The Balcony and the Books
On Saturday the thirteenth of June the Grenadier Guards will troop their colour down a closed Mall, fourteen hundred soldiers and two hundred horses arranged in the geometry of an institution that wants you to look at the order and not the ledger. King Charles will take the salute. The balcony will fill, the flypast will come at one o’clock, and the cameras will linger on the choreography because the choreography is the point. Trooping the Colour is a sovereign’s annual reminder that the Crown is a going concern, solvent in the only currency that has ever sustained it, which is consent.
This year the parade arrives eight days after the National Audit Office reminded everyone what the consent is paying for. The watchdog’s first review of royal residences in twenty years found that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who held a seventy five year lease on Royal Lodge for a one million pound premium and a peppercorn rent, was permitted to sublet three cottages on the estate and pocket the income himself. The sum is undisclosed. The principle is not. Whatever he took went to him rather than to the Crown Estate, which returns its profits to the Treasury, which is to say to the rest of us.
Set that beside the comparison the same report makes unavoidable. William and Catherine, the future king and queen, pay roughly three hundred and seven thousand pounds a year to rent Forest Lodge on a commercial lease. The brother stripped of his titles over the Epstein emails paid a pound a year and ran a small letting business off the side of the arrangement. Eugenie and Beatrice, neither of them working royals, live in royal palaces at rents settled by the King’s private income, and even then the discount was not always applied as policy required. This is not corruption. It is something more corrosive: a class of beneficiaries who draw on the institution’s dignity while contributing nothing to its work.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The Crown’s one asset is legitimacy, and every member of the family either replenishes it or consumes it. A working royal who stands for a regiment or visits a hospice converts deference into something the public can see a use for. A non working royal in a grace and favour cottage simply draws down the balance, and each peppercorn lease that reaches the front pages marks the whole estate down a little further. Revaluations of that kind do not reverse on their own.
The monarchy has survived for a thousand years by being ruthlessly good at one thing, which is shedding what it cannot defend. It abandoned absolute power, then most power, then the pretence of political opinion, and each surrender bought another century. The hangers on are the next thing it cannot defend. The danger is not Andrew himself, stripped of his titles, moved out to Sandringham, his East Lodge lease surrendered and his Royal Lodge cottages emptied. The danger is the architecture that produced him: a sprawling household of cousins and children and former spouses, each with a key to a building they did not earn, each insulated by the assumption that proximity to the throne is itself a form of service.
Charles appears to understand this better than his mother’s court ever did. The titles were withdrawn. The leases are being clawed back. The audit was published, the Palace called it transparency, and for once the word was not entirely hollow. But the slimmed down monarchy he spoke of on accession remains more aspiration than fact, and an institution cannot slim by communiqué. It slims by deciding, case by uncomfortable case, that the emptied room is better than the occupied embarrassment. The principle is not peculiar to monarchy. Every institution that rests on consent, the alliance, the parliament, the state itself, carries the same temptation to protect the embarrassing insider out of loyalty or habit, and pays for it in the only currency that matters, which is the belief of the people it asks to keep faith.
Israel knows this better than most, because it has spent its short life being audited in public, its legitimacy contested daily by those who would prefer it spend the capital and never replenish it. The lesson runs in one direction. Institutions endure not by hiding what cannot be defended but by giving it up before it is taken. So watch the parade on the thirteenth, and watch it properly. The pageantry is genuine, the soldiering is real, and the affection of the crowd along the Mall is not manufactured. But the parade is also a claim, renewed each June, that the Crown is worth its keep. That claim is now audited. The colour will be trooped in front of a King who knows, better than most of his line, that the threat to the balcony was never the republican in the street. It was always the relative in the cottage, drawing the rent.