Although financially stretched, Marina managed to hang on to her Coppins country home. There she liked to entertain theatrical friends such as Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton and Sir Malcolm Sargent and members of her extended family including her sister Princess Olga, Princess Katherine of Greece and the Tsarina's sister Victoria Milford Haven. One frequent visitor in the years immediately after the war was her first cousin Prince Philip of Greece, another was the young Princess Elizabeth who lived nearby at Windsor Castle. Marina was very close to Philip who had gone to great trouble as a boarder at Gordonstoun school in Scotland to attend her London wedding (at which Princess Elizabeth was a bridesmaid) and then stayed regularly at Coppins during the school holidays. It became one of his favourite places - a retreat from the turbulence of his family life which had seen the separation of his parents, his mother’s committal to a sanatorium and the death of his sister in a plane crash. Marina treated him as her protégé and is said to have encouraged his romance with the young princess. Another house guest, Chips Channon, observed presciently in October 1944: “As I signed the visitors' book I noticed 'Philip' written constantly. It is at Coppins that he sees Princess Elizabeth. I think she will marry him."35
5.THE PRINCESSES OF NOTHING - 1948-1952
“Princess Helena Victoria - of what?"
Sir Henry “Chips” Channon’s verdict on the princess’s royal pedigree
The wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten on 20 November 1947 was memorably captured in a group photograph that showed all forty members of the royal family clustered around the happy bride and groom. To the right of the smiling princess are her mother, Queen Elizabeth, and her father, George VI, while just behind the future Duke of Edinburgh is the stern figure of his grandmother-in-law, Queen Mary, and at the back Louis Mountbatten, his tall and handsome uncle, characteristically manages to get into the picture, towering above the bejewelled Princess Marina. Just squeezed in on the right at the corner of the frame is a frail elderly woman seated in a wheelchair and holding a stick. She is dressed in a white gown cut by a royal sash with a fur stool across her shoulders and a beret-type hat with a small brooch half hiding her curly locks. Unlike other members of the family she ignores the camera and seems lost in a world of her own. Her name was Princess Helena Victoria, a distant cousin of the bride, and the wedding would be her last major public appearance. She died four months later on 19 March 1948, aged seventy-seven and unmarried.
Helena Victoria would have gone to her grave a footnote in royal history but for her one claim to fame: her will. If you inspect the records at the London Probate Registry, her name appears 19th on the list of the royal wills sealed by order of the president of the Family Division. Her entry sits between that of HM Queen Mary and the Rt Hon Maud Countess of Southesk but in one significant respect it differs from the thirty-two royals on the list. The recorded details for Her Highness Princess Victoria Louise, Sophia, Augusta (otherwise known as Princess Helena Victoria) read: Probate London 28 May 1948 - £52,435 12s 9d. No order made for the will to be sealed.
The list as we have seen gives the names of all the senior royals you have died since 1910 and records that with this one exception all their wills have been sealed. So, how did Princess Helena Victoria slip through the net? Why did her executors not follow the example of the thirty-two other royals and make an order for her will to be kept secret? What was special about this forgotten princess?
She was born Princess Victoria, Louise, Sophie, Augusta, Amelia, Helena in Frogmore House near Windsor Castle on 3 May 1870. Her mother was Princess Helena, the third daughter of Queen Victoria and her father was Prince Christian, the third son of Duke Christian August of Schleswig-Holstein. They had married in 1866 after Queen Victoria gave her consent apparently on condition that her daughter continued to live close to her in England. Until her marriage, the docile Helena (known as Lenchen) seemed content to play the role of dutiful daughter to her grieving and demanding mother. Not blessed with beauty and forever struggling to keep her weight down, the twenty-four-year-old princess was in danger of being left on the shelf until the thirty-five-year-old prince from Schleswig-Holstein appeared on the scene. With no family money of his own, he was delighted to receive a £30,000 dowry from Queen Victoria.
