In 2010, following repeated criticism of Charles’s spendthrift ways, it was reported that he too had been cutting back, with his total official expenditure, including that which he funds himself, down by fourteen per cent to £10.72 million. The British press were amused to note that the Prince slashed £275,000 from his entertainment bill by feeding his 9,396 official visitors with finger buffets rather than banquets.
Such cost-cutting was all relative, however. The £17.1 million salary the Prince pocketed from the Duchy was four per cent higher than the previous year. The annual report from Duchy of Cornwall, published a few days after the royal pay freeze, revealed that while the monarch appeared to have been tightening her belt and cutting back on staff, her son had been hiring extra housekeepers, valets and gardeners. By 2010 his official household stood at 125, a sharp rise from ninety-four five years earlier.
The Prince’s income rose even further in 2011, with the proceeds from the Duchy of Cornwall up by almost another four per cent to £17.8 million and the amount he was paid from grants-in-aid increasing by £298,000 to £1.96 million. The size of his household, too, grew – to 132 – after he took on five new aides, three of them to work for Princes William and Harry.20
A major omission from British royal accounts is the cost of security provided by the police and the army and ceremonial duties performed by the armed forces, which, although not officially disclosed, has been estimated at more than £100 million a year. Republic, an anti-monarchy group, has put the true cost of maintaining the Queen and her extended family at as much as £200 million a year – if you add not just security costs but also the loss to the public purse of revenue as a result of royal ownership of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall and various other property enterprises.21
Provision of a royal yacht was one of the conditions set out by Prince Carl of Denmark when he agreed to become King Haakon VII of Norway of 1905. Also essential for the modern monarch, he felt, were a palace and a country house. The new king got his palace – albeit a relatively modest nineteenth-century one in the centre of town. He and his successors have also had use of the summer palace of Oscarshall, located on the peninsula of Bygdøy in Oslo, and the Bygdø Royal Manor nearby. There is also Skaugum, an estate fifteen miles south-west of the capital, which has been passed to subsequent crown princes since Haakon’s son, the future King Olav, moved in after his wedding in 1929.
Haakon did not push for his yacht, though – and it was not until more than forty years later that a national appeal was launched to raise money to buy him one to express gratitude for his heroic resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War. Built in 1937 in Gosport, Hampshire for Sir Thomas Sopwith, the aviation pioneer, the yacht, Philante, measures just over 260 feet and was one of the largest vessels of its type. Extensively refitted and renamed KS Norge, it has been used by Haakon, his son and his grandson, although major repairs were needed in 1985 after it caught fire while being worked on at the navy shipyard in Horten. A Royal Decree of 1947, the year the ship was acquired, provides that it shall be manned, operated and maintained by the nation’s defence forces – a substantial expense given that it has a crew of more than fifty when it is used by the King and his family from May until late September each year.
Haakon’s reluctance to press his demand for a yacht is typical of the modesty that has always characterized the Norwegian monarchy – making it in many respects the polar opposite of its British equivalent. While the British monarchy has evolved over the centuries, the Norwegians, ruled first by Danes and then in a union with Sweden, were free to create their own modern version from scratch in 1905. The result has been a kind of stripped-down “monarchy-lite”, which remains true to its modest origins even today, when Norway’s vast oil and gas reserves have turned the country into one of the wealthiest in Europe.
Since the Second World War the Norwegians have been without the royal stables and carriages that are such an important part of British royal ceremonial. For special occasions they have a black 1939 Cadillac – which the royal drivers are wary of because of its unreliability – and an open-back Lincoln Continental dating from the 1960s. Most of the time, King Harald makes do with a Lexus instead or, when travelling abroad, uses the Airport Express. For longer journeys, though, they do have a set of royal carriages maintained by Norwegian State Railways. There is a throne, but it is brought out only once a year for the opening of parliament and remains for the rest of the time in a closet next to the office of the vice-speaker.
Harald, the current monarch, seems happy with such a low-key style: “The King is very much a middle-class chap,” says Carl-Erik Grimstad, a former court official turned writer and critic. “He has a nice country house, he has got middle-class friends, he’s into musicals and likes to watch sport – any sport.”22 He is also a keen yachtsman. The Queen, by contrast, is more interested in modern art.
Annemor Møst, a veteran Norwegian royal reporter who has been watching her country’s royal family since the late 1950s, is also struck by the King’s lack of airs. “He’s a very nice person, intelligent and with a sense of humour,” she says. “He takes his work very seriously, but not himself very seriously.”23
The Swedish and Danish monarchies share something of this Norwegian simplicity. The Swedes make great play of the fact that King Carl XVI Gustaf drives himself from home to work every morning like an ordinary subject. The only difference is that his office is located in a magnificent eighteenth-century baroque royal palace. The Danes also put the emphasis on informality: alongside her official duties, Queen Margrethe II is a gifted artist whose various endeavours have included designing sets for theatre and film. Her special interest is découpage – a technique of making images from photographs cut out from magazines.
