‌Chapter 5

‌Pomp, Circumstance and Paying the Bills

At first sight she could have been any elderly lady heading out of London for her Christmas holidays. Dressed in a long grey coat, with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a Hermès scarf tied firmly over her head, Queen Elizabeth II walked down platform 11b of King’s Cross station. After boarding the 10.45 First Capital Connect train to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, she took her seat in a first-class carriage next to a middle-aged man with closely cropped hair who was dressed in a smart suit.

The photographs, which appeared in the press in December 2009, did not tell the whole story. A few minutes before the Queen had arrived at the station, one of Britain’s busiest, the platform had been cleared and swept by security men. And, rather than mingling with other passengers, Elizabeth was seated in an eight-seat section at the back of the carriage. The man beside her was a plain-clothes royal-protection officer; his four colleagues standing by the door of the compartment turned away any other passengers who tried to join her. Then, at 12.20, when the train arrived at its destination a hundred miles to the north, the Queen was whisked away by a waiting Range Rover to Sandringham House, where she and her family traditionally spend the Christmas holidays. Yet the point had been made – and was rewarded with approving headlines that will have brought cheer to Buckingham Palace and its spin doctors. As one newspaper pointed out, the Queen could have chosen instead to make the journey by the royal train – which costs taxpayers £57,142 each time it is used. In comparison, the regular first-class tickets cost £44.40 each for the monarch ‌and members of her entourage.1

However unusual the image, it was not the first occasion on which the Queen had taken public transport. A spokesman for the palace said members of the royal family frequently use scheduled train services when security allows. The difference this time was that the press had been tipped off in advance.

In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the cost of maintaining the monarchy is a complicated and highly emotive issue. In medieval times the monarchy and state were indistinguishable from one another: the king received revenue from taxes, but this had to pay for the workings of the government and for fighting wars – as well as fund his own court. The country was like a family-run firm, and the treasury was what its name suggested: the chest that contained the king’s personal wealth.

A medieval monarch would demonstrate his power in part through the splendour of his court. By wearing finer clothes or owning more luxurious palaces than those of rival rulers, he was not merely indulging himself or even showing off on a personal level. He was also showing off on behalf of his nation. When Henry VIII of England and King François of France met near Calais in 1520, both monarchs tried to outshine each other with the magnificence of their tents, clothes, feasts, music and games. Such was the splendour of the occasion that their meeting place became known thereafter as Le Camp du Drap d’Or – the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Such traditions of conspicuous consumption are still maintained by the ruling families of the Gulf states; visitors to Muscat, the capital of Oman, will see the Sultan’s splendid five-hundred-foot yacht – large enough to accommodate a fifty-piece orchestra – anchored conspicuously off the Corniche. Yet different rules apply to constitutional monarchs, whose economic power has dwindled over the centuries along with their political influence.

The modern-day European monarch has much in common with a civil servant: in return for the duties outlined in the preceding chapters, he or she is paid a fixed sum each year from the public purse. Yet this is clearly a civil servant with a difference. For a start, the amount paid, variously described as a “civil list” or an apanage, is, in most cases, several times higher than that received by the prime minister or any other public figure – even though it may be dwarfed by the sums earned by the more successful banker.

Nor does it stop there: in most cases, there are also allowances for the monarch’s spouse, children and, in the British case, even cousins. Typically there are several palaces and other residences that need maintaining – and staffing – as well, perhaps, as a royal yacht, train or plane.

Blurring the picture, monarchs can also rely on vast personal wealth, accumulated over the centuries; such fortunes usually have their origins in military conquests or other confiscations, but have grown in recent years thanks to successful investments. Special tax concessions, especially on inheritance, have also helped.

Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Walter Bagehot contrasted the relatively modest nature of Queen Victoria’s court with the splendour of Napoleon III of France’s surroundings. “Refined and original observers,” he said, believed that “there are arguments for not having a court and there are arguments for having a splendid court, but there are no arguments for having a mean court. It is better to spend a million in dazzling when you wish to dazzle, than three quarters of a million in trying to dazzle and yet not dazzle.” Yet while conceding this argument might hold true for Napoleon’s realm, Bagehot was not sure how appropriate it was for his own country. If the British court were to be as lavish as its French counterpart, he warned, “it would do evil if it added a new example to our many examples of showy wealth – if it gave the sanction of its dignity ‌to the race of expenditure.”2

In today’s more egalitarian, meritocratic age, public opinion has shifted further in Bagehot’s direction: we are much more likely to disapprove of such displays of royal wealth, which, although acceptable among film stars or footballers, are less easy to stomach when indulged in by those who have inherited rather than earned their fortunes. There are limits, however: while some may grumble at the sight of some or other act of royal extravagance, few – at least among those who support the idea of monarchy – would want to see their king or queen living in a modest home, travelling regularly by bus or train or dressed in high-street clothes.

But how wealthy are Europe’s royal families? How much are they paid – and, indeed, how much should they be paid – and how lavish should their court be? The answers have varied from country to country.

Sandringham, the estate to which Queen Elizabeth II was heading on that December day, is one of a series of residences that the monarch occupies at different times of the year. Home to four generations of sovereigns since 1862, it is here, close to the north Norfolk coast, that Elizabeth and her family traditionally spend the period from the Christmas holidays until February. In August and September, by contrast, their home is Balmoral Castle – a property beloved of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which lies on a 17,400-acre estate in the Scottish Highlands. Both are the private property of the royal family.

And then there are the official residences. Windsor Castle, west of London, the largest occupied castle in the world and a royal home and fortress for more than nine hundred years, is usually used by the Queen at weekends and is her official residence for a month over Easter and again for a week in June, when she attends the service of the Order of the Garter and the Royal Ascot race meeting.

The most famous royal residence of them all – and indeed in the world – is Buckingham Palace, a massive structure 335 foot wide, with 775 rooms and almost 830,000 square feet of floor space. Bought by George III in 1761 for £21,000 as a private retreat, it was only in 1837 on the accession of Queen Victoria that it became the principal royal residence. Very much a working building, it has since become firmly established as the centrepiece of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. There are a series of other palaces too, among them Clarence House, the former London home of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, which provides an official residence for the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and Princes William and Harry.

