Royal Legacy: How the royal family have made, spent and passed on their wealth

by McClure, David

  So, around the turn of the century Lady Kilmorey (better known to her friends as "Nellie") was at different times having an affair with both the future Edward VII ("Bertie") and the great grandson of George III ("Frank"). No wonder her family motto read Nunc aut Nunquam (now or never). As was clear from her portraits, she also had a hunger for jewellery - one which was inadvertently fuelled by the death of Prince Francis's mother.

  In October 1897 the Duchess of Teck passed away without leaving a will, although she left verbal instructions to be buried in the royal vault at Windsor where she was soon joined by her husband whose senility was aggravated by her death. Under the intestacy rules the bulk of her estate passed to her one daughter and three sons. Francis inherited the famous Cambridge emeralds which were valued at several thousand pounds. The collection of matching jewellery included a tiara, stomacher, earrings, ring and eight large cabochon gems set as a necklace, as well as some loose emeralds. Originally they had been won in a Frankfurt lottery around 1800 by Princess Augusta of Cambridge who left them to her daughter, Princess Mary Adelaide. Francis in turn gave them to his mistress as a token of his love and apparently sealed the arrangement in his will.

  By 1910 Francis was approaching his fortieth birthday. He had now left the army, put on weight and was beginning to lose his rakish good looks. Although he refused to settle down and was famous for racing around London in a motorised carriage, he had at least made a nod to maturity by working as a fundraiser for the Middlesex Hospital where he was also chairman. In the autumn of 1910 he was himself admitted to hospital for a minor nasal operation. Released prematurely, he went up to Balmoral to enjoy the healthy Highland air with his sister in her newly acquired royal estate. Unfortunately he suffered a bad bout of pleurisy and despite a dash to London for emergency surgery, died of pneumonia on October 22.

  Queen Mary, who had only just been reconciled with her brother after the long rift caused by his gambling and his gifts to his mistress, was overwhelmed with grief. At the funeral at Windsor where his coffin was placed next to his mother's in the royal vault, she broke down and wept freely - her first (and, some say, her last) show of emotion in public. Her sadness turned to horror a few days later when she learnt what her brother had done with the Cambridge emeralds. Her first reaction was to contact Lady Kilmorey directly and demand the return of what she regarded as a family heirloom, but when she discussed this with her two brothers they feared that the countess might refuse and cause a public scene. In the end, Mary sent "one of the gentlemen of her household” to Ireland to negotiate a deal by which the jewels were released in return for the payment of £10,000 (the equivalent of £600,000 today). It is rumoured that Lady Kilmorey's cooperation may have been bought by letting her keep an emerald brooch from the collection which she gave to her daughter-in-law as a marriage present and which, to add to the mystery, was later stolen. 2

  This still left the problem of Prince Francis's will and the danger of a publicity disaster in coronation year. Not only were there the gambling debts and a mistress shared with the king of England but there was also talk of a love child. If any of this were made public in the run up to the coronation on June 22, it would bring discredit on the reputation of both the Teck and the royal families. With her customary foresight, Mary duly applied to the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division for an order sealing the will. When the court agreed in early 1911, it set a precedent that has been faithfully followed by the Family Division for over one hundred years.

  It was not until 1993 that the first shaft of light was thrown on the contents of the will. In that year the Kilmorey family deposited around 4,000 documents in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast. They included, according to the official record, a bundle of letters and papers from 1902-27 relating to "Lady Kilmorey's unspoken but widely recognised role as chere amie of Queen Mary's younger brother, Prince Francis of Teck…who made embarrassingly generous provision for her in his will." It was not until a BBC reporter from the Radio 4 programme “Document” dug further into the archive that a draft copy of Prince Francis's will was finally unearthed.

  The typewritten document is dated January 15, 1902 - just six weeks after he retired from the army and two weeks before he signed the actual will. It begins by stating that it is the last will of Prince Francis of Teck [PF of T]. Being a draft document it freely uses initials and acronyms rather than full names. Lady Kilmorey is not mentioned by name but referred to as COX - perhaps a contraction of her maiden name Constance or a pet name. Clause four refers to his emeralds - that is, the Cambridge emeralds. All the jewels inherited from his mother he intended to leave to COX. The next clause concerns the jewellery inherited from his father which he also decided to leave to COX.

