For decades, courtiers, Downing Street and Whitehall have been hammering away at Operation London Bridge, the extraordinarily meticulous and detailed plan that came into effect in the early hours of Friday morning AEDT with the death of Her Majesty The Queen .
From the pallbearers who will already practice carrying a lead-lined coffin to the three trumpeters who will appear on a balcony at St James’s Palace on Saturday, UK time, before the league’s king-in-arms reads the proclamation of the new king, there is not a single detail that has not been traced and exposed in triplicate.
However, sometime in the coming weeks and months, as the UK and the world slowly acclimatise to the accession of King Charles III and Queen Camilla, there is a very uncomfortable situation that will inevitably arise in the none: His Majesty’s will.
At the beginning of this year, the Sunday Times’ Rich List put the nonagenarian’s fortune at about $630 million, which is what she was worth personally rather than the billions of dollars in investments, property, jewelry and art that is owned by the Crown, after earned about $8.5 million in his last year through the booming stock market.
Regardless of the best estimates, the exact extent of the Queen’s wealth, and the strength of the coffers of the House of Windsor as a whole, have always been largely shrouded in opacity and secrecy.
So how much of his hundreds of millions of pounds could go to his son King Charles III and his three other children: Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward? We’ll never know, thanks to a unique legal loophole that only applies to the royal family and was being fought out in court just six weeks ago.
By law, all wills in Britain are publicly available, but for more than a century, the monarch and her family have been the recipients of a unique legal practice that means they can apply to be exempt from this requirement legal
A royal request for secrecy has never been refused by a judge.
Today, Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division of the High Court, is the custodian of a safe containing the last wills and testaments of 33 members of the extended Windsor family. (Diana, Princess of Wales was a notable exception.)
In the near future, it is very likely that a will number 34 will be added to this safe.
To understand how this unusual legal situation came about, you have to rewind to 1910, when Queen Mary’s brother, the famous gambler and ladies’ man Prince Francis of Teck, died suddenly at the age of 39. (He had contracted pneumonia while at Balmoral.)
It turned out that he had left some very valuable jewels, known as the Cambridge Emeralds, to his mistress, the Countess of Kilmorey.
Mary, who at the time was the Duchess of York, was terrified that the news of the bequest would trigger a serious public scandal, so she convinced a judge to seal Francis’ will.
(In 1911, when she was crowned queen with her husband, King George V, what did Mary choose to wear? None other than those Cambridge stones.)
Today, Prince Francis’ will is just one of dozens Sir Andrew has under lock and key.
In the past year, this controversial tradition has become the subject of renewed debate and even legal action in the UK.
In April 2021, the Queen’s husband of 73 years, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, died with the Ground reported the following month that the duke had left behind a fortune of $51 million, a staggering sum given that his parents were penniless and he never held a gainful job. (The same report said that, poignantly, he had included bequests to his private secretary, Brigadier Archie Miller Bakewell, his page William Henderson and valet Stephen Niedojadlo.)
Last September, Sir Andrew agreed to the royal family’s confidential request to seal the Duke’s will, with the hearing held behind closed doors and the media excluded from the proceedings.
Since then, the guardian has waged a legal battle over the secret process with Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, acting for the newspaper, telling the London court in July this year that “a totally private hearing like this is the most serious interference with open justice”.
Despite the challenge, in the same month three appeal court judges ruled that Sir Andrew had been correct to ban the press from the silent hearing.
That means it will be 2111 before there is any chance the world will know how much money Philip left and where it went, and only if the future monarch’s private attorney, the Keeper of the Royal Archives, the Attorney General and any surviving representative of Philip decides that it should be made public.
It might now be established law, but in the court of public opinion, these special provisions offered by the royal family are highly controversial, with accusations that they are being used to obscure the family’s financial dealings.
For example, how Philip, when the Queen Mother died, left behind a mysterious fortune, reported to be around $119 million, which included a lot of jewels that had been given to her while she herself was Queen in the years forty This valuable carriage went to his daughter the Queen and, had it been anyone else, this legacy would have attracted a hefty inheritance tax bill.
(In 1993, when Her Majesty was signing an agreement with Prime Minister John Major to pay income tax for the first time, they also agreed that sovereign legacies would not be taxed.)
While this was all perfectly legal, this fancy footwork only added to the impression of an obscure palace that is unwilling to shed any light on its wealth.
So will the Queen’s death and her reinvigorate the debate over whether members of the royal family should receive special treatment? At a time of growing calls for transparency, will these covert maneuvers still fly? And could the royal family be facing a new row in the room on that front?
On Friday morning AEDT, Charles acceded to the throne and some members of His Majesty’s family inherited millions. We may never know who got much richer today.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years’ experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.
Read related topics: Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth II