1
The (Family) Firm: Labour, capital and corporate power
The 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was a key moment for the contemporary British monarchy. It attracted two billion television viewers in 180 countries, and one million visitors to London.1 As has become tradition for royal events since Queen Victoria's reign as a way for royals to manufacture intimacy with audiences,2 the royal family appeared for now-famous photographs on Buckingham Palace balcony (Figure 1.1).
1.1 The royal family on Buckingham Palace balcony, 29 April 2011
Although predominantly unnoticed, a host of Buckingham Palace staff were involved in staging the balcony: laying out and vacuuming the iconic red velvet drape (Figure 1.2). The cleaner doing this labour is just one staff of over a thousand working for the monarchy behind the scenes, largely rendered invisible behind the mediated royal spectacle. This chapter explores this backstage labour. It will pull back the stage curtain of monarchical spectacle to reveal the mechanics, technologies, infrastructures and actors behind.
1.2 Buckingham Palace cleaner vacuums the balcony, 29 April 2011
To do this, I introduce a key term used to describe the monarchy in this book: the Firm. This name has a long and debated royal history, seeming to originate with Prince Albert / George VI. The historian Denis Judd claims that in 1920, when accused of behaving inappropriately for the royal family, Prince Albert replied ‘we are not a family, we are a firm’, which Judd suggested demonstrated disillusionment with his uncaring parents.3 In the film The King's Speech (2010), he says directly to his father George V, ‘Papa, we are not a family, we're a firm’, to note a lack of familial intimacy.4 This demonstrates how the language of ‘the Firm’ has entered into accepted myths about the royal family. However, a more widely cited usage suggests a different meaning. During the Second World War, George VI reportedly stated ‘we are the Family Firm’ in reference to himself, Queen Elizabeth and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.5 This usage was positive, celebrating the royals’ enactment of ‘ordinary’ British family values to inspire strength and proximity between the monarchy and ‘the people’ during wartime.6 This framing has reportedly been adapted by the Queen to refer colloquially to the monarchy as ‘the Family Firm’,7 and multiple articles, reports, books and documentaries have used the designation uncritically.8 The historian Edward Owens uses it to describe the public relations strategy of monarchy in the mid-twentieth century, suggesting it uses ideas of ‘the family’.9
I opened this chapter with the photograph of the Buckingham Palace cleaner vacuuming the balcony to illustrate the ‘backstage’, and each of these sections peels back another layer of the Firm's power. Analysing the Firm is comparable to a tapestry: from afar it appears a complete picture, but upon closer inspection its threads are tightly woven together, and the process of unweaving is near impossible. The Firm's history is so complex, and so bounded in unwritten privileges, that it is extremely difficult to undo its logic – if, indeed, it has any logic. I demonstrated in the Introduction how the monarchy is a key player in financial capitalism, but, whilst the Paradise Papers made this (temporarily) hyper-visible, on the whole the very invisibility of the Firm's social and economic power is its power.
Defining the Family Firm
Representations of the monarchy as an ‘ordinary’ family are commonplace in contemporary Britain. The feminist scholars Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh argue, ‘it is not the institution of monarchy that is popular, it is the royal family’,10 illustrating the separation of the royal figures from the institution. The ex-Director of Royal Communications Sally Osman said ‘there is a distinction between what we do to articulate the Monarchy … and then the role that each of the individuals play within that story’.11 Osman demonstrates how royal representations are often organised strategically, and indeed many royal biographies12 and academic studies13 highlight the importance of a monarchy built on ideologies of quasi-nuclear familialism and ‘ordinariness’. In 1917, a royal proclamation renamed the monarchy the House of Windsor, replacing the hereditary surname Saxe-Coburg and Gotha after concerns about anti-Germanism following the First World War. The marketing scholars C.C. Otnes and Pauline Maclaran term this ‘brand repositioning’, realigning the monarchy with British ‘family values’.14
‘A Family Firm’ is a business with ‘a family member [as] chief executive officer’.15 Although they still exist, such firms played an important role in mediating new forms of capital in the Victorian industrial era.16 At each shift of capitalism, particular figures emerge as ‘vulgar’ faces of capitalist wealth, ‘contaminating’ the ‘natural’ economic order headed by the aristocratic landowner.17 The historian Nicholas B. Dirks, for example, describes how the eighteenth-century dominance of the East India Company led to moral panics about so-called ‘nabobs’: mercantile elites returning from India who would then marry into aristocratic families, buy positions in Parliament, and disrupt established economic norms.18 Likewise, the historian Stana Nenadic argues that new Victorian middle-class commercial business owners were seen to compromise a social class order grounded in the morality of the family and inherited wealth.19 To counter this, early business organisation was modelled on ‘the family’. ‘The Family Firm’ mimicked the landed estate, which organised enterprise around family relationships.20 As Nenadic summarises, ‘the public integrity of the firm was built on the public integrity of the family’.21
This led to corporate exploitation of ideologies of ‘the family’ to appeal to public morality, and make new capitalist forms appear respectable.22 In the 1930s and 1940s, the American car manufacturers General Motors advertised itself as a family organisation, claiming ‘the word corporation is cold, impersonal … “Family” is personal, human, friendly’.23 A 2014 YouGov survey found ‘managers of big businesses’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ scored a net negative rating on trustworthiness, while ‘managers of small businesses’ received a net positive rating.24 In contemporary popular culture, ‘family brands’ such as the Beckhams and the Kardashians commercialise family relations for profit.25
The contemporary monarchy seems to draw on a family model propagated by Queen Victoria. The Industrial Revolution created new commercial business owners and entrepreneurs, while advancements in print cultures and transport expanded prospects.26 The result was a new ‘middle class’, differing from the aristocracy above and the working classes below.27 The sociologist Steph Lawler argues that middle-classness was differentiated through claims to ‘culture, morality, and modernity’, which since have become social ‘norms’.28 That is, ‘middle-classness [became] the benchmark against which other groups are measured’.29
The development of the ‘separate spheres’ of work and home meant that the nuclear, heteronormative family (looked after by the wife or mother) was key to Victorian middle-class respectability.30 The aristocracy drew on this ‘ordinary’ bourgeoisie sensibility to distance themselves from classed associations with greed and debauchery – Queen Victoria included.31 While previously ‘the court’ was the centre of political power, Victoria's reign was characterised by portraits of interior domestic scenes.32 Of course, these representations erased the background labour of nannies, governesses and servants.33 But royal palaces were depicted as family homes, with Victoria and Albert as bourgeois parents.34 This played out globally with Victoria depicted as grandmother of the nation, the Empire and – after most of her children married into European royalty – Europe.35 Margaret Homans suggests that these were affective representations when monarchies across Europe were being dismantled under parliamentary democracy.36 By modelling the monarch on middle-class wives, who were required to act as public symbols of their husband's values and status, monarchy could act as a public symbol of the nation's values and status, and avoid political accountability.37
As this book demonstrates, the contemporary monarchy's performance of Victorian-inspired, middle-class ‘family values’ is a strategic project. It is a prism, distancing the Firm from wealthy oligarchs and capitalist dynasties such as the Bransons and the Trumps – with whom the Firm arguably has more in common than with a typical, middle-class family. Indeed, keeping the royal family clean of associations with capitalist vulgarity is a central ideological project to produce consent for the monarchy in the public imagination, and to preserve a higher moral order that has become untethered from divine right under changing forms of sovereign power. Elsewhere, monarchy and corporation are more visibly interrelated. The Princely Family of Liechtenstein, for example, owns Liechtenstein's biggest financial group, LGT, with Prince Maximilian acting as CEO.38 That family's estimated worth is $5 billion, and LGT's corporate strategy draws on discourses of both monarchy and family.39 It describes itself as a ‘family-run company’, and the LGT Code of Conduct is embedded in ‘rules’ established in the seventeenth century by Prince Gundaker.40 The political economist Adam Hanieh explores connections between Gulf state monarchies and circuits of global capital in oil industries, agriculture, construction and banking.41 In Royal Capitalism, Puangchon Unchanam argues that the Thai monarchy has embraced global capitalism by, for example, forming relationships with business elites and global corporations, patronising local industries and selling material goods.42
Defining the corporate Firm
I frame the monarchy as a corporation to distinguish from existing work that considers monarchy as a brand.43 Contemporary marketing literature understands branding as ‘distinguish[ing] a particular product or service from its competitors’, which means differentiating products from other (similar) items.44 A brand operates externally. To examine the royal brand is, to be blunt, analysing what they want you to see. The Firm has developed some ‘public facing’ brands, such as the ‘Royal Collection Trust’ (manages the Royal Collection and tourism at royal residences), ‘Duchy Originals’ (Prince Charles's organic food range), ‘Highgrove’ (Prince Charles's garden tours and home products shop) and the ‘Windsor Farm Shop’ (organic produce shop).45 Prince William, Kate Middleton and Prince Harry have created companies – ‘APL Anglesey’, ‘CE Strathearn’ and ‘Tsessebe’, respectively – to protect their brands and ‘intellectual property rights’.46 Royal brand visibility is ensured through official merchandise sold at royal tourist sites and other stores such as Waitrose and Harrods.47 Branding is certainly not irrelevant. But to understand the monarchy's material practices, we must consider its complex historical, economic, political, social and cultural infrastructures; infrastructures often rendered invisible behind the royal spectacle.