The couple moved into Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park where Prince Christian was given the honorary post of ranger and Helena set up home for her growing family. Helena Victoria - as she became known to distinguish her from her mother - had a younger sister, Marie Louise, and two older brothers - one of whom died in the Boer war. During the fighting her mother started the military nursing service and founded the Prince Christian Nursing Home in Windsor in memory of her lost son.
Despite her German-Danish pedigree, Helena Victoria was regarded as a fully paid up member of the British the royal family. She became close to her grandmother Queen Victoria and often visited her at Balmoral. When she wanted to arrange an afternoon tea with friends in the gillie’s cottage in the outer grounds she first had to get the permission of her grandmother who meticulously vetted the guest list.
The queen always referred to her granddaughter as “Thora" (a contraction of Victoria) but the rest of the royal family knew her as "Snipe" on account of her lengthy nose and elongated doleful features. As the twenty or so photos in her collection at the National Portrait Gallery clearly testify, she was no oil painting. One taken in 1885 at the wedding of Prince and Princess Henry of Battenberg shows a plump, plain-looking teen-ager. After her younger sister, Marie Louise, married Prince Aribert of Anhalt in 1891, her parents were desperate to find her a husband and earmarked Prince George (the future George V) as a possible match.1 But the prince had already been paired with another German royal, Mary of Teck and in a crowning irony that much annoyed her mother Helena Victoria was made one of the ten bridesmaids at their wedding in 1893.2
Mary of Teck had originally been engaged to George's older brother, Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence, but in January 1892 just weeks before the wedding he caught the flu and died suddenly. When it came to finding a bride for Prince George, Mary was the obvious choice since her suitability to be a royal consort had already been approved. Although an arranged marriage, it proved – according to one royal biographer - a relationship of lasting strength and affection.3
Left on the shelf with no husband after a brief flirtation with the Duke of Hesse came to nothing, Helena Victoria devoted much of the rest of her life to charitable work. This sense of duty had been drummed into her from an early age, being taught as children, as her sister highlights in her memoirs, to work for the sick and the distressed.4 She became president of a number of charities including her mother’s hospital in Windsor but her name was most closely associated with the Young Men’s Christian Association. On the outbreak of the First World War she founded the YMCA National Women's auxiliary force (which consisted of 40,000 volunteers under her charge) and as casualties mounted she travelled to France to see for herself the shocking conditions in the camps and hospitals.
Later in the war a bombshell from a royal provenance dramatically changed her status. In July 1917 - in a response to the growing anti-Kaiser feeling in the country fuelled by the war's horrendous death toll - George V changed the name of the British royal family from the House of Saxe Coburg Gotha to the House of Windsor. It was a shrewd move to reconnect the king with some of his potentially alienated subjects. At a stroke all German-sounding connections were shed - although a veil was drawn over the fact that his wife Mary still spoke with a slight German accent. He ordered a root and branch renaming of royal relations in England - so that not only did the Battenbergs become Mountbattens as we saw earlier but Mary's Teck relations adopted the name of Cambridge. For Princess Helena Victoria and her sister Princess Marie Louise, this meant that they could no longer use the territorial title "of Schleswig Holstein" and instead had to be called “Her Highness Princess” Helena Victoria or Marie Louise. The two sisters were left in a curiou
s royal limbo of being princesses but not princesses of any family or monarchy. George V never formally granted them the title of Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, even though they were both British citizens and for all intents and purposes treated like any other member of the royal family. In effect, they were – as Princess Victoria, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, rather mockingly put it - "princesses of nothing."5
In 1917 her eighty-seven-year-old father died and in 1924 her mother aged seventy-seven also passed away. It is unclear what she inherited from her parents as neither of their wills is available to the public. But it is unlikely that she received much money as her father was known to be penniless when he married her mother.6
It is known that under the settlement of their mother's estate both daughters were granted a right to use their parents’ London residence, Schomberg House, which in due course became their home for the next two decades earning the distinction of being the last house in Pall Mall to be used as a private residence. Sitting at No 78 on the south side of the club-lined avenue, Schomberg House is today an elegant 18th century four-storey mansion with a rich history. After the death in 1719 of its first owner the Duke of Schomberg, it was rented by fashionable artists of the day, most notably Thomas Gainsborough. When two centuries later the two sisters took over the lease, they were keen to continue this artistic tradition and Helena Victoria, an accomplished pianist in her own right, became a patron of music. Her beautiful drawing room which had acoustics to rival those of Covent Garden was used as a private venue for some of the leading singers and instrumentalists of the day. Leon Goosens, regarded as the finest oboist in Europe, often took to the stage and the sisters were able to wallow in their love of the music of Wagner. With more than a suspicion of her own suppressed passion, Marie Louise recounts in her memoirs listening in raptures to the great Wagnerian soprano Frieda Leider singing the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.
