Rent the Queen can’t spend

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 11

Rent the Queen can’t spend

(By PAUL WALLACE)

Every autumn a small package arrives at Buckingham Palace postmarked New Castle, Pennsylvania. It always contains the same thing: a single peppercorn.

Not a lot for the year’s rent of a thriving steel town of 60,000 people, but that’s what King William 111 decreed in 1693, and that’s what Queen Elizabeth II gets in 1975. As Britain’s monarchy sinks back into the red many experts feel that the owner of some of the world’s most valuable real estate should get less rent

in the form of peppercorns, flags, nails, twigs, gloves and bowls of hot water ... and more in hard cash!

Typical of the present royal rent collections is a scene which takes place in London just before Christmas when the Queen’s Remembrancer, dressed in black gown and lace cravat, collects 61 nails and six horsehoes as rent for a blacksmith’s forge. At the same time he will also accept two faggots, a chopper and billhook as rent for a piece of land referred to as “The Moors” and believed to be somewhere in Wales.

Equally strange is the fact that having been given these rents, the Queen’s Remembrancer returns them — to be kept in safe custody until the following year’s rent day. Some of these virtually rent-free properties are

highly impressive: when the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the nation gave him the estate of Strathfieldsaye, in Berkshire, on condition that the Duke delivered, in person, a small Union Jack to the Sovereign on the anniversary of the battle. The present Duke arrives at Windsor with his rent every June. James V, of Scotland attacked by a band of gipsies, was saved from injury by a local farmer, Jack Howieson. As a reward, Howieson and his family were given the perpetual tenancy of lands at Braehead, near Edinburgh. In return, whenever the monarch passes through the area, a member of the family must, theoretically at least, provide a basin of hot water and a towel for use if required.