It’s just an average day in Buckingham Palace.
Queen Elizabeth II is sitting down at the breakfast table with a plate of buttered crumpets
and a cup of Yorkshire tea.
Her beloved husband Prince Philip enters the room and asks Jeeves the butler for his breakfast.
“I’ll have a Full English,” he says, “Easy on the black pudding and no beans…and
brown sauce.
Jeeves old sport, none of that damned ketchup.”
The Queen suddenly starts shaking her head while reading the Daily Mail newspaper.
Philip asks her what’s wrong, to which she replies, “The hordes of the city of Bradford
are rioting again…over the price of extra-strength cider this time.”
Philip looks equally annoyed, and says, “We gave them three Aldi discount supermarkets…THREE!…what
more could one ask for!”
“So frightfully depressing,” says the queen, and then sinks her teeth into one of
those crumpets, the butter dribbling down her chin.
“What do I always tell you,” says Philip, “The hordes will be hordes, Lizzie.”
“Yes…quite,” says the queen, just as a servant wipes the butter from her chin with
a lace handkerchief.
“What have you got planned for today,” the queen asks.
“Oh, I thought I’d just take the Land Rover out for a spin,” replies the 98-year
old prince.
“Do try your hardest, dearest, not to crash into one’s subjects again.”
“Righteo,” says the prince, while stuffing a specially-made Buckingham “banger” into
his ancient mouth.
Ok, so we admit we made that up.
The Infographics Show hasn’t yet bugged Buckingham Palace and we are still waiting
for our invitation to visit the queen.
Maybe that’s not quite how things go down during breakfast time, but who would know?
Sure, we’ve all watched some of “The Crown” on Netflix, but just how realistic is that
series?
The British Royal Family is steeped in mysteries and intrigue and the occasional scandal, but
as you’ll see today, there are a lot of fascinating secrets the royal household would
rather you didn’t know.
One thing is just how much cash those royals have?
If you check out the Forbes rich list you’ll find that Queen Liz aint that rich at all.
She’s only supposed to have just over $500 million in the bank.
That’s not even enough to get on Jeff Bezos's birthday party guest list.
When the multi-billionaire King of Thailand was told by someone about the queen’s fabulous
wealth, his response was simply, “Hold my beer.”
What you might not know is that the British Royals make most insanely wealthy people look
like paupers begging at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
No one knows just how much they have, but if you count royal household-owned properties
we are talking billions.
Add to that the Crown Jewels, said to be worth over four billion.
That would be less if India gets that massive Kohinoor diamond it says the British stole
from the country.
But that’s still nothing compared to what something called “The Crown Estate” is
worth.
What’s that, you might wonder, and so we’ll tell you that it’s hundreds of thousands
of acres of land, many mineral sites that can be legally excavated, an entire street
in one of the richest parts of London, racecourses, parkland, forests, farms, and a massive chunk
of the British shoreline.
We haven’t even started and we won’t go into everything that belongs to the British
Crown, but we’ll tell you that the British Royals also have land and holdings in other
countries belonging to the British Commonwealth.
In fact, about 89 percent of Canada is actually Crown Land.
28 percent of Australia is Crown Land.
Ok, so the queen can’t just put an ad on Craigslist saying, “For Sale.
Canada.
Nice place, if not a bit cold in some parts in the winter.
Reason for quick sale: Never liked maple syrup and poutine.”
She cannot do that, but technically the Crown owns a lot of parts of many countries.
Then you’ve got entities such as the Duchy of Lancaster, and that is a private estate
with its fingers in a lot of money pies.
It even appeared in those “Paradise papers” that revealed all those off-shore accounts
that rich people like to have.
Ok, so the entire royal estate isn’t worth the 17 trillion dollars that some folks say
it is, but the British Royal estate in its entirety is a lot more than you might think
it is.
Like we said, the Queen just can’t sell off Crown Land, but her name is on the lease.
She technically owns it.
But even if you forget about selling the land, the Crown is worth a lot more than the queen’s
paltry 500 million.
A conservative estimate is the royals are worth 88 billion dollars, but we bet if they
decided to cash out they'd have a bit more than that.
Besides being filthy rich, the royal family has been involved in its fair share of scandals
over the years.
One of the biggest scandals of late involved the woman that was sometimes called “The
People’s Princess.”
She was of course Princess Diana and before her life ended abruptly in a tunnel in Paris,
she had made the major mistake of marrying Prince Charles.
That’s the queen’s son and the heir to the throne if you know nothing about the royals.
We imagine that most of our beloved viewers are too young to have heard of “Squidgygate.”
That was a spied on conversation that Dianna had on the telephone with a lover who affectionately
called Dianna, “Squidgy”.
In that conversation Dianna said her life was like a British soap opera, and if you’ve
ever seen one of those you’ll know they are often depressing.
Dianna used an expletive beginning with “F” when she talked about the family she had married
into, and she told her lover that her life was utter torture.
That wasn’t a good look for the Royal Family at all.
Dianna described her life like she was a lamb living with a bunch of wolves.
But then things got worse because the rapacious and not always ethical British tabloid media
found out about Prince Charles’ affair with a woman named Camilla Parker Bowles.
There was also a phone conversation that was spied on and that scandal became known as
“Camillagate.”
The life of the British Royal family was indeed really starting to sound like a soap opera.
The King to be was dating someone else while married and Dianna had told the world how
wicked the royals were.
Dianna once famously talked about her relationship with her cheating husband, saying, “There
were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Meanwhile Charles’ brother Prince Andrew was in a doomed relationship with a woman
most Brits called a “money-grubber.”
Her name was Sarah Ferguson and she was also likely a cheat.
When on holiday with an American financial advisor the British tabloid media as usual
weren’t far behind.