‘The Firm’ is analogous to ‘corporation’, referring to a company with distinct legal personhood and deriving from the Latin ‘corporare’, meaning ‘combine in one body’.48 Corporations can ‘acquire assets, employ workers, pay taxes and go to court’.49 The Crown is legally a common law corporation. Medieval law used Roman ideas of the body politic as ‘universitas, a corporation of the polity’, to distinguish between the Crown and the monarch's natural body, meaning that laws made regarding, and assets belonging to, the monarch(y) will pass to the succeeding monarch.50 Historically, the Crown used private corporations to manage public services, such as municipalities, universities or the Corporation of London, and to manage colonisation projects across the Empire.51 The Bubble Act 1720 decreed that chartered companies must be granted through Royal Charters – documents issued by the Crown – and many monarchs benefited directly from trade deals through custom duties.52 The Companies Act 1862 granted limited liability joint-stock companies the same rights as humans, and negated Royal Charters.53 The Industrial Revolution initiated large-scale corporations, with multidivisional organisational structures.54 Finally, the period since Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation has shifted from the postwar welfare state to financial capital, neoliberal deregulation, free markets and privatisation.55 In the Global North corporate values are embedded in practices of everyday life.56 Corporate and civic citizenship increasingly intersect,57 and corporate accumulation through dispossession, exploitation and extraction expands.58
Often monarchy operates similarly to corporations to sustain itself in a networked world market. Yet rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) corruption, it uses ‘extra-juridical’ forms of precedence rooted in the (uncodified) British constitution and political custom. The legal bases for monarchical privileges are entrenched in historical laws, policies and/or loopholes. The Firm is embedded in the institutions of the British state as a guarantor of the British constitution with an executive political role. The Queen appoints and dismisses Prime Ministers, has weekly private meetings with them (the contents of which are undisclosed) and receives a daily ‘red box’ of government documents; the monarch's signature allows Bills to take effect legally under royal assent.59 The monarch's advisory body, the Privy Council, comprises 650 members including all Cabinet Ministers. The Council approves government decisions but can also create ‘Orders’ enforceable by law under royal prerogative.60 In 2021, the Guardian revealed that the procedure of the ‘Queen's consent’, previously considered a formality where government ministers would seek the Queen's permission before debating bills or laws which would affect her, had actually been used to lobby government ministers to alter more than a thousand laws, from the Brexit trade deal to laws on inheritance.61 The cultures of secrecy surrounding the monarchy are upheld by various state actors, and the Firm has tangible powers. Yet, as I demonstrated in the Introduction, many global corporations also rely on governmental protection and legal loopholes. As the political economist David Ciepley has argued, ‘corporations are government-like in their powers’.62
Working for the Firm
Royal staff
The Firm draws extensively on the time and energy of others to reproduce its power. Whilst civil servants, military personnel and ministers could be considered employees of the Crown,63 my narrative of domestic employment defines staff as those working in royal palaces. The Firm employs around 1,200 staff across the Royal Households, the largest being the Household of Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.64 This Household is overseen by the Lord Chamberlain, and work is departmentalised: the Lord Chamberlain's Office (ceremonies, public events); the Private Secretary's Office (constitutional and political duties, communications); The Privy Purse and Treasurer's Office (finance); The Master of the Household's Department (catering, hospitality, housekeeping); and the Royal Collection Trust (maintaining the Royal Collection of artwork and artefacts).65 I argue that this personnel organisation reflects bureaucratic multidivisional corporations, with the Queen equivalent to Vice President, the Lord Chamberlain as Chairman, the Queen's Private Secretary as Managing Director or Chief Executive, and Heads of Department as sector managers.
