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

by McClure, David

  A few antiques also went under the hammer. A 1910 gilt inkstand, an 1820 silver seal box and an 1823 desk set all commanded good prices - as did some of the duke’s personal items such as tobacco boxes, clocks, swords and even a sporran. After the auction house deducted their premium, the Pasteur Institute was left with around £26 million. The bulk of the money was spent on a new building for research on retroviral diseases, including cancer and HIV (AIDS).

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  The world record proceeds from the auction give the lie to notion often propagated by the duke and duchess that they were ever short of money. Even if one allows for the fact that Sotheby’s prices were inflated by the cachet of their royal name and romantic story, their combined wealth - including landed property, liquid assets and jewellery - would still be worth tens of millions of pounds at today's prices. The duchess's inheritance from the duke was further inflated by the exemption on any death duties. With no tax to pay, one would have thought that there was little to hide and therefore no reason to keep the duke’s testamentary affairs secret. Yet his English will was sealed like other royals of his rank. Even though in his lifetime he rebelled against the monarchy and its cold-hearted customs that prevented him from marrying the woman he loved, in death he respected its protocols on testamentary secrecy.

  What is unusual about the secrecy concerning the Windsor inheritance is that it concerned not just paper money but paper documents. The fact that within hours of the Duke of Windsor being buried, Lord Mountbatten and Prince Philip had reportedly asked his grieving widow what she intended to do with his private papers indicates how important it was for the royal family to control the documentary record. If there was anything remotely embarrassing in the duke's collection of letters - particularly relating to the abdication - then it was far better if it was all put under lock and key in the archives at Windsor Castle. This would explain why Mountbatten felt obliged to go to such lengths get the material back to Britain, even going behind the duchess's back to make an arrangement with the duke's staff. Suzanne Blum later alleged that two individuals acting on royal authority "burgled" the duke's filing cabinets without the knowledge or consent of the duchess. A small batch of documents were later returned "by mutual agreement" although the palace categorically denied any wrongdoing and it is now widely accepted that the maître may have embroidered the truth.40

  The battle over control of the duke’s image continued well after his death. In the early 1980s the palace authorised Philip Ziegler to write an official biography of Edward VIII and "by generous permission of Her Majesty" as he later acknowledged was accorded unrestricted access to the Royal Archives at Windsor.41 This included access to the crucial memorandum of the king's private secretary Lord Wigram that revealed new details of George V's will and the duke’s bitter disappointment at his inheritance. Many reviewers thought that Ziegler produced a less than flattering portrait of the duke.

  The duke's camp provided their own version of events. Shortly after the duchess's death in 1986 her executor Maitre Blum authorised Michael Bloch to release a collection of her letters owned by the estate. In the preface to "Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931-37" Bloch explained that it was the duchess’s clear wish that the letters be published on her death since she had been hurt by several recent biographies giving an image of their characters and relationship that she found “unrecognisable.” She was thus keen that when the moment was right “the truth should be known to the world” via “the authentic contemporary record."42 In 1996 Bloch went on to write a personal biography of the duchess that drew on the Windsors' correspondence and tried to set the record straight on "her much-misunderstood life.” Most reviewers found it if not a hagiographic portrait then certainly one sympathetic to her viewpoint.

  And what exactly was in the duchess's will? When the biographer Caroline Blackwood had the temerity to pose this question to her executor, Maitre Blum exploded: "If I have anything to do with it, the duchess's will is never going to be published. Never. Never."43

  10.DIANA'S ESTATE OF WAR - 1997-1998

  "Basically not a lot of thought went into it. It has all the hallmarks of someone saying: 'You'd better make a will'"

  A legal expert's verdict on Princess Diana's will

  If in popular myth Wallis’s marriage to the Duke of Windsor represented "the greatest royal love story" of the first half of the twentieth century, then Diana's "fairytale wedding" to Prince Charles played almost the same role in the second half. In their different ways, both stories ended tragically and so it was somehow inevitable that the only time their two trajectories crossed was in death. When Mohamed al Fayed's son Dodi died with Diana in the Paris car crash such was his grief that he decided to sell the contents of his Bois de Boulogne house that he had once dreamed might be their matrimonial home. That house was the Windsors’ mansion in Neuilly which he had acquired through the duchess's executor Maitre Blum, paying £3 million to the Pasteur Institute for its contents. These included - as the later auction catalogue showed - heirlooms passed down from George V, such as a set of silver dishes with the cipher of George III, the Garter banner of Edward VII and silver ashtrays from the royal yacht of Queen Victoria. The sale in February 1998 raised a total of £14.5 million which was donated by al Fayed to a charity in memory of Dodi and Diana.

