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

by McClure, David

  After the two camps split into separate rooms, they eventually agreed to make a number of minor changes to George V's will and the financial settlement document was signed by both the new and the old kings. The agreement also included a commitment by the future George VI to pay the pensions of his brother’s staff and a promise by Edward VIII that he would gift His Majesty the total contents of Sandringham and Balmoral belonging to him, the live and dead stock at Windsor and any other effects inherited from his father.15

  When Edward informed Wallis of the precise details in a phone call that evening she was far from pleased. He later compared the hurried negotiations to a fire sale.16 For his part, the Duke of York remembered the meeting ending harmoniously due in no small part to the advice of Sir Edward Peacock.

  Unfortunately two linked developments conspired to undermine the agreement - and ultimately to sour relations between the two brothers for the rest of their lives. First the mood in parliament - particularly among Labour MPs who formed part of the coalition government’s majority - began to turn against Edward. Originally the government had been sympathetic to the view that Edward should be granted funds from the Civil List to allow him to live in a style appropriate to a former sovereign - with Baldwin famously responding to one dissenting colleague “but you can't let him starve." But in the months after the abdication - as Mrs. Simpson’s divorce case dragged through the courts - attitudes to the king began to harden. Perhaps anticipating a change in public opinion and a backlash from Labour coalition MPs, Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now became distinctly chilly about granting the king £25,000 a year and as chairman of the parliamentary select committee responsible for Civil List payments his opinion held much weight.

  Secondly - and more significantly - it was discovered that Edward had lied about the true state of his finances. Although in December 1936 he claimed to have less than £100,000 in capital, around mid February 1937 it was discovered that that his total fortune was closer to £1m. Wigram believed he had accumulated considerably more than one million sterling17 and Sir Edward Peacock put the figure at £1.1m (including a portion settled on Mrs Simpson), although more recently the royal chronicler Michael Bloch, who had full access to the Windsors' papers calculated that his investment was at least £800,000.18 This last sum, however, does not appear to include his ranch in Canada or his collection of jewellery.

  In retrospect, Edward was a fool to lie. His official biographer Philip Ziegler takes this view and then attempts to be charitable arguing that his mind may have been disturbed by the emotional impact of the abdication and that he was worried that he would let down the woman he loved by failing to secure the funds he thought she deserved.19 But the fact of the matter is that he was devious and greedy. Indeed, he was unabashed about his obsession with money, often remarking that in his precarious profession he had good reason “to make provision for a rainy day."20

  As a result of the new information, the parliamentary committee did not grant him the promised Civil List money and the Belvedere agreement had to be renegotiated. On February 10, 1937 the representatives of the government and the former king met again. Edward's solicitor, George Allen, insisted that the Belvedere agreement was a legally binding contract that must be honoured. Warren Fisher, the permanent secretary of the Treasury, reminded him that Edward had failed to disclose the true extent of his private income - a point that was repeated in a letter a day later from George VI to his brother. Negotiations over the financial settlement dragged on for another year - with the threat from Edward's camp that he might prevent the court moving to Balmoral that summer unless there was a satisfactory agreement. They did not accept what they saw as the government’s low valuation of Sandringham at £146,000 and Balmoral at £90,000 (later the estates were revalued so that their total value was set at £300,000).

  In the end, it was decided that the revenue from their sale should be invested in war bonds and the annual income (around £10,000) should be paid to Edward. Since he had been promised a revised total of £21,000 instead of £25,000 a year, this left another £11,000 a year which would have to come from George VI's own pocket rather than parliament. Even for the king of England, this extra payment put a strain on his finances which had already been stretched by the need to reverse Edward's proposed sale of thousands of acres of farmland neighbouring Sandringham and his other cost-cutting reforms. For his part, Edward was unhappy that he now had to pay for the pensions of his former staff which under the Belvedere agreement had been paid by his brother.