While working on a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Wild Swans’, released in 2009, the Queen regularly joined Jacob Jørgensen, the head of JJ Film, and his team at their studio in Valby, in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to work on the project. A heavy smoker, she was often spotted popping outside for a cigarette. However informal her behaviour, no one ever forgot she was the Queen: when her colleagues addressed her, it was not as “Margrethe” but as “Your Majesty”. The Queen’s eldest son Crown Prince Frederik and his Australian-born wife Crown Princess Mary have tried to cultivate the image of a modern couple having a normal life in which they raise their own children – inspired, in part, by Mary’s own middle-class upbringing in Tasmania. Yet they reportedly employ twenty-five staff including maids, nannies for their three children, private secretaries, footmen and Mary’s hofdame (lady-in-waiting), Caroline Heering.
When it comes to residences, both the Danish and Swedish royal families are well supplied: Margrethe has a string of palaces between which she and her family, like their British compeers, move according to a long-established ritual. Thus winters are spent at Amalienborg, spring and autumn in Fredensborg and the summer at Marselisborg or Graasten. The palaces were historically the property of the royal house, but following the introduction of the 1849 constitution they passed to the state.
The Queen and her consort, Prince Henrik, also have a home in his native France, Château de Caïx, near the latter’s family estate of Cayrou. Since buying the property in 1974, the royal couple have carried out an extensive renovation of the house, which has been rebuilt several times since the fourteenth century. It is to this residence, overlooking a curve in the River Lot, that they traditionally repair in summer and also where they used to host an informal press conference each August – until the practice was halted, without explanation, in 2009.
For Henrik, it is a chance to spend time not just relaxing but also indulging his passion for wine-making – the chateau’s website even contains a poem that the Prince, an artistic soul, has composed about his vineyards:
Cahors de Cœur
Des vins seigneurs
Du Lot la fleur
De Cayx l’honneur.
Beloved Cahors
Flower of the Lot
Honour of Cayx.
The wine is not just for royal consumption. Just as Prince Charles has turned his passion for organic farming into a food business, so Henrik markets his wines – all marked clearly with a Danish crown and large H, lest anyone be in doubt of their royal origins. One is known as “La Royale”, the other as “Le Rosé du Prince de Danemark”. There is also a shop and the chance for visitors to tour the estate.
Critics in the Danish media have not been impressed. Figures published in January 2009 that cast doubt on the profitability of the Prince’s wine-making operations were seized on by Ekstra Bladet, an anti-royal tabloid, which complained the whole operation was kept afloat only with subsidies from the Queen – and so, effectively, from the country’s taxpayers. “Henrik must be thanking his wife and her position as Denmark’s head of state with an associated salary that he can live a life that none of the other growers in the region can match,” it claimed. The newspaper also noted how the Amalienborg Palace effectively propped up Henrik’s venture by being a major buyer of his wines, which are often on the table at official dinners.24
Sweden has no fewer than eleven royal palaces, although the King and Queen use only two: Drottningholm Palace, dating from the seventeenth century, west of Stockholm, where they live in rooms in the southern wing; and the six-hundred-room Royal Palace, on Stadsholmen (City Island), in Gamla Stan, the old town of the capital, which remains their official residence and the place where they work and official receptions are held. Even these two are open to the public. Since their marriage in June 2010, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel have moved into Haga Palace, just outside Stockholm. Once home to Victoria’s grandparents – and the place where her father was born – it was used as a government guest house for foreign dignitaries from the mid-1960s and then restored for her and Daniel at a cost of more than 40 million kronor (£3.7 million).
Officially, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has three palaces: Noordeinde Palace and Huis ten Bosch Palace, both in The Hague, and the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. All three, though, belong not to the Queen but to the state and, as the official jargon puts it, “have been placed at her disposal by Act of Parliament”. King Albert II of Belgium makes do with just two: his official residence, the Palais Royal, in the centre of Brussels, and the eighteenth-century Château de Laeken, which has been home to Belgian monarchs since the time of Léopold I.
Although the Spanish monarchy is almost Scandinavian in its modesty, the country has the largest royal palace in Europe – a throwback to the glorious past of the Borbóns. Built from 1738 until 1755 and first occupied by Carlos III in 1764, the Palacio Real de Madrid, in the western part of the city centre, has more than 2,800 rooms and a combined floor area of 1.5 million square foot. But although deemed the official residence, it is used only for state ceremonies.
Juan Carlos and his family have lived instead since 1962 in the more modest Palacio de la Zarzuela, built in the seventeenth century as a hunting lodge. For symbolic reasons they refused after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 to move into El Pardo Palace, where the dictator had lived, using it instead for foreign state guests. Another former royal property, the Moncloa Palace, meanwhile, became the residence of the prime minister. The King’s son Prince Felipe has lived since summer 2002 in a 34,000-square-foot palace in the grounds of La Zarzuela.
