They left the church arm in arm, with smiles that radiated affection and warmth: the bride in an elegant Italian haute couture dress that hugged her slender figure and the handsome groom unleashing that devastating smile that made him a “delight” on the circuit social.
As they stood on the steps of St George’s Chapel, waving to a crowd of well-wishers and on the threshold of a life together, Lady Gabriella Windsor and her new husband Thomas Kingston looked blissfully happy.
“She was very pretty and he seemed proud,” remembers one guest. ‘They had that stare of supreme satisfaction. My wife whispered to me, “This is a couple that will never be apart.”
No one could have imagined that 12 weeks before their fifth wedding anniversary, Tom would take a family shotgun and leave their side forever.
An inquest yesterday discovered how the 45-year-old son-in-law of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent was found dead next to the gun with a catastrophic head injury in an outbuilding in the grounds of his parents’ £3million mansion in Kemble , Gloucestershire.
Lady Gabriella Windsor and her new husband Thomas Kingston looked blissfully happy on their wedding day in May 2019.
The details of the final hours leading up to this devastating tragedy last Sunday were vague and almost mundane. He had lunched with his parents, Martin and Jill, at the family home, a 15-minute drive from King Charles’s country retreat, Highgrove House.
After lunch, Tom’s lawyer father took the family dogs for a walk. When he returned to the house, where the couple has lived since 1996, his son was no longer there.
About thirty minutes passed and his mother went out to look for him. Shortly afterward, her husband, unable to respond, forced open the closed door of an outbuilding.
Inside he found his son with a fatal wound.
No other parties were believed to be involved. Gloucestershire Police previously said an ambulance crew called officers to the scene shortly before 6.30pm. According to an autopsy, the cause of death was a traumatic head injury.
Opening the inquest, which lasted just five minutes, Katy Skerrett, Gloucester’s chief coroner, limited her comments to a brief summary of what happened. “Mr. Kingston,” she said, “he was visiting his parents’ house in the Cotswolds. His father was out walking the dogs.
Lady Gabriella Windsor with her husband Tom Kingston two months after their wedding in 2019
‘On his return, Mr. Kingston was not in the house. His father forced his way into a locked outbuilding when he couldn’t get a response. He found Mr Kingston deceased with a catastrophic head injury. A firearm was found at the scene. He called emergency services. Police are convinced the death is not suspicious.
What drove this seemingly happy man in the prime of life with an adoring wife to an act of desperation is now probably the subject of intense investigations.
Outwardly, Tom Kingston seemed to have it all. Marriage to one of the “nicest” members of the Royal Family, a wide circle of friends and a thriving financial investment business. He was a man for whom a bright and promising life from childhood was marked by quiet joy and reassuring conventions. And someone, according to his acquaintances, who was looking for nothing more than comfortable domestic satisfaction.
Although they had no children, married life clearly suited them. He had navigated the fishbowl existence that permeates all royal marriages, no matter how far removed they are from the throne. And he had done it with aplomb.
Lady Gabriella (She to her family and friends) is not close in the line of succession to the Crown, but as the daughter of the colorful Princess Michael, she often found herself in the center of unwanted attention. To her credit, she has always approached it with an easy smile.
The couple did not live an extravagant life nor were they the target of the paparazzi.
In many ways, their down-to-earth approach (their home is a modest apartment in fashionable Notting Hill that they had recently put up for sale pending a move to a larger place) would serve as a valuable life lesson for some of King’s royal cousins. She.
It earned them a place at the royal table: guests of the King and Queen at their party at Ascot last summer and at countless other high-profile gatherings.
Indeed, it was significant that the King interrupted his cancer treatment not only to pay a moving tribute following Tom’s death, but also to direct staff at Buckingham Palace to provide support not only to Prince and Princess Michael but also to the grieving Kingston family. This was unusual because the Kents are not working royals. But it is also reflected in the popularity of Ella and Tom.
His death has stunned a Royal Family already recovering from a series of domestic problems, including the illnesses of Charles and the Princess of Wales, testing their ability to carry out their normal duties.