Inside accounts suggest a strictly demarcated staff hierarchy usually built around proximity to the royals and policed by a dramaturgy of ritual and etiquette.66 Reports recount segregated dining locations and timings, whereby ‘junior members’ (butlers, housekeepers) eat self-service meals using plastic seats and plastic cutlery; ‘officials’ (long-serving staff, dressers, chauffeurs) dine on upholstered chairs with silver cutlery; ‘senior officials’ (personal secretaries, press officers) are permitted alcohol, and ‘members’ (ladies-in-waiting, Private Secretary) are served by junior staff.67 This shows the Firm merging corporate structure and historical royal etiquette or hierarchy. Reports also show inconsistent hiring practices and enormous variations in wages and benefits. Whilst senior staff are typically headhunted and often employed without formal interview,68 lower-level staff complete an application form, undertake an interview, and some attend an Assessment Day.69 Stephen P. Barry's interview for Valet in the 1960s involved being judged ‘entirely on appearance’, particularly height.70 Now, all staff must have relevant experience, such as in hospitality.71
Salaries also vary. A Housekeeping Assistant position was advertised in 2015 at £14,513.16 per annum,72 which, presuming a 37.5 hours per week contract (it advertises for ‘five days’), is barely above the 2015 London living wage of £9.40 per hour.73 Pay scales for senior staff are not advertised, but the biographer Brian Hoey suggested that in 2011 the Queen's Private Secretary was paid £146,000 and the Keeper of the Privy Purse £180,000.74 In 2011–12, pay was seemingly frozen for staff earning over £21,000,75 but reports suggested that some top earners saw increases of up to 6.4 per cent regardless.76 This reflects how UK elite wages continue rising after the North Atlantic financial crash and austerity economics, despite average UK household income decreasing.77 Meanwhile, reflecting the global ‘gig economy’ model, the Royal Households use temporary contracts. According to reports, some cleaners are agency staff; footmen from elite colleges apparently undertake unpaid ‘internships’ at state banquets; and 350 part-time staff worked on zero-hour contracts for Buckingham Palace's 2013 summer opening.78 Some staff are Public and Commercial Services Union members, and in 2015 they threatened industrial action over working conditions and pay.79
Benefit packages seem to operate hierarchically. Reports say that junior staff are offered accommodation within Buckingham Palace – typically single rooms with gendered and hierarchical segregation – costing 17.5 per cent of wages.80 Meanwhile, many senior staff receive ‘grace-and-favour’ (either reduced rent or free) apartments in other royal buildings.81 Brian Hoey claims that staff sign a confidentiality agreement, forbidding them to discuss their work.82 The consequences of breaking these agreements were revealed in 2003, when the Daily Mirror journalist Ryan Parry posed as a footman to work at Buckingham Palace for two months, before documenting his experiences in the newspaper. Buckingham Palace sued Parry for breach of contract, and his stories were redacted.83
White male employees seem to dominate. The government's 2018 gender pay gap report showed that women in the Royal Household are paid 12.39 per cent less than men,84 and the first Black equerry was hired only in 2017.85 Although the official Royal website has a ‘diversity and inclusion’ policy stating that the monarchy attempts to ‘raise awareness of diversity and equal opportunities throughout our workforce’, and hire on merit, it does not detail how this occurs (indeed, the gender pay gap suggests it does not).86 Statistics on racial diversity are not available. In 1997, the Independent revealed that UK statutory policies on ethnic monitoring of staff were not being used by the Firm.87 In response, the Firm claimed that ‘the number of current employees from an ethnic minority background is about 5 per cent … in line with ethnic minority representation across the Civil Service’.88 The Civil Service figure was actually 18.4 per cent in Greater London, and the Firm did not seem to undertake any ethnic monitoring of current staff by position, making calculations on BAME employees’ distribution across pay grades impossible.89 In 2001, Elizabeth Burgess, a Black woman and former personal assistant to Prince Charles, went to tribunal over discrimination and racist bullying by other staff. Her claims were dismissed.90
The ‘revolving door’
Mapping the senior members reveals networked labour relations between the Firm and other institutions and corporations, and how ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of wealth intersect in the Firm's operations. Table 1.1 illustrates current occupiers of key posts within each department, plus additional information about their employment and personal histories according to the reports and sources listed. Due to significant staff changeovers since 2015, the table also includes some previous longstanding holders of these positions. Table 1.1 shows how gender and race remain problematic, as white males dominate. Likewise, over-representation from elite schools, landowners and titled families seems to suggest accumulations of class privilege, and the significance of inherited wealth. There are also cross-institutional relationships: this ‘revolving door’ between networks is typical of elite institutions to preserve privilege and affluence.113 As the sociologist Andrew Sayer writes, ‘the plutocracy make use of a dense lattice of relationships between businesses, trade and professional organisations, think-tanks, lobbying firms, politicians, political party researchers and special advisers to politicians’, which reproduces nepotism and profit.114
According to these data, the Royal Household has four key previous and/or future employers: corporations, military, broadcasters and the civil service. Sir Alan Reid, Sir Michael Stevens and Tom Laing-Baker all worked for the finance corporation KPMG, and the former Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Michael Peat retained his KPMG partnership upon joining the Household in 1990,115 demonstrating how elites employ experts from ‘a handful of firms’ that dominate the sector.116 Corporate banks Barclays and RBS also feature. These affiliations seem to demonstrate ‘old’ money and ‘new’ money merging, as corporate businessmen appeal to the Firm's strategies.
The military recurs throughout Table 1.1, reflecting interlinked military and monarchy histories (see Chapter 5). The current Master of the Household (who is always from the Armed Forces), Anthony Johnstone-Burt, notes similarities between military values and Royal Household values, as both emphasise ‘the pursuit of excellence, and … teamwork’.117 They also share value systems to ‘serve the Queen’. Equerries are Armed Forces officers, seconded as personal attendants to royals for three years. The Armed Forces continue to pay them, apparently costing the military around £500,000 annually.118
Court culture in the Firm
As early modern courts were formed by aristocrats and noblemen as the centre of government and society,119 the Firm's court remains populated by senior members with political, economic and social influence. Sally Osman and Jason Knauff were listed in the Evening Standard's ‘Progress 1000: London's most influential people 2017’ in the category of ‘Communicators: Media’.120 Their inclusion alongside key media figures such as Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of the UK's largest newspaper the Daily Mail, and BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg, seems to demonstrate the Royal Household's power in shaping British media culture. Osman was further awarded Communications Professional of the Year in 2018 by CorpComms magazine.121
The Royal Communications Office has undergone structural development in response to changing media landscapes. The Palace Press Secretary position was initially instituted in 1918 in response to growing tabloid print cultures.122 Sally Osman said the change from Press Secretary to Communications Secretary was a purposeful decision: ‘we are a communications office and we deal with all sorts of media’.123 In 2014, the previously separate Communications Offices of each senior royal merged into one department in Buckingham Palace, headed by Osman.124 This could suggest attempts to streamline and cohere royal public relations before Charles's succession; as Osman says ‘we are all working in the interests of the institution’.125
The Sovereign's Private Secretary forms part of a ‘golden triangle’ of senior royal courtiers and civil servants, alongside the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister's Private Secretary.126 The Private Secretary communicates between the monarch and the government, arranges official correspondence, and organises the Queen's programme (including writing her speeches).127 Although the holder of this office is officially a neutral liaison figure, the biographer Paul H. Emden suggested in 1934 that ‘to prescribe the limits of his activities, to fix once and for all the sphere of his influence, is impossible’, and little seems to have changed since.128 Indeed, the historian David Cannadine asks, ‘how far is the political history of the modern British crown, not so much the history of particular monarchs, but rather the history of successive private secretaries?’ 129 Despite its importance, the position evolved organically and is unelected – indeed, many citizens seem unaware of its existence.130
Some roles are always filled by aristocrats, such as Ladies-in-Waiting.131 According to reports, this position is not advertised and relies on personal contacts, and Ladies-in-Waiting are unpaid (aside from travel expenses) and work two-weeks-on-four-weeks-off.132 With no pay, this is unpaid gendered domestic labour. The role seemingly functions as a mark of honour, and as an aristocratic classed dedication to reproducing royal power.133 As an aside, these aristocratic–royal relationships are further preserved through godparents for royal and/or aristocratic children. Many key aristocratic families, such as the Knatchbulls, descended from Prince Philip's uncle Louis Mountbatten,134 and the van Cutsems, who own a 4,000-acre estate in Norfolk,135 seem to be repeated as godparents or godchildren across multiple generations, which could indicate commitment to hereditary power and maintaining social networks. Aristocratic institutions and events – for example elite schools or exclusive sporting activities like hunting and polo – further nurture these relationships.136
Questions are raised about staff's investment in reproducing the Firm when they seem to experience poor wages and living conditions. Stephen Barry, Prince Charles's valet, said that many staff ‘are natural royalists who work for the monarchy for the same romantic reasons I did’, and this motivation pivots on moral economies of class subservience.137 Even senior household members are paid less than in comparable corporate institutions, which could suggest that the networks, privileges and status the Royal Household affords are important across the employment divide. The workforce seems to be essentially bifurcated, with low- to middle-income ‘domestic workers’ doing the essential, daily, unglamorous work of maintaining the Firm, and then symbolically and politically important senior and honorary staff linked into broader British elites. Various levels of in/visibility permeate across these groups, from those honoured in prestigious, national ‘most influential people’ lists (although, the intricacies of their daily work remain unknown) to the silent, impersonal figures walking beside state carriages in ceremonial dress during state events.138 The structure of royal staff appears anachronistic, yet it is maintained, and including royal staff in prestigious lists suggests that these forms of status have value amongst ‘the elites’.
