How many royal people are the British supporting, anyway?

Factual Questions
21

It has already been tweaked a bit. The Royal Family used to include only the male children of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. If that rule still applied, only the son of the current Duke of Cambridge, George, would be a royal; his daughter Charlotte would not. The rules were tweaked in 2012 when the Duchess of Cambridge was pregnant with her first child.

I’m not sure whether they anticipate a more general elimination of gender discrimination. If they were to do that, the size of the royal family would be considerably increased - Princess Anne’s two children are the grandchildren of a monarch, and they both have spouses. Likewise Princess Margaret’s two children and their spouses would be included. Plus the living female-line grandchildren of George V, and their spouses.

I think there might be adverse public reaction to a substantial expansion of the Royal Family. Plus, there’s a possibility (to put it no higher) that the people affected are quite happy not being royal, and wouldn’t welcome the baggage that comes with the status.

While gender discrimination has been eliminated as regards succession to the throne, it certainly has not been eliminated generally with regard to royalty. Prince Andrew’s title as Duke of York will die with him, for example, since he has no male heir, and Prince Edward’s title of Earl of Wessex will descent to his younger child James rather than to his first-born Louise, who has the wrong chromosomes. There doesn’t seem to be any great appetite for change as regards these aspects of royalty, so I wouldn’t assume that there will be change in the way membership of the royal family is defined.

22

No, I asked “How many people” – I don’t care about the amounts, I wondered what would keep the number of royals from expanding forever if the monarchs had more than one child. From UDS’s later post, it looks like half the potential expansion is already closed off, since girls can’t pass on their royal status. (Unless they get to be Queen, obviously.)

On the other hand, it does look like each ‘extra’ son a monarch has could start a new branch on the Royal tree that persists until someone doesn’t have a son. So if King Abel has six sons, numbers 2 through 5 are given some title (Dukes, Earls) and then their oldest son inherits that title and on potentially forever?

And then King Bob (Abel’s eldest) in turn has six sons, and there becomes five more new branches of Dukes/Earls/Whatevers that will also persist.

Continue having really fertile generations and the total number Royal Persons could get astounding.

No, inherited money/land/shareholdings/whatever don’t interest me. We all inherit from our ancestors, whether it’s Grandma’s pickle recipe or huge estates. Some of us are luckier in our choice of ancestors, but that’s life.

It was the idea that money collected from taxes should be handed over to people who are already wealthy for no reason other than their ancestors did something or other back when that seemed utterly unfair.

On the other hand, I don’t know what “should” happen to those old palaces and such. It would be a shame to abandon them to decay away, but who would keep them up, if not some combo of the government/royalty? And if you are maintaining them, someone might as well get the benefit of living in them.

Side question: all those palaces and castles that have been mentioned in this thread, who actually own them? Could the Queen say, “You know, I’m tired of XXX Palace, I’m going to sell it”?

23

The Queen lives in a gilded cage. So much of what she can and cannot do has to be approved or live up to royal standards of deportment. So it depends on the castle and many people would weigh in on if it was proper.

24

Some are owned by The Crown Estate (read: the Government/nation, so the Queen can’t sell them) and some are privately owned by the Queen (remember, she’s a rich lady who inherited a lot of money and estates independent of being Queen).

The Queen owns Balmoral Castle in Scotland (where she has her summer hols) and Sandringham in Norfolk (where she spends Christmas). There are also other properties on the estates connected to these properties, but those are the main ones.

Everything else is Crown Estate (Buckingham Palace, her main res; Windsor Castle, her weekend pad, Holyroodhouse, her official Scottish residence and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland). Which means she can’t sell them.

25

Since they were private property, Edward VIII retained ownership of Balmoral and Sandringham after he abdicated, until his brother agreed to buy them.

26
27

Yes, but they aren’t royal forever. The next dukes of Kent and Gloucester are not HRHs and will not be even when they inherit those titles.

