A woman who married a man just hours before he died has failed in her attempt to stop his first wife inheriting £100,000 from his estate.

Owen and Elizabeth Soulsbury married in 1966 and had three children. They divorced 20 years later but remained on good terms. He was ordered by a judge at Southampton County Court to pay her £12,000 a year.

In 1993, he suggested that he should stop paying her maintenance in return for leaving her £100,000 in his will. She agreed and the will was drawn up to that effect. By this time Mr Soulsbury had started living with another woman called Kathleen.

Mr Soulsbury later became ill with leukaemia and married Kathleen on the day he died in 2000. Kathleen then argued that her marriage made the will null and void and so she refused to pay the £100,000 to the first wife, Elizabeth.

However, a judge then ruled that Mr Soulsbury had entered into a binding agreement with his first wife which had to be honoured. Now the Court of Appeal has upheld that ruling.

The Appeal Court judges said that Elizabeth could have taken legal action at any time to force Mr Soulsbury to continue paying maintenance but she didn’t do so because of the agreement about the will. She had therefore kept her side of the bargain and so Mr Soulsbury’s estate was bound to honour it.

If the agreement wasn’t honoured then Elizabeth would be entitled to take action against the estate for breach of contract.

The case raises important issues. It is true that marriage normally revokes existing wills and so couples should make new arrangements as soon as they are wed. That would clearly have been difficult in this case because of Mr Soulsbury’s health and so the Appeal Court upheld the general principles of contract law because an agreement had been reached between Mr Soulsbury and Elizabeth.

The whole area of wills and probate can be complicated. It is important to get legal advice when drafting a will and making arrangements for the future.

Please contact us if you would like more information.