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

by McClure, David

  The longer the wait, the greater the cumulative income - providing of course he did not spend it all. This financial calculus applied equally to his son, the future George V who enjoyed almost a decade of Duchy of Cornwall revenues and also to his grandson, the future Edward VIII, who had more than twenty years of income. Indeed, it is often forgotten that today's Prince of Wales like Bertie has had forty plus years of revenue from the Duchy of Cornwall, although in his case the revenues have been much greater since the duchy is today much more profitable than it was in the 19th century.

  Prince Albert also overhauled the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster, another anomalous portfolio of hereditary land that somehow escaped the 1760 settlement and in this case became the personal source of revenue for the sovereign.27 In the early years of Victoria's reign revenue was as low as £5,000 per annum but by the end it was closer to £60,000,28 although it never reached the level of the Duchy of Cornwell. One possible reason why Bertie may have got into debt as a sovereign was that on his accession his personal source of income switched from the Duchy of Cornwall (which produced £92,085 in 1910) to Duchy of Lancaster revenue (which produced just £64,000), although of course he did get a uplift in Civil List payments as sovereign.

  Albert also had his eye on a property in Norfolk for Bertie - Sandringham Hall set in 7,000 acres of prime game country on the southern shore of the Wash. But when he died suddenly from stomach cancer (and possibly undiagnosed Crohn’s disease) in December 1861 it was left to Bertie (with perhaps some aid from Queen Victoria) to pay the hefty £225,000 asking price, although at least one tenth of the sum came from Duchy of Cornwall revenues.29 It had been the hope of Bertie’s parents that he would be distracted from the fleshpots of London by the estate’s bucolic charms but in the event their plans backfired spectacularly. He took such an immediate shine to the place that he invited all his lady friends and fun-loving financiers down for bacchanalian weekends in the country. Shooting, hunting and eating were favourite pursuits.

  Finding the original house too cramped for his needs, he soon demolished it and built at considerable expense a new Jacobean-style redbrick mansion known as “The Big House”. With an entrance hall that doubled as a ballroom which was dominated by a stuffed baboon, the interior decoration was on a par with Balmoral and Osborne. One royal biographer thought the house had all the majesty of a Scottish golf hotel.

  In time Bertie made extensive changes to the estate. New roads were constructed, a spectacular ironwork gate was installed and extra stables and cottages were built - including York Cottage which was to be the much-loved home of his son, the future George V. In addition to spending £200,000 on new buildings, repairs and landscaping, he purchased more land in nearby Anmer and Flitcham almost doubling the total holding to 15,000 acres.

  When Edward finally died in 1910, he left George V not just Sandringham but also Balmoral. He also bequeathed him many priceless family art treasures but according to the testimony of George's private secretary no cash. This was because as Prince of Wales George would have been able to accumulate a considerable fortune from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall. He also received a generous annuity from the Civil List from which he saved money.

  Although Edward's will left ownership of the Sandringham estate to his eldest son, it also granted his wife Alexandra the use of Sandringham House for her lifetime. Even though it would have made more sense for her to swap places with George V and allow him to use the spacious Big House instead of the cramped York Cottage where he lived with the queen and their six children, she preferred to stay put. Since Bertie had bought and built up the place as his private country house, she regarded it as totally different to the palaces which belonged to the crown. One royal biographer detected a streak of "spoiled selfishness" in her character and this came to the fore when she became a widow. She led a life of profligacy which might have been a reaction to decades of playing second fiddle to her philandering husband and enduring the sniping of other members of the royal family. Princess Alice was of the opinion that “Alix” could never be a good companion for someone as intelligent as “Uncle Bertie” because she was heavily deaf and not very bright. In fact, her life had been transformed back in 1867 when an attack of rheumatic fever left her with progressive deafness, tinnitus and a permanent limp. While her husband pursued the pleasures of the flesh in London, she had to endure a life of exile in Sandringham, only consoled by the fact that the flat Norfolk countryside reminded her of Denmark.

  Alexandra was also left £200,000 in her husband's sealed will. We know this thanks to an entry dated June 30, 1910 in the diary of Charles Hobhouse, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury in Herbert Asquith's cabinet: "the king I find left a fortune of £200,000 to the queen for her life. She is now trying to evade payment of super tax, income tax and death duties."30

  Balmoral and Sandringham were liable to a relatively new and highly unpopular tax known as Estate Duty which was introduced in 1894 by the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir William Harcourt - partly “to woo the masses” and partly to finance naval expenditure by Lord Rosebery’s government. Levied at 8% on estates over £1 million, this “punitive taxation” was regarded as the first deliberate assault on landed wealth – Sir Edward Hamilton, then an assistant Financial Secretary in the Treasury, described the tax scale as "frightening"31 and even Queen Victoria wailed that it could not fail to cripple all landowners.32 In 1910, when the rate was up to 15%, the Attorney General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, drew up a confidential memorandum which he submitted to his Prime Minister Asquith stating that unlike crown property, the monarch's landed property was not exempt from estate duty.