Despite the obvious scale of the palaces, life within them cannot always be described as opulent. The Buckingham Palace into which the future Queen Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret moved in 1937 after their father became king was a curious mixture of luxury and decrepitude. As Marion Crawford, the girls’ governess found, the upper floors had been little changed since Victoria’s days. Shortly after they arrived, Crawford – or “Crawfie” as she became known – recalled sitting down for tea on a pink-and-gold chair in the magnificent Belgian Suite, only for it to dissolve beneath her with an ominous splitting sound. The chair, it seemed, had not been recaned. The first night that the housemaid came to pull down her bedroom curtains, the whole thing – curtains, pelmet and heavy brass rods – came down with a clatter, narrowly missing their heads. In a nod to modernity, electric light had recently been installed, but the switch to operate the bedroom light was two yards away down the corridor.

And then there were the mice. Crawford described a meeting with the vermin man, who offered her his secret weapon for her bedroom: the so-called sticky trap, a piece of cardboard with a lump of aniseed in the middle surrounded by a sea of treacle. Crawford declined. “People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart could desire, and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort,” she recalled later. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum. These historic places are so old, so tied up with tradition, that they are mostly dropping to bits, all the equipment ‌there decades behind the times.”3

Life at Buckingham Palace became considerably grimmer during the Second World War as the royal family made a great show of sharing rationing and other privations endured by their subjects. Hot water was available for only a few hours a day, and black lines were painted on the side of all the royal bathtubs to indicate the five inches of water allowed. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor, who stayed there for two days in 1943, was struck by how tough life was: she was allocated the Queen’s bedroom; it was cold and draughty, with wind whistling through the bombed-out windows, while the fishcakes offered for dinner were of poor quality. Roosevelt’s hosts may have been exaggerating the hardship they were suffering for dramatic effect: the royal family’s rations were, in reality, bolstered by the large numbers of deer, pheasants, grouse and rabbits caught on the royal estates. One member of the staff at Balmoral recalled eating so much venison during rationing, “it’s a ‌wonder we didn’t grow antlers”.4

Buckingham Palace has been considerably updated in the decades since, largely thanks to Prince Philip. After his wife became queen in 1952, Philip had wanted them to remain living in Clarence House. The palace, recalled Mike Parker, Philip’s private secretary, “seemed to him the coldest and most unfriendly place to raise a young family and the Queen quite agreed. She ‌was delighted with the idea.”5 Winston Churchill, the prime minister, was opposed, insisting that Buckingham Palace was the centre of empire and this was where the royal family should live. Philip was forced to back down, but in the years that followed he devoted considerable energies to making it a more modern and comfortable place.

Various insights into the day-to-day reality of royal life in the decades since have been provided by latter-day “Crawfies”, the various servants or royal hangers-on who have attempted to cash in on their connections, or from the occasional tabloid stunt. In 2003 for example, an undercover reporter from the Daily Mirror spent two months working as a footman at Buckingham Palace, taking photographs of royal bedrooms and other private areas which revealed a rather dubious royal taste in interior design, as well as some curious insights, such as that the royal cornflakes and porridge oats are put on the breakfast table in Tupperware containers. Further amusement was provided for the press a few years later by the publication of a photograph of an old white plastic tray on which, it was claimed, the Queen’s breakfast of tea, white toast, butter and jam is brought to her bedroom ‌every morning at eight o’clock.6

The conclusion is obvious: despite the Queen’s vast wealth, her lifestyle has little in common with that of a Russian oligarch or a Hollywood star. She and Prince Philip instead exhibit the kind of parsimony traditional to the British upper classes, who think nothing of sitting down on a broken chair or wearing a worn jacket. Philip, for example, seems quite happy to be seen in public in trousers more than fifty years old – albeit taken in by his tailor to reflect current fashion – or a Royal Naval uniform, vintage 1947. It is merely important that such items, however old, should have been of good quality to start with. “Counter-intuitive as it may seem, and notwithstanding the vast excesses of luxury into which they were haplessly born, the Queen and her kind specialize in a kind of inconspicuous non-consumption,” commented one observer. “Understand this, and everything else about ‌the Queen makes perfect sense.”7

Such thrift does not extend to the size of the royal staff, however – a legacy of the past when servants were cheap. In all, the royal household comes to 1,200. A glimpse of the scale of Prince Charles’s entourage was provided by evidence at the trial in 2002 of Paul Burrell, long-serving butler to Princess Diana, on charges of theft – which then collapsed. The heir to the British throne, it emerged, ‌had a team of four valets so that one is always available to lay out and pick up his clothes, a servant to squeeze his toothpaste onto his brush, and another who once held the specimen bottle while the Prince gave a urine sample after he broke his arm. Such revelations were acutely embarrassing at a time when the royal family was trying to present itself as reinvented, modernized and scaled down. Even Queen Elizabeth was said to have been appalled at the degree of Charles’s profligacy, reportedly believing the “amount of kit and servants ‌he takes around is grotesque”.8 The Queen might be better off looking to her own household: the previous Christmas, during separate trips to Sandringham, Charles took three butlers and four cooks, while his mother brought along eleven butlers and twelve chefs.

More embarrassment for Prince Charles came from a book on royalty by Jeremy Paxman, a well-known BBC current-affairs presenter, published in 2006, which claimed the heir to the throne was so fussy about the boiled egg he eats after a day’s hunting that his staff cooks seven and has them arranged in a row, in increasing order of hardness, so if one proves too runny, he can ‌choose the next one along.9 Clarence House usually refuses to comment on what it considers “personal matters”. This particular accusation of profligacy must have hit home, however: within hours of the allegation appearing in a newspaper serialization of the book, a spokeswoman for the prince declared, “The story about lots of eggs ‌being boiled is not true.”10

Living on such a scale – even if eating only one boiled egg at a time – costs a lot of money, which means the financing of the monarchy both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe is a complex and often controversial issue that over the course of the years has regularly been tied up with broader political questions.

In Britain, whose monarchy is by far the costliest to maintain in Europe, the publication of the royal accounts every June is typically accompanied by pronouncements by palace officials of the good value that the institution represents. The year 2011 was no exception: the cost of maintaining the Queen and the rest of the royal family in the year up to that April had fallen by £1.8 million to £32.1 million – a total cost of 51p per person, down 3p from the previous year, it was announced. “The Queen is very keen that the royal household should continue to reduce its expenditure in line with public-expenditure reductions,” declared Sir Alan Reid, ‌keeper of the privy purse,11 though there were limits to what more was possible after a nineteen-per-cent fall in expenditure in real terms over five years. There was a difference, however: the release of the figures coincided with the drawing up of a new formula that would change fundamentally the way in which the monarchy is financed.

