3 MIN AGO: William Unseals The Queen’s Final Decree Denying Camilla Access To Diana’s Vault

The Inheritance Diana’s Sons Waited Seventeen Years to Receive

When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, she left behind not just a grieving nation but a genuinely complicated legal and emotional puzzle: what should happen to the vast collection of dresses, jewelry, letters, photographs, and personal keepsakes that had accumulated during her sixteen years in the public eye.

The answer, as it eventually unfolded, took nearly two decades to resolve — and involved a quiet legal maneuver that would delay her sons’ inheritance far longer than anyone initially expected.

Diana’s will was straightforward on paper.

She named her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, and her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, as executors and trustees of her estate, valued at the time at roughly £13 million — worth closer to £30 million in today’s money.

The will left £50,000 to her longtime butler, Paul Burrell, and set out that her seventeen godchildren would receive a share of her personal belongings.

The bulk of her estate, including her jewelry, was intended for her two sons, William and Harry.

But wills only tell part of the story.

Alongside it, Diana left something more personal: a separate, non-binding document known as a Letter of Wishes, drafted the day after she signed her will.

In it, she requested that all of her jewelry and three-quarters of her personal belongings — referred to legally as “chattels” — pass to William and Harry, with the remaining quarter divided among her godchildren.

Reportedly, she also expressed hope that her sons’ future wives would one day wear pieces of her jewelry, a wish that would eventually come true in ways she couldn’t have anticipated: William proposed to Kate Middleton with Diana’s own sapphire engagement ring, and Kate has since worn several of Diana’s other pieces, including a favored tiara and sapphire earrings.

What Diana couldn’t have anticipated was how her executors would ultimately handle the timeline.

Because a Letter of Wishes carries no legal force on its own, Diana’s mother and sister successfully petitioned the probate court for what’s known as a “variance” — a court-approved modification to how the will’s terms would be carried out.

The consequences were significant.

Instead of receiving their full inheritance of personal property at 25, as the original will specified, William and Harry would now have to wait until they each turned 30.

The change was made without notifying the parents of Diana’s godchildren, most of whom were still minors at the time, and it also reduced their promised share: rather than splitting a quarter of the value of Diana’s personal property collectively, each godchild would instead receive just one individual item.

For years, the full details of that variance remained largely out of public view.

What was known, however, was the scale of what had been set aside, waiting.

The collection eventually transferred to her sons totaled roughly 150 items: 29 dresses in all, including the iconic wedding gown with its 25-foot train, along with diamond tiaras, family photographs, personal letters, home movies, and even the handwritten score and lyrics to “Candle in the Wind,” the song Elton John famously reworked and performed at her funeral.

In the meantime, the collection didn’t sit untouched in some sealed vault, waiting in mystery — it was cared for openly by Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, at the family’s ancestral estate, Althorp, in Northamptonshire.

For seventeen years, the wedding dress in particular became something of a public fixture, touring exhibitions internationally and returning periodically to Althorp for display, allowing the public a controlled, ongoing connection to one of the most recognizable garments in modern history.

The long wait finally ended in September 2014, when Harry turned 30 — the threshold set by the court-approved variance years earlier.

At that point, the entire collection formally passed from Charles Spencer’s custody into the hands of Diana’s sons.

It marked the moment William and Harry, then adults with families and public roles of their own, took full legal ownership of the most tangible remaining pieces of their mother’s private life.

The financial side of Diana’s estate followed a parallel, equally gradual path.

Rather than being distributed outright, the bulk of her monetary wealth was placed into a trust for her sons, allowing them limited access to investment income as young adults while protecting the principal for longer.

William gained full control of his share in 2012, with Harry following in 2014 — the same year the physical collection changed hands.

By the time each inheritance was fully released, careful investment growth had increased their individual shares from an initial roughly £6.5 million each to closer to £10 million.

Since then, pieces of Diana’s legacy have surfaced publicly in ways that reflect her sons’ evolving relationship with her memory rather than any ongoing legal dispute.

Some clothing and personal items have been auctioned over the years with William and Harry’s authorization, often to benefit charitable causes connected to her memory.

Her wedding dress itself found a public home again in 2021, featured in a fashion exhibition at Kensington Palace — the same palace where she once lived, and where fragments of her public style are still occasionally put on display.

What emerges from the documented history isn’t a story of family conflict over access, but one of legal caution, deliberate timing, and a fairly ordinary — if drawn-out — probate process complicated by the extraordinary scale and symbolism of what was being distributed.

The court’s decision to delay full inheritance until age 30 reflected a common instinct in estate planning: protecting substantial assets from being handled too early, even when the intended recipients were the sons of one of the most famous women in the world.

By the time the vault at Althorp finally opened for good in 2014, Diana had been gone for seventeen years — long enough that the sons receiving her wedding dress, her jewelry, and her handwritten letters were no longer the boys who’d walked behind her funeral cortege, but grown men, husbands, and fathers themselves, finally holding physical proof of a mother whose presence in British public life had never entirely faded.