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

by McClure, David

  The duchess seemed in the dark too. On one occasion, Mountbatten went out of his way to confirm to her that the duke had indeed left her his entire estate.19 This was not strictly speaking true since there was one other royal beneficiary. Mountbatten's eldest daughter, Lady Brabourne, was bequeathed an inscribed copy of a royal family tree which he had had printed privately and given to the duke.20 This would appear to be the same personalised chart mentioned earlier that Mountbatten bequeathed to all of his grandchildren.

  Although the precise value of the duke's estate was never made public, a breakdown of his assets - ranging from landed property to jewellery and other personal possessions - suggests that the duchess inherited a small fortune. Her most important inheritance in terms of both their monetary and sentimental value were the jewels. Here we need to unwind the love story to get an idea of their true worth. As was mentioned in Chapter Four, the Prince of Wales showered Wallis with jewellery from the very start of their romance in May 1934 when Lady Thelma Furness found herself supplanted as the royal mistress. That summer on a cruise round the Bay of Biscay, he gave his new love a stunning Cartier diamond and emerald charm.21

  In the months that followed the trickle of jewels turned into a flood. He bought her a magnificent pair of diamond clips ostensibly as a Jubilee present in May 1935 and by October of that year Lady Diana Cooper after dining at Fort Belvedere observed that Wallis was “glittering and dripped in new jewels and clothes.”22 When another leading socialite Mrs Belloc Lowndes innocently wondered whether they might be costume jewellery she was told in no uncertain terms that the prince had given her £50,000 worth of jewels at Christmas followed by another £60,000 in the New Year.23

  Some saw this cascade of gifts as a reflection of the prince’s emotional immaturity (one diamond bracelet came with the inscription “a boy loves a girl more and more and more”). Wallis who privately referred to the prince as “Peter Pan” wondered whether the infatuation might soon wear off, but with her own household income constrained by her husband’s business problems, she was now beginning to get hooked on the royal high life and there was clearly an element of wilful financial entanglement on the prince’s behalf in his extravagant gift giving. Just as he was emotionally dependent on her, so she would become financially dependent on him. In addition to the jewels, she received a more than generous income from the prince, believed to be £6,000 a year.24

  After the abdication, he never recovered from the snub of being told in a letter from the new king that Wallis would be denied the title of “Her Royal Highness” – despite being the wife of a royal duke. The news came on the eve of their wedding on 3 June 1937 prompting the ex-king to retort: “what a damnable wedding present.” In public he continued to address her as “Her Royal Highness” or “son altesse” and instructed his French-speaking staff to do likewise, as well as bow and curtsey in her presence. Some interpreted his gifts of jewels fit for a queen as a form of compensation for the royal title he could never give her. On 29 June 1937 he paid £6,320 to the jewellers van Clef and Arpels and a fortnight later wrote a cheque for £1,000 to their Parisian neighbour Cartier. The outbreak of war did little to dampen his ardour. Even in May 1940 as France was on the brink of falling to the Nazis, he found time to visit Cartier’s showroom on the Rue de la Paix to buy her another hoard of jewels leaving detailed instructions for a special piece to be made – a flamboyant diamond brooch in the shape of a flamingo with tail feathers made of rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

  At the time of the duke’s death, Wallis’s jewel box was locked away in the vaults of the Morgan Guaranty Bank in the Place Vendome and the secrecy surrounding its contents prompted rumours that it contained some crown property - a set of emeralds that he had inherited from his grandmother Queen Alexandra. To his dying day the Duke of Windsor always maintained that he had never given his wife any jewels that were royal property. He insisted he kept all the receipts for the duchess's jewellery, behaviour consistent with someone obsessed with money. There is some evidence to suggest that he was telling the truth. According to a letter from the socialite Maggie Greville, the emeralds did once belong to Queen Alexandra who left them to her daughter Princess Victoria who sold them to the London jewellers Garrard. King Edward VIII later bought the jewels from Cartier’s in Paris who were acting as an agent for Garrard.

