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

by McClure, David

  Given such family wealth, some people wondered whether the children could have afforded to pay the inheritance tax out of their own pocket without selling their mother's possessions. This is perhaps unfair. The two heirs had every right to sell off their bequest to pay a large tax bill since finding £3m in cash - even for a junior royal - is a tall order. Finding space for all the property was another problem. "What were he (David) and Sarah going to do with all the stuff?” asked Ingrid Seward, the royal watcher and editor in chief of Majesty magazine. "You’ve got to store it somewhere; you've got to insure it."12

  Other critics thought the Queen might have advanced the money to save for the nation her late sister's possessions. She almost certainly came to the aid of Prince Charles in funding his multimillion pound alimony payment to Princess Diana and as we have seen she in all likelihood part-financed Margaret's divorce settlement. But when it came to the Christie’s auction, Buckingham Palace on the whole took the view that it was “a private matter for Margaret's children." In the end, many items did go abroad. A private Italian buyer paid £60,000 for a silver dressing table service, while a £42,000 four poster bed and a £276,000 jewelled clock both went to private Asian buyers. Overall, Christie’s recorded registered buyer activity as 30% from the UK, 44% for the rest of Europe, 17% from the Americas, 9% from Asia and the Middle East.13

  Historic Royal Palaces who were left in charge of an empty Kensington Palace apartment were unhappy about having to compete in an open auction for items such as the dining room table - which they hoped to put on show for the general public. The agency was able to afford the pair of regency blackamoors holding their torches aloft that used to adorn the entrance to the dining room. They also picked up for a reasonable price the turquoise glassware that she was fond of collecting, as well as three bottles of Kensington white wine made in 1976 from her own grapes in the garden and a set of menu cards. The daily menu gave a choice of three dishes per course and reveal how the princess indicated choice with written annotations.

  Until recently, any member of the public could go on a tour of Kensington Palace including apartment 1A where the blackamoors were on display in the drawing room and bespoke bottles of wine in the kitchen. But access has now been denied to Margaret’s home due to the arrival of new tenants – the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge who have totally refurbished the interiors. It is assumed that the Ascot Balustrade remained unaffected by the major refit, although at the time of writing the palace could not confirm one way or another whether it was still in situ.

  14.THE PRINCESS'S "LOVE CHILD" – 2006-2008

  "I was…opposed to monarchy, believing with Tom Paine that a hereditary head of state is as sensible as a hereditary poet"

  Geoffrey Robertson QC, barrister representing Robert Brown

  In the summer of 2006 as Princess Margaret's two children were busy auctioning her personal chattels, a fifty-one-year-old accountant who claimed to be her illegitimate child began a legal challenge to open up her will and find out what if anything she had left him. Its ultimate significance would lie not in the individual merits of his case but in what it revealed about the history - and even legality - of the sealing of royal wills. By chance it would also establish an important legal connection between Princess Margaret and her great uncle, Prince Francis of Teck.

  In May of that year Robert Brown drafted a fifty-six page summons setting out the background to his claim. The documents included his birth certificate recording that he was born on 3 January 1955 in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of Cynthia Joan Brown (née Lyall) and Douglas Richard Brown. She was a society model who worked for Hardy Amies, the Queen's dressmaker; he was an army officer posted during the Second World War to Kenya who stayed on to become a successful building contractor. It was Robert Brown’s contention that this birth certificate signed by Cynthia was inaccurate. The date was inconsistent with the one listed in the births section of the Times of 7 January 1955 which gave his birthday as the 6th and not the 5th of January. To add to the confusion, his birth was not registered until February 2 and the certificate recording it was dated as late as June 4.