Are these staff best considered ‘domestic workers’ or ‘service workers’? Many live in-house, and perform like domestic servants in aristocratic households.139 Alternatively, if we understand the monarchy as the Firm, staff are not just providing domestic support for a family but labouring within a corporation. This again illustrates the blurring of ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth. In her study of luxury hotels, the sociologist Rachel Sherman notes that rather than the Marxist view of labour processes alienating the worker from themselves, in service work alienation occurs in every interaction.140 That is, workers and guests (or, workers and royals) ‘perform class in their appearance and demeanor … [and] interactions’, and in so doing ‘normalise class entitlements’ so they are taken for granted.141 Sherman calls this ‘service theater’, where class is ‘performative but not necessarily inauthentic; rather, this ‘acting’ of class can feel genuine and natural’.142 Of course, for the royals, class hierarchy is more powerful because it functions on inter/national levels, as we all enact the role of loyal subject. I am not suggesting that all staff accept their inferior position or even consider the royals superior. But in many published staff accounts (Paul Burrell, Brian Hoey, Stephen Barry, Dickie Arbiter), deference and class subservience structure their experiences. This is especially notable when the historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argued that deference is declining following the postwar welfare-state ethos of equality, and neoliberalism's emphasis on individualisation.143 The Firm does not appear to have fallen victim to this decline. I argue this is partly attributable to histories of sovereignty and divine right, which although not widely believed today, continue to impact our understandings of monarch(y) (see Chapters 2, 3 and 4). It is also partly attributable to symbolic power: representations and discourses in media and public culture celebrating the Firm as, for example, the embodiment of national identity (Chapter 3) or an idealised ‘middle-class’ family (Chapter 6), which circumvent questions of inequality.
In Chapter 2, I discuss how media representations of the royals actively bring the mystique of monarchy into being. Likewise, in enacting class subservience, I argue that royal staff are actively ‘doing’ class in every interaction, and reaffirming labourer/owner, servant/master binaries. All staff reproduce the Firm as a national institution, and reproduce corporate power across the ‘revolving door’ of the elites.144 The connections described here between staff and other institutions begins to reveal the complex threads weaving together the Firm and other spheres. This is complicated further when considering how historical precedencies inform present economics.
The economics of the Firm
The feudal monarchy accumulated wealth through land: royal estates, feudal rights (feudal aids and reliefs from the tenant to the lord), rent (‘landgable’, ‘hawgable’ and the ‘fee-farm’), and taxation.145 The Crown still owns all British land, as the Land Registration Act 2002 states: ‘The Crown is the only absolute owner of land … [A]ll others hold an estate in land’, with ‘estate’ meaning ‘derive[d] from feudal forms of tenure’.146 Indeed, the story of twenty-first-century royal wealth has distinct similarities to the eleventh century, and it remains embedded in ‘old’ forms of wealth and privilege. This section maps the Firm by exploring its economics: funding, wealth and value.
Funding
The British government has provided funds to the monarch since 1688.147 A fixed payment seemed to give Parliament more control over expenditure, where previously it fluctuated with each monarch's whims. Between 1760 and 2011, this was the Civil List: an annual payment, rising with inflation, in return for the Crown Estate profits – a portfolio of land and property belonging to the Crown.148 The last Civil List payment in March 2011 was £7.9 million.149 This was supplemented by grants-in-aid, which funded official engagements, travel (including helicopter, chartered flights and the royal train) and property maintenance.150 In 2015, royal travel cost £4 million.151 Only the Queen claimed from the Civil List. The Dukes and Duchesses of Cornwall and Cambridge (and previously Sussex) use profits from the Duchy of Cornwall, and other members receive income from the Privy Purse.152 The Privy Purse comprises surplus income from the Duchy of Lancaster, another portfolio of Crown land and property, which totalled £20 million in 2017 (the Duchy is valued at £534 million).153 Funding was completed by the Queen's ‘personal income’ from her ‘private’ investment portfolio (including the Balmoral and Sandringham Estates).154 As this book argues, the concept of ‘personal wealth’ is questionable considering the monarchy's history of extraction, enclosure and exploitation.
In October 2011, the Civil List and grants-in-aid were replaced with the Sovereign Grant (the Duchy of Cornwall, the Privy Purse and ‘personal’ funding remain).155 This restructure seemed to be aimed at improving accountability: the annual payment is calculated from a percentage of the Crown Estate's net income, with the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee undertaking regular examinations.156 However, as the anti-monarchy campaigners Republic argue, concerns arising from examinations are routinely dismissed by the government.157 Furthermore, although the Financial Times used financial capitalist language to describe the Sovereign Grant as ‘performance-related pay’, the payment does not reflect actual profits or losses of the Crown Estate.158 A House of Commons Research Paper stated that this was merely ‘a means of arriving at a figure’.159 This lack of accountability is reflected in payment increases. In 2011, the Firm received 15 per cent of the Crown Estate's net income surplus, but in 2017 the Royal Trustees (the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse) agreed to 25 per cent, plus an additional 10 per cent annually to fund the ten-year ‘Reservicing of Buckingham Palace’ project.160 This amounted to £82.2 million in 2018–19,161 up from £40 million in 2014–15.162 As the royal commentator David McClure writes, paraphrasing the Financial Times, this bears ‘a remarkable resemblance to the generous performance-related pay packages granted to business executives by their indulgent boards’ (except that these do occasionally make the news).163
Since 1993, after the 1992 fire at Windsor Castle which seemed to prompt public concern about royal funding (see Introduction), the Firm has published annual finance reports purporting to encourage financial accountability.164 However, figures appear to be obscured. For the Sovereign Grant increase described above, the 2017–18 report first highlighted a ‘core’ Sovereign Grant of £45.7 million, with the additions in the subsequent paragraph.165 Likewise, the Queen's report includes only Sovereign Grant income, ignoring other operational costs ‘cross-subsidis[ed]’ by government departments.166 The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport funds ceremonials; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office funds state visits; the Ministry of Defence pays equerries’ and orderlies’ wages; the Home Office provides security and police support;167 and the Queen's country estates receive European Union farming subsidies of over £1 million (Brexit could end this agreement).168 Journalists also uncovered that the Firm attempted to claim funds to heat Buckingham Palace under an energy-saving scheme designed for low-income families.169 A Sovereign Grant clause states that funding can never decrease even if Crown Estate profits do, but can increase when profits go up (especially pertinent given the austerity cuts to public institutions like the NHS), reflecting a more pervasive neoliberal practice which socialises losses and privatises profits.170
Discourses of accountability, then, seem merely to assuage public opinion around elite privilege,171 and could reflect the corporate accounting of global companies like Amazon which ‘manipulate results’ to appeal to shareholders.172 In 2018, Republic published ‘Fat Cat Monarchy’, a report claiming that the monarchy earned the equivalent of the average UK annual salary within the first 43 minutes of 1 January.173 This played on ‘Fat Cat Thursday’, research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which claimed that the chief executives of FTSE 100 companies earn the equivalent of the average UK annual salary by 4 January.174 Here, Republic makes explicit connections between monarchy and corporate capital, and demonstrates how the monarchy surpasses this elite wealth.