  There are also many references to his two brothers - DT (the Duke of Teck, Aldolphus or "Dolly") and AG (Prince Alexander George of Wuerttemberg or "Alge") who in addition to being beneficiaries of the estate were later named as his executors. In clause nine he leaves his furniture to Adolphus, while in the next he bequeaths his horses and equine equipment to Alexander.

  Not all of Francis’s chattels went to the Teck family. After the discovery of the draft will, the present Earl of Kilmorey, Sir Richard Needham, revealed to the BBC that he possessed a pair of cufflinks inscribed "FT" - which he assumed was a love token from Francis to his grandmother. "To get someone's cufflinks", he told Radio 4, "you have got to get close to their shirt". As for the Cambridge jewels, Queen Mary wore one of the reclaimed gems at the coronation of George V at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. However, as we shall see in the coming chapters, this would only be the start in the jewels’ long chain of ownership as they were passed down from generation to generation. Mary's success in sealing her brother’s will would also have long term consequences for the secrecy surrounding royal estates. Not for the first time in royal protocol in the Edwardian era, a tradition had been invented.

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  In the administrative files of the probate registry in London a yellowed A4 sheet was recently discovered by the author revealing that since 1911 a total of 31 royal wills have been sealed (i.e. closed to public inspection) by order of the President of the Family Division. The next entry after 1911 - H.S.H Prince Francis of Teck (probate - £23,154 3s 1d) is dated 1912 and refers to the Duke of Fife, Alexander William George (probate - £1,000,000). The two junior royals were distantly related by the tenuous association of them both sharing George V as a brother-in-law. In 1889 Sir Alexander Duff, the first Duke of Fife, married Princess Louise, the first daughter of the future Edward VII. With one estate in Banff and another near Braemar, the duke came from a long line of wealthy Scottish landowners (including an uncle who sold Balmoral to Prince Albert) but his fortune was greatly augmented by his directorship of the Chartered Company of South Africa - which he helped found with Cecil Rhodes and which went on to acquire lucrative mining and political rights over large swathes of southern Africa. As a privy councillor and a former Liberal MP, he also undertook several diplomatic missions for the government. But in January 1912 just one month after narrowly surviving with his family a shipwreck off the coast of Morocco, he contracted pleurisy - the illness that also finished off Prince Francis - and died in Aswan, Egypt. He was sixty-two and exceedingly wealthy.

  Even if one makes no allowance for inflation his 1912 estate is still in nominal terms the third largest on the list of 20th century royal wills. With one million pounds to be divided between the families, it is understandable why for reasons of privacy his executors - his business partner Horace Townsend (Baron Farquhar) and his widow Louise (recently elevated to the august rank of Princess Royal) - applied to the courts to seal his will. Given that the princess’s own estate was later worth only £46,000 it seems likely that he left the bulk of his estate to his two surviving children and with no male heir the lion's share would have gone to his eldest daughter, Princess Alexandra who inherited the title Duchess of Fife, married her cousin Prince Arthur of
Connaught and then retired to a reclusive existence on her Scottish estate. Another reason why Louise's estate was so modest is that late in life she found herself saddled with an unforeseen new debt. After the death of Baron Farquhar in 1923, it emerged that her husband's business associate (and erstwhile financial advisor to Edward VII) had engaged in some dubious financial practices that left him almost bankrupt and her liable to some of the debts of their business partnership. To balance the books, she was obliged to auction her collection of old master paintings that realised £13,577 at Christie’s in July 1924.3

  The next names on the list are those of Prince Maurice of Battenberg who died in 1914 and his brother Lord Leopold Mountbatten who died in 1922. What is curiously missing from the roll call of sealed wills is an entry for their uncle - Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Marquess of Milford Haven, who died between the two in 1921. After further inquiries at the Principal Registry in London, it was discovered that his will was in fact open to public inspection. This seemed a remarkable act of full disclosure for a well-connected royal, close to both Edward VII and George V, whose daughter Alice became the mother of the Duke of Edinburgh and whose son Louis, Earl of Mountbatten, became the cousin of the Queen.