28

I don’t think the OP realizes how many people have a Royal ancestor:

29

And the OP is equally underestimating the likelihood of peerages dying out. Since the late fifteenth century there have been only six sons of British monarchs who did not themselves become King (or are likely to do so) and who had a surviving son to inherit their peerages (or are likely to do so).

  • Ernest Augustus, son of George III, created Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale. Later becomes King of Hanover by inheritance.

  • Adolphus, son of George III, created Duke of Cambridge.

  • Leopold, son of Queen Victoria, created Duke of Albany. His son later became Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by inheritance.

  • Henry, son of George V, created Duke of Gloucester.

  • George, son of George V, created Duke of Kent.

  • Edward, son of Elizabeth II, created Earl of Wessex. Who has a son who will presumably in due course inherit that title (as well as the dukedom of Edinburgh).

(Prince Harry might well be added to that list in the future, but, then again, the point is that there is also a non-trivial chance that he’ll have no children or only daughters.)

What’s more, only the last three titles still exist, although, to be fair, the other three died out for anomalous reasons unrelated to any lack of male heirs. So it’s not as if in the long term giving peerages to younger royal sons significantly inflates the number of peerage titles.

30

The “process” is a matter of discreet negotiation between assorted background advisers, with the Prime Minister judging what Parliament and the public mood will wear in relation to Crown finances.

Historically, the private wealth of the royal family and expenditure on government functions were all the same, with taxes becoming an add-on to land rents and other assorted income streams from Crown estates (some of which have over time become commercial operations, and others have dwindled to traditional historical curiosities preserved for some sort of symbolic heritage value). The big move towards separating them came in the late 18th century, when George III’s burgeoning family and the cost of maintaining government in a time of almost permanent war were overburdening the system with costs. He offered the income from the Crown Estates to Parliament, in return for a Parliamentary “civil list” of funding for maintaining the royal household (which still covered a lot of ceremonial public functions rather than private self-indulgences, but still did fund a lot of the latter too).

That still left a fair number of income sources considered the private property of the family - chiefly the Duchy of Cornwall estates, which by tradition are to support the heir to the throne, but also properties and estates bought out of their private funds (Balmoral, Sandringham, for example).

That still left a lot of negotiating between government, trustees of assorted agencies as well as the family and their own advisers, over where the boundaries went, in terms of maintaining the “historic royal palaces” (now hived off to a specific public agency), which bits of them are public and which private, and what sort of funding there is for the private accomodation bits, whether it’s all fully charged out or whether some of it is buried in general expenditures by the relevant government departments and specalist heritage agencies that would have had to be spent anyway if you’re going to maintain a palace for heritage/tourist reasons. After the fire at Windsor, there was an embarrassing public outcry when the government announced it would fund the repair and restoration work, and in the end the Queen agreed to raise funds by opening Buckingham Palace to paid tours to fund the repairs within “royal” financial accounts.

So as to who gets a house, where and on what terms, that’s also a matter of behind-the-scenes negotiations…

31

A very interesting question.

Britain still has fee tail estate land ownership. The usual description is that the land is* entailed*. By comparison the vast majority of land is fee simple estate (or lease). Fee simple means freehold and the owner is able to mortgage it and to sell it.

However fee tail means the owner inherits the land for their lifetime after which title passes to their heir and so on down the ages. Entailed land cannot be sold.

For example Prince Charles looks enormously wealthy but the Duchy of Cornwell is not his personal property. At some point William will succeed to it.

And this isn’t just for royals either. There are probably a few hundred entailed estates in Britain. Other European countries have this system too although generally it is dying out.

32

Off the top of my head, the private estates are Balmoral and Sandringham, and (I assume) the country houses bought for Charles and Anne - none of the London palaces, nor Windsor, all of which are generally considered to be in some way held in trust as a heritage issue or whose acquisition dates back to before George III’s handover of the Crown estates to Parliament (but I have no idea as to their exact technical legal status, nor, I suspect, does anyone else).