Of the two sisters Marie Louise was the more artistic and individualistic, once admitting that despite their close attachment they were totally different in temperament.7 If Helena Victoria was closer to Princess Elizabeth, the reserved and dutiful future queen, Marie Louise was Princess Margaret, the pleasure-seeking younger sister. Like her distant niece, she loved music and liked to surround herself with actors and the show business crowd. The renowned actor-manager Sir Henry Irving was a frequent guest as was his commercial partner and grand dame of the London stage, Ellen Terry. Like Princess Margaret, she enjoyed holidaying in the Caribbean and her wanderlust stretched to trips to South Africa, Rhodesia, Ceylon and Burma. On her journeys across Europe, she pursued her bizarre hobby collecting anything to do with Napoleon: carved ivory figures, bronzes and even snuff boxes. Her habit was in part inspired by her nominal connection with the emperor. As an eleven-year-old boy her father, Prince Christian, had the honour of being the dinner guest of Napoleon's wife Empress Marie-Louise and later - having dined off the story for a decade or more - decided to name his daughter after her.8
Like Princess Margaret she had a failed marriage – but in her case it was unconsummated. In July 1891 she wed Prince Aribert of Anhalt, a cousin of the Kaiser Wilhelm II who helped to arrange the match. They managed to stay together for another nine years but the marriage was as joyless as it was childless. In her memoirs she makes no attempt to hide her bitterness about not being wanted by the man she refers to throughout as simply her husband. The final rejection came in a letter from Aribert informing her in a matter of fact fashion that he was a young man and wanted to live his own life. It was rumoured that the prince was homosexual and had been caught in flagrante with a man either by Marie Louise or her father-in-law. What is certain is that he got his father to exercise his sovereign right as Duke of Anhalt to declare the marriage null and void in 1900. Despite this legal fiat, she still regarded her marriage vows as binding. In later life her main male companion was Edward Voules, an openly gay writer who privately published a book about the royal family called "Free of All Malice." It was left to Edward VII to sum up the plight of his niece: "Ach, poor Louise,” he is widely reported to have said. “She has returned as she went - a virgin."
The two "spinster" sisters began the Second World War defiantly encamped in Schomberg House. But their home on Pall Mall was dangerously close to government buildings and as the German bombers started to hit their targets, they reluctantly had to move to the relative tranquillity of a friend's house at Englemere near Ascot. It was just as well since soon after moving four incendiary bombs hit Schomberg House and burnt out most of the dining room.
After the war, they moved again into the queen’s Berkeley Square flat at 10 Fitzmaurice Place. The fourth floor premises although far from cramped were much less grand than Schomberg House but Helena Victoria was now very frail and confined to a wheel chair. After a spell in her mother's hospital in Windsor, she finally died in the new flat on 13 March 1948 aged seventy-seven. Her funeral was conducted at St George's Chapel Windsor and she was laid to rest in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore.
The Times obituary of March 15 records that "her death severs one of the few remaining links with the family life of Queen Victoria whose example of public duty she so worthily followed." Probate was completed two months later on May 28 and an estate duty of £12,437 4s was paid by her executors - her sister and Coutts bank. So why did they decide to fly in the face of royal convention and make the will available to the public?
