How much does a free portrait of the king cost?

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Britain’s government, in its wisdom, has set aside £8 million so that schools, police stations, courts, and any organization run by the state can request a portrait of King Charles. In full regalia, as a government website reminds us, making him sound like an action figure–the kind you’ll find on the shelves of your local toy store–and I won’t post the link for that because this is the first paragraph and posting links in the first paragraph is against my religion.

But this is not only a portrait of the king in full regalia that’s on offer, it’s a free portrait of et cetera. True, you don’t get any extras with it–no surprise gift, no fries, no pickle–but still, free is free. Especially if we don’t count that £8 the government will fork out for however many it sends or the £86.3 million the country pays to support the monarchy itself. 

Irrelevant photo: I think this is a kind of thistle. Anyway a wildflower. Definitely not a king.

The portraits will be particularly welcome in police stations and courts. There’s nothing like getting arrested to make a person grateful for a glimpse of the overdressed face of authority.

 

Hang on. How much does the monarchy really cost?

That £86 point whatever million is only the Sovereign Grant, formerly known as the Civil List–money that funds the monarch’s official duties, which include cutting ribbons, pulling cords that dramatically sweep back itty-bitty miniature curtains to unveil plaques. (Cue applause from thrilled spectators.) Ah, but that’s not all. The royal family’s duties also include dressing in improbable clothing for ceremonies, waving, smiling (not as easy as you think), and entertaining a carefully selected group of interlopers on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. 

The Sovereign Grant also has to cover property maintenance, travel, payroll, and whatever I’ve forgotten.

But that’s not the royal family’s only income. We haven’t counted the money it gets from Cornwall and Lancaster, which are duchies held personally by the prince of Wales (Cornwall; £21 million a year) and the king (Lancaster; £24 million). We also haven’t counted whatever else is included because that info’s private.  

Even without that, I may still be underestimating their cost to the country, because we should add security–possibly only security for special events like the queen’s funeral, but hey, this all gets murky pretty quickly–and I have no idea what else. Republic, an organization trying to establish (you saw this coming, right?) a republic, estimates the total annual spend at £ 345 million.  

So £8 million for a free portrait? Don’t be stingy. It’s a bargain.

 

By way of comparison

In 2012, the Department for Education was prepared to spend £370,000 to send a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country. The government was supposed to cough up the money, but all hell broke loose and the program ended up being funded by–well, the list I glanced through featured a lot of hedge-fund gazillionaires and donors to the parties that were then in power, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

That didn’t shut up anyone who thought the thing was a waste of money (most schools already had a bible, they said, so what was the point?), but it did let me compare the number of pages in the King James Bible (many) with the number of pages in the king’s portrait (one) and wonder what they’re printing these portraits on. I mean, yes, photographic paper’s expensive, and yes, the King James Bible Project only sent out 24,000 Bibles compared to no-one’s-saying-how-many portraits, but still, on a page-to-page and order-to-order comparison, it does sound pricey.

 

And since we’re talking about that Bible project

The then-education secretary, Michael Gove, was asked if he’d back a similar plan to send around copies of the Quran. 

Um, yeah, sure, he mumbled. The Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud. What the hell. Name a holy book and he was all for it–and all the more so because you can’t say Quran in a positive context unless you buffer if with several other holy books

Oddly enough, that was the last we heard of those follow-up projects.

*

Discussing the bible project with Lord Google raised some interesting issues. People, he reminded me, often ask whether the British crown owns rights to the bible.

Sure, I thought. And it’s got a monopoly on god. 

It turns out the question isn’t as silly as I thought. The King James version is covered by crown copyright, which applies to work made by civil servants, government ministers, and other people you can stuff into related categories. To quote WikiWhatsit, “There is . . . a small class of materials where the Crown claims the right to control reproduction outside normal copyright law due to letters patent issued under the royal prerogative. This material includes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.”

I don’t usually quote Wikipedia. On an average, it’s as accurate as standard encyclopedias (or was when I was working for a standard encyclopedia and looked it up), but it’s also subject to brief fits of madness, and it changes, making it an awkward beast to cite. But it’s late in the week, I post on Fridays, and I’m short of time. It’ll do.

According to a copyright advice website, “To split hairs a bit, the King James Bible is not subject to copyright in the UK, however because of Letters Patent issued by the Crown, only the Queen’s Printer may print, publish and distribute the KJV Bible within the UK and its Overseas Territories.” 

A grammar advice website (mine will do in a pinch) would tell you to replace the comma before “however” with either a semicolon or a period. You’re welcome. 

But to return to the copyright issue, if you planned to print the King James Bible in the back bedroom and you live in the UK, you’re advised to find a new hobby. If you have other plans for the weekend, this won’t affect you.

29 thoughts on “How much does a free portrait of the king cost?”

    • I’m not the one to do the math on that, but I’m skeptical. Granted, a president can do a lot more damage, but that’s only because a king can’t do much anymore–at which point you have to ask, Why are we doing this?

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  3. About 1955, when I was in the fifth grade, it was a yearly practice for every public school fifth-grader to receive a copy of The New Testament (KJV) from The Gideons. I don’t know when this practice stopped (do they even place Bibles in hotel rooms anymore ?) but I can’t imagine the uproar that such a thing would cause now – though Christian Nationality may come to that.

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  4. Times became damn liberal, now they are allowed to “request” a portrait of the monarch. It should be nailed at the wall of any police station, school, court house, and barracks, where something happens in his name – the king’s name, not GOd’s. Thinking of it – nail a cross under his portrait : After all he’s the head of the church, too. It’s just the CofE heathen church, but Christian at least.
    Can’t see nothing wrong with this. Much too much effort to redesignate that lousy eight millions. I only hope the portrait was master crafted & printed in the UK, and not sloppily thrown together by Bung Ling’s copy shop, tah.

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  5. I’m sure it’s a very nice portrait. Although the one I saw has Charles looking rather uncomfortable. I had rather imagined that those were sent to the police and courts as a matter of course, and they were required to hang them.

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  6. This is all so depressing I have to say. And slightly funny, if it wasn’t so depressing. As it happens, the streets of Manchester are littered with homeless, and yet all this tax money is going towards dressing the royal family so they can wave at us from their chariots. I guess they do ‘bring in’ tourist money, but they seems to be guzzling a lot of it for themselves too.

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    • And if that isn’t enough to make your hair spontaneously combust, I just read that the monarch gets the money from anyone in Lancashire and I think somewhere else who dies without a will or immediate family.

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  10. Say, doesn’t that King James tome say a few words about not coveting thou neighbor’s trinkets and Bathshebas? Also, I believe it contains some advice on rendering unto Caesar et Al? How about practicing what the Royals once preached in that oft cited volume and returning all the stolen marble artwork back to the Acropolis where it belongs? The British Museum could replace all those precious stolen marbles with a diorama of natural monarch habitat along with some of those King Chuck portraits that are all the clamor, while returning the artwork the British Museum never should have accepted to begin with.

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    • Hmmm. You think they’d go for that? I can’t help thinking they’d tell the Greeks not to covet etc., and then find a way to avoid saying that the portraits just aren’t as arty an artwork as those marbles.

      Besides, they’ve gotten used to them by now.

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