  * * *

  Edward’s disputed financial settlement would sour relations with Bertie for the rest of his reign and the new king’s anguish was deepened by the fact that the unexpected abdication meant that he had little preparation for the job. No “gentle glide” like today’s handover to Prince Charles which even provides special constitutional tuition for Prince William, this was the most bumpy of succession processes. When Edward sprang the news of his imminent announcement to abdicate, the future king rushed to his mother’s sofa at Buckingham Palace and broke down in tears on her shoulder.21 Seeking further family solace, he confided to Lord Mountbatten that his only training was as a naval officer and he was totally unprepared for the new job.22 At the back of his mind too must have been the appalling prospect of delivering long formal speeches with a permanent stammer.

  In 1942, however, the squabbling siblings were briefly brought together in grief by an accident to their youngest brother, Prince George. On August 25 the Duke of Kent as part of his duties as Chief Welfare Officer of the Royal Air Force Home Command boarded a Sunderland flying boat at RAF Invergordon in Scotland bound for another RAF station in Iceland. Flying conditions were poor due to a thick mist that had descended on the neighbouring mountains. After take-off at 1.30 pm, the plane failed to reach a height above seven hundred feet and in the fog flew straight into the hillside at Berriedale. All but one of the fifteen men aboard were killed and the prince's mutilated body was identified from an ID bracelet that read: His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, The Coppins, Iver, Buckinghamshire. The fact that the one survivor, Flight Sergeant Andrew Jack, never disclosed what had happened fuelled speculation that it might have been a case of pilot error and that the prince might have been at the controls himself flying the plane too low. But new evidence now suggests that the most likely cause of the crash was instrument failure as the gyro-magnetic compass failed to show the correct height. A recent authorised royal biographer has also argued that the plane should never have taken off in such poor visibility and that the pilot may have been partly to blame for the accident.23

  George VI was less than seventy miles away on the moors of Balmoral shooting with his other brother Prince Henry, when the crash happened. He took the news badly, almost broke down at the funeral four days later in St George's Chapel and was only consoled by the fact that his brother had died in active service (later underlined in the official probate records that cite that he died "on war service"). Eager to be given some military duties to perform, the Duke of Kent had been created an air commodore in the Royal Air Force and made responsible for inspecting RAF facilities in the UK and abroad. Hence his trip to an air station in Iceland.

  Edward was on the other side of the Atlantic in Nassau serving as Governor of the Bahamas when he learned of the death. On receiving the telegram he was so distraught that he was barely able to cable back a message to his family. Despite being eight years his junior, "Georgie" had been his favourite brother and in their bachelor years in London they had lived in each other's pockets - and for a time under the same roof. When the continual round of partying left the Duke of Kent addicted to cocaine, Edward came to the rescue by moving him into his own apartment at York House and acting as "doctor, gaoler and detective combined" before a stay in a rehabilitation clinic finally got his brother off the habit. Unable to attend the funeral, he received a tender letter of condolence from his mother Queen Mary in which she thanked him for all the kindness he h
ad shown to “Georgie” and which after six years of estrangement he interpreted as a thawing of the ice.24

  The Duke of Kent was survived by his thirty-five-year-old widow, Marina, and three young children. Svelte, sophisticated and always impeccably groomed, the beautiful duchess was the Diana of her day - a thorough-bred clothes horse who brought a European chic to the House of Windsor’s frumpy wardrobe. In the thirties - in much the same way as would happen in the sixties to Princess Margaret and in the eighties to Princess Diana - she was built up by the popular press as an arbiter of fashion with her trademark pillbox hats and her British-made blue cotton outfits being splashed across the front pages. The society photographer Cecil Beaton also captured her glamour in a series of film-star like portraits. Her sense of style had been cultivated during her adolescence as an exiled princess in 1920s Paris where she mixed with couturiers and boutique-owners and even modelled in advertisements for skin care products earning her pin-money of £50-£100 for each photographic shoot. Her good looks and high cheekbones (not to mention her pronounced accent and penchant for Russian cigarettes) had been inherited from her Danish-Russian ancestry. She was the daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark, the son of George I of Hellens, who had been put on the Greek throne briefly after the Danish royal family had been chosen to provide an overseas sovereign, and the brother of Prince Andrew who married Alice, the daughter of Lord Louis of Battenberg, who in turn gave birth to Prince Philip, the later Duke of Edinburgh. Her mother was Grand Duchess Elena of Russia, daughter of the Grand Duke Vladimir (uncle of Tsar Nicholas II) and grand-daughter of Tsar Alexander II. So despite her image as a "Greek princess", she was two thirds Russian and one third Danish and possessed not one drop of Greek blood.

