The £37,000 outlay on Barnwell soon proved a shrewd investment. When in December 1944 Prince Henry was sent to Australia for two years to be Governor General, he was obliged to sell the tenanted parts of the estate (to among others the magnificently named Augusta de Cock-Brogniaux) which brought in £47,000. On his return he could afford to buy up more arable land so that the total size of the farm was close its pre-war level of 5,000 acres. The farm, however, was never run as a modern agribusiness and in Alice's view probably never paid for itself.9
Surprisingly Alice's exile in Australia as the Governor General's wife cemented her relationship with her mother-in-law. Queen Mary had originally been delighted with the marriage as it brought her a much sought after second daughter and during the war she invited her to stay at Badminton where they went antique hunting together. But it was during the Australian sojourn that they grew close through a lengthy correspondence. With Henry not being a natural letter writer and often away from the Governor General's residence on tours of the country, Mary found it easier to keep in touch with her son through her daughter-in-law. Their correspondence contained intimate and witty exchanges and helped forge a bond of affection between two women who were both naturally shy and reserved.10
By this time Queen Mary also had two grandchil-dren. Both wartime babies, Prince William was born in December 1941 and Prince Richard in August 1944. Their godparents were the two spinster-sister princesses described in Chapter Five. Princess Marie Louise was named Richard's godmother at his baptism at the private chapel at Windsor and later left him a stunning Russian-style diamond tiara, while Princess Helena Victoria became William's "sponsor" or godparent in the same Windsor chapel where she gave him a silver tankard as a christening present. William's other godmother was Queen Mary who true to her generous nature showered him with a rich spray of christening and confirmation presents (see Chapter Six). This was the start of a cascade of valuables that passed from the septuagenarian Mary not just to her two grandchildren but also to her daughter-in-law. By the time of her death in 1953, she had left Alice two diamond tiaras, three diamond brooches and a pearl choker lined with diamonds.11
Queen Mary survived to the ripe old age of eighty-five but it soon became apparent that her son Henry was unlikely to make old bones. The first inkling that something might be seriously amiss occurred on the day of Winston Churchill's funeral in January 1965 when the duke was driving back to Barnwell Manor with the duchess at his side. Just before he reached home, his Rolls-Royce swerved, left the road and turned over. Fortunately he was thrown free and escaped with a few scratches, but his wife was not so lucky. She broke her arm and nose, cracked her knee and suffered deep facial injuries which required fifty-five stitches and a two week stay in hospital. In her memoirs, she seems to blame herself for not being sufficiently alert and not steadying the wheel when her husband lost control of the vehicle. But Henry's biographer suggests that the duke might have suffered the first trace of a stroke.12 His doctors had earlier told him to give up driving but he had refused. Less than eight weeks after the accident the duke suffered an unequivocal - albeit mild - stroke. He was in Canberra to take part in the commemorations for the 50th anniversary of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli when just before the opening ceremony he tried to get up. His legs gave way and seemed to lose all awareness. He managed to complete his official functions but the big blow came in the summer of 1968 when he suffered two more serious strokes that left him in a wheelchair and virtually deprived of speech.
At this point Alice could not have failed to realise that her sixty-eight-year-old husband's days might be numbered. She acknowledges in her book that he was now a complete invalid and she could not even be certain that he could understand what anyone said to him.13 In the light of her own personal experience witnessing her father unable to survive long enough to avoid crippling death duties it is reasonable to assume that she would have discussed with her husband or his financial advisors how to pass on his wealth to his family in the most tax efficient manner. The traditional device to avoid estate duty was either a discretionary trust or a lifetime gift. Although in the sixties, the transfer could be made one year before death to escape all tax, by 1972 the period had been extended to seven years with a sliding scale determining the liability to be paid if the death occurred during that period. So, if he gifted assets in 1968 after his serious stroke, he would probably have needed to survive until 1975 to escape the full force of death duties.