Ella loved being married and being ‘Mrs Kingston’, although technically she still retains her title and is, officially, Lady Gabriella Kingston.
Tom laughs with Queen Camilla at Royal Ascot last summer
On weekends, the couple could often be seen at the Notting Hill Farmers Market and browsing hand in hand in the trendy shops lining Holland Park Avenue.
When Tom and Ella got engaged, the Bristol University economics graduate’s old friends joked that he was going above and beyond by marrying into Princess Pushy’s upper circle.
He would repeat with equal good humor that she was the lucky one to join the Kingston clan.
They both had a “past”, of course, but nothing too controversial, although Ella found herself in the spotlight when an ex-boyfriend wrote an indiscreet article about her mother, royalty and racism.
The truth is that Tom, who spent several dangerous years working in hostage negotiations in war-torn Iraq, had had several pretty girlfriends before he met Ella. She was one of those attractive figures about whom friends liked to tell stories of love affairs.
But not all of them were tall. Women were attracted to her languid confidence, while men envied her effortless success with the opposite sex.
In fact, it has attracted some of the most beautiful young women from Prince William and Prince Harry’s sets.
Among them were Pippa Middleton, the sister of the Princess of Wales, now married to hedge fund executive James Matthews (although she denied they were romantically involved), financier Louisa Strutt and Natalie Hicks-Lobbecke, a former flame of the Prince William who Tom dated while working in Iraq.
He and ‘Nats’ met when they were both at Bristol University.
As a close friend said admiringly: ‘Tom’s great achievement is that none of his former girlfriends have anything but good things to say about him. Even when it’s all over, they still like him.
At the time of their wedding, one of Tom’s friends told me, “He’s the kind of person you want to introduce to your mother.”
But there was another side to the Gatsby-esque figure who always appeared at high-society weddings on the arm of a pretty girl. She had a deep and abiding Christian faith. And it was this spiritual element that armed him during the three years he spent in Baghdad at the height of that country’s postwar violence.
He worked there alongside Canon Andrew White, the so-called Anglican vicar of Baghdad who described him as a “brave” and “exceptional young man”, and whom Tom affectionately called “Abouna”, which in Arabic means priest.
The two had numerous brushes with death, most notably when a suicide bomber attacked White’s church in 2004, claiming 22 lives.
“Tom was with me in Iraq in the most dangerous days of the war,” White said this week.
‘One of the first things I taught him was: “Remember that we don’t worry, we take risks. The next thing we must remember is that in making peace, we do not make peace with the good, but only with the really bad.” Tom learned that very quickly and that’s what he did with me.
‘One day he came back from seeing a group of ayatollahs I had sent him to see and said, ‘It’s not right, Abouna, they were all good guys.’ He had certainly gotten the message that he could only make peace with the bad guys.’
Memories of those days came back to Canon White when he was among the guests at Tom and Ella’s wedding. There, he was able to speak with his protégé’s new father-in-law, Prince Michael, about a mission the two had accomplished for him in Israel long before Ella was a twinkle in Tom’s eye.
The Prince, whose mother’s family was from Greece, had a relative buried near the Mount of Olives, but did not know where. The priest and his assistant not only found the neglected tomb, they cleaned it.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, Tom entered the world of finance, first at blue-blood asset management firm Schroders, then joining Devonport Capital as one of two directors in 2017. Devonport offers loans in the short term to companies operating in the developing world. and has offices in St James’s, a stone’s throw from Clarence House.
Their wedding day at St George’s Chapel was an important social occasion. The Queen and Prince Philip led the guests.
It had been almost a year since Prince Harry married Meghan Markle in the same location, but that and the sun were all they had in common.
“She was a very sweet bride, she cared about the bridesmaids and the pages, and he was very attentive too,” one guest remembers. “Of course it helped that they both had dazzling smiles on their faces.”
From the chapel, buses took guests to Frogmore House for the reception, where the couple posed for their wedding photographs.
In the dark months ahead, they will always be a memory of that happiest day.
Additional reporting: Simon Trump