said ‘I’m sorry I’m not sure I’ve got a story for you’.

He added: “I think I said ‘I’m tired, shall we just sleep together, be together?’.

“I was expecting sex because we had previously had sex. I lay down next to her and gave her a cuddle and stroked her.”

Murray said the girl kept her hooded top on and he pulled her tracksuit bottoms and knickers down to her knees.

He said sex last between 45 and 60 minutes and insisted he had “no doubt” she was awake.

Asked how the encounter ended, Murray said he discovered the condom had split.

He added: “I wondered what to do about that. I looked over at her and she was sort of starting to roll over and curl up. I wondered whether to raise it to her attention and decided that maybe I would talk to her in the morning.”

The jury heard how Murray, now living in Perth, Scotland, was unable to get the girl to agree to get a morning-after pill and she left to meet up with friends.

Asked why he sent text messages to her that day, including one that read “if you call the police and cry rape and say I spiked your drink then our friendship will be over” and another repeating the word ‘sorry’ 21 times, Murray said: “I felt (she) felt something had gone wrong and I apologised without necessarily knowing what I was apologising for.”

The trial continues.