Apart from the family silver (in the shape of the Gloucesters’ valuable collection of jewellery, furniture and other heirlooms), the duke’s most important asset was Barnwell Manor and its surrounding farmlands. Here he would have been faced with the dilemma of whether to transfer title to his wife who loved the manor and its gardens but who was like him in her late sixties, or to his two sons - with the elder Prince William the more likely recipient since he would inherit the title Duke of Gloucester and would need a country seat. After Henry's stroke, William retired from the diplomatic service so that he could spend more time managing the Barnwell estate. Between 1970 and 1972 the heir to the Gloucester title worked closely with the farm manager Mr Vinson learning the intricacies of livestock breeding and trying to introduce more modern farming methods.
Regardless of whether some lifetime transfer took place in the years after Henry’s major stroke, any significant long term estate planning would have been dramatically cut short by a second transport accident. Prince William had a reputation as a "wild boy" - not just in his pursuit of older, divorced women (such as his long-time lover the Hungarian-born Szuzui Starkloff) but also in his outdoor pursuits. He was a brave polo player, a fearless skier and a dare-devil pilot. He had first started flying when he left Eton and fully got the bug during his diplomatic postings in Nigeria and Japan, on one occasion completing a two thousand mile flight to Tokyo. After stepping down from the Foreign Office, he took out a competition flying licence and began to enter rallies.
On 28 August 1972 he enrolled for the Goodyear International Trophy at the Half Penny Green Airfield near Wolverhampton. In the first paired race his yellow and white Piper Cherokee Arrow was trying to catch up with the aircraft in front piloted by his Irish friend, Tim Phillips, when it took a steep bend at too low an altitude. It managed to pass over some houses but the left wing glanced the branches of a large tree and the impact broke off part of the wing. The aircraft rolled over, dived inverted into the ground and burst into flames. The crash was witnessed by a crowd of thirty thousand people but the heat of the blaze prevented onlookers and firemen alike from rescuing him and his co-pilot Vyrell Mitchell. A later investigation found no fault with the aircraft. Both pilots were fit and fully qualified to fly the aircraft. The final word was left to one pilot friend who concluded that "there are risks in all competitive flying."
By her own admission Princess Alice was never quite the same again after the death of her eldest son. It is not clear what long term effect the news had on the ailing Prince Henry who saw the crash on that evening's television news bulletin but within two years he too was dead. In the early hours of 9 June 1974 he passed away at Barnwell Manor. In an ironic twist, the estates of father and son would be united in death by death duties.
Prince William's gross estate was valued at £416,001 61s, but it had massive debts and other liabilities in the region of £100,000 and the net figure was reduced to £318,378. He may have been eleventh in line to the throne but this was still a substantial sum for a thirty-year-old farmer. Over the years William must have benefited from royal bequests: we know his grandfather, George V, set up a trust for his grandchildren and we know that Princess Helena Victoria left him a small cash sum in her will (although somewhat typically he spent some of the money to buy a racehorse) and of course there was all the silverware and furniture from his grandmother, Mary. The bulk of his wealth is likely to have come from his father who is believed to have passed on many family heirlooms to him. But it seems unlikely that Barnwell Manor was included
. With an estimated price tag over £500,000, it would have pushed his estate well beyond its probate value of £318,378. Even without the heavy tax burden of the manor house, some reports suggest that he left to his brother Richard “crippling death duties" of over £70,000. Under the 1972 Finance Act, there was no tax to pay on the first £15,000 but the rates climbed from 25% to a staggering 75% on the slice above £500,000. It seems likely that despite Henry's possible attempt to mitigate inheritance tax by gifting assets to his son, the family was hit by a double whammy of paying tax first on William's estate and soon after on Henry's. It is possible that Henry left his elder son some possessions that in the space of a couple of years would have been subject to two lots of estate duty.