Since 1910, the Crown seems to have been gradually exempt from a number of taxes, including annuities paid to the royals: Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother paid no tax on annuities and Princess Anne has 95 per cent exemption.175 By law, the Crown is exempt from taxation, and the Sovereign Grant exempt from income tax.176 In 1993, responding to the aforementioned public anger over royal spending, the Firm agreed to pay ‘voluntary’ income and capital gains tax on the Privy Purse and private investments (see Introduction), but only ‘to the extent that the income is not used for official purposes’.177 Prince Charles pays income tax on the Duchy of Cornwall to the same caveat,178 but pays no corporation tax.179 The Crown is also exempt from inheritance tax on ‘sovereign to sovereign bequests’.180 The Queen does pay council tax on her properties: £1.4 million in 2018.181 Whilst corporations like Amazon move their headquarters to avoid paying tax in the countries where their wealth is accumulated, the Firm relies on ‘extra-juridical’ forms of precedence rooted in the (uncodified) British constitution and political custom to play the same game as corporations – stitching together historical customs with financial capitalist logic, and reminding us of the complexities and interdependency of these overlapping infrastructures.
Wealth
Estimations of the Firm's wealth differ substantially depending upon calculations. The Sunday Times Rich List estimated the ‘personal net worth’ of the Queen as £340 million,182 news agency Reuters claims the monarchy has nominal assets of £22.8 billion,183 and consultancy firm Brand Finance combined tangible and intangible asset values to suggest the monarchy ‘brand’ is worth £44 billion.184 David McClure argues that these disparities are partly down to royal wills being sealed, probate details kept hidden, senior royals being exempt from Freedom of Information requests, and the tax exemption on sovereign-to-sovereign bequests, which makes accurate calculations impossible.185 In 2021, the Guardian revealed that the monarchy had used the arcane parliamentary procedure of ‘Queen's consent’ to lobby the government to alter a draft law which would have revealed her private wealth, which could suggest concerted attempts by the monarchy to conceal royal worth.186
Discrepancies are also perhaps attributable to misunderstood differences between the Queen's ‘personal investments’ and property of the Crown. The Queen's ‘personal investments’ are assets legally hers to maintain, use or sell, including the Balmoral and Sandringham Estates, ‘personal possessions’ and ‘personal investment portfolios’.187 Properties of the Crown, meanwhile, are held in trust for the nation by the Sovereign, passing to the new Sovereign upon succession. These include the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, Royal Collection artwork,188 most palaces and castles, jewellery (including the Crown Jewels) and land. Because the Queen is not entitled to these profits, they are often omitted from ‘official’ calculations, although Republic argues that citizens lose profits accruing from them.189
The Crown Estate is a land and property portfolio belonging to the Crown, whilst the Duchy of Lancaster is owned by the sovereign as the Duke of Lancaster, and the Duchy of Cornwall by the Duke of Cornwall, currently Prince Charles (see Chapter 5 for the latter). The Crown Estate incorporates UK residential and commercial property, including (at the time of writing) London's Regent Street, some of St James's Park, some of Regent's Park, Kensington Palace Gardens, Eltham, Richmond, Egham and Hampton; three shopping centres; fourteen retail parks; much of the UK's seabed and foreshore including wind, wave and tidal power, marine aggregates and minerals, cables and pipelines; and 336,000 acres of agricultural land and forestry.190 In 2018, it announced a capital value of £14.1 billion.191 In 2021, reports suggested that energy companies such as BP had made huge bids for the Crown Estate's offshore windfarm plots, which could sell for up to £9 billion.192 The Crown Estate is described as an ‘independent commercial business’, which suggests that it is separate from monarchy but run on its behalf.193 However, as Andrew Duncan argues, much of its portfolio was ‘stolen from the Church at the time of the Reformation’ or conquered by historical monarchs.194 In 2019, the Guardian revealed that over five years 113 Crown Estate tenants were evicted so the homes could be sold for profit, and over a hundred complaints from tenants (about leaks, faulty electrics etc.) were received in two years, prompting questions about the management's morality considering the Crown Estate is a custodian, not a commercial estate agent.195 These misunderstood differences in ownership could demonstrate how the Firm's corporate interests are masked under historical precedence of inherited landownership.
Value
When laid bare, these figures are staggering. However, I argue that royal funding and/or wealth are offset in public discourse against notions of wider cultural, historical or economic royal ‘value’ to British society, and moral economies of social responsibility. Newspaper headlines such as ‘Thank you Ma’am: Royals earn Britain nearly £2 billion a year’,196 ‘The Queen costs her subjects 60p each a year’ 197 and ‘Monarchy attracts £500 million a year from overseas tourists’ 198 use mathematics to appeal to capitalist logics of ‘value’ and exchange.199 In the Introduction, I described this as ‘keeping-while-giving’.200 Likewise, the Firm's initiatives suggest the production and distribution of broader economic value, such as endorsing goods, practices or places. This is exemplified in three separate royal activities: Royal Warrants, the honours system, and royal visits and/or patronages.
Royal Warrants are awards given to traders providing goods or services to the Queen, Prince Philip (prior to his death in 2021) and/or Prince Charles.201 Recipients can display a Royal Arms (each royal has a personalised Arms) on their product and premises, meant to function as a marker of value, authority and ‘a commitment to the highest standards of service, quality and excellence’.202 There are currently around eight hundred Warrant holders, and most are members of the Royal Warrants Association, which promotes networking.203 The award seems to provide both symbolic and economic value, and Otnes and Maclaran liken it to celebrity endorsement, which benefits marketing strategy for the endorser and endorsee by ‘transfer[ring] a celebrity's symbolic and aesthetic assets to the promoted brand’.204 Concomitantly, I argue that the Warrant system provides value for the Firm. The Royal Warrant Holders Association liaises directly with the Royal Household, suggesting that the Firm has or could have access to a network of corporate contacts. In 2013, Buckingham Palace hosted the Coronation Festival, where two hundred Royal Warrant holders displayed their goods for sixty thousand visitors.205 Additionally, the Arms functions as ‘branding’ for the Firm through its global display. This is a distribution of symbolic value which reinforces modalities of exchange, whereby the monarchy appears to be generating wealth. The Firm's achievements and profits from this are arguably masked behind notions of patronage and social responsibility.