One obvious explanation is that because she was not a true royal her will was not royal either. As we have seen, in 1917 due to the actions of her uncle George V Helena Victoria had lost not only her geographical designation of Schleswig Holstein but also her royal title, ending her life being known simply as Her Highness. It should be added that George V was so concerned about the great number of descendants from Queen Victoria that he clarified what was meant by royal, decreeing that only the children of the sovereign and the children of the sons of the sovereign could be called royal. Hence Princess Margaret was strictly speaking correct when she famously said that “my children are not royal; their aunt just happens to be queen.” In accordance with her grandfather's ruling, Lady Sarah Chatto, as the daughter of the Queen's sister, has no title, whereas HRH Princess Beatrice of York, the daughter of the Queen's son, Prince Andrew, has the royal title.
So if one follows this argument losing the HRH title also entailed losing the privilege of having your will kept secret. The only problem with this line of reasoning is that when Helena Victoria's sister, HH Princess Marie Louise, died her will was sealed even though she too had lost her royal title. In fact, of the thirty-one sealed royal wills on the Principal Registry's list ten do not have a royal highness title before their name. Even the royal who set the ball rolling in 1910, Prince Francis of Teck, was only his Serene Highness. In normal usage - despite the attempt of George V - the term royal is commonly applied to members of the House of Windsor who are not direct descendants of the sovereign.
So, if losing your royal highness title is no bar to having your will sealed are there any other reasons why Helena Victoria's will slipped through the net? Another plausible explanation is clerical error: the elderly Princess Marie Louise simply forgot to place an order for the will to be sealed. If this indeed had been the case, one would have expected that at a later date the error would have been discovered and her executors would have put in a retrospective application. When the author first discovered on the royal list that Helena Victoria's name had been omitted, he presumed that when he came to request a copy of the will, it would be withheld because the error would have been rectified. But to his surprise, the royal will was delivered to him in the same way as any commoner's will. So, the fact that the will was not resealed at a later date suggests that there was no error and the will was deliberately made open to the public.
If that was indeed the case, why was there such an un-royal-like desire for transparency? Why in this instance did the House of Windsor not want to protect their privacy? One clue
lies in the size of the estate - £52,435 - which although not a paltry sum in 1948 was in royal terms relatively modest when you take into account that five years earlier Prince George, the Duke of Kent had left £153,735 and a year before that Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, bequeathed £150,677. Traditionally, one of the alleged reasons why royal wills were hidden was to hide the size of their wealth and to minimize death duties. So, if as in Helena Victoria's case the estate is small and the resultant tax liability is small, then there is much less cause to hide the value and nature of her assets.
A second traditional reason for sealing wills, as we have seen with Prince Francis, was to hide skeletons in the closet - embarrassing mistresses, illegitimate births or details of which offspring got what share of the estate. Since Helena Victoria died unmarried, childless and possibly a virgin, she had no heir whether legitimate or not to whom she could pass on her assets. Moreover, apart from her sister, she had no other surviving close relatives. Both her parents were long dead. Her elder brother, Prince Christian Victor, died childless in 1900. Her other brother, Prince Albert, the titular Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, had died unmarried and heirless in 1931.
One is forced to conclude that because Helena Victoria had few assets - and even fewer relatives to give them to - her executors decided there was nothing to hide and no need to seal her will. Indeed, as we shall see, her executors were forced to look outside her family to find suitable beneficiaries.
But what was actually in the will? The four-page document is dated 23 June 1943 and begins by appointing as both executors and trustees her sister Marie Louise, her banking accountant John England and her solicitor John Nairne although the latter two are replaced by Coutts bank in a codicil dated 10 June 1945. Her first bequest is to her sister. This consists of the bulk of her chattels – including books, furniture, china and jewellery. Her sister was further instructed to make gifts from the chattels to anyone named in a memorandum left with the will or her papers. No memorandum was attached to the will and it is not known whether one was found in her private papers, although it is a well established method for wealthy testators to distribute their possessions without making it public in their wills. It is likely that one of the unnamed beneficiaries was Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester as his estate when put up for auction included many personal items of furniture (such as a dressing table and a mahogany stand branded "PRSS H.V”) once owned by Helena Victoria. As we shall see later, Princess Diana did something similar with a letter of wishes.
Royal Legacy: How the royal family have made, spent and passed on their wealth Page 9