Oh and all the Swans in Britain must be worth a bob or two.
Damn hamsters!
The Queen doesn’t own all the swans. Some belong to the Dyers’ Company and some belong to the Vintners’ Company. But the Queen is the only person who can eat swans.
(What to the Dyers and the Vintners do with swans if they can’t eat them? Better not to ask . . .)
hehehe - during the war (WWII) my dad and brothers tended to hope that Her Maj would not notice a swan or two gone AWOL, specially once they were cooked and gone.n Greedy woman.
Which was why I cited the figures from the Sunday Times Rich List (as reported by the BBC). As this issue always creates a fuss, the Sunday Times (which is not exactly enthusiastic in its support for the monarchy) takes great care to use a definition based on the best legal advice.
No it wouldn’t. Credible estimates of the market value of the Royal Collection, even making allowance for the royal provenance, are never more than a fraction of Gates’s fortune.
Urban Legend Alert.
It makes more sense when one remembers that the most valuable bit of a swan were the feathers.
As any fule no…
they indulge in swan upping, which is surely forbidden in the bible.
(the truth is here:
http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsor1999/upping.html
THis is really asking for the word “quaint” I’m afraid.
Stuff you simply couldn’t make up regarding swans:
The following was issued by the Royal Web site:
http://www.royal.gov.uk
25th May, 1999
The dates for this year’s Swan Upping, were announced today by David Barber, The Queen’s Swan Marker. Swan Upping will begin on Monday 19th July 1999 from Sunbury-on-Thames and continue upstream to Abingdon in Oxfordshire on Friday 23rd July 1999.
Polycarp - good example - in fact, it actually happened in Canada a century ago, at the provincial level in Ontario.
A private member introduced a bill which passed the Assembly, against the wishes of the Government. (Party discipline wasn’t as strong back then.) Premier Mowat advised the Lt. Gov. not to give royal assent to the bill, so it never became law. Legally, the Lt. Gov. has the power to refuse assent, and he was on sound constitutional grounds in doing so, since he acted on the advice of the Premier who took the political responsibility for the decision.
Sudden mental image: Elizabeth Regina in blue tights & a red cape, flying off to Fight Crime! <insert theme from Superman here> 
QUESTION QUESTION QUESTION
OK! She’s not terribly awfully personally wealthy! The question is, how much of the public property of Britain easily becomes hers?
That is an almost impossible qusetion to answer.
For instance the Crown Estate is te monarch’s property (and there’s absolutely loads of it). However an agreement was reached that the (huge) income from it goes to the exchequer in exchange for the (comparitively) miserly Civil LIst payments.
Or to take another example:
Lucien Freud recently painted the queen. Who’s property is the painting. It’s nominally part of the Royal collection.
Jewellery is another nightmare. Some of it is hers, some is the states (eg Crown Jewels and some of the regalia of other countries). Most is somewhere in between in tha it was given to her, but wouldn’t be given to the average small pensioner.
Also remember the phrase “live like a king” is a truism in her case. She has more servants than you can shake a stick at. Her lifestyle is truly lavish, however a lot of this is official or semi official in that it is to impress others eg foreign folk.
It would be impossible to unbundle the “Windsor” fortune from the British state.
The only possibility would be to take the lot a la Greece with King Constantine.
>> Yes, they did. And it would be unconstitutional, if we had a freakin constitution.
That’s obvious. X would be illegal if we had a law making X illegal. yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s right.
And now. . . if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs. . . if we had some eggs.