  A second - and more substantial - royal parallel to Diana is Princess Helena Victoria. At first sight, no two princesses could be more dissimilar. One was a global celebrity who dazzled the public with her model looks, stylish clothes and fabulous jewellery, the other was a plain Jane who liked to dress in sombre shades and hide her long face beneath voluminous hats. One married the future King of England, had two sons and seventeen godchildren - not to mention a string of lovers; the other had neither a husband nor children or indeed a single niece or nephew. One perished in a Paris underpass in the most publicised death of the 20th century; the other died almost anonymously in an obscure London flat.

  Yet they shared one significant thing in common: they both left their wills unsealed and open to public inspection.

  The first thing that strikes one on inspecting the two wills is how simple they are. Both leave almost all their estate to just two heirs: for Helena Victoria it was Prince Michael of Kent and Alexander Ramsay, while for Diana it was the two royal princes - William and Harry. With few beneficiaries, both wills are relatively short: Helena Victoria's runs to barely four pages, Diana's to six.

  The second noticeable feature is that they both use trusts. Discretionary or will trusts are a typical device for royals and many other rich families to minimise death duties but in this case they were employed because three of the four heirs were minors. Prince Michael was just five years old when Helena Victoria died, while Prince Harry was twelve and William fifteen. Michael would have to wait until he was twenty-one before his trust fund came on stream; for Harry and William it was twenty-five, although this would be later changed so they could access funds sooner.

  When it came to the matter of chattels or personal possessions, both wills use memoranda or a letter of wishes to govern their distribution. We saw earlier how Helena Victoria gave her sister total control over her jewellery and personal items, subject to any memoranda signed by her and left with her will or papers on her death. Similarly Princess Diana gave her chattels free of inheritance tax to her executors to dispose of according to any written memorandum or notes of hers. It would later emerge that she left behind a specific letter of wishes which - as we shall see - became the subject of legal dispute.

  Attached to both wills was a codicil that altered the balance of executors in favour of an elder sister. In June 1945 - a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe and two years after writing her will - Helena Victoria decided to replace two of her three executors (her solicitor John Nairne and a banking accountant John England) with the anonymous Coutts Bank leaving her sister, Princess Marie Louise, in the powerful position as the only named executor. In February 1996 - two and half years after writ
ing her will - Diana decided to replace one executor (her personal secretary Patrick Jephson) with her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. For Diana, Sarah was the closest member of the family - just as Marie Louise had been for Helena Victoria. Her mother was named as the other executor.

  So, Diana and Helena Victoria had more in common than meets the eye. One other significant bond is that they both lost their title or style and with it some of their royal status. As we have seen, during World War One Her Serene Highness Princess Helena Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein was divested of her German territorial title and never granted an English replacement or a fully royal style. Diana lost her royal highness title as a consequence of her divorce settlement in 1996. Without full royal status both princesses threw themselves into charitable work and the causes they adopted were remarkably similar. Helena Victoria worked tirelessly for her mother's Princess Christian Nursing Home in Windsor, while Diana championed the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. Helena Victoria helped the casualties of World War One through her YWCA work; Diana the casualties of civil wars through her campaign against land mines. Helena Victoria aided the destitute of the East End through her docklands charity, whereas Diana housed the homeless of central London through the charity Centre Point. By dint of this caring work, they swapped their royal status for a saintly one and became “a people’s princess.”

  Where the two princesses differed, however, was in the size of their estates. Helena Victoria's was valued at £52,435, Diana's at £21,468,352. Probate for Diana's estate was finally granted on 2 March 1998 - six months after her death - following the payment of £8,502,330 in inheritance tax.

  Within a few days of the granting of probate, Martyn Gowar, the senior partner of the city law firm Laurence Graham acting for the estate, agreed to release her will to the public. "The most disconcerting thing for me," he later admitted, "was that at the time we published all this [estate] information…I was being asked to do what I had always spent my life not doing, which was disclosing details to the public, and indeed the world, of a client's affairs."1

  As the probate office in Somerset House prepared two hundred copies of the will in anticipation of a flood of requests from the general public for a soon-to-be 75 pence bestseller, just a stone’s throw down the Strand Gowar handed journalists camped outside his office a press pack detailing all aspects of her estate. This strategy of full disclosure was designed to satiate the media’s feeding frenzy: "If we had not published those details, they would have made the story run for weeks and weeks. By disclosing the information, the story became something of a twenty-four-hour wonder. That would not have happened if we hadn't bared body and soul."2

  But Gowar wasn’t the one who had decided to go for the Full Monty of testamentary transparency. "It was the decision of the family that the will should be made public. They felt it would be appropriate in view of the intense public interest." Two of the three executors were family: Diana's sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale and her mother Frances Shand Kydd, while the third was the bishop who confirmed her, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres. They could have decided to be more discreet but that was hardly the Spencer way. Diana had a history of going public with details of her private life - first with her cooperation with Andrew Morton's book revealing the sham of her marriage, then the Panorama television interview with Martin Bashir which put the final nail in the relationship and finally with the details of her divorce proceedings which were leaked to the press. Her very popularity was based on the fact that she wore her heart on her sleeve. Even from the grave she seemed to be managing the media and her public image.