One afternoon those paparazzi got the shot they were looking for.
It was that American holding onto Ferguson’s leg and sucking one of her toes.
The incident became known as the “Toe-Job.” Ferguson and Philip later got divorced and
while Philip used his power to go into some shady business deals and party some more,
Ferguson made quite a bit of cash by throwing her husband to the wolves.
She was given $633,000 by perhaps Britain’s most miscreant tabloid, The News of the World.
The deal was that she gave the newspaper full access to her former husband.
She was found out and later said she had made a “serious lapse in judgment.”
So, Andrew, like Charles, would get divorced.
He didn’t seem all that concerned about fulfilling his royal duties and preferred
to party and allegedly eat pizza in quaint London suburbs.
Andrew was often criticized for this lifestyle, but he didn’t seem to sweat it.
As for Prince Andrew’s daughter, Princess Beatrice, she once had a relationship with
a guy named Paolo Liuzzo.
This ex-boyfriend has quite the rap sheet, with crimes including cocaine possession and
also a manslaughter conviction for beating a man to death in a fight in the USA.
Can you imagine the first time Beatrice took her lover to meet her father, Prince Andrew.
The conversation might have gone like this: “Ok, Paolo, you do realize you are dating
the granddaughter of the Queen.
So just be honest and tell us if there is anything we should know about your life.”
The reply: “Hmm, well, I once did beat a man to death with by bare hands…Look, I
know I’m no angel, but aren’t you good friends with a gift-giving Libyan gun-smuggler
and a tyrannical dictator who the media have called “hugely corrupt” and “has one
of the world’s worst records on human rights.”
“Fair point,” Andrew replies.
“Just make sure she’s home by midnight.
There are a lot of dangerous men out there.”
The two guys later skied together in Switzerland, so it seems they got on OK.
Then you have the queen’s only daughter, Princess Anna.
She also married and got divorced and then ended up in a relationship with a member of
her royal staff.
The Queen seemed to be holding things together, but her sister Margaret was let’s say, partial
to the odd Gin and Tonic and had a string of extra-marital affairs.
Margaret partied the nights away and dated celebrities, and there was a rumor that she
even had an affair with the actor Warren Beatty.
You might say she was a busy princess because she spent most of her life picking up cigarettes
and glasses of strong alcohol.
Her Dionysian, decadent lifestyle would ultimately be her downfall, since in later life she became
very ill.
So far you might call these scandals mere melodrama, but the royal family has been involved
in matters of a much more serious nature.
We might look to the queen's uncle, King Edward VIII, to expose some of the bigger secrets.
What’s well-known about this man is he abdicated the throne after just one year because he
wanted to marry an American woman named Wallis Simpson.
This lady had been divorced twice and because the British government and the Church of England
took a dim view of the king marrying a divorcee, Edward had to step down as King if he wanted
to get married.
That’s one scandal, but it’s nothing compared to what happened next.
Edward and his wife became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and these two it would later be
discovered were Nazi sympathizers.
Edward even visited Adolf Hitler and gave him the full Nazi salute.
After that, the British royal family wanted him as far away as possible so they sent him
to the Bahamas to be governor.
What’s worse was what happened when the war was finally over.
Just after it ended American troops were in Germany and some of them discovered around
400 tons of Nazi documents.
Not a bad haul, but what was shocking is 60 pages of those papers were correspondence
between Edward and the Nazis.
They weren’t just writing to say hello, either.
It was discovered in those papers that the Nazis had written to Edward informing him
of their plan to take over England and put Edward back on the throne.
What’s really shocking was that this Nazi-collaborating Duke wrote to the Germans and told them they
should relentlessly bomb Britain.
That way they’d take control faster because the Brits would lose their resolve, said Edward.
Can you imagine a country’s former King and then a Duke asking a military to basically
kill a great number of people...his own subjects.
Now that’s shameful.
When the Americans sent the British the files both the new king and Prime Minister Winston
Churchill said they should never be seen by the British public and it actually took some
years before all those files were released.
In the TV show The Crown the story goes that Edward was banished from the royal family,
but that’s not true at all.
As for Prince Philip, the bad driver we mentioned at the beginning, two of his sisters married
two high ranking Nazis, so when the people of Britain were being bombed during the war,
Philip was well aware that his family were on the enemy’s side.
When Philip married the queen in 1947, his sisters didn’t get an invite to the wedding.
With that Nazi connection you would think that no one in that family would go anywhere
near a Nazi again, but pot-smoking Prince Harry was not one to shy away from a swastika.
In 2005, he was photographed wearing a Nazi costume at a party, which didn’t go down
too well with his grandmother.
Harry wasn’t much of a royal’s royal and preferred to hang out at parties with the
likes of Kanye West and P. Diddy, but his fondness of cannabis once led to a stint in
rehab.
The royal family were further annoyed when pictures emerged of Harry at a party in Las
Vegas.
The prince was photographed naked after playing a game of strip billiards, and some players
of the opposite sex had also lost their clothes.
So, there you go, these are just some of the things the Royal Family really wish wouldn’t
have happened and no one knew about.
What happens in the family stays in the family, but secrets have a way of finding their way
out of the royal circle.
We’re pretty sure that when new members come into the family the queen has a sit-down
with them.
During afternoon tea and scones she tells the newbie, “The first rule about this family
is.
You don’t talk about this family.”
You’re probably now in the mood to hear more secrets, so we think you should watch
this astonishing story about another family that likes to keep a lid on things, “CIA
Project Stargate & Other Declassified Secrets - How Successful Were They?”.
Or perhaps you’d prefer this other video instead?
Either way, click now, because no matter which video you watch we promise to keep it a secret!