  At first sight he had every reason to want his will kept secret as he was rumoured to be the father of an illegitimate child. Like Prince Francis of Teck Lord Louis shared a mistress with the future Edward VII. She was Lillie Langtry, the Jersey-born actress, London society beauty and estranged wife of the Irish landowner Edward Langtry. Between 1877 and 1880 she had a passionate affair with the Prince of Wales becoming his semi-official mistress and attaining such an elevated status that she was even allowed to accompany him to the races at Ascot. But true to his sociable nature Bertie was happy to pass on his favourite to Louis, one of his best friends in the Royal Navy, a prominent member of the Marlborough House set and a close relative of the German and Russian royal families (his father was Prince Alexander of Hesse). The tall and handsome sailor who loved dancing and partying and had already gained a reputation for having a girl in every port was immediately smitten with "the Jersey Lily", who for her part was beguiled by his good looks and royal status. With her famed common sense and discretion she managed to keep the affair out of the public eye – until, that is, she fell pregnant in June 1880.

  She soon informed Prince Louis that he was the most likely father. To his credit, he did the honourable thing, standing by her and according to some accounts even offering to marry her - but neither her husband nor his own family would agree to the match which would have destroyed his naval career. His German parents dispatched an aide-de-camp from their royal residence in Darmstadt to arrange a financial settlement with Lillie. Now lying low in her old home at Portelet in Jersey, she may have used some of the money to escape to Paris accompanied by a male friend. It was made clear that there could be no question of marriage and in August 1880 the Admiralty who had been alerted to the risk of a royal scandal posted Prince Louis on a long, slow voyage round the world aboard a ship powered only by sail. It was appropriately named "HMS Inconstant".

  The baby, Jeanne Marie, was born on 18 March 1881 in the Hotel Gibraltar in Paris, so averting any embarrassing publicity in the London press. Lillie later returned quietly to England, brought up the child as her niece and waited until her 17th birthday before revealing who her real mother was but keeping the father a secret. After completing his naval voyage, Prince Louis went on in April 1884 to marry his cousin, Princess Victoria of Hesse, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and they had two sons, Louis and George, and two daughters, Alice and Louise. Meanwhile, his naval career went from strength to strength as he climbed the Admiralty rigging from captain in 1891 to the top of the masthead as First Sea Lord in 1912. But at the start of World War One he was forced to resign his position due to anti-German prejudice. Although a naturalised Englishman he had been born in Austria, christened Ludwig and still spoke with a German accent. The fact that he retained German staff in his household and did little to hide his admiration for German naval efficiency led to whispers that he might be spying for the enemy. On hearing of his resignation, George V expressed his sympathy for someone he considered one of the most loyal men in the country.4

  Later in the war as the anti-German paranoia deepened, the king instructed his cousin - along with many other German royals - to anglicise his title. Prince Louis then became the Marquess of Milford Haven as the Battenbergs were turned into more English-sounding Mountbattens. Not impressed by this blatant act of window-dressing by the new House of Windsor, Kaiser Wilhelm II remarked in a rare display of wit: “I am looking forward to attending a production of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”

  In August 1921 the king elevated Lord Louis to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet on the retired list, an honour bestowed on only the very few. But he did not live long enough to become fully rehabilitated as a fortnight later he caught a chill in Scotland where he was inspecting the battle cruiser “Repulse” on which his youngest son, Louis, was serving. He was sent to bed on his return to London but died of heart failure aged sixty-eight, a somewhat bitter and broken man. Young Louis (known to intimates as “Dickie”) vowed that one day he would restore the family name by becoming First Lord of the Admiralty.