For the past two and half centuries, the main element of royal financing has been the Civil List, which is intended to cover expenditure related to the Queen’s duties as head of state. About seventy per cent of this is spent on staff salaries, although it also meets the cost of official functions such as garden parties, receptions and official entertainment during state visits. Its origins lie in a deal done by George III on his accession to the throne in 1760. The King agreed to surrender the considerable revenues from the Crown Estates – vast royal landholdings dating back to 1066 that still today include Regent Street and large parts of St James’s in central London, as well as forest, farmland and half the foreshore – and to receive in return a flat fee of £800,000 a year for the duration of his reign. (Any money that the Estates earned beyond that was to go to parliament.) Unlike today, the Civil List was not purely for the King’s own expenditure: he also had to use it to fund the civil, but not military activities of ‌the state – hence the name.12

The arrangement became increasingly unworkable during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Britain turned into a world power and the size of the state and scope of its activities grew. Rather than simply increase the Civil List – and with it the economic clout of the monarchy – parliament began to fund an increasing share of expenditure directly itself. In 1830, when William IV acceded to the throne, this process reached a logical conclusion: a new reduced Civil List was introduced, allotted purely for the benefit of “the dignity and state of the Crown and the ‌personal comfort of Their Majesties”.13 The government’s civil expenditure, like the money it spent on the military, would henceforth be financed by parliament.

Over the years since, British monarchs have done well out of the Civil List – while all the while pleading poverty. Queen Victoria’s German-born husband, Prince Albert, who always felt himself especially badly done by, led the way in the early 1850s, calling for a more than doubling of his £30,000 annuity to £80,000 to pay for “the ordinary establishments and pursuits of an English gentleman”. These he listed as “a hunting establishment, a pack of hounds, a breeding stud, shooting establishment, a moor or forest in the Highlands of Scotland, ‌a farm, etc. etc. etc.”.14

Yet at the same time Albert and Victoria had managed to buy Osborne House, a substantial property on the Isle of Wight, in 1845. The initial cost was £45,000, but the total bill, once they had rebuilt the place in Italian ‌Renaissance style, came to £200,000.15 Then, in 1852, the royal couple found the £31,500 necessary to buy the freehold on Balmoral. After Albert’s death in 1861, Sandringham was purchased for their son, the future Edward VII, in the vain hope it would encourage him to spend more time away from his unsuitable London friends.

And so it went on: when Edward came to the throne in 1901 he was deeply in debt after years of lavish living; when he died nine years later, he left £2 million – the equivalent of about £150 million today – in his will, thanks to all the money he had managed to set aside over the years out of the Civil List. His son, George V, saved a net £487,000 during his quarter of ‌a century on the throne.16 This did not prevent Sir Frederick Ponsonby, the keeper of the King’s privy purse, in 1920, at a time when the post-war boom was turning to bust, from asking for an increase of at least £103,000 in the Civil List from the £470,000 at which it had been fixed a decade earlier. In trying to make the case for royal penury, Ponsonby conjured up the rather fanciful image of “the King going to open parliament in a taxicab”. The request was declined. The Treasury instead initiated a study of the expenditure of the royal household, recommending a series of economies that saved £40,000 a year.

Such a build-up of wealth has been facilitated by the extraordinarily favourable tax status enjoyed not just by British monarchs but also by the extended royal family over the years. When income tax was introduced for the first time in peacetime in 1842, Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, made great play of Queen Victoria “volunteering” to pay it on her income, including on the bulk of her £385,000 Civil List. Yet from 1910 onwards, even as the general income-tax burden on the rest of the population grew, so the royals were progressively freed of tax.

That changed as a result of 1992, the present Queen’s “annus horribilis”, which saw the marriages of three of her four children fail very publicly, followed by controversy over who – the royal family or the government – should fund the £37 million bill for repairing the damage to Windsor Castle caused by a massive fire. With the royal family’s popularity plunging, John Major, the prime minister, announced in February 1993 that the Queen had “voluntarily” decided to pay income, capital-gains and inheritance taxes on her personal income and wealth, starting from the start of the next tax year that April.

Yet the Queen was not quite subjecting herself or her family to the same rules as her subjects. For a start, the Civil List would not be taxed, as it had been under Victoria, on the grounds that it was used to cover official expenses. Furthermore, “special arrangements” would be made to exempt the royal palaces and certain other assets from inheritance tax when they pass directly to her successor – presumably Prince Charles.

Quite how much tax the Queen would have to pay depended on how wealthy she was, which palace officials were understandably reluctant to reveal. At a press conference, Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain and head of the Queen’s household, nevertheless tried to downplay the extent of her wealth, saying that the monarch had authorized him to describe estimates of £100 million as “grossly overstated”. Some experts estimated the value of the Queen’s private investments at roughly £75 million, which, provided that she was earning a reasonable rate of return on her money, would have equated to between £1.5 and £3 million a year in tax.

As part of the package of reforms it was also agreed that henceforth only the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother would benefit from the Civil List. This left the question of the more than £1 million a year in allowances paid not only to the Queen’s three younger children, Anne, Andrew and Edward, but also – in a unique feature of British royal financing – to her cousins, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandra. It was decided they would continue to be paid, but the Queen would then give an equivalent sum back to the Treasury out of income she earned from the Duchy of Lancaster, a portfolio of 46,209 acres of farmland, urban developments and historic ‌buildings across England and Wales.17

It was in this climate that Elizabeth suffered what was one of the most symbolic blows to her prestige – the loss of the Royal Yacht. In a reflection of its seafaring past, Britain has a long tradition of such vessels. Britannia, built in Clydebank in Scotland and launched in April 1953 by the young Queen, was the eighty-third such yacht since the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. By the late 1990s, however, the yacht was badly in need of replacement: while Major’s Conservatives vowed, after some hesitation, to replace it, Tony Blair’s Labour Party was opposed, claiming that the £60 million it would cost could be better spent elsewhere. When Blair won the May 1997 general election, Britannia’s fate was sealed. The yacht was decommissioned that December and moored in Leith, Edinburgh, where it was turned into a tourist attraction and luxurious venue for corporate events. The move, the former prime minister was later to lament, was “such a mistake”.