The British honours system is the awarding of medals, decorations and/or titles to individuals to recognise achievement or service.206 The system has an internal hierarchy with various ‘classes’ of honours awarded to individuals according to their achievements. Since 2005 the Honours Committee has operated within the Cabinet Office, with eight sub-committees composed of independent experts and senior civil servants (Arts and Media; Community, Voluntary and Local Services, Economy; Education; Health; Parliamentary and Political Service; Science and Technology; Sport; and State).207 The system has an imperial history, and the language of Empire remains in its titles: OBE stands for ‘Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’. In 2004, a Public Administration Committee condemned the honours system as ‘anachronistic, dominated by secrecy, riddled with class prejudice and biased against ethnic minorities and women’, and recommended altering the names to remove imperialist connotations, for example, ‘Officer of the Order of British Excellence’.208 The then Labour government rejected all of the recommendations.209 This could be in part, as the historian Tobias Harper suggests, because it encourages public loyalty.210 That is, recipients could ‘buy into … a formal social hierarchy’, consenting to monarchy because they felt included in an elite social system.211 Like the Royal Warrants, the honours system also seems to give the Firm a network of elite contacts. The Order of the Merit – described as ‘the story of our country over the last 100 years’ – has only twenty-four holders at once and the Queen hosts a gathering every five years.212 As of 2020, current recipients range from the inventor (and key Brexiteer) Sir James Dyson, the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web.213 Whilst the honours system is presented as ‘gift giving’, with the Firm bestowing status and privilege on those deemed ‘deserving’ (we may also question the logics of ‘deserving’), it also benefits the monarchy, both by (re)producing loyalty and by creating networks of contacts. It is another form of ‘keeping-while-giving’.214
Finally, royal visits and patronages provide value for particular places and organisations. Constituting the bulk of royal ‘duties’, in 2019 the fifteen ‘working’ royals undertook 3,567 official engagements.215 Visits are organised by a team of staff, and royal figures visit civic, commercial or charitable sites, open buildings, undertake themed activities (for example, cheese tasting at a cheese factory), chat with members of the public chosen to be presented to them and do a ‘walkabout’ on local streets to greet the general public.216 Protocol dictates that royals are met on arrival by local dignitaries, including the Mayor and the Chief Constable.217 This draws on ‘old’ forms of social hierarchy, where royals are greeted by those with ‘status’ according to traditional precedence. Although visits enact values of royal ‘access’ and intimacy, security is tightly managed: road traffic is rerouted, admission to buildings that the royal is visiting is prohibited, and crush barriers along the street regulate public viewing.218 Only those invited to meet the royals are given access and – like the honours system – this seems to be only those deemed ‘worthy’. Meeting royalty is the reward for an achievement. This imbues monarchy with a symbolic sense of value: it is so special it is accessible only to those important enough.
Royal patronages are when royals become associated with chosen charities, military associations, professional bodies or public service groups. The official royal website lists over three thousand patronages across the ‘working’ royals.219 Various foundations organise these patronages. In 2009, the Royal Foundation was launched to manage William's and Harry's charitable initiatives.220 Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle were later absorbed, before Harry and Meghan launched their own foundation, Sussex Royal (this has since been closed following their resignation). The Foundations typically theme their programmes: as of 2020, the Royal Foundation focuses on mental health, early years, wildlife conservation and emergency responders.221
These visits and patronages function as symbolic markers of value for the place or organisation, connoting worthiness and attracting public interest. They are also markers of value for the Firm. The monarchy appears to ‘donate’ time to a cause, and, as Andrew Sayer writes, philanthropy can legitimise elite wealth because it is ‘symbolic capital in the form of a legacy that evokes admiration’.222 In fact, the sociologists Jessica Sklair and Luna Glucksberg argue that philanthropy is particularly used by elite family firms as a way to associate themselves with discourses of social responsibility akin to their values of kinship.223 Many royal visits are commemorated with a plaque: a physical marker of legacy for the Firm. These visits and patronages could be considered as strategic forms of self-presentation.224 Locations and organisations are organised systematically for regularity and fairness, and are typically matched with individual royals’ represented ‘interests’ in order to maximise audiences (for example, Prince Harry has many military patronages, see Chapter 5).225 Key journalists are invited to cover the events (according to the Royal Rota, see Chapter 2), and their travel, accommodation and itinerary are organised by Buckingham Palace, with the aim of generating coverage from key media outlets.226 Royal events are quantified: all royal engagements are recorded in the Court Circular, and these are then calculated annually by the royal fan Tim O’Donovan and published in The Times.227 This suggests the reproduction of royal popularity around the globe through strategic and calculated activity.
In these events and patronages, who is ‘keeping’ and who is ‘giving’? The charity campaigner Giving Evidence found that royal patronages have little effect on the charity's work: 74 per cent of charities with royal patrons received no visits from their patron in 2019, and Giving Evidence found no evidence that a royal patron increased a charity's revenue, or increased the public's likelihood to donate.228 Although these initiatives arguably suggest the production and distribution of value which offsets the ‘cost’ of monarchy, this is not exchange among equals at all. Rather, as the anthropologist David Graeber argues of broader economic histories, while economic relations are embedded in ideologies of morality – for instance, debt repayment as a moral imperative – in fact moral relations of inequality are ordered hierarchically.229 Indeed, as this chapter argues, the legal bases for monarchical privileges are based on past actions informing present propriety, whilst emotional investments in the royal family – across public and media cultures – offset monarchy's cost. The monarchy undertakes ‘keeping-while-giving’.230 The sociologist Beverley Skeggs suggests that ‘ideas such as equivalence and propriety inform the mechanisms of valuation such as calculation and are performative; that is they enable particular processes of valuation, such as judgment, evaluation and expectations, to come into effect and occlude others’.231 Notions of value seem to allow the monarchy to perform and hence embody a sense of worth(iness). Skeggs also reminds us that ideas of value are difficult to evaluate because they are symbolic.232 Vague ideas of being ‘good value’ allows the monarchy to make claims about its contributions. The ongoing debate about royal tourism is one example. Republic has repeatedly rejected claims that the monarchy attracts millions of pounds in overseas visitors, arguing that the attractions that tourists enjoy (palaces, castles) will still exist even if monarchy is gone.233 Yet, the claim that ‘the monarchy is good for tourism’ continues in public and media discourse, becoming what Stuart Hall would call a form of ‘common sense’.234 I argue the intangibility of value works in the Firm's favour here as a form of producing consent.
The global Firm
Contemporary financial capitalism is transnational.235 Marxist work describes capitalism's (historical and present) dependency on exploitation, extraction, conquest, displacement and slavery.236 The Firm has always been global: corporations undertook colonisation projects across the British Empire, run on behalf of the British state and the monarch.237 The East India Company was granted a Royal Charter in 1600, and used its private army to rule and establish monopolies over global trade.238 The British Empire implemented violent regimes of genocide, famine, enslavement, indentured labour, imprisonment and torture.239 The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, of which the Duke of York was the governor, was given royal monopoly to trade in the mid-1600s.240 It transported over three thousand Africans to Barbados, many with the initials ‘DY’ burned into their chests to signify their belonging to the Duke of York.241 The Firm seems to continue to use, and extract value from, goods stolen during colonisation, such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India used in the Crown Jewels.242 Hence I argue it continues to benefit from ‘old’ forms of wealth vested in extraction and exploitation.