  Although Cynthia brought him up as her own she was not according to the affidavit his true mother: "[My] conclusion that I am the illegitimate child of Princess Margaret is based upon a jigsaw of personal recollections, events, circumstantial evidence, conversations, reactions and extensive research."1 The pieces began to fall into a pattern at a cousin's wedding in Wales. It was a high class occasion overflowing with titled guests who made Brown acutely aware that he was one of the few commoners present: "When I mentioned this to my uncle he gave an embarrassed half-laugh and said 'wrong side of the sheets'.”2 This off-the-cuff comment triggered a hunt for his true mother.

  By this time both his "adopted” parents were dead. Cynthia had died aged forty-nine in 1980 when he was twenty-five. Douglas had earlier separated from her and moved to Jersey before his own death. They were survived by one son who was born after Robert and whom he believed was their clear favourite. The key indicator pointing Robert in the direction of Princess Margaret as his true mother was a photograph dated October 1956 at the time of a visit to Kenya by Princess Margaret. The image shows a child peering through the closed front window of a car with the reflection in the rear window of the photographer who according to Brown bears a resemblance to the princess. He also records as a five-year-old being taken by Cynthia to Nairobi town hall to see the Queen Mother. His supposed "grandmother" visited Kenya in February 1959. Piecing together these items of evidence and inchoate re-collections, he came to the conclusion that Princess Margaret had had a concealed pregnancy and that to avoid a scandal he had been adopted by Cynthia and Douglas Brown. As to who is his true father, Robert suggested it could be either Group Captain Peter Townsend or Robin Douglas-Home, both of whom had well-publicised affairs with the princess.

  Robert Brown hardly fitted the mould of a fantasist or fortune hunter. Trained as an accountant, he worked for eight years for an Irish bank in the offshore tax haven of Jersey. He had moved there in the footsteps of his legal father and settled in St Lawrence outside of St Helier where unmarried he lived a life of relative tranquillity. Using his financial skills, he did well out of the island's booming property market helped by the absence of capital gains tax and the low rate of income tax.

  Rakishly thin with piercing blue eyes and a balding pate, he came across as an articulate, well-mannered and likable figure. He spoke in public meetings of the need for the Jersey government to show greater openness and accountability in their handling of a controversial reform to the island's tax regime and in March 2004 he stood unsuccessfully as a senatorial candidate for the parliament - "the states" - on a platform opposing some of the fiscal changes. The only hint of a more rebellious side came when he challenged his bank over the nature of some of its offshore products and ultimately parted company with the bank, although he felt vindicated by a later investigation into its investments. Passionate about dietary matters, he also found time to research a book about the harmful effects of Omega 6 oils.

  * * *

  He was also minded to investigate the legal rights of illegitimate children of the royal family. In the last century there has been no shortage of conjecture and rumour surrounding the offspring of British royals born on the wrong side of the sheets, but hard facts are thin on the ground. As we saw with the story of Lady Kilmorey and the Cambridge emeralds, Edward VII had a string of mistresses (one royal researcher put the figure as high as fifty-five) and hence it was thought more than possible that he might have fathered a love child (the most commonly proposed mother being his mistress Lady Sarah Vane-Tempest who reportedly gave birth to a child in 1871, although it may have died soon after or been offered over for adoption).3 Yet he never acknowledged any illegitimate children and despite detailed studies of his love life no definite proof has emerged. Since as sovereign his will was automatically sealed there is no clear testamentary evidence to prove bequests to any illegitimate issue
.

  We heard earlier the story of how Edward's best friend Lord Louis of Battenberg may have fathered a love child by Lillie Langtry - although doubts persist about its true paternity. However, we do know for certain of one modern royal who famously had a child “out of wedlock” – or rather when he was still married to his first wife. George Henry Lascelles, the 7th Earl of Harewood and first cousin to the Queen, married the operatic singer/pianist Marion Stein in 1949 and then in 1964 had a child by the violinist Patricia Tucker. Two years later the Queen gave her permission under the Royal Marriages Act, 1772 for him to marry his second wife and mother of the child. At the age of eighty-eight, Lord Harwood died in July 2011 and the precise details of his will and the size of his estate remain unclear.

