Prince Charles may cut off Prince Harry’s funding if he walks away from royal duties, blowing a huge hole in Harry and Meghan’s plans to become “financially independent.”
He may also decide to charge them rent on their U.K. home.
“Charles is not the kind of person to take insults to the crown well and, while personally sometimes guilty of extravagance, he likes to think of himself as frugal on behalf of the institution,” a source who knows him told The Daily Beast. “The idea that he will just roll over and continue giving Harry and Meghan millions of pounds a year if they want to go off and do their own thing is seriously wide of the mark.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Prince Charles currently provides Harry and Meghan with an estimated $3-$4m per annum, which goes toward funding every aspect of their lifestyle, from the clothes they wear and the staff they employ to the food they eat. A final 5 percent of their income, dedicated for office expenses and fulfilling official duties, comes from British taxpayers; it is this relatively small sum Harry and Meghan have said they will give up.
Charles gives the same endowment to William and Kate, and the money is technically his own; it comes from a vast private estate of land and property holdings known as the Duchy of Cornwall. (Republicans have long disputed how authentically “private” this property really is, given that it was seized by the crown in the 1300s and enjoys a suite of “royal exemptions” that release it from such tedious details as paying capital gains tax.)
Prince Charles’ team appears to have briefed U.K. paper of record The Times that Charles may not be willing to continue writing the Sussexes a blank check, with its royal reporter Valentine Low saying that, “while he is unlikely to leave them without a penny, Charles has made it clear that any agreement over money depends on the details of their future role and will not be settled until that has been decided.”
The blithe assumption in their box-fresh website sussexroyal.com seemed to be that Charles would happily continue funding them, and they could continue to enjoy a taxpayer-funded home in Windsor.
The idea that the Queen and Prince Charles will simply agree to those terms now looks impossibly remote, with The Telegraph quoting a source suggesting “that Prince Charles could withhold the Duchy money which funds his office and that of his sons or that the couple could be asked to pay rent on their home at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor.”
The new harder line comes after a day of dramatic developments on Thursday, which culminated in Meghan packing a bag and flying back to Canada, where, it turns out, she had left her infant son.
News broke on Thursday afternoon that the Queen, Prince William, Prince Charles, and Harry had been locked in a four-way phone call as they tried to thrash out a future settlement.
It now appears that despite the documents published on Harry’s new website that presented Harry and Meghan’s situation as a fait accompli, it would be more accurate to see them as an opening pitch, a fantasy version of their best-case scenario.
Will HM agree to it lock, stock, and barrel? Not a chance.
Indeed, the Queen and her de facto consigliere, Prince Charles, are also coming under pressure to strip Harry and Meghan of their royal titles after the couple announced they want to embark on professional careers.
There is deep unease that Harry and Meghan may tarnish the royal brand if they become HRH4H: His/Her Royal Highnesses for Hire.
Pressure groups, prominent media voices, and ordinary people on social media are among those who have called for the couple to either be stripped of—or renounce—their HRH status if they want to market themselves for financial gain.
A key plank of their dramatic statement Wednesday was the assertion that stepping back from their roles as frontline royals would enable them to “earn a professional income” which would result in them becoming “members of the royal family with financial independence” and give them “the future financial autonomy to work externally.”
Many might have assumed that with an estimated fortune of $45m between them, the bulk of it thanks to legacies from Harry’s mother and great-grandmother, Harry and Meghan would already enjoy a not inconsiderable amount of “financial autonomy” and might choose to focus on not-for-profit and humanitarian concerns in the next chapter of their lives.
However it seems that, like a long line of ill-fated royals before them, the familiar claim of “really, we’re broke” has gone up.
They are hoping “to make a shitload of money,” as one source who knows the family well put it bluntly to The Daily Beast.
On their new website, Harry and Meghan talk optimistically about how other royals have gotten jobs, but the fate of the most recent royal to go into—sniff—trade does not get a specific mention.
Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, hoped her divorce from Andrew would free her to carve out a lucrative career as a children’s writer and inspirational speaker, but instead she found herself reduced to hawking juicers on QVC, doing interviews with Oprah, and becoming a spokesperson for Weight Watchers.
