Not yet crowned but already very rich: Charles III, who is about to receive the inheritance from his mother Elizabeth II, valued at 360 million pounds (406 million euros), will add this sum to the assets he has well managed as a prince. According to Times, his total fortune will amount to 600 million pounds (678 million euros). The former Prince of Wales has pursued an ambitious investment policy to replenish his coffers after divorcing Diana, explains the daily, quoting a relative of the royal family.
The separation cost him 17 million pounds in 1996, but Charles did not start from scratch and could count on the resources of the Duchy of Cornwall, from which he received the benefits of his mother’s accession to the throne in 1952 on the death of this last in 2022. This heritage was set up in the 14th century to give financial independence to the royal heir. Concretely, the latter does not own the assets of this fund, but receives its profits until his accession to the throne.
Poundbury, laboratory of Charles III’s managerial passions
For Charles, the duchy “brings together everything that excites him”, assured his wife Camilla, in a documentary by the ITV channel dating from 2019. The future king tours the farms there which he rents to farmers and encourages them to use sustainable farming methods. In addition to 260 farms, the Duchy owns 52,450 hectares of land, and leases 345 million pounds of commercial properties. Charles even created a village, Poundbury, in the suburbs of Dorchester, where he applies his architectural preferences.
Under his leadership the Duchy has grown in size and in its latest annual report it has over £1 billion in assets, a record, with income paid to the heir standing at £23 million, an increase of more than 40% in fifteen years. This income is now paid to his heir William, but he had time to fill Charles’ account even before his royal inheritance.
Balmoral Castle in the count, not Buckingham
Due to a centuries-old tradition confirmed in the 1990s to avoid dissolving the royal estate, “he will not pay any inheritance tax,” says Geoff Kertesz, a London heritage lawyer. While the Queen’s will is not public, another exception, Balmoral Castle, where the Royal Family spends their summers, and Sandringham, are among the properties inherited by Charles.
Conversely, the palaces of Buckingham and Windsor, historic residences of the royal family, belong to the State. Another historical symbol of the British monarchy, the Crown Jewels are also the property of the nation, and are therefore excluded from assessments of the royal fortune, since they alone represent several billion pounds.
A complex calculation
On the other hand, the State pays the sovereign a “sovereign grant”: an endowment for the sovereign of a quarter of the income generated by the “Crown Estate”, a vast fund made up of real estate assets such as wind farms at sea. The rest goes to the Treasury. The royal endowment has reached £86.4m for 2021-22. Finally, a third fund completes the royal fortune: the Duchy of Lancaster, controlled by the sovereign, and which brought in the queen 24 million pounds in 2022.
In a series of articles entitled “The Cost of the Crown”, the Guardian tries to evaluate the royal fortune, making in particular the assumed choice to include the property of the Duchy of Lancaster, legally defined as controlled by the State but whose entire benefit goes to the sovereign. The daily also includes luxury vehicles, technically owned by the state but used by the royal family. Added to this are works of art, including a painting by Claude Monet, Le Bloc, bought for 2,000 pounds by the Queen Mother, the mother of Elizabeth II, in the post-war period and now valued at twenty million pounds. . As a result, Charles’ fortune would then be 1.8 billion pounds (two billion euros).