Although the British monarchy remains by far the most expensive in Europe to run, the finances and financing of its Continental counterparts remain a highly complex and controversial subject. The systems used vary from country to country, but two factors are common to all: firstly, not just the sovereigns but also, in most cases, other members of the royal families are paid considerable sums of money each year by their subjects. Secondly, the precise amount that they cost the state and the extent of their private wealth are shrouded in mystery.
Not surprisingly, such arrangements came under growing scrutiny in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008; while many of their subjects had to cut their spending or lost their jobs, the monarchs and their families continued to enjoy not just absolute job security but also a generous pay and benefits package that, in most cases, has been steadily increased year in, year out.
The debate in Belgium has been especially intense, in part because of the hostility towards the Crown of substantial parts of the Flemish political establishment. Matters have not been helped, however, by the behaviour of the royal family themselves – whether it was Prince Laurent, the younger son of the King, at the wheel of a brand new €87,000 Porsche Carrera, or King Albert himself, paying €4.6 million for a ninety-foot yacht in summer 2009 while his country was still only slowly emerging from recession – especially since it was just two years since he had spent €1.5 million on another vessel.
The Belgian system is one of the least transparent in Europe. Or so says Herman Matthijs, a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who has made a study of the financing of Belgium’s royals.25 According to Matthijs, under an arrangement dating back to 1853, the king receives a payment from the state known as the liste civile (or civile lijste). The amount is fixed on the accession of each monarch and, like much else in Belgium, automatically increased each year in line with the cost of living. Out of the total, fixed at €10,673,000 for 2011 (£8.89 million), King Albert was expected to cover both his personal needs and the expenses required to run his various palaces. How he divides the money is up to him. “He is completely free with the money to do what he wants,” says Matthijs. “There is no control system whatsoever, not from the government or from the parliament.”26
Another four members of the royal family – the King’s children, Philippe, Laurent and Astrid, and his late brother’s widow, Fabiola – received a further €2,989,547 (£2.46 million) in 2011. For the second year running, the figure was actually cut – albeit by a modest 1.4 per cent – after the royal family was called on to take on its fair share of belt-tightening in response to the financial crisis.
Curiously, Laurent is only a relatively recent addition to the payroll: it was only in 2001, when he was thirty-seven, that he began to receive an allowance of his own, after complaining publicly about being left out. Questions have also been asked about the generous treatment enjoyed by Fabiola, the Queen Dowager, now in her eighties, whose dotation, set for more than €1.46 million (£1.18 million) in 2011, has long been almost as much as her niece and two nephews’ allowances put together. This, according to the news magazine Le Vif, seemed “even so rather a lot for an elderly woman… living piously in her Château du Stuyvenberg (also put at her disposal by the state)”.27 The palace’s explanation that much of the money went on paying Fabiola’s twenty-strong staff – including driver, valet de chambre, hairdresser and secretary – did not silence the critics.
Fabiola’s dotation, like the money paid to the other members of the Belgian royal family, is tax-free, since it is not considered income as such – a valuable perk in a country that has long been one of the most highly taxed in Europe. Members of the family also pay little or no property taxes, since the official royal residences in which they live technically belong to the state.
As in Britain, however, the official figure of almost €14 million (£11.5 million) substantially understates the true cost of maintaining the Belgian royal family. About the same amount again goes on security, which includes around 240 police assigned to royal-protection duties. Albert also has the salaries of a number of his staff paid for him: many of those working at the palace are on secondment from the armed forces or the civil service and their salaries are covered by their employers (although the King has to make a small contribution towards them). Royal trips, too, must be funded. Matthijs estimates the true total cost of the Belgian monarchy at about €30 million a year.
Amid growing criticism of the royal family, especially among Flemish politicians, there have long been calls to reform the system. In July 2009, a cros
s-party senate committee proposed that in future only the monarch, his or her spouse and the heir to the throne would receive money from the state. The reform will only come into effect after Albert’s death, however; in the interests of fairness, it was decreed that Princess Astrid and Prince Laurent, each paid more than €300,000 a year at present, will continue to receive the money for life.
This did not go far enough for some, however, among them Pol Van Den Driessche, an outspoken former journalist turned Christian Democrat senator from the CD&V party, who wants greater transparency over the manner in which the royal family spend their money. “The King’s Civil List is there to cover the costs of the royal house,” he said. “But besides that, resources are provided in the budgets of different government departments for that same royal house. The result is an impenetrable tangle where no democratic control is possible.”28
Van Den Driessche and his allies are also keen to shed more light on the Donation Royale, an opaque organization that owns a considerable amount of land and buildings in Brussels and beyond – some of which are used by members of the royal family. The foundation has its origins in the last days of Léopold II, who, following the death of his only son as a child, was determined not to let any of his fortune fall into the hands of his three daughters, who had all married foreign princes. He instead left it to the foundation – much to the fury of the daughters, who fought several unsuccessful court cases after their father’s death in 1909 to receive what they considered their rightful share of their inheritance.
The Great Survivors Page 11