In the years that followed there were proposals for the construction of a new royal yacht, financed perhaps through a loan or the Queen’s own money, but they made no headway. Then, in January 2012, in the run-up to her Diamond Jubilee, Michael Gove, the monarchist education secretary, suggested a replacement as an “excellent” way of thanking the Queen “for her long and untiring service to this country” – although how to raise the money to build it was not clear. Cameron described the proposal as a “truly inspirational initiative” but made clear that the government would not finance it at a time when ‌public spending was being cut.18 This left open the possibility of public donation – anathema to many, especially on the left – or that it should be paid for by big business. But then there was the question of how to fund its upkeep and running costs.

Although deprived of her yacht, the Queen still has use of aircraft from No. 32 (The Royal) Squadron, based at RAF Northolt, north-west of London, and of a Sikorsky S-76 C+ helicopter operated by the royal household from Blackbushe Airfield in Hampshire. And there is the Royal Train, a pair of two special diesel locomotives that can pull up to eight royal carriages, including sleeping, dining and support cars, all painted in a distinctive maroon with red-and-black coach lining and a grey roof.

Traditionally the Civil List was revised every ten years – which would have meant an increase in 2000. Unusually, it was left unchanged by Blair. The previous settlement of £7.9 million a year, set a decade earlier, had turned out to have been too generous, as inflation had been below the predicted 7.5 per cent a year, leaving the palace with a massive surplus of £35 million by the beginning of the new millennium, which was only gradually eaten away over the following years as expenditure rose.

As 2010 approached, palace officials began again lobbying behind the scenes for an increase in the Civil List, on the grounds that the £7.9 million, adjusted for inflation, was worth only a quarter of what it had been twenty years earlier. On the other hand, the Civil List Reserve, although much depleted, still amounted to more than £20 million. Aides, meanwhile, were calling for an increase in the grant-in-aid that covers the maintenance of Buckingham Palace and the other royal residences. These buildings, it was claimed, were in a poor state, as demonstrated by an incident in 2007 when Princess Anne narrowly avoided being hit by a piece of loose masonry that fell off the roof. The palace’s staterooms, where the Queen entertains foreign leaders, hadn’t been redecorated since 1952 and were also said to be in urgent need of repair. A palace audit in 2009 put the cost of meeting the backlog of repairs at £40 million.

The economic climate was not a good one for the Queen or anyone else to demand a pay rise, however. After becoming prime minister in 2010, David Cameron was committed to cutting the deficit, and so when his government unveiled its budget the following month, it was announced that the Queen, like many of her subjects, would have to accept a pay freeze – and continue to dip into the Reserve, which contained enough money to keep her going through 2012, the Diamond Jubilee year.

In the meantime, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, was working on a more radical solution. From April 2013, it was announced, the Civil List would be combined with the various other payments made to the monarch covering the cost of building and travel into a single payment, to be known as the Sovereign Grant. This would be set at the equivalent of fifteen per cent of the profits of the Crown Estate, which reached £210.7 million in 2010 – thereby restoring the link between the monarch’s income and the revenue from her traditional lands that was broken more than two hundred and fifty years ago.

If such a formula had been in place in 2010, the Queen would have received £31.6 million, slightly more than the £30 million she was actually paid. Critics also pointed out that Crown Estate’s profits were expected to grow substantially thanks to a planned expansion of wind farms on its coastal land. Faced with an outcry over this potential windfall for the monarchy at a time when everyone else was being forced to live more frugally, the government swiftly announced that a cap would be imposed on the formula.

In the event, the net effect in the short term was expected to be a slight decline – rather than rise – in royal income; an official Treasury briefing document deposited in the House of Commons Library for the second reading of the Sovereign Grant Bill warned that the levels of support provided under the new system would, in real terms, in the early years be “below what the royal household spent in every one of the last twenty years”, indicating that the Queen could not expect a rise in her real pay until ‌April 2015 at the earliest.19

Under the new formula, it is also expected that for the first time Elizabeth will be forced to lay her account books before parliament to promote “clear accountability” and “strengthen public confidence”. Whether such scrutiny will lead, in turn, to a reduction in the main item of expenditure, namely the vast number of staff employed to look after the Queen and her family, remains to be seen.

Prince Charles, as the heir to the throne, does not receive an allowance from the Civil List as such, but like previous princes of Wales before him he is funded by income from the Duchy of Cornwall, a predominantly agricultural estate of 134,724 acres that has been passed down the generations since it was created in 1337 by Edward III for his son and heir, Prince Edward, the Black Prince. Part of the income finances Charles’s public and charitable work, while the remainder goes on meeting his costs and those of his wife Camilla and Princes William and Harry. Bills run up by the Prince while carrying out his official duties are also reimbursed out of the grants-in-aid.

In 2010, following repeated criticism of Charles’s spendthrift ways, it was reported that he too had been cutting back, with his total official expenditure, including that which he funds himself, down by fourteen per cent to £10.72 million. The British press were amused to note that the Prince slashed £275,000 from his entertainment bill by feeding his 9,396 official visitors with finger buffets rather than banquets.

Such cost-cutting was all relative, however. The £17.1 million salary the Prince pocketed from the Duchy was four per cent higher than the previous year. The annual report from Duchy of Cornwall, published a few days after the royal pay freeze, revealed that while the monarch appeared to have been tightening her belt and cutting back on staff, her son had been hiring extra housekeepers, valets and gardeners. By 2010 his official household stood at 125, a sharp rise from ninety-four five years earlier.

The Prince’s income rose even further in 2011, with the proceeds from the Duchy of Cornwall up by almost another four per cent to £17.8 million and the amount he was paid from grants-in-aid increasing by £298,000 to £1.96 million. The size of his household, too, grew – to 132 – after he took on five new aides, three of them to work ‌for Princes William and Harry.20

A major omission from British royal accounts is the cost of security provided by the police and the army and ceremonial duties performed by the armed forces, which, although not officially disclosed, has been estimated at more than £100 million a year. Republic, an anti-monarchy group, has put the true cost of maintaining the Queen and her extended family at as much as £200 million a year – if you add not just security costs but also the loss to the public purse of revenue as a result of royal ownership of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall ‌and various other property enterprises.21

Provision of a royal yacht was one of the conditions set out by Prince Carl of Denmark when he agreed to become King Haakon VII of Norway of 1905. Also essential for the modern monarch, he felt, were a palace and a country house. The new king got his palace – albeit a relatively modest nineteenth-century one in the centre of town. He and his successors have also had use of the summer palace of Oscarshall, located on the peninsula of Bygdøy in Oslo, and the Bygdø Royal Manor nearby. There is also Skaugum, an estate fifteen miles south-west of the capital, which has been passed to subsequent crown princes since Haakon’s son, the future King Olav, moved in after his wedding in 1929.

