motto, ‘brilliant places through conscious commercialism’, may be a rather nauseating PR slogan, but its contribution to the Exchequer’s coffers nowadays is considerable: £329 million in 2017. Subject to Freedom of Information law and with its finances fully open for public scrutiny, the modern Crown Estate’s professionalism is a world away from the sloppy venality with which the Crown’s lands were managed for many centuries. Still, its transformation into a corporate property agent has its pitfalls: some of the properties it looks after risk succumbing to the overriding imperative for high returns. The Laxton Estate, for instance – the last example of a medieval open field system in England, which has been owned by the Crown Estate since 1981 – was earmarked for sale in early 2018 because it doesn’t turn enough of a profit.
Then there’s the matter of the reorganisation of the royals’ finances in 2012, when the then Chancellor, George Osborne, ended the Civil List and replaced it with a new Sovereign Grant. This new system re-established the link between the health of the Crown Estate and what the royal family receives in income. Now its annual funding is 15 per cent of Crown Estate revenues – so if the Estate posts higher turnover, the Queen and her family get more money. In fact, during the most recent review of the grant, MPs voted to increase the index to 25 per cent of revenues for the next decade, to cover repair works to Buckingham Palace. Not everyone was happy, understandably: as the Labour MP Alex Cunningham pointed out, ‘I have always respected the fact that we have a royal family, but I know they also have vast wealth and I don’t know what sort of contributions they will be making towards this project.’
Because the Crown’s wealth doesn’t actually stop with the Crown Estate. There’s also the small matter of the other two property empires it owns: the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster.
Down a side alley off the Strand, behind the Savoy Hotel, with its cucumber sandwiches and champagne and top-hatted doorman, is an ancient church. This is the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, and it harbours a well-kept secret. It lies at the heart of the Duchy of Lancaster, one of the oldest property empires in England, and a little-known moneyspinner for the monarchy.
When I visited it, the cool air of the chapel was a welcome relief from the sticky heatwave that had been slow-roasting London. Stepping into the sepulchral gloom, I felt the urge to tiptoe: though only yards from one of the capital’s busiest shopping districts, the building’s thick stone walls muffled all external sound. Blue satin cushions covered empty pews upon a chequerboard floor. Every surface seemed suffused with heraldry. Armorial plates plastered the wood-panelled walls, the coats-of-arms of bygone Knights Commander and Grand Masters of this or that Order. Translucent lions and crosses shone from the stained glass windows; above the altar, one gothic arch framed a depiction of the Holy Grail. It was all very Dan Brown.
Except here, the secret societies and ancient bloodlines are all real. The Savoy Chapel is not only the Queen’s personal place of worship, complete with regal throne at the back of the nave. It’s also the church for the Royal Victorian Order – an obscure, dynastic order of knighthood that rewards personal service to the monarch. More portentous still are the names that adorn the vaulted ceiling. Commemorated in azure and gold is the royal lineage of the Lancastrians, stretching back to one of the most Machiavellian and capricious bastards in English history: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and founder of the Duchy. The chapel is built from the rubble of his luxurious mansion, the Savoy Palace.
Gaunt was the power behind the throne of his teenage nephew, Richard II: the archetypal evil uncle and scheming Grand Vizier par excellence. He was also stupendously rich, the largest landowner in England, with vast estates in every county. In 1381, Gaunt was up north hammering the Scots when the Poll Tax rebellions erupted in Kent and Essex. Peasants and townsfolk alike marched upon London, demanding that the king’s evil advisers should be hanged – Gaunt chief among them. When the young king refused to hand them over, anarchy ensued. The rebels descended upon the Savoy Palace and began systematically dismantling the wealth of their feudal masters. Tapestries were wrenched off walls, furniture thrown out of windows, and a vast bonfire made of Gaunt’s riches. Rather than engage in looting and be written off as mere thieves, the rebels instead opted to smash up the tyrant’s vast stash of gold plate so it couldn’t be reconstituted. The Savoy – which had cost £35,000 to build, a third of the estimated annual wage bill for the entire English army – was ground to dust.
But Gaunt’s ducal lands remained intact. After defeating the Peasants’ Revolt, Gaunt was determined to see the House of Lancaster prosper for ever. So when his son, Henry Bolingbroke, murdered Richard II and usurped the throne, his first act was to declare the Duchy to be his and his male heirs’ estate for ever more, held separately from other Crown lands. The Duchy of Lancaster has remained the monarchy’s personal fiefdom ever since.
Today it runs to 45,674 acres, including five ‘rural surveys’, which span grouse moors in north Lancashire, moorland in North Yorkshire, dozens of farms near Burton-upon-Trent, and entire villages in Cheshire. In addition, it owns the foreshore along most of the Lancashire coastline, and extensive mineral rights, including valuable gypsum mines. Looking through the Duchy’s entries in Land Registry data, the estate’s ancient hold over certain areas comes through clearly in the place names: Duchy House, Savoy Road, Lancaster Farm. The Duchy’s Savoy Estate in central London, though tiny in extent, rakes in rents from retail, as well as hosting the estate’s headquarters at Lancaster House, just around the corner from the Chapel of the Savoy.
The affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster remain cloaked in mystery. Until recently, anyone wishing to look into what the Duchy currently owns had to make do with one grainy map on its website. That’s changed with the Land Registry’s recent release of more data on land owned by companies and corporate bodies. But in every other way, the Duchy of Lancaster seems to have deflected public attention from its affairs. It’s not subject to scrutiny by the National Audit Office, Parliament’s financial watchdog. It produces an annual report to Parliament and a Cabinet minister serves as Chancellor of the Duchy, a mostly symbolic role; yet the Duchy has avoided being made subject to Freedom of Information requests from the public. Nor does it pay corporation tax (although the Queen voluntarily pays tax on any income). The Duchy claims that it ‘does not receive any public funds in connection with its activities’, yet it received almost £38,000 in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies in 2016.
The Duchy is an unreformed anachronism, which owes its survival to the accretions of royal privilege over the centuries. But this archaic body continues to benefit from the modern surge in land and property prices. In 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster posted a £20 million profit – three and a half times larger than what it generated back in the year 2000, and on top of the £76 million received by the royal household thanks to the Sovereign Grant. It seems crazy that we continue to tolerate this set-up, meekly allowing the monarchy to keep a medieval cash cow with minimal oversight and exempt from the tax levied on other businesses. ‘Why are we throwing millions of pounds at the Queen,’ asks Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, ‘when that money could be spent on schools, hospitals and local communities?’ Why indeed?
A similar story can be told about the Duchy of Cornwall. It, too, was created in the 1300s, as the personal dukedom of the heir to the throne. Its lands were first gifted to Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, and today the Duchy belongs to Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall.
Like its sister body, the Duchy of Cornwall is one of the strangest beasts in England’s still quasi-feudal political economy. It’s not a company, and so doesn’t pay corporation tax. It’s neither a charity nor a public body – and it isn’t subject to formal parliamentary scrutiny or Freedom of Information requests, though it has to gain permission from the Treasury if it wants to sell off land. The Duchy has even successfully fought off attempts to make it subject to public requests made under the Environmental Information Regulations – something that sits uneasily alongside the Prince’s environmental credentials – in a bizarre case involving its ancient ownership of the Fal estuary and its right to allow oyster dredging over it. It is, in short, an anachronism – but one that has survived for nearly seven hundred years and continues to grow in size.
But try to investigate what the Duchy of Cornwall owns, and you’ll find it’s an even more opaque institution than the Duchy of Lancaster.