Ferguson flirted with bankruptcy, a fate she only avoided thanks in part to a loan from none other than Jeffrey Epstein, and was also caught trying to sell access to her husband to an undercover reporter.
So, that little excursion into the world of business didn’t go so well.
Another prominent HRH4H, Prince Andrew, has been constantly bedeviled by his financial dealings. In a flagrant abuse of his position, he sold a property he owned to a Kazakh billionaire with political connections for over $4 million above the asking price.
A source said: “Andrew has always felt it very unfair that he hasn’t had money in the same way as Charles does. Charles has literally millions to do more or less what he wants with, but Andrew hasn’t, hence all these dodgy deals and unsavory chums. Harry and Meghan should maybe have thought about what the pursuit of money has cost Andrew before embarking on this course.”
The rules prohibiting royals from trading off their names were introduced after Prince Edward and his wife, Sophie, were both accused of cashing in on their status.
At least Princess Michael of Kent was honest about the plight of the struggling HRH4H, saying she and her husband’s circumstances were so reduced they would go “anywhere for a hot meal.”
The Sussexes have given no detail on what kind of work they plan to undertake (although, having recently trademarked their Sussex Royal brand for items such as T-shirts and magazines, one shudders to think of the possibilities), but paid-for after-dinner speaking—the traditional refuge of the defenestrated super-famous egomaniac—will likely be on the cards, with wild estimates of their earning power circulating.
Many are today pointing out that if the Sussexes are traveling the world making money, and current estimates are that they could make millions of dollars from just a few well-chosen speaking engagements, TV production and book deals, some might understandably feel outraged if the security bill for protecting them around the clock—millions of dollars a year—was still being sent to the U.K. taxpayer.
Even when the royals are doing public work, such costs are frequently used to attack them. Police protection for the entire family is said to cost some $450 million, according to anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, and with Harry and Meghan based overseas, these costs could rocket, as, ludicrously, even when they are overseas, they have to be protected by British cops and duties cannot be outsourced to local police.
Meghan and Harry made no effort to say they would pay these costs themselves, or even contribute toward them. Their new website states, with an air of sorry-but-our-hands-are-tied regret, that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “are classified as internationally protected people and will therefore still be protected by the Metropolitan Police,” a situation “mandated by the Home Office.”
That may well be the case, for now, but it’s hard to see how, in the long run, Meghan and Harry will be able to avoid paying security costs themselves, especially if the Queen and Prince Charles do decide to strip them of their HRH honorifics, as many voices (not least that of arch Meghan critic Piers Morgan) are urging them to do.
Indeed the London Evening Standard reported Thursday that their security operation (estimated by the Standard to cost £600,000 per annum) would be reviewed now that “circumstances have changed.”
Living abroad will push those costs up: Their recent jaunt to Canada over Christmas involved a rota of 10 officers, with replacements flown out from London to maintain protection.
A source told the Standard: “This is simply not practical going forward, given officers working in the department have families and private lives to consider, too. It is also a question of resources.”
The palace did not reply to questions from The Daily Beast about Harry and Meghan’s future HRH status.
However, what is clear is that HRH status is entirely in the gift of the monarch, and the Queen is utterly furious with Harry and Meghan.
The Evening Standard reported that on being told of the outline of their plan earlier this week, Her Majesty explicitly told Harry and Meghan not to make any announcements, but they did anyway.
Part of the reason that the royal family makes so much sense to insiders (and often so little sense to outsiders) is that insiders understand it is effectively an outgrowth of the military. The family is deeply rooted in military tradition, and one of the worst transgressions in the military is to disobey a direct order from the commander in chief.
The trouble, as many see it, is that this commander in chief is old and frail and lacks the cold detachment necessary to cry “Off with their heads!”
If anyone will strip Meghan and Harry of their titles, it will be Charles and it will represent his effective assumption of power.
It’s hard, really, to see how he can afford not to do it.
To allow Harry and Meghan to trade off their connections and titles for personal gain would be hugely damaging for the monarchy.
The dilemma was illustrated succinctly in a social media post by the aforementioned pressure group Republic, which said: “If they’re making millions from their royal status, that status needs to be removed. Royal titles and positions are public offices and should be governed by the same standards as other officials and politicians. Making a private profit from public office is called corruption.”
