The 14th Duke of St Albans, peer who was uninterested in rank and privilege and worked as an accountant

The 14th Duke of St Albans, who has died aged 87, had none of the advantages usually associated with his social position. With no private fortune and no ducal estate, he led a modest existence as a London chartered accountant.

Even his right, as Grand Falconer of England, to an annual haunch of venison from Richmond Park was terminated by Tony Blair’s government as a “cost-cutting measure”, an act that the Duke denounced as “a pretty poor show”.

That title, as well as the dukedom, had been bestowed by Charles II in 1684 on the elder of his two sons by the celebrated actress, orange-seller and strumpet, Nell Gwynn. He also gave the child’s mother the ancient royal hunting estate Bestwood Park in Nottinghamshire, which remained in the St Albans family until 1940. But according to Brian Masters in his book The Dukes, “the Dukes of St Albans have not been, for the most part, illustrious or accomplished”, and they seldom had much money to play with.

An exception was the 9th Duke (1801-49) who, at the age of 26, married Harriet Coutts, the 50-year-old widow of the banker Thomas Coutts. Formerly a penniless actress, she had found herself the richest woman in England after Coutts’s death.

Even then, however, the St Albans family did not prosper in the long term: on her death in 1837, Harriet left the bulk of her fortune to her step-granddaughter, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. None the less, in 2010, while unveiling a plaque in Harriet’s honour, the 14th Duke declared: “She was my favourite duchess because she was such a character – in fact, she would have been considered quite vulgar by some people.”

The 14th Duke was born Murray de Vere Beauclerk on January 19 1939 and educated at Tonbridge School in Kent. His mother was Nathalie Chatham. His father, who succeeded to the title in 1964, served as a wartime military intelligence officer and later had a distinguished career at the Central Office of Information before entering the City. He took a particular interest in the arts, and believed that the works of Shakespeare were created by a team of authors that included his ancestor, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Murray Beauclerk went by his courtesy title of Earl of Burford, and succeeded to the dukedom on his father’s death in 1988, but he showed scant interest in rank or privilege. Having elected to make a career in accountancy, he qualified in 1962. He was a partner in the firm Burford & Partners LLP (formerly Burford & Co) from 1981 to 2015. For much of the time he lived in a modest London flat.

He served as Governor-General of the Royal Stuart Society, which holds that Franz, Duke of Bavaria, is the true successor to the British crown.

Murray St Albans married first, in 1963 (dissolved 1974), Rosemary Frances Scoones, with whom he had a son and a daughter; secondly, in 1974, Cynthia Theresa Mary Hooper, née Howard, who died in 2002, the year the marriage was dissolved; and thirdly, in 2002, Gillian Anita Roberts, née Northam. She survives him with his children.

His son, Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, born in 1965, succeeds to the dukedom. The author of biographies of his ancestor Nell Gwynn and of the pianist and composer John Ogdon, he has hitherto preferred to be known as plain Charles Beauclerk. He also shares his grandfather’s doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, although he believes that they are the creation of the Earl of Oxford alone.

A staunch traditionalist, when hereditary peers were being removed from the House of Lords in 1999, during the final debate he was seated on the first step of the throne, as was his right as the eldest son of a peer, and leapt on to the Woolsack crying: “Vote this treason down!” An admiring Matthew Norman, writing in the Evening Standard, referred to him as a “full-blown, 24-carat nutter”.

The 14th Duke of St Albans, born January 19 1939, died April 22 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]