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!
