Royal Legacy: 1910-2010
To mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, Royal Legacy tells the story of her family's private wealth and how it has been passed from one sovereign to the next in the last 100 years. Like all inheritance tales, this history of the Windsors' wealth is a highly human story full of greedy relatives, contested wills, family splits and skeletons in the closet
Through a succession of linked personal stories beginning with Edward VII and ending with the Queen, the book describes how the Royal Family have spent lavishly yet managed to retain and increase their vast private wealth, avoiding public scrutiny but not internal strife.
Dividing monarchs into spenders and savers, it tells how the profligate Edward VII blew his inheritance on a life of wine, women and song and only got out of debt with the help of some shady banker friends who were loathed by his son. As king, the apparently more frugal George V saved a fortune on his tax free state income and used it to fund his wife's obsessive jewellery habit and his own priceless stamp collection.
The book describes how today the Prince of Wales lives a much more lavish lifestyle than the Queen - at least, in private. While her Majesty is most at home in the country with her horses and dogs, Prince Charles loves spending money - with his private annual income of £18m going on his huge household staff, his entertaining and his pet environmental projects.
Through the discovery of unpublished royal wills, little-known royal auction records and recently declassified Treasury papers, the author has been able to piece together a mosaic of the landed property, jewellery and artworks that together forms the bedrock of the royal family’s inherited fortune.
The book argues that while the Windsors may be relatively cash poor when compared to billionaire businessmen or some other royal families, they are asset rich - particularly when you take into account their private art collection and the landed estates of Balmoral and Sandringham which despite a century of deaths, divorces and one abdication have been kept firmly in the family.
Book Author
David McClure is a television producer, journalist and writer.
He has a cosmopolitan background - American by parentage, British by birth and European by dint of studying in France, Germany and Italy.
After graduating from the London School of Economics with a Masters in International Relations, he worked as a television journalist with Channel Four making a string of current affairs programmes (including "A Week in Politics") during its first decade on air. He also wrote for The Guardian and The Sunday Times.
Later he joined Reuters Television where he worked as an on-screen interviewer...
more about David McClure...
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