National Archives files show Queen asked for late aunt’s will to be concealed

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Staff on the National Archives reportedly redacted paperwork displaying how the late Queen asked for particulars of a relative’s wealth to be withheld from the general public.

The redacted parts include a request from Queen Elizabeth II to suppress publication of the will of her late aunt, the Countess of Harewood. The direct request was made greater than 5 a long time in the past.

Staff in Kew, south London, withdrew a beforehand disclosed file detailing official discussions about royal wills between 1957 and 1970, censored components of it after which positioned them again within the public area, The Guardian reported.

The doc was open to the general public since 2018, earlier than being withdrawn two years in the past to be censored and reshared later that 12 months.

The National Archives mentioned the file was reviewed and later redacted in session with the Ministry of Justice because the paperwork contained data relating to communications with the monarch. The data was stored secret underneath a bit of the Freedom of Information Act, it added.

The royal household has been in a position to preserve the contents of its wills secret for greater than a century due to a conference that in any other case does not apply to commoners.

One of the censored paperwork was a 1970 report by senior judicial officer Robert Bayne-Powell. “I be taught that her majesty requested the solicitors for the executors to apply to seal up the will of the Princess Royal, Countess of Harewood. I counsel that any royal will ought to be sealed up if the sovereign so requests,” read the censored paragraph, according to The Guardian.

A letter dated June 1970 was also removed in which a Whitehall official recorded a conversation with Lord Tryon, the then-courtier in charge of the Queen’s finances. “The Buckingham Palace legal professionals take into account that besides in particular circumstances (for instance a will containing one thing which shouldn’t be made public) ‘fringe members’ of the royal household needn’t have their wills sealed. This ought to solely be for HRHs,” Tryon informed an official.

Another innocuous paragraph from an official memo in 1970, which recorded Tryon and the Queen’s non-public secretary discussing junior royal members of the family with an official, was eliminated.