‘Highly embarrassing’: Gross way Prince William is raking in millions
A five-month long investigation has revealed the full extent of the way that the Prince of Wales makes more than $50 million a year.
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The middle ages ended on August 22, 1485, but no one tell Prince William’s accountant. (That date was when homicidal worst-uncle Richard ‘Dickie’ III met a grisly end at the Battle of Bosworth Field).
The Prince of Wales is rich – really, really, really rich. That, well, the world has always known.
But now, a bombshell new report has laid bare where the actual money comes from – and it’s highly embarrassing, if not quite simply gross.
For the first time in history, a full list of the commercial properties and assets owned by the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the private fiefdoms set up to bankroll the Prince of Wales and the sovereign in the middle ages, have been compiled after a five-month investigation by the Sunday Times and the BBC’s Dispatches.
The look for William today: Hideous.
Him making money from leasing land for a cemetery, a prison and a children’s playground hardly tallies with his caring, sharing, modern can-do royal image now, does it?
The background here is this. Since 1337, heirs to the throne have paid their jousting bills and kept their ladies in fine feathers and mercury treatments for syphilis via the Duchy of Cornwall, the private trust set up for the exclusive use of the Prince of Wales. (In 1265, the Duchy of Lancaster was set up in the same way for the monarch).
For the last 687 years, the Duchy has been the personal piggy bank which has funded 23 – and now the 24th – Princes of Wales and their multitudinous wives, children, paramours, dogs, boyfriends, mistresses, stables, drinking problems and various bouts of warmongering, though not in that order.
To this day, William enjoys the extraordinary fruits of this estate but this week, we finally understand the “how” part. The Times/Dispatches reporting has revealed that the Duchy of Cornwall owns 1874 properties the length and breadth of the UK which are worth more than $2 billion and thanks to a heady combination of commercial rents and feudal levies, paid William $51 million in 2023.
This money comes from things like demanding levies for a cemetery, the land on which a prison sits, for a children’s playground and from pocketing the estates of dead pensioners.
Some of the ancient privileges William enjoys are highly uncomfortable, like “bona vacantia”.
If anyone dies in Cornwall without an heir, the Duchy gets their estate. Last year, they earned more than $280,000 from lonely people dying this way, though that money was donated to charity.
The only saving grace for the Prince of Wales today after this lengthy, long term investigation came out is that it’s so extensive that I doubt many people actually bothered to wade through it to the end and to realise the full scale of the ick here.
Between William and Charles’ Duchy holdings, they “charge for the right to cross rivers; offload cargo onto the shore; run cables under their beaches; operate schools and charities; and even dig graves. They earn revenue from toll bridges, ferries, sewage pipes, churches, village halls, pubs, distilleries, gas pipelines, boat moorings, open-cast and underground mines, car parks, rental homes and wind turbines”.
Making the picture even grubbier is the fact that the Duchies enjoy special tax status, meaning they don’t pay capital gains or corporation taxes.
All of this is perfectly legal and above board and his right, but the fact that William is earning millions off the backs of UK taxpayers is decidedly distasteful.
The timing of this Times/Dispatches report is the absolute pits from his perspective. Right now, the 42-year-old should be enjoying a victory lap after the doco about his campaign to end homelessness was met with glowing reviews and scored a Disney+ global distribution deal. The prince should be puffing up his feathers and readying himself for round two, with him setting off for the latest instalment of his successful Earthshot Prize in South Africa this week.
Everything should be coming up William. Extra razzle, hard on the dazzle.
What he doesn’t need is the world finding out – or at least, being very plain reminded – that he has been making money off the financially crippled British government and lonely dead pensioners.
Short of it being discovered that William is pulling in millions from running an underground boxing ring featuring homeless combatants or skinning squirrels and selling them to Ikea for their meatballs, this is about as bad of a look as it gets.
William can’t claim that this is all being done in his name and he has no blooming idea.
Last year, Alastair Martin, the Duchy of Cornwall’s former keeper of the records, said during an interview, “There will be weekends when my WhatsApp messages will be in double figures … If something has gone well or badly, I will want to tell my boss and he’ll be straight back”.
These reminders of the ancient underpinnings of monarchy undermine his and wife Kate, the Princess of Wales’ attempts to refashion Crown Inc into a can-do force for modern good.
The Waleses want to be seen as championing causes and work that have a tangible and positive impact on the community – and now the world has been reminded that sure, they are doing that, but they are also simultaneously sucking an enormous fortune out of the coffers of the British State too, and mercilessly extracting a fortune from the people.
Anyone know how you say greedy and entitled in Cornish?
Maybe this storm will blow over, maybe no one will care that a wealthy prince has been outed as a wealthy prince. But if there is one lesson those 23 previous Princes of Wales could and should teach William, it’s that change is inevitable and the only way to survive is to keep pace with the times.
That, and the mercury cure doesn’t work.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as ‘Highly embarrassing’: Gross way Prince William is raking in millions
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