Of course the will of Elizabeth II’s aunt was kept secret – blame the randy Prince Frank of Teck

It sounds immediately like the stuff of intrigue. This month, a report stating that the National Archives had sealed up some royal household correspondence over the will of Elizabeth II’s aunt, Princess Mary (who died in 1965), turned the spotlight on the subject of royal wills. Was there something mysterious going on with our late Queen’s finances?

Those hoping for juicy nuggets of gossip will be disappointed to learn that this is most certainly not the case, as the act of keeping the last wishes of a royal away from prying eyes is, these days, simply par for the course. But the history of will suppression certainly has colourful origins. Up until 1911, it was only the sovereign’s will that was kept behind closed doors. That all changed due to the antics of Prince Frank of Teck, the wayward brother of Queen Mary (Princess Mary’s mother).

The gambler and troublemaker – he’d been expelled from Wellington College, Berkshire, “for throwing his housemaster over a hedge to win a bet” – had had an affair with society beauty Ellen, the wife of the Earl of Kilmorey, and thus bequeathed her the famous Cambridge emeralds in the will he wrote in 1902. (He died in 1910.) To cover up the scandal and recover the jewels, Queen Mary succeeded in getting his and all subsequent wills of extended Royal family members sealed.

Years later, in connection with some research I was doing, I requested a copy of the will of the Countess of Southesk. Puzzled officials at Somerset House, where the records were then kept, were confused as to why they could not give it to me. It was because, like Princess Mary, she too was a granddaughter of Edward VII (i.e. now part of the large coterie of minor royals whose final wishes are kept under lock and key). While we do not know what is in most royal wills, in respect of the dispositions within them, we do know how much money they left in total, because that is published. For example, we know that Princess Mary left a total of £347,626, reduced to £328,224 after death duties, which works out at around £5.6 million in today’s money.

To tease us further, extra information slips out from time to time. But it helps if you know your Georgian and Edwardian royals. Take, for example, Queen Mary: she persuaded her son Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, to appoint two of Queen Victoria’s spinster granddaughters, Princess Helena Victoria and Princess Marie Louise, as godmothers to his sons, William and Richard (the present Duke). As Queen Mary hoped, the princesses left their estates to the boys. We know all this because, firstly, Prince Henry complained to his aunt, Princess Alice, that he was “stung” into paying for Princess Marie Louise’s gravestone in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, and secondly, many of their possessions, including beautiful fans, were sold in the Gloucester sale at Christie’s in 2006. In addition, the present Duchess of Gloucester sometimes wears Princess Marie Louise’s chunky Indian-inspired Cartier tiara, left by the Princess specifically for use by her godson’s future wife.

Some kept things blissfully simple. The Queen Mother, for example, left everything to Elizabeth II, who then distributed a selection of bequests to members of the Royal family as a way of saving death duties. Others, meanwhile, were just plain irritating: upon her death in 1959, Princess Arthur of Connaught, Duchess of Fife left the striking Mar Lodge estate in the Cairngorms to one nephew, Captain Alexander Ramsay… and its contents to another, the Duke of Fife.

Then there are the particularly complex cases, which include the Duke of Windsor’s estate. He made a will with Allen & Overy that was designed to protect the Duchess, Wallis Simpson, for the rest of her life. His private secretary told me that he left bequests to the staff at the house in Paris, which they would only receive if they were in the Duchess’s service when she died. This helps to explain why Georges Sanegre, the Duchess’s worldly butler, was attending her at her deathbed in 1986, many years after his duties were over. The Duchess herself apparently did not have a will, though I saw one drawn up in the 1950s that left bequests to some of her friends and family. Until 1973, her affairs remained in the hands of Sir Godfrey Morley at Allen & Overy, but then he was sacked by the sinister Suzanne Blum, the formidable Paris lawyer who took the Duchess’s affairs into her own hands.

With the Duchess in increasingly dismal health, Blum was able to do whatever she pleased. Much of the Duchess’s fortune was directed to the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris and I daresay a fair amount of it was syphoned off by Blum herself. We will never know. Significantly, no photograph of the Duchess going round the Louis Pasteur Institute has ever been published, which confirms my suspicion that it was the lawyer who decided, not the Duchess. Some years later, in 2017, the Royal Archives were confronted with tricky copyright issues concerning the Duke of Windsor’s personal writings, and the Librarian (but he alone) was allowed to inspect the original will.

One will that was emphatically blown open, however, was that of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1998. Hers was made public by her lawyers at Mischcon de Reya, as it was deemed to be in the public interest – and by the time of her death, she was no longer technically a member of the Royal family. Her estate of £21,711,485 was largely divided between her sons, William and Harry with £50,000 given to her butler, Paul Burrell, and certain keepsakes to her 17 godchildren. Evidently there was controversy: the original plan was that all of her jewellery and 75 per cent of her personal belongings (“chattels”) be passed on to her two sons and 25 per cent to her godchildren, but her mother and sister challenged this in the probate court. In the end, the godchildren merely got “tacky mementos” (so the story goes), while her sons’ age of access to their inheritance was raised from 25 years to 30.

In earlier times there were monarchs who tried to alter the line of succession in their wills. Michael Nash, who has made a comprehensive study of them – Royal Wills in Britain From 1509 to 2008 – digs deep into the many shenanigans. Amongst other things, he tells us that Queen Adelaide’s will was deemed invalid when presented for probate, and that Elizabeth I and Queen Alexandra were so suspicious of lawyers that they refused to make wills at all.

As for our most recent royals – Prince Philip’s will was not made public after his death in 2021; the latest court ruling is that it remains sealed for 90 years, respecting the position that, when he made the will, he did so in the belief that its contents would remain private in perpetuity. My understanding is that far from having any sensational content, Prince Philip went to considerable lengths to see that those who had served him faithfully were properly rewarded. He did so partly since he himself received only a signet ring, an ivory shaving brush and some clothes (then adapted for his use) when his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, died in Monte Carlo in 1944 and wanted to do better.

Prince Philip was one of those people who did many acts of kindness, but went to some lengths to make sure that these were not generally known. Rightly, we will never know the dispositions of Elizabeth II’s will, but it is likely that she will have left some instructions as to private bequests to her loyal relations to respect the support they gave her in her lifetime.

As eye-opening as it is to look back on old royal wills and speculate on present ones, it’s worth sparing a thought for the custodians of them – the people, legal firms and institutions who have to fend off the crazy claims that are made to access them. One such case was made by a man called Robert Brown, who challenged the courts to allow him to see the wills of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret after alleging that he was the illegitimate son of the latter. He was born in Kenya in January 1955 and argued that in the later stages of the pregnancy a body double was used to cover up the Princess’s guilty secret. Such matters take up an undue amount of time in the courts.

Much of what the general public think of as belonging to Elizabeth II were not of course her private possessions – the Crown Jewels and the treasures in the Royal Collection being held in trust for the nation. Of these she was an admirable custodian. I suspect that some of her privately owned possessions will now become part of the royal collection. As to the personal bequests, the late Queen deserves a degree of privacy, as do we all.

Hugo Vickers is a royal biographer whose books include Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story of Wallis Simpson.