omit both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
In fact, both royal residences are under the management of the Royal Household Property Section, yet another part of the Crown’s byzantine structure. It, too, hasn’t changed much over the years. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated drily that ‘in its main outlines the existing organization of the royal household is essentially the same as it was under the Tudors or the Plantagenets.’ Aficionados of Netflix’s The Crown will be familiar with the hidebound traditions of the Royal Household’s management, customs that no doubt irk even the Queen at times. But it might be more accurate to say that no one owns Buckingham Palace – or at least, no one has actually registered ownership of it. I bought the Land Registry records to check: there’s no registered proprietor – only a caution from the Crown Estate Commissioners saying that the Queen is ‘interested in the land as beneficial owner’.
Who owns Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and the rest of London’s royal parks is an easier question to answer: it’s a charity that’s grown out of what used to be a government quango. The same is true for the royal residences that are no longer occupied by the royal family – which in England consist of the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting Hall on Whitehall, and Kew Palace. They’re owned and managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a charity that’s taken on functions previously carried out by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In both cases, what was previously private splendour – enclosed deer parks and palatial homesteads – has now rightly been opened up for public enjoyment.
But strangest of all, and certainly most revealing about where sovereignty really lies under our archaic constitution, is the ownership of Parliament. Few people remember today that Parliament was once a royal residence: the Palace of Westminster. It occupies the site next to the tidal Thames where the Danish King Canute once demonstrated to his courtiers the limits of his regal powers by failing to hold back the waves. Canute built his palace on what was then the low-lying Thorney Island; Parliament was still succumbing to floods as recently as 1928.
For centuries, there has been a longstanding convention that no monarch is allowed to enter the House of Commons. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, the Queen sends her emissary Black Rod to knock three times on the door of the Commons, to summon MPs to hear her speech. But the door is slammed shut in his face, symbolising the Commons’ independence. This crucial limitation of the monarch’s remit dates back to the Civil War. As political theatre, it represents Parliament’s subsequent armed rebellion, its execution of the king and imposition of a republic, and its later shaping of a constitutional monarchy. In short, it’s an assertion of Parliamentary sovereignty. And yet, it appears that the Queen still quietly asserts her claim to own Parliament.
I discovered this when I chanced across an old parliamentary debate from the Swinging Sixties. The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, having just swept to power on a modernising mission to unleash the ‘white heat of technology’ and update Britain’s tired old institutions, made a special announcement to Parliament in March 1965. The Queen, he declared, had ‘graciously agreed that the control, use and occupation of the Palace of Westminster and its precincts shall be permanently enjoyed by the Houses of Parliament’. Control of the building would pass to the Speaker. Wilson’s Cabinet colleague Tony Benn must have been pleased: as a diehard republican, he had refused to kiss the Queen’s hand when he joined the Privy Council.
Intrigued, I decided to take a look at the Land Registry records for the Houses of Parliament – expecting to find the freehold registered to the Speaker.fn2 But it wasn’t. Instead, there was simply a recent caution, similar to that for Buckingham Palace, lodged by the Crown Estate Commissioners, that ‘the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty is interested in the land as beneficial owner … in right of Her Crown’. Wilson, it seemed, hadn’t taken back control at all.
The confusion over who owns Parliament illustrates a broader truth about the muddle of British politics, and how interwoven our modern system of government is with the ancient institution of the Crown. The Crown’s formal powers may have withered, but its symbolic soft power remains strong – and its landed wealth is still extensive. Grappling with the archaic customs of the Crown remains essential to understanding land ownership in England today. Who owns the land on which the House of Commons meets is only a small, perhaps trifling part of that. But symbolism matters in politics. Brexit, we are told, is all about reclaiming parliamentary sovereignty. If that’s to be the case, why doesn’t Parliament first take back control of the land beneath its feet?
If the story of the Crown has been one of territorial survival, the tale of what’s happened to the Church’s lands is one of almost complete collapse. Once the country’s largest and wealthiest landowner, the Church today is a shadow of its former glory. But what’s most surprising is how recently its possessions were lost. Even in the late Victorian period, the Church was the largest single landowner in England. Yet over the past century, it has lost around 90 per cent of its lands. Why? The mystery of who stole the Church’s land is a whodunnit worthy of a Brother Cadfael novel.
The medieval Church enjoyed vast wealth. Domesday suggests that bishops and abbots owned over a quarter of the entire kingdom, around 8.3 million acres. By the Reformation, historians’ best estimates are that Church lands had declined somewhat, to around 4 million acres. But this was still a colossal area, and it brought in great riches in the form of tithes, rents and agricultural produce. Large areas of England had been settled by the monastic orders, who set to work on draining marshy ground and putting wilderness under the plough. The ordained clergy of priests and bishops also owned plenty of land, not to mention churches and outbuildings. Of course, some of this worldly wealth was reinvested by the Church into building ever-larger cathedrals, and redistributed to the poor in the form of alms. But the senior ranks of the Church seldom went hungry. Over the centuries, various nonconformist and heretical sects – from the Friars and mendicant orders to the Cathars, Lollards and Protestant puritans – poured scorn on the gilded wealth of the Church hierarchy, seeing it as a corruption of the holy poverty of true Christianity.
Henry VIII’s decision in 1536 to dissolve the monasteries and seize their lands had no such spiritual motivation. Part and parcel of Henry’s break from Rome, it was also a land grab pure and simple, to bolster royal finances and fund foreign wars. A large chunk of the land that Henry took from the monasteries was quickly sold off or handed out to noble cronies. The Russell family, for example – later the Dukes of Bedford – were given the old monastic lands of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. It’s still their family seat today. For centuries afterwards, the beneficiaries of Henry’s land grab would remain staunch defenders of the Anglican settlement – terrified of losing their possessions should the Catholic Church ever be restored. One of the main reasons why Bonnie Prince Charlie – the Catholic pretender to the throne in the eighteenth century – never succeeded in becoming king was because of the aristocracy’s fear of losing their ‘Abbey Lands’ if he took power.
But the newly created Church of England was hardly poor, either. Only the monasteries had been dissolved; the old bishoprics kept their lands, and the Anglican Church started out with an endowment of land that ensured it would remain very rich. By the time of the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, the Church still owned a vast estate of 2.13 million acres, making it the single largest landowner in England at the time.
Most of this was in the form of land known as ‘glebe’ – land set aside for the upkeep of parish priests, the lowest and poorest rung of the Anglican clergy. It comprises the land on which vicarages and rectories are built, but also farmland to supplement vicars’ incomes. From the Reformation until the twentieth century, parish priests had three main sources of income: fees from performing baptisms, marriages and deaths; tithes, a form of