  Lady Sarah too had once been famously indiscreet with the press. When she herself was having a relationship with Prince Charles in February 1978, she gave an interview to two tabloid reporters spilling the beans on her own battles with the bottle and anorexia nervosa and revealing according those reports how "I would not marry anyone I did not love whether he were the dustman or the King of England." The romance did not survive the interview. When she warned Prince Charles of its publication, his response was reportedly "you have just done something extremely stupid.” Her mother Frances who had "bolted" from Earl Spencer to marry Peter Shand Kydd was understandably more wary of the press, but after Diana's death she went out of her way to collaborate with the journalist Max Riddington and his colleague Gavan Naden in a sympathetic portrait of her life - "Frances: the remarkable story of Princess Diana's mother."

  If they had wanted to avoid publicity, the two family executors could have instructed their solicitors to make an application to seal Diana's will. This would have been done on the basis of the right of any member of the public to apply to the courts for greater privacy on the grounds that publication was "undesirable or otherwise inappropriate." They could also have tried to use the blanket royal prerogative that allowed all royal wills to be sealed as a matter of course - providing the standard summons was served on the Treasury Solicitor.

  But why was it in the interests of the Spencer family to go out of their way to protect the privacy of the Windsors? It should be remembered that in the aftermath of Diana’s death there was considerable bad blood between the two families. This was dramatically brought into the open by the funeral address of her brother Charles. In what was seen as a thinly veined attack on the Queen for taking away the HRH title of the princess, the Earl Spencer declared "she proved she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic…I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned." One royal chronicler interpreted the remarks as “the nearest thing you get in the late 20th century to an Act of Sedition.”3 Both Prince Charles and the Duke of Edinburgh were said to be so annoyed by the rebuke that they had to be restrained from making an official response.

  Of course, the royal family could have tried to put pressure on the Spencers to seal Diana's will. The fact that she had lost her HRH title would not have necessarily prevented her testamentary affairs coming under the catch-all title of royal will. It was later confirmed that Buckingham Palace regarded her as a member of the royal family by virtue of the fact that she was the mother of the second and third in line to the throne and even after her death the palace seriously considered restoring her royal title. Both Her Highness Princess Marie Louise and Lady Patricia Ramsay had set a precedent of princesses who despite losing their royal title were still able to have their wills sealed.

  The one person to whom the Windsors might have turned to put the case for sealing the will - or at least being as discreet as possible - was Patrick Jephson, Diana's initial choice of executor. Just a week after the princess’s death the former naval commander declared in a newspaper interview that his first duty was to the monarchy and he later confirmed in his memoirs that he shared "an establishment outlook."4 After eight years' service in the royal household - first as an equerry to the joint office of the Prince and Princess of Wales and then after the separation as private secretary to Diana alone - he was in a perfect position to act as a bridge between Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace. Indeed, in his last two years in the job he had worked behind the scenes to "stitch together a rapprochement," trying to persuade the Queen's household that Diana could be a valuable asset to the royal family and trying to persuade Diana to curb some of her wilder comments and be more conciliatory to Charles. But all his efforts were torpedoed by the princess’s interview to Panorama in which to his horror she suggested that Charles was not fit to be king and the monarchy was out of touch with the public. He only learnt of what exactly she had said by watching a video of the programme after its broadcast. Diana's refusal to keep him in the loop with her public statements proved the final straw in their disintegrating relationship. A few weeks later, he resigned as her personal secretary and executor of her will. With his departure went any direct l
everage the Windsors might have had over the estate.

  Even if they had found a sympathetic ear amongst the Spencers, any attempt to keep Diana’s affairs secret would have met with opposition from the wider public. In the weeks following Diana's funeral, the mood of the nation was - if not exactly pro-republican then certainly hostile to the Windsors whose seemingly cold-hearted response to the death was symbolised by their refusal to fly the royal standard at half mast outside Buckingham Palace. When Prince Philip sought advice from his old friend Lord Brabourne on how best to respond to Earl Spencer’s funeral eulogy, the media-savvy baron reportedly told him to do absolutely nothing. Similarly, when Charles learned that Diana's early death meant that legally he might be entitled to reduce his divorce settlement pay-off, his advisors pointed out that it would not be wise to be seen to be bending the rules in the current climate. Consequently, the royal family kept their heads down.

  When the will was made public, the Windsors had to swallow some embarrassing details. The first page stated Diana’s clear wish that should she predecease her husband he would consult with her mother with regard to the upbringing, education and welfare of their children. Written in June 1993 soon after the separation from the prince, this clause was interpreted as a snub to the parenting skills of Charles. In fact, this line is almost the only reference to her husband in the entire will. In many respects, the will is more interesting for what it does not include than what it does. There is no bequest to or mention of Paul Burrell, her long-serving butler who was portrayed as “her rock." Nor are there any bequests to any member of the Spencer family or any mention of the many charities she supported.