  She met her future husband through her eldest sister Olga who was married to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, a close friend of both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Kent. Although the dashing heir to the throne initially had his eye on Marina, it was his younger brother who soon fell for her charms marrying her in a full state ceremony at Westminster Abbey in November 1934, less than a year after their first formal introduction at a London lunch party. Rejecting the proposed suitors arranged by his straitlaced parents, he was determined to marry for love and proposed to her during a summer vacation at Prince Paul's holiday home in Yugoslavia. Up to that point, "Georgie" had been the wild boy of the House of Windsor. Having turned his back on the naval career favoured by his father, he worked intermittently at the Foreign Office and Home Office and developed a passion for flying, fast cars and derring-do (Marina's willing embrace of his breakneck driving was one of the things that especially endeared her to him).

  In the free and easy Jazz Age of the twenties and thirties, a royal prince could live recklessly in a way that would be impossible in today's intrusive media world. Described by one member of his raffish set as "weak but charming"25 and another as a "narcissist", he had a string of affairs with unsuitable women including the good time girl "Poppy" Baring, the black singer Florence Mills and most disastrously the American adventuress Kiki Whitney Preston who got him hooked on cocaine and morphine. He also had male partners. Tall, with neat brown hair, deep blue eyes, thick sensuous lips and sharp aquiline features, he was a natural magnet to many men - including the bisexual Chips Channon who noted: "The Duke of Kent followed, blue-eyed…insinuating, and - to me - though not to Honor [his wife] altogether irresistible."26 His name was linked with the Kaiser's grandson Prince Louis Ferdinand, the art historian Anthony Blunt and the playwright Noel Coward. Later in a London nightspot a well-known gay South American whispered in Marina's ear: "you don't know me but I was your predecessor."27

  Marriage to Marina brought much-needed stability to George’s life, although he never totally lost his wandering eye. They rented a town house at No 3 Belgrave Square, redecorated its spacious reception rooms and threw glittering dinner parties for the cream of London society. They also acquired a country retreat in Buckinghamshire more suitable for a young family. Their first child Edward was born in October 1935, followed by a daughter Alexandra in December 1936 and a second son Michael in July 1942 - just six weeks before the duke's fatal crash.

  The sudden death of her husband caused not just emotional turmoil for Princess Marina - for a time all photos of him had to be hidden from her view and his name not mentioned to staff - but also severe financial hardship. She had turned down a RAF widow's pension of £398 a year - presumably on the assumption that she could live off the duke’s Civil List income. Unfortunately the payments ended with his death due to an inexplicable oversight by which no provision was made for widows of the sons of the king. She also had the unenviable distinction of being among the few war widows who paid death duties.28 His estate of £157,735 was liable to estate tax of 26-30% and after the further deduction of debts the net amount came to £79,148.