  The only Windsor jewels that we know for certain made their way back to the royal family were some gems that the duchess gave to the children of the late Duke of Kent in memory of her husband's close bonds with Prince George. In 1977 some unspecified jewels were given to Princess Alexandra and the Duchess of Kent and in 1978 - following his marriage to Marie Christine von Reibnitz - Prince Michael of Kent was given a diamond brooch in the shape of the Prince of Wales's feather and a pair of panther shaped emerald earrings.25

  The Duke of Windsor’s liquid assets were believed to be worth well in excess of £3 million. A former financial comptroller admitted that when he saw the duke's portfolio of investments in the sixties it amounted to £3 million and since he was famously reluctant to dip into his capital by the seventies its value would have grown considerably if only by compound interest. The money had been built up from his savings as Prince of Wales from the Duchy of Cornwall revenues (£70,941 in 1936 alone),26 his generous abdication settlement and income from his best-selling memoir "A King's Story" and two other successful royal books "The Crown and the People” and "A Family Album."

  Always on the look-out for a quick profit, he had mixed while Governor of the Bahamas with a number of tax-exile tycoons (some with shadier pasts than others) whose financial brains he was not afraid to pick. Later on trips to the United States he took more formal advice from Charles Allen of the respected New York financial house Allen & Co, while his European-based financial affairs were placed in the hands of his personal banker Maurice Amiguet of Societe de Banque Suisse in Zurich. He also used a stockbroker in London, James Fitch at E.R.Lewis and Co, and judging by his UK probate it is likely that he had a small portfolio of shares in the UK. Such was his expertise in equities and his willingness to take calculated risks that the duke – as his official biographer pointed out – could have carved out a successful career as a stockbroker.

  On the debit side, it should be pointed out that he lost a large sum of money on the foreign exchange market in the late fifties when it was discovered that his private secretary Victor Waddilove had been defrauding him on a long term basis. The scandal was hushed up to avoid embarrassment to the duke (and the extent of his knowledge of or even involvement in the embezzlement was never revealed), but in December 1958 Waddilove eventually admitted that he had operated illegally on the black market with his employer's money as part of a larger one billion franc crime ring. To stop him taking his story to the press “Mr Light Fingers" (as the duchess dubbed him) was reportedly paid off by the duke's advisors.27

  When it comes to landed property, the duke was more secure. He owned the EP ranch in the hills of Alberta, Canada - and for a time harboured a dream of retiring there until it was eventually sold in the mid-sixties when he became too frail to enjoy it fully.28 But his prized possession was the Moulin de la Tuilerie at Gif sur Yvette - better known as "the Mill." In July 1952 he paid the fashion designer and painter Etienne Drian $80,000 for this semi-derelict 18th century mill house set in twenty-three acres of woodland and semi-arable land in the valley of Chevreuse forty-five miles south of Paris. The money came in part from the proceeds of his book sales but in 1952 he also had to get special dispensation from Churchill's government to transfer from the United Kingdom an extra £20,000 (on top of earlier £80,000 remittance) which exceeded the strict exchange controls of the time.29 For the next four years he spent a further $100,000 converting the stone-walled mill and the old wooden barn into a Fort Belvedere-like country house replete with English garden and babbling brook. Its interior decoration was less English – certainly in the view of Lady Diana Mosley who thought its apricot-coloured carpets and other b
right features “more Palm Beach” than French or English. Much of this was the work of Stephene Boudin, the same designer that Chips Channon had hired in the 1936 to decorate his London home where he entertained the then Edward VIII and his brother Prince George. Although the design work was not to everyone’s tastes – Cecil Beaton called it “overdone and chichi” - it nevertheless proved a good investment as in June 1973 the property was sold to the Swiss industrialist Edmond Artar for two million French francs (almost £400,000). In the spring of 1953 he acquired a twenty-five-year lease from the city of Paris to No 4 Route du Champ d'Entrainement, an elegant turn-of–the-century mansion with a gatekeeper's lodge, garages and two greenhouses in its own two-acre park in the Bois de Boulogne. It was the former home of General de Gaulle and would be the Windsors' main residence for the rest of their lives. Thanks to the duchess's handiwork, it soon had all the trappings of a royal residence - from the driveway lamp-post topped with a gilded crown to the royal arms carved in wood in the entrance hall. Even the footman wore royal livery. In an echo of his buying her jewellery fit for a queen, he seemed to be building her a palatial home suitable for a royal highness.