  This was not the first time that Alexandra had locked horns with the Treasury. At the beginning of Edward VII's reign when the Civil List payments were being negotiated, she rejected out of hand the generous offer of a pension of £60,000 a year in the event of her husband predeceasing her and instead persuaded the Exchequer to grant her £70,000 a year (close to £4 million at today's prices). This proved a considerable income for someone who grew up a member of the cash-strapped Danish royal family. As the Prime Minister Arthur Balfour observed waspishly at the meeting of the Civil List committee: "it would be interesting to know what are the revenues of the court of Denmark.”33 In fact, we now know that her parents, Prince and Princess Christian, had only a paltry £800 a year to live on.34

  Alexandra also held out for as much jewellery as possible from her husband's estate. She wanted to keep Bertie’s diamond garter insignia and the diamond crown she wore at the opening of parliament. But his will was unclear whether they belonged to the crown or Alexandra personally. Matters were not helped by the fact that Alexandra never made any attempt to differentiate public from personal jewellery in sharp contrast to Queen Victoria who carefully catalogued all her jewels and specifically listed in her will which pieces should be worn by future queens.

  In the end, it is believed that she kept the disputed items thanks in part to the intervention of her beautiful sister “Minnie”, Dowager Empress Dagmar, the widow of Tsar Alexander III, who had a soft spot for priceless gems and took great delight in upsetting British royal protocol (one exacerbated junior royal called her a "pernicious influence").

  Edward would probably have left some of his other private jewels to his three daughters - and his long time mistress Mrs Keppel. It is remotely possible that other paramours were remembered in his will but we have no documentary evidence for this as following the instructions in his will, Alexandra destroyed all his private and public papers, including letters to her and Queen Victoria.

  The old queen spent the rest of her life in declining health dividing her time between Sandringham and her London home at Marlborough House. Despite the £200,000 inheritance from Bertie and the Civil List pension of £70,000, she still managed to have money problems. Sometimes she ran up large bills on new furniture, on other occasions she would shower a big sum on a favourite charity or an acquaintance down on his luck. Th
e word "cost" was not part of her lexicon and she was reported as saying that if she got into debt then the government could pay. George V was forced to give her a personal allowance of £10,000 and pay for much of the upkeep of Sandringham and Marlborough House. Even the Treasury agreed to exempt almost all of her annuity from taxation.

  But as her health deteriorated, she was able to take less and less pleasure from her vast wealth. On one memorable visit, the Arabist adventurer TE Lawrence found her “a mummified thing" with "red-rimmed eyes" in an "enamelled face” - an image reminiscent of another faded beauty, the stroke-stricken Princess Margaret with her bandaged arm and face hidden behind dark glasses. In her final years, Alexandra was half blind, mentally confused and almost totally deaf. She eventually died at Sandringham of a heart attack on 20 November 1925 aged 80.

  Her will did not need to be sealed because she never made one. Unlike her mother-in-law Queen Victoria or her daughter-in-law Queen Mary, succession planning was never her strong suit. Dying intestate meant that her estate was divided according to family closeness as defined in law rather than any personal testamentary wishes. Whether you are a royal or a commoner, this is a traditional recipe for domestic strife.

  For Alexandra’s estate the difficulty lay in how the jewellery and personal effects were to be split up. On Saturday January 9, 1926 the main beneficiaries gathered at Sandringham House. Present were King George V, Queen Mary and Alexandra's two daughters, Queen Maud of Norway and Princess Victoria (Princess Louise, the eldest daughter, was at home in Scotland). Queen Mary later described how she was faced with a vast collection of good and bad personal possessions that showed what happened when nothing was thrown out for six decades.35

  Mary quickly assumed the lead role in the distribution of chattels, with the jewellery collection being split into four equal shares.36 When it came to choosing their joint share, George and Mary were particularly interested in any personal items given to Alexandra by the royal family on her marriage in 1863 and any personal bequests from Queen Victoria in 1901. They also retrieved all the crown jewels that Alexandra had kept for her own use after the death of Edward VII.

  By not making a will that could be sealed, Alexandra broke with royal convention and unwittingly allowed some daylight to be shed on her estate. But she could not totally shake off the royal family’s atavistic attachment to posthumous privacy. She left instructions that on her death all her private papers be burned.

  3.MARY'S BAD BROTHER - 1910-1922

  "Nunc aut Nunquam” (Now or never)

  The family motto of Lady Kilmorey, mistress of Prince Francis of Teck, King Edward VII et al

  On 22 October 1910 - just four months after the death of Edward VII - The Times reported on its front page: "His Serene Highness Prince Francis of Teck passed away at eleven o'clock." A longer article followed on page ten which gave details of his more famous sister:

  "Universal sympathy will be felt by the whole nation and empire with Her Majesty the Queen in the death of her brother his Serene Highness Prince Francis of Teck which occurred at eleven o'clock on Saturday morning at the nursing home in Welbeck Street.”