Haakon did not push for his yacht, though – and it was not until more than forty years later that a national appeal was launched to raise money to buy him one to express gratitude for his heroic resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War. Built in 1937 in Gosport, Hampshire for Sir Thomas Sopwith, the aviation pioneer, the yacht, Philante, measures just over 260 feet and was one of the largest vessels of its type. Extensively refitted and renamed KS Norge, it has been used by Haakon, his son and his grandson, although major repairs were needed in 1985 after it caught fire while being worked on at the navy shipyard in Horten. A Royal Decree of 1947, the year the ship was acquired, provides that it shall be manned, operated and maintained by the nation’s defence forces – a substantial expense given that it has a crew of more than fifty when it is used by the King and his family from May until late September each year.

Haakon’s reluctance to press his demand for a yacht is typical of the modesty that has always characterized the Norwegian monarchy – making it in many respects the polar opposite of its British equivalent. While the British monarchy has evolved over the centuries, the Norwegians, ruled first by Danes and then in a union with Sweden, were free to create their own modern version from scratch in 1905. The result has been a kind of stripped-down “monarchy-lite”, which remains true to its modest origins even today, when Norway’s vast oil and gas reserves have turned the country into one of the wealthiest in Europe.

Since the Second World War the Norwegians have been without the royal stables and carriages that are such an important part of British royal ceremonial. For special occasions they have a black 1939 Cadillac – which the royal drivers are wary of because of its unreliability – and an open-back Lincoln Continental dating from the 1960s. Most of the time, King Harald makes do with a Lexus instead or, when travelling abroad, uses the Airport Express. For longer journeys, though, they do have a set of royal carriages maintained by Norwegian State Railways. There is a throne, but it is brought out only once a year for the opening of parliament and remains for the rest of the time in a closet next to the office of the vice-speaker.

Harald, the current monarch, seems happy with such a low-key style: “The King is very much a middle-class chap,” says Carl-Erik Grimstad, a former court official turned writer and critic. “He has a nice country house, he has got middle-class friends, he’s into musicals and likes ‌to watch sport – any sport.”22 He is also a keen yachtsman. The Queen, by contrast, is more interested in modern art.

Annemor Møst, a veteran Norwegian royal reporter who has been watching her country’s royal family since the late 1950s, is also struck by the King’s lack of airs. “He’s a very nice person, intelligent and with a sense of humour,” she says. “He takes his work very seriously, ‌but not himself very seriously.”23

The Swedish and Danish monarchies share something of this Norwegian simplicity. The Swedes make great play of the fact that King Carl XVI Gustaf drives himself from home to work every morning like an ordinary subject. The only difference is that his office is located in a magnificent eighteenth-century baroque royal palace. The Danes also put the emphasis on informality: alongside her official duties, Queen Margrethe II is a gifted artist whose various endeavours have included designing sets for theatre and film. Her special interest is découpage – a technique of making images from photographs cut out from magazines.

While working on a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Wild Swans’, released in 2009, the Queen regularly joined Jacob Jørgensen, the head of JJ Film, and his team at their studio in Valby, in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to work on the project. A heavy smoker, she was often spotted popping outside for a cigarette. However informal her behaviour, no one ever forgot she was the Queen: when her colleagues addressed her, it was not as “Margrethe” but as “Your Majesty”. The Queen’s eldest son Crown Prince Frederik and his Australian-born wife Crown Princess Mary have tried to cultivate the image of a modern couple having a normal life in which they raise their own children – inspired, in part, by Mary’s own middle-class upbringing in Tasmania. Yet they reportedly employ twenty-five staff including maids, nannies for their three children, private secretaries, footmen and Mary’s hofdame (lady-in-waiting), Caroline Heering.

When it comes to residences, both the Danish and Swedish royal families are well supplied: Margrethe has a string of palaces between which she and her family, like their British compeers, move according to a long-established ritual. Thus winters are spent at Amalienborg, spring and autumn in Fredensborg and the summer at Marselisborg or Graasten. The palaces were historically the property of the royal house, but following the introduction of the 1849 constitution they passed to the state.

The Queen and her consort, Prince Henrik, also have a home in his native France, Château de Caïx, near the latter’s family estate of Cayrou. Since buying the property in 1974, the royal couple have carried out an extensive renovation of the house, which has been rebuilt several times since the fourteenth century. It is to this residence, overlooking a curve in the River Lot, that they traditionally repair in summer and also where they used to host an informal press conference each August – until the practice was halted, without explanation, in 2009.

For Henrik, it is a chance to spend time not just relaxing but also indulging his passion for wine-making – the chateau’s website even contains a poem that the Prince, an artistic soul, has composed about his vineyards:

Cahors de Cœur

Des vins seigneurs

Du Lot la fleur

De Cayx l’honneur.

Beloved Cahors

Lord of wines

Flower of the Lot

Honour of Cayx.

The wine is not just for royal consumption. Just as Prince Charles has turned his passion for organic farming into a food business, so Henrik markets his wines – all marked clearly with a Danish crown and large H, lest anyone be in doubt of their royal origins. One is known as “La Royale”, the other as “Le Rosé du Prince de Danemark”. There is also a shop and the chance for visitors to tour the estate.

Critics in the Danish media have not been impressed. Figures published in January 2009 that cast doubt on the profitability of the Prince’s wine-making operations were seized on by Ekstra Bladet, an anti-royal tabloid, which complained the whole operation was kept afloat only with subsidies from the Queen – and so, effectively, from the country’s taxpayers. “Henrik must be thanking his wife and her position as Denmark’s head of state with an associated salary that he can live a life that none of the other growers in the region can match,” it claimed. The newspaper also noted how the Amalienborg Palace effectively propped up Henrik’s venture by being a major buyer of his wines, which are often on ‌the table at official dinners.24

Sweden has no fewer than eleven royal palaces, although the King and Queen use only two: Drottningholm Palace, dating from the seventeenth century, west of Stockholm, where they live in rooms in the southern wing; and the six-hundred-room Royal Palace, on Stadsholmen (City Island), in Gamla Stan, the old town of the capital, which remains their official residence and the place where they work and official receptions are held. Even these two are open to the public. Since their marriage in June 2010, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel have moved into Haga Palace, just outside Stockholm. Once home to Victoria’s grandparents – and the place where her father was born – it was used as a government guest house for foreign dignitaries from the mid-1960s and then restored for her and Daniel at a cost of more than 40 million kronor (£3.7 million).