As the historian Nicholas B. Dirks contends, today Empire has transformed into global, corporate forms of power using international banking systems to achieve domination under so-called free trade.243 Post-Second World War decolonisation saw the formation of international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Money Fund and the World Economic Forum: global elites representing the interests of major international, cross-border corporations.244 These shifts map on to the Firm's development since the 1953 coronation. Analysing the Firm's global interests – the Commonwealth and British Empire, the Queen's sovereignty in other realms, and its role in international trade, commerce and sponsorship – reveals how the Firm reshapes itself in response to changes in capital and global governance, moving from the household to the globe.
The Commonwealth and the British Empire
The Commonwealth is a transnational organisation of fifty-two ‘independent and equal’ member states headed by the Queen, promoting principles of peace and security, human rights, tolerance and access to health, education, food and shelter through the Commonwealth Charter.245 These ‘shared values’ have been contentious. The historian Philip Murphy describes the Charter as ‘so poorly drafted that it leaves the nature of [the nations’] commitment [to particular values] completely unclear’.246 This is illustrated in some member states’ apparently poor human rights records, such as criminalising homosexuality despite the Charter's ‘discrimination clause’.247 The Commonwealth also has imperial origins. Many of the fifty-two member states are former colonies of the British Empire, and Murphy describes the ‘haphazard’ way ‘“Imperial” became “Commonwealth”’.248
David Cannadine notes that the British Empire was royal.249 It was unified by representations of the British sovereign – Queen Victoria as the Empress of India, for example – and numerous everyday references to royalty, such as coins, stamps, rituals and place names. In 1949, the Commonwealth was formally constituted for former colonies to give ‘constitutional and symbolic expression to their independence’.250 This remains invested in the British monarchy. The Australian Studies scholar Holly Randell-Moon argues that ‘the secular autonomy of settler states is buttressed by Crown sovereignty’ with regular royal visits to promote ties.251 At one occasion in 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth visited South Africa and declared she would devote her life to ‘the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’.252 Randell-Moon argues that, when royals are treated like celebrity visitors, histories of colonialism are transformed into ‘a shared endorsement of the divinity of Crown presence’.253 If, as I argued above, royal visits (re)inscribe royal popularity through strategic activity, this has particular importance in producing consent for the monarchy in Commonwealth countries.
As Head of the Commonwealth, the Queen is supported by intergovernmental agency the Commonwealth Secretariat, and biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings.254 There are hundreds of Commonwealth-wide non-governmental organisations, such as the Royal Commonwealth Society (a charity supporting Commonwealth citizens), CPU Media Trust (promoting ethical and free media) and the Commonwealth Forestry Association (encouraging sustainability).255 Perhaps most notable for this book is the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC), an organisation promoting intra-Commonwealth trade and investment between government and private sectors.256 Although its remit focuses on small businesses, the multinational corporations Tesco and Rolls Royce attended the 2017 CWEIC first trade ministers’ meeting.257 Although it is not a trading bloc, the Commonwealth Secretary-General said that trade ‘is the lifeblood of the Commonwealth’, and in 2013 intra-Commonwealth trade was calculated at $592 billion.258 Despite claims of equality, intra-Commonwealth trade arguably relies on an imperialist framework: 57 per cent of imports to developed countries were sourced from developing countries.259 This seems to further demonstrate systems of Commonwealth hierarchy.
The Firm's association with Commonwealth and Empire raises key issues of British citizenship, national identity and migration. During the British Empire, all newly acquired colonies assumed the status of ‘Subject of the British Crown’.260 Thus, in theory, UK citizen status belonged to anyone able to travel.261 Upon establishment of the Commonwealth, the Nationality Act 1948 distinguished between ‘Citizens of the UK and Colonies’, ‘British Subjects without Citizenship’ and ‘Citizens of Commonwealth Countries’.262 The Nationality Act 1981 has since replaced this, but these histories demonstrate how notions of national belonging and migration have emerged directly from racialised, gendered and classed histories of colonialism.263 The use of ‘Subject’ in these histories means they are inseparable from British monarchy. Not until 1983 did British passports alter from ‘British Subject: Citizen of UK and Colonies’ to ‘British Citizen’,264 and the category of ‘British Subject’ still refers to those who were considered ‘British Subjects without Citizenship’ before the Nationality Act 1981 and who are not considered citizens of any other country.265 This means that some individuals living in ex-colonies still have their official immigration status defined by a foreign monarch(y), which I argue continues histories of colonial oppression.
The Firm's power seems to be interwoven, then, with complex historical and legal formations of belonging, borders and dominion. Commonwealth symbolism, connected to histories of Empire, acts as a form of expansionism whereby the Firm's power is extended through imaginaries of global dominance. This is also articulated through notions of ‘the family’. As Princess Elizabeth gestured towards in 1947, collective belonging to an international family was key to British imperial ideology.266 The current Queen may not be ‘grandmother of Empire’ like Victoria, but elements of familalism remain: the Queen's Christmas speech is broadcast across the Commonwealth, for example. This hierarchical relationship to monarchy is even more complex in countries where the Queen remains sovereign.
Sovereignty in other realms
Whilst the London Declaration 1949 permitted Commonwealth countries – as ‘free and equal members’ – to adopt republicanism, sixteen remain constitutional monarchies with Elizabeth II as a legally distinct Head of State.267 These include Caribbean islands like Barbados, African states such as Ghana, and Canada and Australia.268 Canada was unified in 1867 and Australia in 1901, when each developed independent constitutions as self-governing dominions, while vesting ‘executive power’ in the British Crown.269 The Royal Style and Titles Act 1972 permitted the Queen's realms to erase UK references in her overseas titles to highlight their independence, thus making her, for example, ‘Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth’.270 Since 1842, each country has nominated a local governor-general as the Queen's representative, with the power to propose legislation, (dis)prove bills and dissolve parliament.271 Although the Queen has no ‘direct’ political control in these realms, governor-generals could be interpreted as ongoing monarchical administrative power. Likewise, as the sociologist Ty Salandy argues, the British Empire was partly established by ‘the violence of “knowledge” … spreading a narrow and ideological system of values, culture and information’ to form a ‘global model of civilization’.272 Adopting ‘God Save the Queen/King’ as the national or royal anthem, for example (still used in Australia, Jamaica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Tuvalu and Barbados, amongst others), could instil British values and subservience to colonial authority.
Discussions around dominion status are ongoing, seemingly with various degrees of public consent. Although 1999 saw enough popular disapproval of monarchy in Australia to trigger a referendum on republicanism, 54 per cent of citizens voted to keep monarchy.273 Since then, despite enduring republican sentiment, most famously from the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (2015–2018), republicanism has waned.274 Meanwhile, Canada has had no mainstream republican debates, and public understanding of the role of monarchy in Canada seems to remain minimal.275 The Firm has played these relations carefully. There have been attempts to use the term ‘Sovereign’ for the Queen as opposed to ‘Head of State’, and to depersonalise the role by emphasising the Crown as a symbol rather than individual monarchs, which as Philip Murphy argues allows the Realms to act as ‘Crowned Republics’.276
Shore and Williams suggest that the Crown's presence in global realms is built upon balancing visibility and invisibility, where despite intense prominence it usually goes unnoticed because people tend not to understand its role.277 If I argue throughout Running the Family Firm that media representations produce consent for the monarchy in Britain, this works on a global scale in the Commonwealth and other sovereign realms. And, as in Britain, this means that the Firm's functions and infrastructures are not addressed in global public and media cultures. One issue that media representations mask, for example, is the Firm's connections to global trade, commerce and sponsorship. I argue that these are built on imperial dominance and draw on neoliberal models of global enterprise.
