[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: The Royal Wedding and the Bank Account

[Shaun Hately]

On 14/04/2011 2:53 AM, justcarol67 wrote:
> Geoff wrote:
>  > The Queen, and the Prince of Wales, both also have the income from
> property associated with two Royal Duchies (the Queen is Duke of
> Lancaster which generates about 10 million, the Prince of Wales is Duke
> of Cornwall which generates about 15 million). Overall though the Crown
> is a real money spinner for Britain - in a sense they pay an income tax
> rate of about 80%!)
>
> Carol responds:
>
> The queen is a duke? How does that work? I know that it's possible to be
> a duchess in your own right and not just as the wife of a duke. If the
> British assign the male title to women who hold a title in their own
> right, then logically, she should be king, not queen, of England.

She's actually two Dukes and a Duchess :)

Geoff has already answered this. There are two Ducal titles merged with 
the Crown, and the Monarch always holds them as Duke, even when there is 
a Queen Regnant - these titles are Duke of Lancaster and Duke of 
Normandy. Duke of Lancaster generates an income as it still has property 
associated with it (46,200 acres of Lancashire and many of the buildings 
lying on top of that land), Duke of Normandy does not (and the Queen 
actually only claims the remnants of the old Duchy of Normandy that lie 
in the English Channel - Normandy itself is in France, most famous today 
for being the site of the D-Day landings in World War II).

She is also Duchess of Edinburgh, a title she holds as wife of the Duke 
of Edinburgh (she is similarly Countess of Merioneth and Baroness 
Greenwich, as Prince Philip is Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich).

> Wouldn't they also have income from Prince Philip's duchy of Edinburgh?
> (I don't know about his connections with the Greek and Danish royal
> families or even whether those families--or kingdoms--still exist.)

Only two Dukedoms - those of Lancaster and Cornwall still have specific 
property deliberately associated with them. The others are all just 
titles. Most of the Dukes are wealthy men (Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of 
Westminster is generally believed to be the richest man in Britain with 
a personal wealth of 6.75 billion) but the wealth is technically 
speaking separate from the title - it's their personal property - it 
just so happens that rich men tended to become Dukes, and Dukes have had 
lots of opportunities to become richer. There's no guarantees though - 
Maurice Fitzgerald, 9th Duke of Leinster is a landscape gardener, his 
grandfather having gambled away what was left of the wealth (this didn't 
stop an American recently spending $2 million in a legal battle to try 
and prove he is actually the rightful Duke).