That clause was a tangential, almost tongue-in-cheek aside; I’m afraid I took it less seriously than you did. And yes, “Royalist” was not a typo: I’d have preferred a slightly more general term but none came to mind.
… And, as so often here at the Dope, only the least important part of my post drew attention, with downthread posts still claiming incorrectly that the Estates inherited from William the Conqueror (and not specifically ceded) somehow became “taxpayer property” at some point.
The crown jewels are owned by the state.
As others have said, it’s a complex web of arrangements, some property owned by the state, some property owned by the certain family members, but for life only. Doubtless many of the members of the family have actual private property that they own free and clear, but the details are probably not very accessible to the public.
Wikipedia says that George III “surrendered the income from the Crown lands to Parliament in return for a fixed civil list payment and the income retained from the Duchy of Lancaster.
[…]
Every succeeding sovereign has renewed the arrangement made between George III and parliament and the practice has, since the nineteenth century, been recognised as ‘an integral part of the Constitution [which] would be difficult to abandon’.”
That sounds like ceding to me. The estates are owned by the Crown, not the monarch personally. It’s a definitional thing, but since the government ultimately controls the Crown Estates and the people elect the governement, I think it is more accurate to say that the people “own” the estates rather than the monarch.
If I have $100 per annum income, and cede $90 of that to the “taxpayers” I still have $10 of income that is mine
When I wrote “Estates not specifically ceded,” I was referring, strange as it may seem, to those Estates (e.g. Lancaster) or portions thereof (e.g. “civil list payment”) which were not specifically ceded.
I know I have communication difficulties (and it was very silly to begin my first post in this thread with what should have been a parenthetical aside), but my communication skills aren’t quite bad enough to write “not specifically ceded” to mean something other than “not specifically ceded.” 
No, they don’t own that one.
It seems I have comprehension difficulties then, because I don’t know which posts you are referring to when you mention “downthread posts still claiming incorrectly that the Estates inherited from William the Conqueror (and not specifically ceded) somehow became ‘taxpayer property’ at some point”.
The Crown Estate revenue is much times higher than the Civil List, but that’s not really a meaningful comparison. Before 1760, the money from the Crown Estate didn’t go solely to fund the monarch’s household.
To clarify - in any jurisdiction, there were lands owned by the crown, lands owned by the local lord(s) all the way down the line, and land owned by the farmer himself. (And before Henry VIII, lands owned by the Catholic church - in fact one stat I read was that the church owned 10% of the lands, so giving them the boot and taking their holdings was a lucrative adventure). This in addition to the tradition that the King owned ALL the land and everyone else was just allowed to rent it.
So like most other lords, barons, earls, etc., what they haven’t sold off over the years, continues to belong to the title passed to the next heir. The Queen owns huge… tracts of land.
Note that in the Scots Highlands, the law was interpreted to mean that the lord did in fact own ALL the land, and his farmers were just tenants. When sheep were bred that could live well in that climate, starting about 1770 - it was expedient to boot those tenants off the land and convert to raising sheep for the textile trade. The “kindly” lords helped pay to send their tenants to the USA, Canada, and Australia. The less kind forced them to marginal lands or the cities - anywhere but not on their land. The highlands today are almost empty, and Mac-whatevers populate the rest of the globe.
[QUOTE=md2000]
To clarify - in any jurisdiction, there were lands owned by the crown, lands owned by the local lord(s) all the way down the line, and land owned by the farmer himself. (And before Henry VIII, lands owned by the Catholic church - in fact one stat I read was that the church owned 10% of the lands, so giving them the boot and taking their holdings was a lucrative adventure). This in addition to the tradition that the King owned ALL the land and everyone else was just allowed to rent it.
So like most other lords, barons, earls, etc., what they haven’t sold off over the years, continues to belong to the title passed to the next heir. The Queen owns huge… tracts of land.
[/QUOTE]
Which is irrelevant, as almost all practical benefits to the Crown from those feudal tenures (in England and Wales*) were abolished in 1660. The Crown ‘owns’ that land only in the most abstract sense.
*Scotland, of course, being an altogether different story.
One could just as easily argue that the opposite was true. (See below)
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
…this is called the “Crown Estate” In the 1760s, George III surrendered his income from that (or most of it) in exchange for an annual payment from Parliament.
[/QUOTE]
That encapulates the basic misconception about what was agreed in 1760.
There was nothing new in 1760 about the idea of the monarch receiving an annual payment from Parliament. Every monarch since 1697 had received permanent revenues for the duration of their reign to supplement their hereditary revenues for the purpose of funding the ‘Civil List’ and, even before then, going back to 1660, monarchs had received revenues by parliamentary grant to cover ordinary non-military expenditure.
Moreover, the revenues from the Crown Estates had never been more than a small proportion of the revenues assigned towards the Civil List. Indeed, the revenues from the Crown Estates had during that century always been dwarfed by the costs of just the Royal Household. In other words, ‘civil’ expenditure had been paid for from a range of revenue sources. Those always included the various hereditary revenues, including those from the Crown Estates, mainly on the basis that ordinary revenues should be used to pay ordinary expenditure. The Civil List before 1760 was actually paid mostly from the excise and, under George II, as much was paid to the Civil List from the Post Office as from the Crown Estates.