International trade, commerce and sponsorship
Alongside Commonwealth trade, the Firm seems to have other interests in international trade and commerce. There have, for instance, arguably been multiple cases where royals use their connections for personal commercial gain. The Queen's grandson Peter Phillips founded the Patron's Fund charity to arrange her ninetieth birthday celebrations in 2016, but then apparently gave the contract for staging the event to his own for-profit company, SEL UK Limited.278 Companies House accounts revealed that SEL UK received a £750,000 fee.279 In 2020, a Chinese television advertisement featured Peter Phillips promoting Jersey Milk to audiences using royal iconography, such as a country estate and a state carriage.280 His sister, Zara Phillips, has multiple commercial promotional details for the luxury watch brand Rolex, horse auction house Magic Millions, outdoor clothing brand Musto, iCandy prams and a personalised jewellery collection for Calleija.281 Monarchy's symbol is used to sell commercial products and generate profit. I explore this further in the Postscript, with Harry and Meghan's resignation from royal duties and their attempts to trademark the brand ‘Sussex Royal’, which was allegedly prohibited by the Firm.282 As I argue, this is contradictory considering the other deals described above.
The Firm has multiple connections to multinational conglomerates through sponsorship for its charitable initiatives. Heads Together, the mental health charity headed by William and Kate, has four corporate partners: the retail bank Virgin Money, telecommunications company Dixons Carphone, consumer goods company Unilever, and investment management corporation BlackRock.283 As the sociologist Imogen Tyler writes, this means that Heads Together is sponsored by corporations who benefit from the neoliberal economics ‘that are eroding state welfare and social care, and in doing so are exacerbating mental distress’ among citizens.284 The Prince's Trust regional awards are sponsored by a range of corporate actors, including banks HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster and Natwest, technology company Dell, Delta Air Lines, supermarket Tesco, security service G4S and arms dealer BAE Systems.285 The Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme is supported by partners including the bank Lloyds Banking Group, travel company Stagecoach Group plc, legal firm Legal and General, car manufacturer Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd and energy provider British Gas.286 These connections could demonstrate that royal–corporate partnerships are not anomalies but rather strategically sought, providing philanthropic opportunities for both businesses and monarchy, offering the Firm a network of loyal corporate contacts, and demonstrating the blurring of ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of capital accumulation.
Business and trade values are emphasised in some royal charities, particularly those supporting young people. The Queen's Young Leader Award rewards ‘exceptional’ young people across the Commonwealth with a ‘mentoring and networking package’;287 the Prince's Trust ‘Youth Can Do It’ campaign helps young people gain employment skills;288 the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme encourages young people to undertake self-improvement exercises;289 and Prince Andrew's ‘Pitch@Palace’ initiative gives young technology entrepreneurs opportunities to pitch to investors.290 The sociologists Eva Bendix Petersen and Gabrielle O’Flynn argue that the Duke of Edinburgh Award promotes responsibilisation, encouraging young people to align with neoliberal ideology.291 In fact, all of these royal initiatives emphasise neoliberal enterprise and self-management for young people as vehicles for social mobility. As the media scholars Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn have argued, this obscures material experiences of inequality that limit the opportunities available to young people.292 The conflation of neoliberal entrepreneurial logic with royal initiatives again demonstrates the merging of ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth, and enterprise and heritage cultures, whereby monarchy gives the schemes and its participants a form of status.293
Royal symbolism as status also seems to have been wielded by the UK government. Prince Andrew ‘worked’ for ten years in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as the United Kingdom's Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, promoting the UK at international trade fairs and conferences. This ended in 2011, after reports surfaced about his connections with corrupt Middle Eastern regimes and his personal profiting from trade deals.294 For instance, he allegedly exploited his personal relationship with the Kazakh oligarch Kenges Rakishev to broker a £885 million deal between a Greek and Swiss consortium and the Kazakhstan government, for which he apparently received £4 million commission.295 In 2007, he purportedly sold his country estate Sunninghill Park in Berkshire to the Kazakh oligarch Timur Kulibayev for £3 million above the asking price, and in 2011 he allegedly tried to arrange for the British wealth manager Coutts to accept Kulibayev as a client.296 The former Foreign Office Minister Chris Bryant claimed that ‘it was very difficult to see in whose interests [Andrew] was acting’.297
The Firm also seems to have questionable connections with British arms trader BAE Systems. In 2016, Charles's tenth visit to Saudi Arabia at the Foreign Office's request, where he danced with members of the House of Saud regime, apparently coincided with the sale of 72 BAE Typhoon fighter jets to the dictatorship.298 The South African MP Andrew Feinstein has further claimed that the Firm was key to persuading South Africa to buy BAE Hawk jets.299 The spokesman for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Andrew Smith, said ‘it is clear that Prince Charles has been used by the UK government and BAE Systems as an arms dealer’.300 These examples seem to demonstrate how the government–monarchy relationship is used to further trade investments. I argue that the royal figures act as symbols of capital and status, wielded in the pursuit of profit. Due to the royals’ nationalist symbolism, and the classed respectability associated with them, they could be used as forms of morality to shield against accusations of crony capitalism or abuse of political privileges.
Conclusion
This chapter aimed to expose the infrastructures of the Firm – the version of monarchy not usually visible. I have attempted to unravel a complex and multi-layered tapestry, ranging from the daily operations and financing of royal households to the global connections that maintain economic and symbolic privilege. We have seen the exploitation of low-paid workers through ideologies of class subservience; the ‘revolving door’ between the Royal Household and corporations, the military, broadcasters and the civil service; the murky rules of royal financing; the secrecy of royal wealth; the networks of contacts; the relationships to post/colonialism; the exploitation of political relationships for profit; and the abuse of political privileges. This picture is complicated further because the legal bases for monarchical privileges seem to be based in historical precedence, many of which apparently have no discernible logics. These privileges then appear to be reworked in a corporate image. The example of the Paradise Papers in the Introduction precisely encapsulates this: I argued that the Firm's tax exemptions vested in historical privilege allow it to act similarly to contemporary corporations, evading accountability. This is not suggesting that connections between monarchy and capital are new. Rather, the Firm continually adapts to various periods of capitalism, and various ‘types’ of (‘old’ and ‘new’) wealth work together; stitched through the constitutional fabric of Britain. From capitalists, rentiers, aristocrats, the famous, the titled, the idle rich, these are all entangled together, shoring up a highly stratified classed infrastructure.
The Firm seems to evade accountability by preserving symbolic and moral codes. If corporations are organised around (im)moral logics of exchange, where they seem to be contributing to society,301 the Firm achieves this through (im/material) ideas of patronage, philanthropy, heritage, stability and nationalism. This chapter discussed this through the lens of the Family Firm: a particular ideology of ‘middle-class’ family values as performed by Queen Victoria. These representations obscure capitalist relations behind mediated royal spectacle, emotional investments in ‘the family’ and notions of social responsibility and value. In subsequent chapters, I outline what form these representations take, and what they might be obscuring. Before this, the next chapter outlines how these battles are waged in, and through, media culture.