  With skeletons in the closet in the shape of an illegitimate child and an erstwhile mistress who was now a famous actress, one would have expected Lord Louis’s will to have been sealed as a matter of course. This is what happened to the will of Prince Francis of Teck who found himself in a similar predicament with a former mistress of the Prince of Wales and - as mentioned earlier - what happened to the wills of both his nephews, Prince Maurice of Battenberg who died in October 1914 at Ypres serving with the British Expeditionary Force but whose £3,146 estate was not sealed until 1917, and Lord Leopold Mountbatten, who passed away within seven months of Lord Louis's death and had an estate of a similar value although no illegitimate issue. But for some reason no application for privacy was made to the Family Court and the will and grant of probate are today freely available from the Principal Registry.

  As befits a neat and practical naval officer, the will is short, to the point and altogether ship shape. In one of the first clauses he expressed a wish for a simple funeral with only the most modest of tombstones erected over his remains. Should his wife predecease him and his children were amenable he wanted to be cremated - an almost unprecedented form of burial for a member of the royal family and one that would not be adopted by a senior royal until the funeral of Princess Margaret in 2002.

  The accompanying probate document records that he left a gross estate of £6,533 17s 1d (net £4,101 3s 2d). In the will dated 9 July 1921 (just two months before his death) he left almost all his personal property to his wife and sole trustee, Princess Victoria, but in the event of her predeceasing him (or for that matter dying after his passing), certain assets were to be divided between their four children. Under a complex arrangement, all four would get equal shares of the jewellery, books and art works, but the china, silver and glass-ware were to be split equally only between the two sons and the younger daughter. As for the cash and securities, the eldest son, Lord George, would receive half, Lord Louis three tenths, while Princess Alice and Lady Louise would have to be content with one tenth each. Clearly, in the first quarter of the 20th century the aristocratic practice of passing on the bulk of family wealth to a male heir was still very much alive - although Louise would later have the financial compensation of marrying King Gustaf of Sweden, while Alice would wed Prince Andrea of Greece.

  Unsurprisingly no illegitimate children nor indeed Lillie Langtry are mentioned in the two-page document although there is one hint that old friends (and perhaps even old flames) might be remembered in the will's last paragraph where he instructs his executors to distribute appropriate mementos to his closest friends. It could be argued, though, that the possibility that his widow who was named as executor would hand out some of his personal possessions to
his erstwhile lover seems remote. The other two named executors - Sir Arthur Davidson, a Rhine colonel with the British army, and Vice Admiral Mark Kerr of the royal navy - were rewarded for their services with a small remembrance souvenir. Kerr later wrote a hagiographic biography of him that made no reference to any mistress or lover or indeed his own management of the estate.

  An additional reason why he might not have provided for any wider family is more prosaic: he was short of cash. This too might explain why he felt no need to keep his will secret. Even by the standards of a junior royal in 1921, his net estate of just over £4,000 was relatively modest. His nephew, Lord Leopold, who was only thirty-two at the time of his death left an estate of £4,049 5s 8d. The reason why Lord Louis was so financially stretched is that his Russian estate of half a million roubles had been decimated by the revolution with the Bolsheviks seizing £50,000 worth of investments (more tragically, he also lost his two Romanov sisters-in-law to the Bolshevik gunmen). To add to his money worries, his German estate of 734,613 marks was drained by the post war financial crash when after the collapse in the value of the mark he only received a pittance from the sale of his ancestral home - Heiligenberg Castle - in 1920. Now in dire financial straits, he had to move out of his English home - Kent House - and sell his beloved collection of naval medals which he had amassed in the course of compiling an encyclopaedia of numismatics. The absence of any landed property to pass on to heirs - whether directly or through the more common device of a family trust - might provide a further explanation why his executors felt no need to seal his will.

  The fact that Lord Louis's will was open and his two nephew's wills were sealed suggests that any decision on testamentary transparency is totally arbitrary. It seems to have nothing to do with a general desire for privacy and everything to do with hiding the scale and ultimate destination of one's wealth. The bottom line was that Lord Louis's open estate was worth almost one million pounds less than the Duke of Fife's closed one.