On Wednesday, the biggest royal story in the world was William and Kate, the duo then known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, taking their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis to their new school, Lambrook in Berkshire, for the very first time.
It was a big day! There were big smiles! Neatly pressed uniforms! As le père Cambridge told their new headmaster, “The gang’s all here!”
What a difference 72 hours can make. Today, of course, the couple have new titles, with his father King Charles III having unexpectedly elevated them to Prince and Princess of Wales on his first day on the regal job.
That’s not the only momentous change. This weekend, William and Kate are now billionaires too.
While their promotion to the Wales title came as something of a surprise, with many expecting that the new king would bestow them with the honour in only the coming weeks or months, they automatically also became the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall when the Queen passed away and Charles acceded.
And getting to call themselves Cornwall? Well, that comes with the eye-wateringly valuable Duchy of Cornwall estate, worth just over the $2 billion mark, per this year’s accounts.
At the beginning of the week, the couple was hardly on Struggle Street, surviving on the $3.8 million they received annually from Charles, and which came from his Duchy income.
The couple also had his inheritance from his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales, which with careful investment, is reported to be worth about $16 million today – and added to which, Kate is a scion of the Middleton Party Pieces empire, with her mother Carol having built up the estimated $50 million business.
So sure, they were hardly having to buy no-name tea bags and send George to school with tinned ham sandwiches, but still, all those millions now pale in comparison to the billions of dollars of assets that the prince now controls. In the past year alone, the Duchy’s valuation jumped by a staggering $157 million.