Princess Mary’s astounding payday as she becomes Queen
On Sunday the crown princess will become history’s first Australian born Queen and will get a whole lot richer thanks to one detail.
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In 1973, when JRR Tolkien died, two drawings from a woman called Ingahild Grathmer were found in his coat pocket.
A review of his estate found that the author had also held onto other unsolicited works sent in by Grathmer, all ink drawings showing scenes from the Lord of the Rings, despite him being wilfully opposed to his works being illustrated in any way.
JRR never knew that Grathmer was not just some devoted fan – but was actually the Queen Margrethe of Denmark.
And just when you thought she could not get any more wonderful …
In the early hours of Monday morning, Margrethe will abdicate the throne, making way for her son to become King Frederick X and his wife, Our Mary, to become the first Australian-born Queen in history.
Sadly, I have to report I doubt we are going to see Mary keeping up with this tradition of combining Queening with gloriously oddball hobbies.
But, expect one major holdover despite the regime change: Mary and Fred are about to come into a staggering financial windfall.
It’s about to rain krone for the duo currently known as the Crown Prince Couple.
Currently they receive about $4.8 million annually from the Danish civil list, money which they use for things like staffing, Royal Household costs, property upkeep and “expenses of a more private nature”, whatever the hell that quite means.
However, come Monday, assuming they will receive the same amount that Margrehte currently does, that number will jump to $19.9 million annually. Hooooo Boy.
(Also, unlike their British counterparts, the royal family is exempt from having to pay tax.)
Compared to other European monarchies, the Danish one is comparatively small potatoes money-wise.
However, they are still doing just fine, as evidenced by the uproar that Mary and Fred set off in the early months of 2020. They were off to Switzerland for three months so that their kids could attend an international school in Verbier, an arrangement that accidentally exposed the fact that the couple had secretly owned a chalet there for a decade.
Not only that, it was revealed that the crown prince couple had secretly bought the joint, with Mary using her maiden name, and had listed it on Airbnb, pulling in around $20,000-a-week for the property.
Under the terms of the civil list money the royal family collects, they are not allowed to use it to invest in foreign assets unless approved by parliament.
A spokesperson for the Kongehuset (or ‘royal house’ in case your Danish is not quite up to snuff) said that the Verbier property was bought with private funds. (Also, it would no longer be rented out due to security and privacy risks.)
Still, it made them look squirrely and less than open and forthcoming with the people, and though Mary and Frederik still have huge public support at home, the scandal dinged the hitherto Teflon couple.
So, just how much money might Queen Magrethe and her family have squirrelled away? The Sun has previously pegged the figure at around $60 million, putting them at the lower end of the spectrum of monarchical wealth. (Sadly unlike Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein whose family had the good sense to start their very own bank in the 1920s which is why they are now worth about $5.2 billion today.)
Still, Mary and Fred are clearly making do despite their circumstances.
In 2023, the crown princess wore $74,000 of new clothes, according to UFO No More, a site dedicated to tracking royal wardrobes. (They do an annual tally based on meticulous work and it makes for fascinating reading if you are into that sort of thing.)
The world got a delicious peek into the crown prince couple’s palace when the Financial Times photographed and interviewed Mary for her 50th birthday. Basically, the place looks like what Cinderella would have come up with if she had a annual subscription to Architectural Digest and a thing for gilt wainscoting.
The piece revealed that in 2009, the crown prince couple commissioned a series of works from big name artists like Olafur Eliasson, Kaspar Bonnén and Morten Schelde for the joint, thus forcing contemporary artistic practice to a collide with a distinctly 18th century ‘more-is-more’ look. Don’t try this one at home kids.
If the story ended here we could get out the old ‘happily ever after’ stamp but we can’t because despite all this lovely new lolly coming her way, Mary also faces some serious headaches.
The way things currently look, in only a handful of years, her four children will be brutally divided into the heir and the spares.
In 2016 it was announced that only the crown prince couple’s eldest son, soon to become Crown Prince Christian, himself will receive civil list cash.
Thus we have a scenario where not too far down the track Christian will be pocketing millions thanks to his sheer good luck to be born first while his three siblings will not receive an øre (or cent).
(That is a departure from the current status quo which sees spare Fred’s younger brother and spare Prince Joachim receive about $864,000 annually.)
This significant disparity between Mary’s children continues when we get onto the subject of titles too. In 2022 Queen Margrethe set off quite the firestorm after announcing that four of her grandchildren, the children of Joachim, were set to lose their royal titles.
The prince then chucked a Harry, aka went straight to the media to share, telling Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, “It’s very sad. It’s never fun to see your children hurt in this kind of way. They’re in a situation they do not understand themselves.”
While Margrethe later apologised, she still went through with the decision and it is Count Nikolai of Monpezat who is currently studying in Sydney and not, as he was formerly called, Prince Nikolai of Denmark.
My point here is that in the coming years, Mary will see her children bluntly separated and sorted into a two-tier system totally bereft of anything like fairness or equality. While one of her kids is set to have everything served up to him on a silver salver (or more accurately, on the white-fluted china with bespoke gold rims from Royal Copenhagen) the other three will be expected to actually fend for themselves.
That 2022 title mess created a real schism in Margethe’s family and Mary will face history the very real prospect of history repeating itself, with every chance her kids could also end up at loggerheads and divided.
Thus in summation: The incoming Queen has hit the krone jackpot, she has never once offered, off her own bat, to illustrate a beloved fantasy series, and her kids could all end up at each other’s throats thanks to the fundamental inequity baked into the system of hereditary monarchy.
What more can I say but, held og lykke, or good luck, Mary. At least she knows when the going gets tough, the tough can nip off to Switzerland and go skiing.
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 Princess Mary’s astounding payday as she becomes Queen
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