  This five figure sum seems remarkably small for a prince who six years earlier had inherited £750,000 in cash from his father and who in each subsequent year had had received a £25,000 annuity from the Civil List. In 1936 he also inherited a country house (valued at £400,000 in 1974) from his maiden aunt "Toria," Princess Victoria, the second sister of George V. Coppins - a two-storey, gabled Victorian mansion set in one hundred and thirty-five acres of Buckinghamshire countryside - provides a clue as to where the missing million may have gone. Finding the redbrick property too dank, dark and cluttered for his tastes, he splashed out on a major conversion, turning the library into a music room with two pianos including a new Ibeck which he liked to play over cocktails before dinner. He also built a nursery, modernised the reception rooms and spent a small fortune on furnishing the house with objets d'art, antiques, and a collection of fine clocks, including an exquisite golden French timepiece in the main room.

  After seeing how luxuriously he filled his two residences with "their houseful of treasures", his friend Chips Channon joked that he might be spending as much as “£500,000 a year” on his London shopping sprees.29 Channon knew from personal experience as the son of a shipping magnate and the husband of a Guinness brewery heiress that if you were fortunate in the thirties to possess great wealth you spent it - recording in his diary on 27 September 1935 that "it is very difficult to spend less than £200 a morning when one goes out shopping." In 1936 he spent £6,000 redecorating a single room, employing the world's foremost interior designer Stephene Boudin to transform his dining room into a luxurious replica of the famous Amalienburg pavilion in Bavaria complete with silver fittings and blue rococo decor. His next door neighbour at No 5 Belgrave Square was the Duke of Kent who became a frequent dinner guest and in an upper class equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses the aristocrats of Belgravia competed with one another to possess what Channon regarded as “London's loveliest room.”30

  George too had an eye for beauty. By far the most intelligent of the five siblings of George V and Queen Mary, he inherited from his mother a passion for fine art and in the interwar years amassed an impressive collection of furniture, silver, porcelain and paintings - none of which came cheap.31 The highlight of his collection were three paintings by Claude Lorraine that he snapped up at the beginning of the war. He also had works by the Italian master Giovanni Pannini and fine porcelain from Meissen. It is hardly surprising that the Keeper of the Queen's Pictures later described him as “the most distinguished royal connoisseur since George IV."32

  Marina was - according to one report - left nothing in her husband’s will.33 This may be a slight exaggeration as one would have expected George to make some provision for his young wife despite his shortage of cash. Some money was probably placed in a trust fund for the three children but what is certain is that the Coppins house was held in trust to be inherited by his eldest son, Edward, on his 21st birthday. Meanwhile, it was left to Marina to pay for the upkeep of the property and the upbringing of her young family. School fees alone would have been a considerable outlay as Edward moved from his prep school at Ludgrove in Berkshire to Eton Co
llege (where his brother Michael would later join him) and Alexandra was sent away to Heathfield School in Ascot - earning her the distinction of being the first British princess to go to boarding school.

  Despite an official allowance from George VI, the young widow soon found it impossible to make ends meet and had to resort to what one observer called "a royal car boot sale."34 In November 1943 she auctioned a batch of antiques left to George in 1939 by his great aunt Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, as part of her massive £247,671 estate. Selling her husband’s chattels was made less of a wrench for Marina by the knowledge that he never much liked the old furniture which eventually fetched £20,000.

  The second auction at Christie’s in March 1947 was a more public and humiliating affair. Marina was forced to swallow her pride and sell some possessions closer to her husband’s heart - including furniture, porcelain, objets d'art and more than sixty paintings and drawings. The loss of the three Claude Lorraine pictures was partially eased by the fact they fetched more than double the price that George had paid for them just seven years previously, while a prized Queen Anne sofa raised £1,700 guineas. Altogether, the three-day auction realised £92,341 - enough to keep the wolf from the door of Coppins, at least for the time being.

  One of the lasting ironies of George's estate is that even though every effort was made to keep it secret by sealing the will, much of its contents ultimately became public thanks to the forced auctions. Had he not been third in line to the throne, one wonders whether George's modest estate would ever have warranted being locked away from public inspection. But reduced financial circumstances forced Marina to open the lid on his treasure trove of artworks. As we shall see later with the estate of George's elder brother Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, this would not be the last time that royal heirs would have to put the family silver up for auction.