I bought the land title to one of the Duchy’s properties, to check out exactly who it was registered to. You need to take a deep breath before reading out the name of the registered proprietor: it’s ‘His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Chester and Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland’.
Welcome to twenty-first-century Britain, I thought. When I cheerfully emailed the Duchy asking for a map of what they owned, reply came there none. Well, it’s always worth a try. But then, concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it.
I had more luck leafing through back editions of National Geographic at my grandma’s house in Cornwall. There, in a feature on the Duchy written back in 2006, was a map showing the outline of its major possessions. That was my starting point for investigating further.
The Duchy does not, contrary to popular belief, own the whole of Cornwall – though it does possess nearly 19,000 acres of it. Its ancient manorial lands encompass the medieval castles of Tintagel, Launceston, Trematon and Restormel; prehistoric stone circles on Bodmin Moor; steep wooded valleys near Herodsfoot and Stoke Climsland; and dozens of idyllic mixed farms, their sunken lanes and high hedgerows as Cornish as clotted cream.
Yet though Cornwall is the heart of the Duchy, its landholdings are spread far and wide. Its biggest possession by far is a 70,000-acre slice of Dartmoor in Devon – most of it leased out to the Ministry of Defence for army training. Further afield, the Prince of Wales has his private home and gardens at Highgrove Farm in Gloucestershire. Some acquisitions are ancient: the Iron Age hill forts of Maiden Castle in Dorset and Ham Hill in Somerset, or the Manor of Inglescombe to the west of Bath. Some are more recent: the Duchy bought the 11,000-acre Guy’s Estate in Herefordshire from the insurance company Prudential in 2000.
Nor is it all bucolic farming. Prince Charles has always expressed strong views on architecture, ever since decrying a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. Much of the public shares the Prince’s taste for old-fashioned classical designs; the difference is that he has the land and money to put such ideas into practice.
Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, is the Prince’s answer to building homes that people want to live in – lots of red brick, green open spaces and plenty of Farrow and Ball paintwork. It’s certainly pleasant and well-designed, but perhaps just a little too perfect, like something out of Noddy or Trumpton. Elsewhere, the Duchy’s properties include housing estates in Kennington – with clues as to the landlord contained in street names like Black Prince Road, and a nearby pub called the Prince of Wales – and the crown jewels of the Oval Cricket Ground. Still, the Duchy owns a few carbuncles of its own: a Holiday Inn in Reading, a Waitrose distribution centre in Milton Keynes and a quarry in Gloucestershire all number among its possessions.
All told, the Duchy today owns around 130,000 acres of land across England and Wales, nearly twice as much as it did in the Victorian period. This alone is enough to make the Prince of Wales the single largest private landowner in England – even without the additional 100,000 acres of foreshore, 14,000 acres of estuaries and riverbeds, and extensive mineral rights that the Duchy also lays claim to.
By all accounts, the Prince is a well-respected landowner, who’s taken a prescient interest in climate change and other environmental issues, and put his money where his mouth is when it comes to long-term estate management. But it’s important to distinguish Prince Charles as a person from the Duchy as an institution, just as with Queen Elizabeth and her Duchy of Lancaster.
Both duchies are medieval anachronisms, whose attempts to dodge corporation tax and avoid being subjected to public sector norms of financial accountability and transparency are, essentially, tedious attempts to preserve feudal privilege. The lands owned by the duchies were acquired through the same mix of conquest and confiscation as all the other Crown lands: and yet, where most of these lands today are vested in the Crown Estate, with their revenues flowing into the public purse, the duchies remain private piggy banks for the monarch and heir to the throne. Let’s not forget that the Sovereign Grant handed the royal family £76 million in 2017: the duchies brought in £41.9 million on top of this – not to mention the £695,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies handed to the Queen for her Sandringham Estate. And while the Queen and Prince of Wales voluntarily pay income tax on these earnings, future monarchs could readily seek to waive such an arrangement. This is the enduring problem of our uncodified constitution: it’s ripe for abuse by changes in personnel. After all, the Prince might respect the traditions of estate management, but he’s broken the royal convention of not engaging in political lobbying on multiple occasions, as was revealed with the publication of his infamous ‘black spider letters’ to ministers.
Surely the time has come for the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall to be abolished, and their lands merged with those of the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate has proved itself to be an exceptionally able manager, generating huge profits while being open to scrutiny and mindful of the long term; so why should it not administer the Duchy lands, too? Their revenues would then flow directly to the public purse. MPs could then decide whether to vote for a corresponding increase in the Sovereign Grant – or whether the extra money would be better spent elsewhere, on things like schools and the NHS. The Duchies, being past masters at surviving, would of course put up a fight. Feudalism dies hard: John of Gaunt would be turning in his grave. But there really is no place for it in the modern world.
Before we move on from the Crown, there’s just one issue left: the surprisingly vexed question of who owns the royal palaces and parks. ‘We all know who owns Buckingham Palace,’ states a recent article in Time magazine. But do we? The Daily Express, admittedly never the most reliable of sources when it comes to the royals, blithely asserts that it’s ‘owned by the Crown Estate’. But it isn’t: their asset maps omit both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
In fact, both royal residences are under the management of the Royal Household Property Section, yet another part of the Crown’s byzantine structure. It, too, hasn’t changed much over the years. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated drily that ‘in its main outlines the existing organization of the royal household is essentially the same as it was under the Tudors or the Plantagenets.’ Aficionados of Netflix’s The Crown will be familiar with the hidebound traditions of the Royal Household’s management, customs that no doubt irk even the Queen at times. But it might be more accurate to say that no one owns Buckingham Palace – or at least, no one has actually registered ownership of it. I bought the Land Registry records to check: there’s no registered proprietor – only a caution from the Crown Estate Commissioners saying that the Queen is ‘interested in the land as beneficial owner’.
Who owns Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and the rest of London’s royal parks is an easier question to answer: it’s a charity that’s grown out of what used to be a government quango. The same is true for the royal residences that are no longer occupied by the royal family – which in England consist of the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting Hall on Whitehall, and Kew Palace. They’re owned and managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a charity that’s taken on functions previously carried out by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In both cases, what was previously private splendour – enclosed deer parks and palatial homesteads – has now rightly been opened up for public enjoyment.
But strangest of all, and certainly most revealing about where sovereignty really lies under our archaic constitution, is the ownership of Parliament. Few people remember today that Parliament was once a royal residence: the Palace of Westminster. It occupies the site next to the tidal Thames where the Danish King Canute once demonstrated to his courtiers the limits of his regal powers by failing to hold back the waves. Canute built his palace on what was then the low-lying Thorney Island; Parliament was still succumbing to floods as recently as 1928.
For centuries, there has been a longstanding convention that no monarch