The Financial Times has repeated its claim that the Crown Estate belongs to queen Liz Windsor, the hereditary head of state. In a report on a deal with a Canadian pension fund property correspondent Ed Hammond referred to the Estate as “the queen’s property company.”
In fact the Crown Estate is effectively a government department and belongs to the people. But the extraordinary willingness of a normally rigorous newspaper to cede the the people’s wealth to the Windsor family is another example of a British willingness to allow democratic principles to be ignored when they challenge the feudal institution.
Mr. Hammond’s report acknowledges that Windsor cannot liquidate Estate assets and that her family is now given just a share of Estate revenue. But the report did not recognise how these facts undermine the claim that the Estate belongs to Windsor.
In The Century of Revolution Christopher Hill wrote that in the seventeenth century the monarch “was still expected to ‘live of his own’, to finance government from crown lands . . . . . no distinction was drawn between the public and private capacity of the King”. But the belief that “crown lands” still belong to the the monarch is what writer Phillip Hall called an “historical fiction”. As long ago as 1952 senior civil servant Burke Trend, wrote that ” … the hereditary revenues which it is now customary for the Crown to surrender at the outset of each reign are simply a historical relic from much earlier days.”