The 1760 deal was actually little more than an adjustment of some of the small print. George III preferred that some of the smaller, non-household expenditures should be paid directly from the Exchequer and so the revenues assigned to pay for the Civil List were adjusted accordingly. This was done by transferring some of the minor hereditary revenues, including the Crown Estates, to other headings. The only sense in which George III ‘surrendered’ those revenues is that, instead of passing automatically to the Exchequer as before, they could now be assigned by Parliament as it wished.
The only significance of all this is therefore the unexciting one that eighteenth-century British monarchs spent on various things, including their own household, and that money was (usually) found to pay for this. The Georgians had the sense to realise that if you were going to have a monarchy, it needed to be paid for and that it didn’t much matter which revenues being raised were used to fund it.
According to the royal website:
*"The Crown Estate is managed by an independent organisation, headed by a Board, and any profits from the Estate is paid every year to the Treasury for the benefit of all UK taxpayers. The Treasury is effectively the principle Government stakeholder and is kept informed of the estate’s overall business plans and strategies.
The Estates portfolio has a value of over £7.3 billion, from beef farms in the north of Scotland to Portland stone mining in Dorset. Windsor Great Park is the only Royal Park managed by the Crown Estate. All other parks are administered by the Royal Parks Agency."*
So essentially, George III farmed out his lands in perpetuity. So although the estate belongs “To the Crown,” for all practical purposes it’s owned by the UK.
I bet that, if there were ever serious moves to turn the UK into a republic, it would turn out that that ‘technical’ ownership means the Queen actually gets to keep all the crown property, plus lots of other stuff.
Parliament could extinguish that ownership with a single act, though (assuming the change to a republic didn’t also involve constitutional changes that drastically altered its powers). Parliamentary supremacy has its problems, but it does make it quite procedurally easy to simply legislate away anybody’s ownership of property.
That’d go down well with the home-owning obsessed general public and newspapers.
That’s a distinction without difference.
Let’s try different terminology:
The Crown Estate is owned by “the state”. The Estate’s revenue is in principle reserved for the use of the reigning monarch. The various Civil List Acts transfer that revenue, adding it in to the general revenue of the state/government. In exchange for that revenue, the reigning monarch is given a defined amount of money.
Um, no.
Actually it was the Marxist bit that was rather odd.
Any chance you want to expand on that?
**Lord Feldon’s **comment though was made in the context you raised ie “if there were ever serious moves to turn the UK into a republic”.
In the context of a situation where serious moves to turn the UK into a republic were coming to fruition, you have to assume parliament would have a mandate to make moves against the royalty’s present position. Their use of that mandate to legislate away certain historical property rights held by royalty is not going to cause the general public to be concerned about Mr and Mrs Average’s home ownership rights.
My point was that for historical reasons, aside from the theoretical ownership of the whole country, and aside from the crown estates which actually pay to the government, the queen herself -or rather, through her title(s) - owns large areas of farmland, several dwellings of assorted sizes, and miscellaneous other assets. Similarly, Charles owns such real estate also through his title. As mentioned iirc in another thread, he uses these farms to produce for example a variety of organic foods.
While many of the historical residences belong to the government (National Trust?) a few are owned outright by the royals just like anyone else can own a house.
Of course parliament can take whatever they want; not sure what happens if the Queen refuses to sign the bill into law. Basically going republic would be a break with the past that probably would ignore the lack of legal continuity.
Neither the large land holdings nor the historic residences owned by NT but lived in by the titled folk are unusual. I believe that a large number of hereditary nobles whose estates and historic homes were not frttered away by their ancestors are in the same boat.
As for the royal list - the pomp and circumstance of the royalty is actually a function of government. The White House is in the same situation. Cooks, cleaners, security, office supplies, transportation to public appearances, etc. All these are government, not personal expenses. A dinner for the visiting head of state at Windsor Castle for 200 is similar to a White House dinner, and both are on the government tab. Britain has just cleverly separated the administrative from the ceremonial jobs as much as possible.
I thought that all fee tails were abolished by statute and that they vested in the next in line as a fee simple. Was there an exception for the crown?
I know what the context was. What makes you think I don’t?
TBH, I wouldn’t assume any govt really had a mandate to do anything so huge unless they held a referendum, which is unlikely to get down to the specifics of what happens to land technically owned by the queen.
The Daily Mail is well-known for its obsession with home ownership, but it’s not alone, and it’s just newspapers that are obsessed with this topic, but the general public. It would be a huge deal if they admitted that someone was the technical owner of some land but decided to just take it away from them through no fault of their own and with no compensation. I can’t imagine that going down too well in the US, either.
Adding something that specific to the referendum - and referenda tend not to get that specific - would be a surefire way of not getting people to agree to a republic.
Actually, if a British govt ever wanted to have a republican referendum that was guaranteed to fail, that’d be a handy clause to include.