  Although the duchess tried to impose her own taste on the decor - spending a small fortune on upholstery and fittings as well as on her fine collection of china and porcelain - their home’s valuable artworks and furnishings came from the duke's family. Full length portraits of Queen Mary and the duke in Garter robes, the abdication desk, the Garter standard and other heirloom treasures from his former English homes of York House and Fort Belvedere adorned the reception rooms, giving a further reminder as if any were needed of his royal ancestry. On a visit in September 1970, Cecil Beaton was struck by how the drawing room positively overflowed with royal souvenirs, wax seals and framed photographs of Queen Victoria and Queen Mary.30

  It is difficult to put a price tag on the value of the mansion as the duke never bought the freehold but the exceedingly generous terms of the lease meant that after his death, the duchess was allowed to stay there for the remaining fourteen years of her life on a peppercorn rent. The French authorities also exempted her of income tax and death duties on her estate. As an expression of gratitude (or perhaps as part of the deal with the state) in March 1973 she donated her Louis VI furniture and porcelain to the Louvre and other French museums. Some of the remaining furniture was later bought by Mohamed Al Fayed for reportedly fifteen million French francs when he took over the lease and contents of the house.31

  * * *

  Despite inheriting such fabulous wealth, the duchess was worried about money. Convinced that she was living beyond her means, she felt obliged to reduce the size of her household from thirty-two (including two secretaries, two cooks, a butler as well as a valet, various gardeners and a gatekeeper) to a dozen key staff. Having always left financial matters in the hands of her husband, she knew little about running a tight budget and with her health now declining, she began to rely more and more on her lawyer Maitre Suzanne Blum to organise her affairs. Some have even suggested that Blum may have encouraged her worries about money in order to ease out staff and so increase her leverage over the duchess.

  Just two years younger than the duchess, the Frenchwoman had strong American connections having studied law at Columbia University in New York and worked for the big Hollywood film studios representing Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin and Rita Hayworth and gaining a reputation for being one of France's toughest attorneys. Her introduction to the Windsors came through her first husband, Paul Weill, who as the Paris representative of Sir Godfrey Morley's London firm of solicitors sometimes acted for the duke. Fiercely protective of her clients, Blum became the Windsors' bulldog - or as the wife of the British ambassador to Paris put it more diplomatically: "she defends the duchess like a lioness with her cubs."32

  Maitre Blum was granted exclusive control of the duchess's legal affairs in January 1973 after the dismissal of her English solicitor. Blum managed to convince the duchess that Sir Godfrey Morley had been mismanaging the duke's estate and that the scheme to put all his assets into an English trust would be financially disastrous since it would be liable to 70% tax in France.33 On 16 February 1973 the duchess rewrote her will that Morley had helped draft on 8 November 1972 to dovetail with the duke's estate and appointed Blum her executor instead of Morley. Further codicils were added on 4 December 1973 and 17 March 1977 which in their total effect with the new will overturned all the provisions to repatriate the duke's assets to England.

  Almost everything was left to the Pasteur Institute, the renowned medical foundation in Paris. This was interpreted by Michael Bloch in his official biography as a show of gratitude to France for all the kindness and privilege the nation had shown to the duke and the duchess.34 It should be pointed out that when choosing between countries she had no particular affection for the United Kingdom (where she was denied access for so long) and she had no siblings or surviving relatives in the United States. She was noted for having many homosexual friends (including the Woolworth’s heir Jimmy Donahue with whom she was rumoured to have had an affair) and she would have been sympathetic to the work of the Pasteur Institute in Paris which was at the forefront of research into finding a vaccine against AIDS.

