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Present Keeper of the Privy Purse is George V's old friend and private secretary, Lord Wigram, who will presently be replaced by one of the new King's men, probably Admiral Sir Lionel Halsey.
The Keeper of the Privy Purse will have the job of investing the unborn Prince of Wales's $125,000 a year, banking the unwed Queen's $200,000, paying off to the King's 150 needy kin their minimum allowances of some $125 a week, meeting household salaries, expenses, repairs.
Kings' fortunes vanish into the realm of the mysterious because what a King saves up and bequeaths to his heirs is subject to no probate, no inheritance tax. Queen Victoria, having ascended the throne practically penniless, saved at least $9,000,000. Edward VII was a spendthrift. George V was as thrifty as his grandmother. How big a fortune he passed on to King Edward VIII nobody except the Royal family now knows.
King Edward moreover has two aces in the hole. One is the King's regular Duchy of Lancaster with an income of $425,000 a year. The other is the Prince of Wales's Duchy of Cornwall, which nets some $330,000 a year. Both are exempt from the Civil List contract with the Government, pay their money directly to His Majesty's Keeper of the Privy Purse. It is from these, rather than from the Civil List, that His Majesty will draw his spending money.
The royal Duchy of Cornwall, Britain's southwesternmost point of land, was given in 1337 by Edward III to his beloved warrior son, the Black Prince Edward, and to the Black Prince's "heirs, the first-begotten sons of the kings of England." Having no first-begotten son, Edward VIII will administer the Duchy as heretofore. Furthermore, as King, he no longer pays the income tax of $215,000 a year on this property, since his late father contracted with the Government to pay for the visits of foreign royalties in return for tax exemption.
It was Victoria's Prince Consort Albert who put the Duchy of Cornwall into profitable shape at a time when its copper mines, with those of Devonshire, produced one-third of Europe's supply. Now the profitable veins have largely run out. There remain a fine fish and oyster business, some mines and quarries, farmlands and a huge piece of South London. These monies go directly to the office of the Duchy of Cornwall in London's Buckingham Gate, only 200 yards from the back door of the Palace. The new King and Admiral Halsey may sometimes be seen scuttling down the narrow street to look over the accounts of the profitable Duchy of Cornwall.
*Hearstpapers last week engaged Edward to his second cousin, thin-lipped Princess Alexandrine-Louise, 21, niece of Denmark's King Christian X. Said Alexandrine's father: "Pure nonsense!"