The restored monarchy soon found its freedom to manoeuvre hemmed in by constitutional restraints put in place by a Parliament determined never to have to go to war with the Crown again. When the Stuarts once more proved too big for their boots, MPs invited first the Dutch and then the Germans to come and have a go at wearing the crown. The Hanoverian dynasty proved much more compliant with the wishes of Parliament. In 1760, George III agreed to give up the income from his Crown lands in exchange for an annual stipend called the Civil List. The lands would still technically be his, ‘in right of his Crown’, but the revenues would flow to the Treasury and they would be managed by an organisation answerable to Parliament – later called the Crown Estate.
It was a sweet deal for the king, as the Crown lands were in a pretty shambolic state at the time. Revenues remained low, and land holdings had continued to be filched for bribes and the enrichment of court favourites. The Civil List, by contrast, handed the royal family a guaranteed fixed income. And over the next century, the Crown Estate’s fortunes were to revive. Staffed with an increasingly professional civil service, its holding of land doubled in size from around 106,000 acres to 220,000 acres over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign. More importantly from the government’s perspective, revenues grew immensely, bringing in millions of pounds for the public purse. The development of London made some Crown lands stupendously valuable – such as Regent Street, built to link the Prince Regent’s mansion on Pall Mall with Regent’s Park in the north. And when it was forced to hand over the remaining royal forests to the Forestry Commission in 1924, the Crown Estate quickly made up the lost acreage by investing in farmland instead.
Over the last century, the Crown Estate has become a fully commercial institution, managing its enviable property portfolio with ruthless efficiency. Its holdings have expanded still further to cover 336,000 acres of England and Wales, with huge tracts of prime farmland in Lincolnshire and the Fens, on Romney Marsh, and along the Holderness shore. Comparing maps of what the Crown Estate owns with agricultural land classification maps, you can see that nearly all of its farms are on top-quality Grade 1 and 2 farmland. It also benefited from receiving £366,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies in 2016.
Still, nowadays, there’s much more money to be made from Apple iPhones than from apples. The Crown Estate gets more rental income from Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street than it does from its entire agricultural estate. And though it still bears responsibility for managing the Crown’s traditional stamping grounds – Windsor Great Park, for instance – its modern capitalist instincts mean it always has an eye out for new ways to boost its earnings. Where the Crown’s landed interests once lay in castles and deer parks, the Crown Estate now prioritises investment in shopping centres and retail parks. That may sound like a moan about creeping commercialisation, but frankly, I’d rather the Crown generate proceeds for the public purse than, say, own a forest for a monarch’s exclusive right to hunt boar. The Crown Estate’s ownership of the UK seabed has also made it a champion for renewable energy and addressing climate change: what was once an effectively worthless asset has become highly lucrative with the UK’s development of offshore wind, which the Estate now has a vested interest in promoting.fn1
The Crown Estate’s 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