  Other biographers have hinted that the duchess's desire to leave everything to France might have been influenced by her French lawyer. In what he describes as "her takeover of the duchess" Hugo Vickers argues that Blum was motivated by "an irrational hatred of the English that developed during her sole visit to Britain [and]…extended to the royal family."35 Not long after Blum rearranged the duchess's estate and organised the transfer of some the Windsors' furniture to Versailles and other French museums, she was made Commander of the Legion d'Honneur by the French state. In the view of Johanna Schuetz, the duchess's long suffering personal secretary who would soon be dismissed by Blum on the spurious grounds of being unstable, it was well merited since the maître had certainly served France well.36

  As the duchess became weaker following a near-fatal intestinal haemorrhage in November 1975, Blum's influence grew stronger. Supposedly on doctors' orders the maître discouraged visits from friends and acquaintances and little by little the duchess became a prisoner in her own home - often eating too little and drinking too much. In October 1977 Blum was given power of attorney over all her affairs. With this seal of approval, she began to protect not just her client's wealth but also her image. On one level this meant using France's strict privacy laws to keep the paparazzi at bay, on one occasion exacting $30,000 in damages from Paris Soir for publishing illicit photos of an obviously distressed duchess being nursed in her garden but it also involved guarding her reputation and lasting legacy. Any biographer who had the temerity to suggest that the Windsors may have had carnal relations before their marriage would be threatened with a law suit. Caroline Blackwood who wrote an unflattering although largely accurate portrait of Wallis in her dotage - "The Last of the Duchess" - had to wait until the death of Blum in 1994 before it could be published.

  By gaining power of attorney over the duchess, Blum also acquired control of the documentary record. She claimed that Wallis gave her written authorisation to publish some of her most intimate letters and papers, although she was reluctant to produce it to sceptical biographers like Hugo Vickers. To counter an unfavourable picture of the Windsors given in the Thames Television series "Edward and Mrs. Simpson" and several new hostile biographies, including "The Windsor Story" by two American journalists, Blum decided to release to the press some of their love letters that testified to the true depth of their feelings for each other. She also authorised her legal assistant, Michael Bloch, to write several books based on the Windsors' papers and putting forward their viewpoint.37

  Blum now saw herself as guardian of the Windsor myth. As one royal chronicler observed after trying to interview her in 1980, "the duchess had always been a figure of myth and it was this myth that had captivated her old lawyer."38 Johanna Schuetz was instructed t
o burn some of the duke's papers, while her predecessor as private secretary John Utter felt obliged to decline an offer to write a memoir about the Windsors on the grounds that anyone who destroys the myth will be despised.39 Despite his loyalty, in 1975 he too was dismissed from the Windsor household.

  By 1980, the duchess was confined to bed and in need of constant medical supervision. Now that her household staff had been reduced to four, her life was dominated by her nurses, her doctor Jean Thin and of course Maitre Blum. Crippled by rheumatism, no longer able to speak and only kept going by a life support machine, the widow of the former king of England was little more than a vegetable.

  The duchess died two months short of her ninetieth birthday on 24 April 1986 and was interred next to her husband in the royal burial ground at Frogmore. A year later, on April 3 1987, Blum put the duchess's jewellery and other personal possessions up for sale. Sotheby’s puffed the auction in its Geneva showroom as the “sale of the century” and enlisted buyers from round the world to take part in the bidding by satellite but even their wildest dreams were surpassed when the sale realised £31 million, six times the estimated price. The duchess’s Mogul emerald engagement ring that the duke gave her on the evening after she divorced Ernest Simpson fetched £1.2 million, while the ruby and diamond necklace inscribed “My Wallis from her David” brought in £1.5 million. A diamond clip in the shape of the Prince of Wales's feathers given to her in 1935 was bought by Elizabeth Taylor for £350,000. The highest price paid was £1.8 million for the famous McLean diamond ring given to the duchess in 1950. But to the disappointment of hunters of the missing Alexandra emeralds there were no recognisable royal jewels among the two hundred and thirty lots.