33

In a recentish thread I posted a link to a list of descendants of Victoria and Albert.

Googling for a list gave me this page. I didn’t know grumpy old Philip was the oldest living gg grandchild.

Note the page needs to be updated. The 2nd oldest living gg grandchild is listed as King Michael of Romania who died December 5th. (This leaves Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria and the Dalai Lama as the last living nominal heads of state from WWII.)

Another page with an easier to scan list of V&A descendants is here. Lots of non-royals listed despite tons of royal intermarriage, esp. in the first couple generations. Pick a great grandchild and note how quickly many of them are just regular folk fairly soon.

34

Charles’s country homes are owned by the Duchy of Cornwall (except Birkhall which is on the Balmoral estate). His main country residence was meant to be Chevening which appears to be under some convoluted form of ownership involving trustees and the government, but he didn’t like it.

I think he could instruct the Duchy to sell the homes it owns, but he wouldn’t be entitled to the proceeds.

35

I assume it also depends on what you mean by “pay for”. Free lodging? Free food?

There’s a whole collection of activities the Queen and her offsprings do that are essentially government pomp. The guard that march around and guard the palace are part of the military. Presumably they’d be doing something similar even if they weren’t guarding the queen - if memory serves me correctly, they also guard assorted other sites in London in full regalia; and the time I went to a Earls Court military show, they had the horse guards there in the shiny silvered breastplates, helmets, etc. So technically, the fancy display is for the military’s benefit more than hers. I suppose the same would apply to the White House, Versailles, Tower of London, and to several other London buildings the queen and her family don’t live in. True, they could tear them down and put up more buildings like Grenfell Towers, but most countries have inherited a legacy of fine old buildings with symbolic and historic significance which a country maintains.

Instead of the pomp of a carriage ride to Westminster, they could have a lowly secretary just read off what the new government plans to do. Hospitals don’t need opening ceremonies, war memorials don’t *need *wreaths laid. But again, these are ceremonies for the benefit of the local public and the government. There are only a few heads of state that seem to get off on adulation or the size of their crowds, and they typically aren’t the ones most people want.

Some people whine here in Canada when Bets and the brood come to visit, and wring their hands about what it costs the Canadian taxpayer. however, this is a Canadian government function, not a “perk” of being a royal. There are better places than Canada or Australia spending all your time on display and listening to politicians drone. I’m sure in a less caring world, they’d prefer to be on the Riviera, getting their toes sucked, or hanging out on a yacht doing nothing like Dodi and Diana. So that money doesn’t really count as the “cost” of paying for royals.

(As I remind anyone when the topic comes up - if we were not a monarchy, Canada would have an elected head of state, like Italy or Israel where a recycled politician in a bland grey suit spends their days as president dodging criminal enquiries. At least we didn’t have to endure Brian Mulroney being president while he explains why a couple hundred thousand cash in paper bags was not declared as income at the time…)

36

AFAIK, all the Queen’s cousins from George V, never mind any other descendants of Victoria, are all on their own finances when it comes to homes and incomes: there were private inheritances and few of them married paupers. Some do assorted public duties for the Queen and get some expenses from the civil list or whatever it’s called towards that. Some have their own personal interests and patronages of charities and so on that they presumably do as a private arrangement. My MP’s most recent newsletter showed him attending some road safety awards with which one of her cousins, Michael of Kent, is associated (and Michael has done a fair bit of trade promotion to Russia, thanks to a certain resemblance to the last Tsar); his wife was once quoted as saying they would “go anywhere for a hot dinner”. Others of them get on with assorted careers of their own (one’s an architect, I believe, and Margaret’s son runs his own bespoke woodworking and furniture business).

“Royalling” is mostly about making polite small talk at events other people organise to celebrate their own activities, in order to make them feel recognised and valued.