capricious bastards in English history: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and founder of the Duchy. The chapel is built from the rubble of his luxurious mansion, the Savoy Palace.
Gaunt was the power behind the throne of his teenage nephew, Richard II: the archetypal evil uncle and scheming Grand Vizier par excellence. He was also stupendously rich, the largest landowner in England, with vast estates in every county. In 1381, Gaunt was up north hammering the Scots when the Poll Tax rebellions erupted in Kent and Essex. Peasants and townsfolk alike marched upon London, demanding that the king’s evil advisers should be hanged – Gaunt chief among them. When the young king refused to hand them over, anarchy ensued. The rebels descended upon the Savoy Palace and began systematically dismantling the wealth of their feudal masters. Tapestries were wrenched off walls, furniture thrown out of windows, and a vast bonfire made of Gaunt’s riches. Rather than engage in looting and be written off as mere thieves, the rebels instead opted to smash up the tyrant’s vast stash of gold plate so it couldn’t be reconstituted. The Savoy – which had cost £35,000 to build, a third of the estimated annual wage bill for the entire English army – was ground to dust.
But Gaunt’s ducal lands remained intact. After defeating the Peasants’ Revolt, Gaunt was determined to see the House of Lancaster prosper for ever. So when his son, Henry Bolingbroke, murdered Richard II and usurped the throne, his first act was to declare the Duchy to be his and his male heirs’ estate for ever more, held separately from other Crown lands. The Duchy of Lancaster has remained the monarchy’s personal fiefdom ever since.
Today it runs to 45,674 acres, including five ‘rural surveys’, which span grouse moors in north Lancashire, moorland in North Yorkshire, dozens of farms near Burton-upon-Trent, and entire villages in Cheshire. In addition, it owns the foreshore along most of the Lancashire coastline, and extensive mineral rights, including valuable gypsum mines. Looking through the Duchy’s entries in Land Registry data, the estate’s ancient hold over certain areas comes through clearly in the place names: Duchy House, Savoy Road, Lancaster Farm. The Duchy’s Savoy Estate in central London, though tiny in extent, rakes in rents from retail, as well as hosting the estate’s headquarters at Lancaster House, just around the corner from the Chapel of the Savoy.
The affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster remain cloaked in mystery. Until recently, anyone wishing to look into what the Duchy currently owns had to make do with one grainy map on its website. That’s changed with the Land Registry’s recent release of more data on land owned by companies and corporate bodies. But in every other way, the Duchy of Lancaster seems to have deflected public attention from its affairs. It’s not subject to scrutiny by the National Audit Office, Parliament’s financial watchdog. It produces an annual report to Parliament and a Cabinet minister serves as Chancellor of the Duchy, a mostly symbolic role; yet the Duchy has avoided being made subject to Freedom of Information requests from the public. Nor does it pay corporation tax (although the Queen voluntarily pays tax on any income). The Duchy claims that it ‘does not receive any public funds in connection with its activities’, yet it received almost £38,000 in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies in 2016.
The Duchy is an unreformed anachronism, which owes its survival to the accretions of royal privilege over the centuries. But this archaic body continues to benefit from the modern surge in land and property prices. In 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster posted a £20 million profit – three and a half times larger than what it generated back in the year 2000, and on top of the £76 million received by the royal household thanks to the Sovereign Grant. It seems crazy that we continue to tolerate this set-up, meekly allowing the monarchy to keep a medieval cash cow with minimal oversight and exempt from the tax levied on other businesses. ‘Why are we throwing millions of pounds at the Queen,’ asks Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, ‘when that money could be spent on schools, hospitals and local communities?’ Why indeed?
A similar story can be told about the Duchy of Cornwall. It, too, was created in the 1300s, as the personal dukedom of the heir to the throne. Its lands were first gifted to Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, and today the Duchy belongs to Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall.
Like its sister body, the Duchy of Cornwall is one of the strangest beasts in England’s still quasi-feudal political economy. It’s not a company, and so doesn’t pay corporation tax. It’s neither a charity nor a public body – and it isn’t subject to formal parliamentary scrutiny or Freedom of Information requests, though it has to gain permission from the Treasury if it wants to sell off land. The Duchy has even successfully fought off attempts to make it subject to public requests made under the Environmental Information Regulations – something that sits uneasily alongside the Prince’s environmental credentials – in a bizarre case involving its ancient ownership of the Fal estuary and its right to allow oyster dredging over it. It is, in short, an anachronism – but one that has survived for nearly seven hundred years and continues to grow in size.
But try to investigate what the Duchy of Cornwall owns, and you’ll find it’s an even more opaque institution than the Duchy of Lancaster. Its annual reports give a flavour of the properties it possesses, but little by way of detail. The Land Registry, despite releasing data on properties owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, has decided to exclude the Duchy of Cornwall from its Corporate and Commercial dataset – seemingly because it’s considered to be the personal estate of one individual, the Duke of Cornwall.
I bought the land title to one of the Duchy’s properties, to check out exactly who it was registered to. You need to take a deep breath before reading out the name of the registered proprietor: it’s ‘His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Chester and Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland’.
Welcome to twenty-first-century Britain, I thought. When I cheerfully emailed the Duchy asking for a map of what they owned, reply came there none. Well, it’s always worth a try. But then, concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it.
I had more luck leafing through back editions of National Geographic at my grandma’s house in Cornwall. There, in a feature on the Duchy written back in 2006, was a map showing the outline of its major possessions. That was my starting point for investigating further.
The Duchy does not, contrary to popular belief, own the whole of Cornwall – though it does possess nearly 19,000 acres of it. Its ancient manorial lands encompass the medieval castles of Tintagel, Launceston, Trematon and Restormel; prehistoric stone circles on Bodmin Moor; steep wooded valleys near Herodsfoot and Stoke Climsland; and dozens of idyllic mixed farms, their sunken lanes and high hedgerows as Cornish as clotted cream.
Yet though Cornwall is the heart of the Duchy, its landholdings are spread far and wide. Its biggest possession by far is a 70,000-acre slice of Dartmoor in Devon – most of it leased out to the Ministry of Defence for army training. Further afield, the Prince of Wales has his private home and gardens at Highgrove Farm in Gloucestershire. Some acquisitions are ancient: the Iron Age hill forts of Maiden Castle in Dorset and Ham Hill in Somerset, or the Manor of Inglescombe to the west of Bath. Some are more recent: the Duchy bought the 11,000-acre Guy’s Estate in Herefordshire from the insurance company Prudential in 2000.
Nor is it all bucolic farming. Prince Charles has always expressed strong views on architecture, ever since decrying a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. Much of the public shares the Prince’s taste for old-fashioned classical designs; the difference is that he has the land and money to put such ideas into practice.
Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, is the Prince’s answer to building homes that people want to live in – lots of red brick, green open spaces and plenty of Farrow and Ball paintwork. It’s certainly pleasant and well-designed, but perhaps just a little too perfect, like something out of Noddy or Trumpton. Elsewhere, the Duchy’s properties include housing estates in Kennington – with clues