Officially, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has three palaces: Noordeinde Palace and Huis ten Bosch Palace, both in The Hague, and the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. All three, though, belong not to the Queen but to the state and, as the official jargon puts it, “have been placed at her disposal by Act of Parliament”. King Albert II of Belgium makes do with just two: his official residence, the Palais Royal, in the centre of Brussels, and the eighteenth-century Château de Laeken, which has been home to Belgian monarchs since the time of Léopold I.

Although the Spanish monarchy is almost Scandinavian in its modesty, the country has the largest royal palace in Europe – a throwback to the glorious past of the Borbóns. Built from 1738 until 1755 and first occupied by Carlos III in 1764, the Palacio Real de Madrid, in the western part of the city centre, has more than 2,800 rooms and a combined floor area of 1.5 million square foot. But although deemed the official residence, it is used only for state ceremonies.

Juan Carlos and his family have lived instead since 1962 in the more modest Palacio de la Zarzuela, built in the seventeenth century as a hunting lodge. For symbolic reasons they refused after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 to move into El Pardo Palace, where the dictator had lived, using it instead for foreign state guests. Another former royal property, the Moncloa Palace, meanwhile, became the residence of the prime minister. The King’s son Prince Felipe has lived since summer 2002 in a 34,000-square-foot palace in the grounds of La Zarzuela.

Although the British monarchy remains by far the most expensive in Europe to run, the finances and financing of its Continental counterparts remain a highly complex and controversial subject. The systems used vary from country to country, but two factors are common to all: firstly, not just the sovereigns but also, in most cases, other members of the royal families are paid considerable sums of money each year by their subjects. Secondly, the precise amount that they cost the state and the extent of their private wealth are shrouded in mystery.

Not surprisingly, such arrangements came under growing scrutiny in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008; while many of their subjects had to cut their spending or lost their jobs, the monarchs and their families continued to enjoy not just absolute job security but also a generous pay and benefits package that, in most cases, has been steadily increased year in, year out.

The debate in Belgium has been especially intense, in part because of the hostility towards the Crown of substantial parts of the Flemish political establishment. Matters have not been helped, however, by the behaviour of the royal family themselves – whether it was Prince Laurent, the younger son of the King, at the wheel of a brand new €87,000 Porsche Carrera, or King Albert himself, paying €4.6 million for a ninety-foot yacht in summer 2009 while his country was still only slowly emerging from recession – especially since it was just two years since he had spent €1.5 million on another vessel.

The Belgian system is one of the least transparent in Europe. Or so says Herman Matthijs, a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who has made a study of ‌the financing of Belgium’s royals.25 According to Matthijs, under an arrangement dating back to 1853, the king receives a payment from the state known as the liste civile (or civile lijste). The amount is fixed on the accession of each monarch and, like much else in Belgium, automatically increased each year in line with the cost of living. Out of the total, fixed at €10,673,000 for 2011 (£8.89 million), King Albert was expected to cover both his personal needs and the expenses required to run his various palaces. How he divides the money is up to him. “He is completely free with the money to do what he wants,” says Matthijs. “There is no control system whatsoever, not from the ‌government or from the parliament.”26

Another four members of the royal family – the King’s children, Philippe, Laurent and Astrid, and his late brother’s widow, Fabiola – received a further €2,989,547 (£2.46 million) in 2011. For the second year running, the figure was actually cut – albeit by a modest 1.4 per cent – after the royal family was called on to take on its fair share of belt-tightening in response to the financial crisis.

Curiously, Laurent is only a relatively recent addition to the payroll: it was only in 2001, when he was thirty-seven, that he began to receive an allowance of his own, after complaining publicly about being left out. Questions have also been asked about the generous treatment enjoyed by Fabiola, the Queen Dowager, now in her eighties, whose dotation, set for more than €1.46 million (£1.18 million) in 2011, has long been almost as much as her niece and two nephews’ allowances put together. This, according to the news magazine Le Vif, seemed “even so rather a lot for an elderly woman… living piously in her Château du Stuyvenberg (also put at ‌her disposal by the state)”.27 The palace’s explanation that much of the money went on paying Fabiola’s twenty-strong staff – including driver, valet de chambre, hairdresser and secretary – did not silence the critics.

Fabiola’s dotation, like the money paid to the other members of the Belgian royal family, is tax-free, since it is not considered income as such – a valuable perk in a country that has long been one of the most highly taxed in Europe. Members of the family also pay little or no property taxes, since the official royal residences in which they live technically belong to the state.

As in Britain, however, the official figure of almost €14 million (£11.5 million) substantially understates the true cost of maintaining the Belgian royal family. About the same amount again goes on security, which includes around 240 police assigned to royal-protection duties. Albert also has the salaries of a number of his staff paid for him: many of those working at the palace are on secondment from the armed forces or the civil service and their salaries are covered by their employers (although the King has to make a small contribution towards them). Royal trips, too, must be funded. Matthijs estimates the true total cost of the Belgian monarchy at about €30 million a year.

Amid growing criticism of the royal family, especially among Flemish politicians, there have long been calls to reform the system. In July 2009, a cross-party senate committee proposed that in future only the monarch, his or her spouse and the heir to the throne would receive money from the state. The reform will only come into effect after Albert’s death, however; in the interests of fairness, it was decreed that Princess Astrid and Prince Laurent, each paid more than €300,000 a year at present, will continue to receive the money for life.

This did not go far enough for some, however, among them Pol Van Den Driessche, an outspoken former journalist turned Christian Democrat senator from the CD&V party, who wants greater transparency over the manner in which the royal family spend their money. “The King’s Civil List is there to cover the costs of the royal house,” he said. “But besides that, resources are provided in the budgets of different government departments for that same royal house. The result is an impenetrable tangle where ‌no democratic control is possible.”28

Van Den Driessche and his allies are also keen to shed more light on the Donation Royale, an opaque organization that owns a considerable amount of land and buildings in Brussels and beyond – some of which are used by members of the royal family. The foundation has its origins in the last days of Léopold II, who, following the death of his only son as a child, was determined not to let any of his fortune fall into the hands of his three daughters, who had all married foreign princes. He instead left it to the foundation – much to the fury of the daughters, who fought several unsuccessful court cases after their father’s death in 1909 to receive what they considered their rightful share of their inheritance.