  * * *

  So when Robert Brown embarked on his legal challenge to open Princess Margaret's will, he was entering a world of whispers, half-truths and secrets. In this topsy turvy realm, some royals who had no illegitimate offspring kept their wills sealed, while others who had love children preferred them open. In order to help him through the legal labyrinth, Brown engaged another Brown as his solicitor. Her full name was Amber Melville Brown. No relation to Robert, Amber had cut her teeth in the chambers of a well-know media specialist Finers Stephens Innocent rising to become the head of their defamation department. She went on to become a partner of Schillings which had a reputation for tenacious litigating. Later she would work as counsel to Withers, one of Britain’s largest law firms which, as we shall see in Chapter 16, has had several members of the royal family among its clients.

  After Melville Brown applied to the family court to open up the wills of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, on 5 December 2006 she wrote to the palace’s lawyers Farrer and Co. requesting copies of the orders to seal the two royal wills and the applications that accompanied those orders. This was the opening shot in a battle over disclosure of evidence which would dominate legal discussions for the next three years. To Brown's camp, the best way to unlock the wills was to find fault with the original order to seal them and the only way to do that was to pick holes in the arguments employed in the application. But without access to the documentation, they had nothing to dispute.

  On 7 December Farrers wrote back refusing the request. Brown would have to produce the evidence of his parentage before they would even consider whether to supply the documentation. The executors’ lawyers apparently wanted to move the legal battleground from Brown’s public interest to view the will - which formed part of the basis of his initial application - to a purely private interest one. The reason for this is that the burden of proof in a private interest approach is much higher - in that he has to establish a clear, personal interest - or “standing” - for wanting to see the will. In other words, he had to supply concrete evidence that he was the child of Princess Margaret - which as Farrers pointed out he had patently failed to do up to then.

  Farrers must have been well aware that Brown did not have bottomless pockets and the longer the case dragged on with disputes over disclosure, the higher his legal bill would climb and the more likely it would be that he would throw in the towel. Equally, Brown’s lawyers as specialists in media matters would have been well aware that the last thing the palace wanted was for the legal battle to be played out in open court before the press and that the prospect of negative publicity could not fail to boost their case.

  On 31 January Farrers launched a counter-attack by issuing a summons to strike out Brown's claim. It was supported by a sworn affidavit arguing that Brown had no public interest justification to see the will and he had yet to establish a private interest claim. As evidence it laid out a series of photographs of Princess Margaret around the time of Brown's birth which apparently showed no hint of a pregnancy and which supported the conclusion that his claim was “frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of procedure” and should be struck out.4

  The affidavit was signed by the Hon. Mark Bridges, the Queen's solicitor. Amber Melville Brown's opposite number had taken the old school route into the legal profession. The product of Eton and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he joined Farrers as an assistant solicitor in 1980 and became a partner five years later. In 1998 he was appointed solicitor to the Duchy of Lancaster before graduating in 2002 to the post of the Queen’s solicitor (later he would be rewarded with her personal honour of Commander of the Victorian Order). As the son of Thomas (Baron) Bridges KG - a much distinguished diplomat who served as ambassador to Italy and undersecretary of state in the Foreign Office - he is heir to the title of third Baron Bridges of Headley. On his mother's side, he is also related to Baron Farrer, a scion of the law firm’s family.

  Melville Brown responded to Bridges’s strike out application by seeking his agreement that should it fail the original hearing would go ahead as planned and by repeating the request for copies of all the documentation that supported the 2002 application. Brown's solicitor also made it plain that they would apply for the hearing to take place in open court.

