How the Queen Mother spent her fortune – and the millions Prince Harry is set to inherit from her
In the Queen Mother’s household, the man with the most difficult job was undoubtedly her treasurer, Major Sir Ralph Anstruther. Sir Ralph, who held the post from 1961 to 1998, is remembered as having been a meticulously dressed but not especially financially proficient man who had “but a hazy idea of costs”. An interesting choice, perhaps, given his chief purpose was, as one biographer puts it, “to try and impose order if not limits on Queen Elizabeth’s spending”.
To give Sir Ralph his due, it was no easy task – by all accounts, the Queen Mother’s spending tended to reach somewhat beyond her means. At one point she is said to have been overdrawn by £4 million in her account at Coutts. An Observer story from the year of her death in 2002 recalls the day she turned to a dinner guest and exclaimed: “Golly, I could do with £100,000, couldn’t you? Had such an awful afternoon today with my bank manager scolding me about my overdraft.”
At some point along the way, though, it appears the Queen Mother was able to set aside a large sum of money for the youngest members of her family. The plan was that one day a substantial inheritance would be handed down to her great-grandchildren, with an initial payment made on their 21st birthdays and another on their 40th. It was recently reported that Prince Harry is about to receive a final bequest from his great-grandmother after he reaches the latter milestone on September 15.
Details of the trust fund are not public, but it’s understood £19 million was set aside in 1994, which then amounted to around two-thirds of the Queen Mother’s fortune. Reports from the time of her death refer to it as the “gamble” that paid off. The hope was that she would live a further seven years and so avoid inheritance tax. A gamble indeed given that she was 94, but she did indeed live another seven years, dying at the age of 101.
There has long been speculation that Prince Harry would receive more money than his brother as a form of compensation for not becoming king. “It makes sense,” says Hugo Vickers, who wrote a biography of the Queen Mother. “Prince William became incredibly rich when his father became King because he became Prince of Wales and had all the money from the Duchy of Cornwall. He was presiding over a committee meeting of the Duchy of Cornwall within days of the Queen’s death. So from having to depend entirely on his father he suddenly had all the revenues, and Charles as King has to rely on the Duchy of Lancaster, which has rather less revenue.”
The brothers are understood to have received £6 million between them when they were 21, with a further £8 million set aside after their 40th birthdays. It is not known if other members of the family are among the beneficiaries of the fund, though previous reports have named Zara and Peter Phillips along with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, as well as two of the Queen Mother’s grandchildren, Lady Sarah Chatto and Viscount Linley, as having been in line to inherit.
“Sarah Chatto and the Queen Mother were very close,” says Ingrid Seward, a royal biographer and editor of Majesty Magazine. “Her wedding reception was at Clarence House.” The King also “adored” his grandmother, she says. “She taught him everything he knew about art and music.” That affection was later shared, it appears, by his eldest son, though Seward suspects the Queen Mother and Prince Harry were rather less close. “I think William was old enough to understand the magic of his great-grandmother.”
When the Queen Mother died, a statement released by Buckingham Palace revealed she had bequeathed “her entire estate (which mainly comprises the contents of her houses) to the Queen”.
“In her will, she asked the Queen to make certain bequests to members of her staff, and these bequests will be subject to inheritance tax in the normal way. The Queen has decided that the most important of Queen Elizabeth’s pictures and works of art should be transferred to the Royal Collection.”
“Her art collection was extensive, including paintings by Monet, Lowry and Millais, as well as silver, furniture and Fabergé eggs,” says Vickers. “The Queen Mother began buying art during the war. It gave the impression that the world wasn’t coming to an end. That was one of the reasons she did it – the other reason of course was that they were incredibly cheap. She had a fantastic art collection, most of which is still at Clarence House.”
By now, he points out, “they will have magnified in value enormously”.
Her vast jewellery collection included a Marie Antoinette necklace which was among a treasure trove given to her by Dame Margaret Greville, a wealthy socialite friend (she and George VI honeymooned at her house in Surrey) who bequeathed the Queen Mother all her jewels, including a set of chandelier earrings she later gave to her eldest daughter as a wedding present.
In her day-to-day life, the Queen Mother was, according to her biographers, a curious mixture of frugality and extravagance. “Her hospitality was of an Edwardian style,” says Vickers. Indeed, Sir Roy Strong once described the scene at Clarence House when 18 people would sit around the dining table being served by three manservants as “pure 1890s”.
“Lots of lunches and dinners, which must all have cost a certain amount,” says Vickers. “And she ran a racing stable too, and that was the real extravagance.”
In Ascot week, the Queen Mother would move into Windsor Castle. Vickers recalls one resident telling him of the “endless hat boxes and dresses coming in before the Queen Mother arrived”. His line was very much: she couldn’t decide what she was going to wear so she brought the whole lot with her and would decide on the day. The Queen would never have done that. The Queen was much more organised and modest in the way she operated.”
Her parties “tended to go with a swing”, writes William Shawcross in his biography of the Queen Mother. “Her senior household were all devoted to Queen Elizabeth but they were aware that her style of living, as ‘the last great Edwardian’ could excite criticism in the more egalitarian times at the end of the 20th century.
“Ralph Anstruther, in particular, had to be concerned about the size of her entourage, as well as the cost of her clothes, her horses and her entertaining at home – no easy matter when she liked everything to be of the best.”
The Queen Mother’s outgoings might have been “reduced” in later years, he speculates, had she not been “so determined, despite her age, to continue leading a remarkably active public and private life”.
Her passbook at Coutts would be “brought by hand every quarter”, and most of her personal cheques were to “dressmakers and those close friends whom she helped”.
The Queen Mother also received “quite a thumping sum” from the Civil List every year, says Vickers. “And that went on until she died. She and Prince Philip were kept on the Civil List when other members of the Royal family were taken off it. Once she went, she went, and once he went, he went. The other members of the Royal family all came off the Civil List and the Queen paid their expenses in a different way.”
There were, writes Shawcross, “inevitable financial shortfalls, even after her Civil List annuity rose, eventually, to £643,000 to cover her official expenses”.
The late Queen, he writes, “had elected always to cover her mother’s racing losses and other expenses, and thus enable her to continue the style of life to which she was both accustomed and suited”.
“I don’t think she really worried about money too much,” says Vickers. “A lot of people probably worried on her behalf.”
Thirty years on, with much of her art still hanging on the walls of the royal residences and her jewellery still in rotation among various members of the family, some of the Queen Mother’s remaining riches are reportedly set to build up the coffers of her grandson on the occasion of his 40th birthday on September 15. A moment, perhaps, to raise a glass of her favourite tipple – a gin and Dubonnet – to the woman he called “Gan-Gan”.