It remains to be seen whether such proposals will eventually see the light of day. Even if they do, it will not be enough for some, such as Ben Weyts, a member of the Chamber of Representatives for Vlaams Belang, a party whose ultimate aim is an independent Flemish republic; in the meantime he and his fellow party members would like to see the King paid just a salary. So how much would the monarch be paid? “The same as ‌the prime minister,” replies Weyts29 – a generous salary by Belgian standards, but a fraction of the amount that he gets at present.

Conscious of such criticism, King Albert has been keen to show he is sharing some of the suffering of his hard-pressed subjects. In January 2012 the palace announced that he would voluntarily renounce a three-per-cent inflation-linked pay rise – roughly €350,000 – to which he was automatically entitled under the constitution, and use the money to pay some of the property-maintenance costs normally borne by the government. The King “had the intention to contribute voluntarily to the ‌[government’s] austerity measures”, it said.30

For critics of the opaque nature of Belgian royal financing, their Dutch neighbours offer a more acceptable model. That country’s rules restrict payment to four members of the royal family: the monarch and his or her spouse and the next in line to the throne and his or her spouse. Given that Queen Beatrix is a widow, this means that just she, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Crown Princess Máxima qualify. Rather than receiving a single lump sum, however, each of them is given two distinct payments – the first part, which reached €7.16 million (£5.81 million) in 2011 and is effectively a salary, and the second, considerably larger part – amounting to €26.41 million (£21.95 million) – which pays for the 260 or so people who work in the Amsterdam, Noordeinde and Huis ten Bosch palaces, and other maintenance and travel costs. This spending is laid out in accounts that can be monitored – making the Dutch royal family commendably transparent, if not especially cheap. According to official figures, the total cost of maintaining the monarchy in 2011 reached €39.17 million (once another €5.61 million to cover work by the government information service and the cost of ceremonial military activities had been added) – though it was due to fall slightly in 2012. This makes it the second most expensive monarchy in Europe, after the British.

The Scandinavian monarchies, not surprisingly, are also relatively transparent and less costly for taxpayers. King Haakon VII, first king of Norway’s current dynasty, got off to a good start in 1905 with a civil list fixed at a generous 700,000 Norwegian kroner a year – the equivalent of about £30–33 million a year today. In order to avoid unpleasant discussions every year about money, it was decided to fix the sum for the duration of his reign. No one, though, had foreseen the inflation of the 1920s, which reduced the real value of the royal couple’s income to a third of what it had been when he came to the throne.

Fortunately for Haakon and his wife Maud, they could also benefit from the generosity of her father, Edward VII. When they married in 1896, the British King gave his daughter a generous allowance of £5,000 a year – understandable given that her husband, then Prince Carl of Denmark, was a second son with little prospect of his own throne and the wealth that would bring. Curiously, the sum was increased to £7,000 – more than half a million pounds in today’s money – and continued to be paid for the rest of her life.

Haakon and his successors did receive steady inflation-linked increases in the post-war years; as elsewhere, however, the figures were deceptive: as the years passed, there was growing concern at what were called “camouflaged supplements” – that is, the hiding-away of expenditure on the royal family into broader government spending. Harald, the present monarch, also faced criticism of the cost of a renovation of the palace – the first major one for many years – that was begun after he succeeded his father in 1991. Decades of neglect took their toll: the final bill by the time they had finished in 2000 was 400 million Norwegian kroner (almost £43 million), far exceeding the original budget of 150 million kroner.

A report was commissioned from Dag Trygsland Hoelseth, a Norwegian historian specializing in royal history, and in 2002 a new system was introduced: under its terms, the King in 2010 was paid nine million kroner as an apanasje (salary), intended to cover his personal expenses and official clothes, with a further 142.5 million kroner for the costs of the court, 15.7 million kroner for the renovation of palaces and 20.9 million kroner to mark his and the Queen’s seventieth birthdays, which goes to a foundation to support humanitarian activities. Crown Prince Haakon and his wife also receive their own apanasje of 7.5 million kroner, with a further 15.7 million kroner to cover their operating costs. Taken together, this takes the cost to the state budget to 232.2 million kroner (about £25.2 million).

The Danish royal family, subject to a more transparent accounting system since 2001, appears considerably better value. As of October 2011 the total annual bill came to 97.4 million Danish kroner (just under £11 million). The Queen receives the overwhelming majority of this – 75.5 million Danish kroner – but is required to give ten per cent (7.5 million kroner) of it to her husband Henrik and 1.5 per cent (1.1 million kroner) to her sister Benedikte. The money is intended to cover costs incurred during the carrying-out of their official duties as well as the upkeep of the interior of their palaces – although the state covers external repairs. Crown Prince Frederik meanwhile receives 18.6 million kroner, 1.86 million kroner of which he must give to his wife, Crown Princess Mary. A relatively modest 3.3 million kroner goes to his younger brother, Joachim. The Prince’s former wife, Alexandra, whom he divorced in 2005, has continued to receive about 1.9 million kroner a year, although since she remarried in 2007 she has had to start paying tax on it.

The Swedish royal family, at just over 122 million Swedish kronor (£11.4 million) in 2011, comes in at about the same cost as the Danish version. Under an agreement between the King and the government made in 1996, fifty-one per cent of this goes on Kungliga hovstaten (court administration), which covers the official duties, travel, administration and personal expenses of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel, and the King’s elderly aunt, Lilian. (The royal couple’s two other children, Carl Philip and Madeleine, are not included.) The remaining forty-nine per cent, under the heading of Slottsstaten (palace administration), finances the royal palaces, their grounds and the various royal collections – although about as much again is obtained in entrance fees and other revenues from the palaces which are open to the public.

