This was an appeal against the decision of the president of the Family Division (PFD) to seal for 90 years the will of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, to publish a list of 33 sealed wills of deceased members of the Royal Family, and to seal those 33 wills for 90 years (Re Will of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh [2021]).
At the start of the original hearing, the PFD directed that the hearing should take place in private, having only heard submissions from Prince Philip’s executor and the Attorney General (AG), but that the judgment should be made public....
This was an application by the executor of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for an order that his will be sealed up and that no copy of the will should be made for the record or kept on the court file, and for a direction to exclude the value of the estate from the grant of probate. The Attorney General was the sole defendant whose role it was to represent the public interest. The Attorney General strongly supported the application.
Applications to seal the wills of senior members of the Royal Family had been made for over a century. It appeared that they were always hear...
The claimants had brought proceedings under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 for reasonable financial provision out of the estate of their late father, Arnold Seal. The sole executrix and beneficiary of the estate was the defendant. Related proceedings had generated considerable acrimony with the result that the parties’ positions were in danger of becoming entrenched. An attempt at mediation had largely stalled and the legal representatives of the parties proposed as a way forward that the court undertake an early neutral evaluation of the ca...
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