Parliament, the British crown, and the tug-of-war over money

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It wouldn’t be irrational to track English, and then British, history by following the financial wrestling match between the monarch of the moment and the parliament of the moment. 

We won’t do that any kind of justice here, we’ll just ice skate over the top, mostly following the mechanism through which the monarchy’s funded. 

 

The Sovereign Grant

As of 2012, Britain’s ruling king, queen, or what have you–along with what are called the minor royals and what Winnie the Pooh would call all Rabbit’s friends and relations–are funded by the Sovereign Grant. This rolls together three earlier grants and presumably makes everything simpler. For all I know, it may actually do that, although I can’t help remembering that every time the US made income taxes simpler, the forms got harder to fill out. 

Never mind. Different country, so let’s go backward, to the Civil List.

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

The Civil List

The Civil List dates back to 1689 (or 1698, but let’s not quibble; if one of those is a typo, it’s not mine) and to the joint monarchy of William and Mary. Parliament voted them £600,000 to cover civil and royal expenses. 

What’s the difference civil expenses and royal ones? No idea. I’m just parroting what the Britannica says but it covers all those minor royals, staff, palace upkeep, and–I don’t know, maybe polishing the jewelry and the sivlerare.

Before the Civil List, the monarchy relied on its own income (it owned stuff–lots of income-generating stuff and still does) and whatever taxes Parliament approved for its use. When that wasn’t enough (it never was for long, especially when a special occasion came up and someone wanted to throw a war), the monarch had to go back to Parliament and say, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Parliament could, and sometimes did, keep a monarch underfunded so–

Well, for this to make sense you have to understand that the king or queen could send Parliament to bed without supper, or more to the point, send them home, where they had no power to recall themselves; they had to wait for the monarch to call them back into session. And since Parliament could be a pain in the royal backside, a king or queen might not call them back for a long stretch of time.

Unless they needed money, so we’ve come full circle: it suited Parliament to keep the crown underfunded.

After William and Mary took their her-and-his thrones, power shifted decisively to Parliament. The monarch was now bound to summon Parliament regularly. That was the cost they paid for becoming the kingsy and the queensy, but even so, as one MP said, “when princes have not needed money, they have not needed us.”

So, yeah, keep that monarch short of money and Parliament had a job for life.  

In 1690, Parliament set up the Commission of Public Accounts, which tracked the crown’s spending. It could then earmark money for certain expenses but not for others. So we’re watching Parliament’s control increase.

That says the Civil List didn’t exactly give the crown the keys to the candy store, but it did give them a lot of candy. What did they do with it? The Georges (I, II, and III) were known for using it to buy friends. Here was a sum of money the crown had under its control. 

George III gets a particular mention here for handing some money to supporters in Parliament in the form of secret pensions and assorted other bribes. Parliament struck back in 1762 by supervising the account and in 1780 by banning secret pensions. 

The fun was over. Victoria was allowed to grant pensions to people in the arts and sciences, or who’d served the crown one way or another but only on the advice of her ministers.

30 thoughts on “Parliament, the British crown, and the tug-of-war over money”

  2. Living in Ireland (Northern and Republic depending on the time of the year) the I can see appeal of being in a republic, as the president (currently, Micheal D Higgins – a poet and academic) is only a president for a number of years.

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    • A lot of people I talk to on this side of the Atlantic seem to see a president and a monarch as being alternatives, but when the monarch’s a figurehead they really aren’t. I’d have thought a prime minister is the parallel position to a president.

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      • In the UK yes, but Ireland have a PM AND a president. France do too but I think the president has a lot of power there. In Ireland it’s a figurehead (meet and greet important visitors etc). In the US it’s all rolled up in the one very powerful person.

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        • I’ve never understood the dividing line in the French system–who has what power and how they manage not to trip over each other. But that’s, I’m sure, because I’m used to a system with one exec. Whichever system we look at, though, when we come back to Britain’s monarchy, it could be snipped out of the photograph without anything else–at least anything politically substantial–having to change.

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  4. If we did away with the monarchy, and didn’t have to pay the Sovereign Grant, we could improve the lives of poor people, give it to the NHS, fund better mental health and all those good things. Or better still line the pockets of Tory politicians and fat cat donators. Not that I’m cynical of course. On the whole I think leave it with the Royals, by all accounts they’re miserable as %$&£ so at least they’re not enjoying it!

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  5. After the ongoing kerfluffle in our House of Reprehensibles to keep the gummint funded, I thought the British system seemed simpler – but I guess not. “If everybody hung their troubles on a line, you’d still pick out your own.”

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  7. Money itself is an illusion, the only thing real is what money does. When I look at all the crap that happens all over the world for money, because of money – in the end : an illusion ! – I think that giving a nice heap of that silly stuff out of the public and common cassa to finance a King is not the worst idea.

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