  The Royal Courts of Justice where the President of the Family Division is based is an imposing, gothic building which was opened by Queen Victoria in 1882. It was designed by George Edmund Street, a lawyer turned architect, and financed by £70,000 in cash left over from intestate estates. On entering through the main gates in the Strand, any plaintiff is immediately made to feel small by the Great Hall - a judicial cathedral two hundred and forty feet long, forty-eight feet wide and eighty feet high, lined with cloister-like alcoves and recesses. The building as a whole contains over one thousand rooms and three and a half miles of corridors - as well as one hundred and fifty judges, registrars and masters.

  Behind court thirty-three are located the spacious chambers of the President of the Family Division. When in April 2005 Sir Mark Potter was appointed President in succession to Dame Elizabeth Butler Sloss, the tightly-knit world of family law was reportedly left "reeling." He was a commercial court judge with relatively little direct experience of the workings of the Family Division. But he was seen by others as the new broom who would sweep away the cobwebs in the family courts. One of his old pupils at Fountain Court, Charlie Falconer, was now Lord Falconer, the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. The government was reportedly keen to change the public perception that the courts operated in unnecessarily secretive way. When the public hearing opened on 27 March 2007, the sixty-nine-year-old President would have been wearing the traditional black silk gown and short wig. Before him sat Geoffrey Robertson QC and Anthony Hudson representing Brown, and Frank Hinks QC and Jonathan Adkin representing the executors. Although both colourful figures, the two QCs could hardly have been more different in background and outlook.

  A bouffant-haired Australian who had studied law in Sydney and only come to the United Kingdom as a Rhodes Scholar, Robertson had little atavistic deference to the royal family. He supported the anti-monarchist pressure group Republic which campaigned for an elected head of state and was himself the author of "The Tyrannicide Brief," a sympathetic portrait of the lawyer who prosecuted King Charles I in the trial that led to his execution and ultimately to the establishment of a republic in England. In another work - "The Justice Game" - he spelt out the reasons for his aversion to royalty: "I was…opposed to monarchy, believing with Tom Paine that a hereditary head of state is as sensible as a hereditary poet.”5

  Robertson's court room manner owes a debt to John Mortimer QC who was his senior counsel in many cases and taught him by example that "the art of cross examination is not to examine crossly." Today he acknowledges the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey as the most influential person in his life, calling him “his forensic father.” It is ironic that John Mortimer's own father, Clifford, was the author of the standard work on probate that would be quoted in arguments opposing Robertson in the case.

  Given that his mentor was John Mortimer, one might have thought Geoffrey Robertson would have had a natural sympathy with his opposing barrister since he too enjoyed a second string
to his bow as a writer. Frank Hinks QC was the author of The Dim Daft Dwarves (2004), the Magic Magpie (2004) and Gary and the Frog Prince (2005). Hinks got into creative writing as a teenager - penning his first children's adventure as early as 1966 but it was not until he had children himself that he began to write professionally in the down time between court assignments.

  Hinks’s speciality lay in land law and property work. In 1990 he acted for the Duke of Westminster in the celebrated "working class case" which provoked leaders in the Times and Guardian about whether Westminster Council should honour an historic contract to use leased land exclusively for housing for low income groups. He began to attract high profile clients such as earls, marquesses and other members of the aristocracy. In one celebrated property dispute, he even established the Queen's title to the bed of the river Severn.

  As soon as court proceedings got under way, Hinks argued that the claimant had produced no evidence to support his application: having failed to establish any private right to unseal the wills, he now claimed a public right. But he had no legal status to do so. The rights of the public were protected by the Attorney General alone. If individuals in general were allowed to claim the right to represent the public and seek judicial review, there would be "anarchy," according to the QC: "This week Mr Brown; next week Mr White, Mr Pink, Mr Green." The principle was laid down to avoid "busybodies, cranks and mischief-makers…With all due respect, this applies to Mr Brown. He is suffering from a delusion."6

  The court also heard that a total of twenty-seven people had claimed to be the illegitimate relations of the royals in 2005. "This appears to be part of a wider phenomenon," submitted Mark Bridges, "whereby people become psychologically obsessed and fixated with the affairs of the royal family."