Thomas Kingston passed away a week ago, on Sunday, February 25. His death was not announced until Tuesday, the 27th, just hours after King Constantine’s memorial service in Windsor, a service which was attended by Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Kingston’s parents-in-law. Kingston’s now-widow, Lady Gabriella, did not attend the memorial service, nor has she been seen in public since about a week before Kingston’s passing. On Friday, the inquest into Thomas Kington’s death officially began. The police and the coroner came out and said, flat out, that he died of a “catastrophic wound” to the head, with a gun closeby. The Telegraph was the first British outlet to say that it was suicide.
Thomas Kingston, the husband of Lady Gabriella Windsor, died from a gunshot wound to the head, a coroner has revealed. Mr Kingston, 45, took his own life at his parents’ home in a Cotswold village on Sunday.
Katy Skerrett, senior coroner for Gloucestershire, said the financier, the son-in-law of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, had lunch with his parents before his father, Martin Kingston, took the dogs out for a walk. As she opened an inquest into Mr Kingston’s death, Ms Skerett said: “On his return Mr Kingston was not in the house.”
His mother went to look for him before his father forced entry into an outbuilding. Ms Skerrett said Mr Kingston was found dead “with a catastrophic head injury. A gun was present at the scene.”
Mr Kingston was a committed Christian who once worked as a hostage negotiator in Iraq. Known as Tom, he read economic history at the University of Bristol before joining the diplomatic missions unit at the Foreign Office. He was seconded to Baghdad as project manager for the International Centre for Reconciliation, based at Coventry Cathedral, in 2003. The following year, he cheated death in a suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital that killed 22 people.
Mr Kingston returned to the UK to work for Schroders, the global asset management firm, as an equity analyst before becoming the managing director of Voltan Capital Management and later a director of Devonport Capital, which provides short-term loans to businesses operating in the developing world. His father, Martin, was a hugely successful barrister, specialising in planning law. Also a devout Chrisitan, he was elected to the General Synod in 2016. His mother, Jill, is a trustee of a Chrsitian healing centre and runs the Nadezhda Charitable Trust, which supports projects in Zimbabwe.
Before this past week, I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about Kingston’s background and, considering his romantic life, I always assumed he was just some random posh bloke with a good education but few real-world experiences. Hearing all of these stories about his time in Iraq, it makes me realize that he had been in some really dire situations and was probably quite haunted by them. This whole situation is so sad and confusing. His parents must be devastated, and poor Ella as well. We hope that they have friends and family around them at this difficult time.
Incidentally, the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay and Sam Greenhill also did a somewhat strange eulogy in which they seemingly used this man’s suicide as a way to bash Prince Harry, writing in part: “[Gabriella and Thomas] did not live extravagant lives or find themselves the target of the paparazzi. In many ways their unfussy approach — home is a modest flat in fashionable Notting Hill which they had recently put on the market pending a move somewhere larger — would serve as a valuable life lesson for some of Ella’s royal cousins.” Ah, yes, how dare Ella’s royal cousin move away from his toxic, abusive family for his own mental health when he could have lived a modest, unfussy life in England… like Thomas Kingston.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.