  Although referred to as "the Queen," his sister Mary had yet to be crowned - as the joint coronation with George V was not scheduled until June 1911. Not unrelated to that event was a further report that appeared in The Times on 22 February 1911:

  "He [Prince Francis] left an estate of gross value of £23,154…His will and codicil are both dated January 29, 1902 and probate has been granted to his brothers…By order of the probate division of the High Court dated February 17 probate was granted without annexing a copy of the will and codicil.”

  In other words, Prince Francis's will was sealed. This would set an important precedent in the sealing of royal wills that almost a century later would have a serious impact on the legal challenge to the estates of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. But why was it necessary to keep under lock and key the last wishes of a relatively obscure member of the royal family who died without a wife, any children or indeed an estate of any great value? What was special about Francis? What dark secrets could he be hiding?

  Apart from dying in the same year as the king and being his distant cousin, the prince shared one significant thing with Edward VII: a mistress, Ellen Constance, the Countess of Kilmorey. At the king’s coronation in 1902 she was seated next to Alice Keppel and Sarah Bernhardt in the special "loose box" reserved for royal mistresses. But to unravel the mystery of the sealed will we first need to rewind Prince Francis’s royal lineage.

  He was born in Kensington Palace on 9 January 1870. His mother was Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, the Duchess of Teck and the granddaughter of George III, and his father was Prince Francis, Duke of Teck and son of the Duke Alexander of Wuerttemberg. Educated at Wellington College, he had the distinction of being along with his brother the first royal prince to go to a public school. But being something of a rebel he soon got into an argument with his housemaster whereupon he threw him over a hedge for a bet and was promptly expelled. Now judged more suited to a military career, he trained at Sandhurst before joining the Royal Dragoons and serving in India, South Africa and Egypt. For his bravery in the Nile expedition he was awarded the DSO.

  The discipline of army life did little to dampen his longstanding passion for gambling. Like his profligate mother (“fat Mary”), he was a spendthrift and lived in a permanent state of debt; like his distant cousin Bertie (“Tum Tum”), he had a love of racing which drained his finances. In one famous bet at Punchestown race course in Ireland, he lost £10,000 - a small fortune in 1895 and more to the point, one he did not possess. His sister, the newly married Duchess of York, came to his rescue and settled the debt. But the family forced him to go into exile in India and before he departed, Queen Victoria counselled him to mend his ways. Even her advice fell on deaf ears. Unrepentant he later wrote from Mahabaleshwar offering to send his sister a betting book as a Christmas present. On his return to England, he ran up another debt of around £10,000 with a professional gambler who threatened to go public with the matter unless it was settled immediately. Once more his sister paid up and fearful of a scandal went to the new sovereign for advice on how to protect the family honour. Edward VII decreed that Francis be sent back to his regiment in India, but this time the feckless Teck insisted on staying in England.

  Prince Francis’s other great passion was women. Photographs from the period show a dark-haired handsome man with a strong jaw and a melodramatic moustache waxed in the style of an Edwardian rake. His true personality is probably best captured in a 1902 lithograph by the caricaturist Sir Leslie Ward which portrays him as a debonair man about town wearing a top hat, long overcoat and provocatively pointed shoes. Behind his back he carries a sinister walking stick which at any minute might be swung round to ward off a rival suitor or cuckolded husband.

  Princess Maud, the pretty daughter of the future Edward VII, was one of his many female admirers. He encouraged her advances through an exchange of amorous letters and then, to the dismay of his scheming mother, dropped her when talk turned to marriage. His sister's nanny denounced his behaviour as "cruel." Broken-hearted, Maud married on the rebound Prince Charles of Denmark, the future king of Norway.

  The lady who succeeded in winning Francis’s heart was not only ten years older than him but also married. A statuesque woman with an ample bust, Ellen Constance had something of the physical bearing of his sister Mary. But portraits of her hint at a strong sensuality with one oil painting showing her dressed in a low-cut dress with a come-hither look in her eye. A photograph of her taken in 1897 by the fashionable portraitist John Thomson captures her dressed in 18th century French court costume as the Countess du Barri, the mistress of Louis XV. Ellen was the daughter of Edward Baldock MP who died in 1875 leaving her much of the family fortune derived from the antiques and porcelain trade. In 1881 she married Francis Needham, the third Earl of Kilmorey, who in addition to possessing a sprawling country esta
te in Ulster and a town house on Park Lane owned two major London theatres - the Globe and St. James's. For a time, he dallied as a theatrical entrepreneur and Gilbert and Sullivan once tried to hire the Globe for one of their new operettas. Socially, the earl was part of the Prince of Wales’s set having first become his friend at Oxford three decades earlier.1 After the coronation in 1902, he was made aide-de-camp to the new king. By this time, his wife had also become a close friend of royalty.