What was apparently happening was the nightmare scenario for the Windsors of their wealth being decimated by a succession of premature deaths. John Major as prime minister had raised this possibility when he warned against royal assets being “salami-sliced” away as he argued the case in the Commons for the 1992 exemption on inheritance tax for the sovereign on transfers to the heir to the throne. A double death can kill even the best-laid schemes of estate planning.
If press reports are true that Richard was left a crippling tax liability, this would suggest that he was the main beneficiary of his brother's will.14 But William's will - unlike his mother's - was sealed. It seems odd that a mere thirty-year-old would have written a will but given his taste for dangerous sports and the fact according to several reports he had been diagnosed with the serious skin disease porphyries, he may have harboured thoughts of dying young – an opinion subscribed to by his mother in her memoirs.15
We know from the probate records that Prince Henry died in June 1974 leaving an estate worth £734,262 19s before tax. Since his will was sealed we cannot be sure whether he left his landed property to his surviving son or his widow. But one clue to its ultimate fate lies in the name of his estate's executor. He was Arthur Collins and his name would reappear in many documents relating to ownership of Barnwell Manor, even though he was in no way related to the Gloucester family. For sixty-five of his eighty-nine years Collins was a solicitor with the London law firm of Withers. By the time of Henry's death in 1974 he had been a senior partner for over a decade and his speciality was looking after some of the great noble estates of England for whom he often acted as a trustee or guardian. He served as trustee for the Duke of Manchester and in one high profile case was also a trustee for the estate of the Duke of Marlborough which included Blenheim Palace and a £100 million inheritance. When its heir James Blandford, the Marquess of Blandford, began to squander the family fortune on his drug habit, the family instructed Withers to go to the High Court to limit his inheritance and set up a new trust in which Blenheim Palace and the bulk of the estate was then placed outside of his control. Collins had a personal interest in the marquess’s affairs as he was distantly related to the family through his mother, Lady Evelyn Innes-Ker, a first cousin of Sir Winston Churchill.
Collins often became friends with his clients and his professional and social life tended to overlap. An old Etonian who served in the Royal Horse Guards before marrying the widow of the 6th Lord Sudeley, he moved effortlessly in the upper echelons of society. He owned a country estate in North Yorkshire and loved fox hunting, shooting and racing. As the advisor to the body that ran Royal Ascot, he regularly came into professional contact with the Queen’s representative at the race course, the Duke of Norfolk, and during Ascot week would inevitably rub shoulders with senior members of the royal family. When Lord Mountbatten heard that the Duchess of Windsor needed an executor for her and the duke's estate, Collins was immediately recommended as a man who could be relied upon to be tactful.16 In 1980 he was appointed KCVO in recognition of his services to the royal family.
It is not known when he first met the Gloucesters but some relationship of trust must have developed since he was made with Princess Alice co-executor of Prince Henry's estate in 1974 and in the 1990s his name regularly appears in the title documents to Barnwell Manor and the surrounding estate. It would be a mistake to assume from the title documents that Sir Arthur was actually the joint owner of Barnwell Manor and its surrounding land. If the estate had been transferred into a trust then the trust could either be registered at the Land Registry under the name of that trust or the name of the trustees (without mentioning the fact that they were indeed trustees and not private individuals). Given that Collins had previously acted as a trustee for at least two other great aristocratic families and given that he was named executor of Henry's estate, the most likely explanation for his name appearing on the Land Registry documents is that he was co-trustee of the trust that controlled Barnwell Manor and surrounding lands. This trust could have been set up after Henry's death, but since any transfer to Alice on death would have been subject to high death duties, it would have been prudent to do it during his lifetime. At this time of rising tax rates, trusts were all the rage with the landed rich. As one leading historian of the British aristocracy observed, “the sixties saw the widespread proliferation of elaborate discretionary trusts among landowning families which were a more effective means of tax avoidance.”17 A Buckingham Palace spokesman later confirmed that Barnwell Manor had indeed been placed in a family trust, although it was not made clear when this transfer took place..18
Following her husband's death, Alice lived happily in Barnwell Manor for the next twenty-one years. It was a tranquil, almost idyllic location, overlooking the gently rolling fields of the east Northamptonshire where ponies and shire horses grazed and nestling beside the picture postcard village of Barnwell with its babbling brook, thatched cottages, medieval church, cricket pitch and one inn – the Montagu Arms. In fact, all of Barnwell seemed branded with the red and gold coat of arms of Alice’s family.