Cheapest of all the seven major monarchies is the Spanish one; under article sixty-five, paragraph one of the country’s constitution, the King is entitled to an annual sum from the state budget, which he is free to spend on himself and members of his family. For 2011 the sum was fixed at €8.43 million (£7.01 million) – 5.2 per cent less than the previous year, after spending on the monarchy was cut in line with the funding of other constitutional bodies such as the parliament. The sum is intended to cover the costs incurred by the monarch in carrying out his duties as head of state, but not to pay for official visits, receiving foreign delegations or security. The King is also not required to pay for the upkeep of the Zarzuela Palace or any other royal domains, which is funded by a body known as the Patrimonio Nacional (National Heritage).

In December 2011 the palace revealed for the first time how the money was divided between members of the royal family. Of the €8.43 million, the King received €292,000 (€140,000 in the form of salary, and the remainder to cover expenses) – taxed at forty per cent, while Prince Felipe was paid €146,375 (compared with the mere €78,185 earned by the prime minister). Queen Sofía and her daughters Elena and Cristina and daughter-in-law Letizia did not receive an official salary as such, but were paid up to €375,000 between them in expenses.

Concentrating on civil lists and apanages risks ignoring another element in the equation: the private wealth accumulated by the various royal families, which dwarfs anything they receive from the state. Not surprisingly, determining precisely who is worth how much has proved difficult – although this has not prevented people trying.

During the 1970s, for example, it was widely assumed that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was the wealthiest woman in the world – surprising perhaps given that her public image was of a rather homely lady more comfortable on a bicycle than on the back seat of a limousine. This impression was strengthened by the publication in 1979 of the biography, by William Hoffman, Queen Juliana: The Story of the Richest Woman in the World. Such estimates appear to have been exaggerated: after the death of her husband Prince Bernhard in December 2004, the Dutch royal fortune was evaluated at about €200 million – a huge sum by most people’s standards, but certainly not enough to give Juliana a place in the top ten.

When Forbes, the American business magazine, attempted a study of the world’s richest royals in 2009, its list was headed by King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, with an estimated net worth of $35 billion. The rest of the list was dominated by oil-rich Arabs, with only two European monarchs: in sixth place was Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, whose wealth Forbes put at $6 billion, and ninth was Prince Albert II of Monaco, with an estimated $1.4 billion. Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, was down in twelfth place, with an estimated $650 million fortune, ahead of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, whose estimated $300 million – less than one hundredth of her ‌Thai counterpart’s – placed her fourteenth.31

The source of Hans-Adam’s wealth is not difficult to explain: Liechtenstein’s princely family owns LGT Group, a lucrative private-banking, wealth- and asset-management concern, which is headquartered in Vaduz, the capital, and has more than two dozen branches across Europe and beyond. It also owns RiceTec, a Texas company that develops hybrid rice. Much of the Monégasque royal family’s money, meanwhile, comes from its holdings of real estate in the tiny principality.

The sources of wealth of the heads of Europe’s larger monarchies are more complex. As discussed above, Queen Elizabeth has considerable land, property and other financial holdings. The Dutch royal family, meanwhile, has a substantial slice of Royal Dutch Shell. Despite its absence from Forbes’s analysis, the Belgian royal family has accumulated a considerable fortune over the years, with some calculations published in the late 1990s putting it at more than €1 billion. At the time, a spokesman for the Royal Palace, Françoise Gustin, described the figures as grossly exaggerated, but would not give any alternative ‌sums to prove them wrong.32

The foundations of the royal family’s wealth were laid by Léopold I, thanks, initially at least, to his brief marriage to Princess Charlotte, heir to the British throne. The £50,000 a year he was paid by the British government after her death was a colossal sum – equivalent to more than £3 million today, and double the amount received by Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the heir presumptive to the throne, and eight times the £6,000 a year that his sister-in-law, the Dowager-Duchess of Kent, was left with to bring up the future Queen Victoria after the death of her husband. To this should be added his substantial inheritance from his wife. He was also allowed to keep Claremont House, the mansion where they had lived.

Even after he became king of the Belgians – which earned him a generous annual sum of 2.7 million francs (or about £108,000) – Léopold insisted, extraordinarily, on continuing to receive his British pension, partly because of the doubts about the long-term viability of Belgium as a country. After some haggling, a compromise was struck: he would still receive his allowance but reimburse the British Treasury with any money left after he had covered the upkeep of Claremont House and paid off any debts accumulated while living in England.

Not surprisingly, Léopold did not return a penny until April 1834, when the British parliament threatened him with an official investigation into the £150,000 he had received since ascending the Belgian throne. In his book, A Throne in Brussels, Paul Belien estimates Léopold received a total of £1.4 million from 1818 until his death in December 1865, a sum equivalent to more than £80 million today. “His marriage to Charlotte was by far the most expensive royal marriage the British have had to finance in ‌their entire history,” Belien concludes.33

Determined to ensure the financial future of his dynasty, Léopold was also a keen investor, buying real estate across Europe and shares in a number of companies, including, most significantly, Société Générale de Belgique, a holding company set up by the Dutch King Willem I in 1822 to encourage investment in what had then been the southern provinces of his realm. Rather than buy the shares out of his own fortune, Léopold did so with money the company itself lent him, under an advantageous arrangement with Ferdinand de Meeûs, its corrupt governor – who was later rewarded with the hereditary title of Count de Meeûs d’Argenteuil.

His son, Léopold II, also devoted considerable attention to boosting the family fortune; indeed the motivation behind his attempt at the end of the nineteenth century to turn the Congo into a personal colony was as much personal enrichment as a desire for national glory. Quite how much found its way to Léopold II’s descendants remains unclear, given his determination to disinherit his daughters and his establishment of the Donation Royale. More recent Belgian monarchs do not appear to have been quite such successful accumulators of wealth as the country’s first two kings.

The Scandinavian monarchs are believed to be considerably poorer. Norway’s King Harald, for example, once claimed his inheritance was two figures in millions of Norwegian kroner – the equivalent of a maximum of about £10 million. Spain’s Juan Carlos is also not thought to have much of a personal fortune – not that he could be said to live frugally: a book published in 2009 claimed the King, renowned for his penchant for fast cars, luxury yachts and expensive ski resorts, has a fleet of seventy vehicles, including an extremely rare Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, once owned by General Franco, and a Harley Davidson given to him by the billionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes – as well as a team of sixty-five ‌people to look after them.34 Juan Carlos does not have much need of chauffeurs, however, preferring to drive himself whenever possible – on one occasion, with an almost fatal result: it is claimed that he came close to death in 1990 when he skidded out of control while driving a Porsche 959 on icy mountain roads in the Pyrenees.