- Big palaces, big crown
jewels, big golden carriages.
How much do these people actually own?
(upbeat music)
The British Royal Family
is perhaps one of the most
over-covered groups of
people in human history.
And one question that comes up a lot,
is who pays for these people?
Where did their money come from?
And it's not actually
coming from a giant vault
in the basement of Buckingham
Palace, Scrooge McDuck style.
They don't actually even
own the crown jewels,
which technically belongs to their charity
the Royal Collection
Trust and frankly to me
that would seem to defeat
the purpose of being a queen.
The royal family's money comes from
basically three major sources.
There's the Queen's personal wealth.
There is something called the Privy Purse
and there's something
called the Sovereign Grant.
Personal Wealth is the simplest one.
There's a certain amount of money
that belongs to Queen
Elizabeth just as Elizabeth,
as just a person in the world.
This includes things like her
country home, Sandringham,
and her estate in Scotland, Balmoral,
which has been the family's vacation home
since the days of Victoria and Albert.
She also has, like anybody else
who has an enormous amount of money,
and any common sense at all,
has an enormous investment portfolio,
and also apparently a very large
and expensive stamp collection.
Then there's something
called the Privy Purse,
which is basically the pool of money
that exists to fund the monarch.
That money comes from
a variety of sources,
for example the Duchy of Lancaster.
(bell rings)
That money can go to sort of
fund the Queen's household,
but also the Queen can dole that money out
to other royals because
just like you can't really
have a broke monarch running around,
you don't really want a bunch
of broke monarch's
children running around.
Charles and William also
have their own Duchys
that generate income
for them as in keeping
with their jobs as working royals
and as heirs to the throne.
So now we come to the most
complicated part of this
which is something called
the Sovereign Grant,
which is where we get into
the debates over whether
or not the taxpayers are
paying for these people.
Once upon a time the King
paid for the government.
Basically the King disbursed
the money to fund things
like diplomats, and
clerks, and all the money
that it takes to do the work of the state.
Obviously the balance of power has shifted
over the last thousand years
from the king to the Parliament.
At some point they cut a
deal where all of the money
that's generated by something
called the Crown Estate,
which is basically an
enormous investment portfolio
associated with the crown.
All of that money goes into the Treasury,
it's hundreds of millions
of dollars every year.
And then parliament
hands back some fraction,
some small fraction, of
that money to the monarchy
to fund the work of the monarchy.
So it's sort of a matter of debate about
who the Crown Estate properly belongs to.
Some people will argue that
the Crown pays for itself.
There's another argument
to be made which says
that, you know, the White
House doesn't belong
to the president personally,
it belongs to the American people.
If the if the queen stepped down tomorrow
she wouldn't actually get
to keep Buckingham Palace.
Buckingham Palace belongs to the nation.
So no, taxpayers aren't like chipping in
50 cents per person every
year to fund royal weddings.
But that money could go to other purposes
and it doesn't because it pays for things
like the renovations on Buckingham Palace,
which God knows it needs,
it's apparently a real mess.
But the biggest answer to the question
of where did their money come from
is just feudalism, literal feudalism.
- But, once you put it on, it stays.
I mean, it just remains itself.
- You have to keep your head very still.
- [Queen] Yes, and you can't
look down to read the speech,
you have to take the speech up.
Because if you did, your neck would break,
it would fall off.