Barnwell Manor had something of the flavour of a Northamptonshire Balmoral – but with a slightly warmer hue due to the cream-coloured brickwork, neat hedgerows and lush greenery. No stately home, the manor was less than luxurious but certainly more than comfortable. Set back from the road on a piece of high ground near a derelict castle, the two-storey building contained eight bedrooms and four reception rooms with a cottage, a coach house, swimming pool and tennis courts. But her pride and joy - as was shown by the many photographs in her memoirs - was her garden which she cultivated with a Panglossian passion. The lawns were beautifully manicured and the hedges trimmed with a maze-like precision. She liked to tell visitors that few people were lucky enough to have a castle in their garden inside which was a tennis court.19
But the Barnwell estate was becoming a drain on the family's finances, its upkeep costing an estimated £35,000 a year. Prince Richard, who had tried to run the farm in a business-like fashion but without making much money, reportedly decided in the spring of 1995 that the only way to break even was to rent out the manor house and move his mother into his grace-and-favour apartment in Kensington Palace. This prompted some press reports suggesting that what he really wanted to do was to put the property up for sale rather than for rental. Shortly after on January 4 1996 a letter appeared in the Times from Paul Howell of Berengar Antiques denying that that Barnwell had been put on the market. In fact, “the duke has leased the manor and the medieval castle,” he wrote “…to me for a period of ten years, and I understand that there is every probability that the Gloucesters will return to Barnwell when the lease expires.” The rental arrangement reportedly brought the duke £60,000 a year – and with it, more bad publicity.20
Although Prince Richard did his best to ease the transition for his mother by recreating the Barnwell drawing room for her and letting her enjoy a walled garden at Kensington Palace, it must have been an enormous wrench for a ninety-three-year-old to decamp to the capital. The Duke of Edinburgh reportedly gave the Duke of Gloucester a severe dressing-down, arguing that his mother should be permitted to see out her last years in her old home regardless of the cost.21 It was unjust, he is reported to have said, to uproot an
old lady who lived only for her garden and dog. Prince Richard's apparent response was the matter was out of his hands since the family's coffers had been drained by the crippling death duties on the estates of his brother and father. But others might have wondered why the duchess could not have sold off some of the family heirlooms - such as the valuable collection of antique books - to pay for the upkeep of Barnwell.
The fact that Princess Alice was not sufficiently cash rich to find another £35,000 a year to run her home strongly suggests that some of her assets might have already been transferred out of her estate to mitigate inheritance tax. We know for certain that she gave a magnificent turquoise suite of tiara, necklace, earrings and bracelets to the present duchess on her wedding to Prince Richard and at some stage this was supplemented by a valuable pearl and diamond dog collar originally owned by Queen Mary. In 1995 she was well into her nineties and so with prudent planning would have handed over her possessions at least seven years before to escape any death duties. We know that she wrote her last will in November 1988 and amended it with a codicil in April 1993. We also know from the Land Registry records that she was still in control of the Barnwell Manor and the farmlands as late as July 1996 but since Sir Arthur Collins' name was also attached to the documentation then it is likely that it was still in a trust and technically outside of her estate. Around this time, she was beginning to lose control of her own faculties. In July 2000 Prince Richard announced that his mother had decided to step down from public life since she had become "increasingly forgetful" and no longer felt “confident in carrying out official engagements away from Kensington Palace or in coping with the clamour of social gatherings." Princess Alice died in her sleep at her London home on 29 October 2004, aged one hundred and two.
Royal Legacy: How the royal family have made, spent and passed on their wealth Page 29