Kerching Charles: JONATHAN MARGOLIS reveals how the royals are cashing in with ‘tasteful tat’ together with a £395 corgi brooch and £2,000 Burberry coats – and the place the cash goes

I am sitting down to enjoy a cappuccino in what may be the world’s oldest coffee shop. With its magnificent, vaulted ceiling, The Undercroft Café inside the grounds of Windsor Castle is in a cellar built by Edward III around 1350, just as the Black Death, which had killed half the population, was abating. It’s a beautiful building, and the chocolate powder on top of the coffee is in the form of a royal crown.

As I sip away, being careful not to disturb the perfection of the royal motif, I realise something rather remarkable: His Majesty has just flogged me a cup of coffee. For £4.40. On top of the £32 he earlier pocketed for letting me into his home.

There’s more royal cashing in as I leave The Undercroft. Conveniently, just on the way out, His Majesty has sited a royal gift shop, where visitors can take their pick of hundreds of licensed royal souvenirs, many sternly labelled ‘Copyright His Majesty King Charles III 2025’.

Here, the royals are now in the business of flogging designer clothes, too, having collaborated on a luxury four-piece capsule collection with the British heritage brand Burberry. Launched last month, it marks Queen Elizabeth’s II’s centenary, and is already almost all sold out. Among the limited-edition designs is a £2,190 gabardine belted car coat with holly-green silk lining and a £435 checked cashmere scarf (both pictured, opposite), as well as a Balmoral Silk iteration, which comes in a little cheaper at £375. The standout? A natty gold-plated £395 corgi brooch.

However, official royal merch shops, of which there are three more in Windsor Castle, four at Buckingham Palace, one at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh plus – naturally – online, with worldwide shipping for all website orders, offer a wonderland of mostly what my parents would have called ‘tasteful tat’.

Whatever a royalist could imagine or covet is found in these emporia, from a royal-branded Mappin & Webb carriage clock for £6,000 to a Buckingham Palace ‘luxury shower cap’ (£8.95), fridge magnet (£6), God Save The King cooking apron (£19.96), Buckingham Palace guardsman stuffed bear (£20), Balmoral honey (£10) and a crown-stamped wooden egg cup (£4.96).

At the biggest Buckingham Palace shop, which I marvel at next, there’s a swish jewellery counter overlooked by giant photos of the King and Queen in matching crowns, and Catherine, Princess of Wales modelling an extravagant diamond necklace. There’s almost-affordable tat here, too, from a Gold Hematite and White Pearl Collar for £220, down to £30 hair clips.

In another Buck House shop, there’s Balmoral brand 1978 single malt (‘tasted by The King’ before being bottled) at £3,200 a bottle, a £2,200 royal-blue handbag by Launer, the brand favoured by the late Queen, and a Queen Elizabeth II Centenary Teacup & Saucer (£80).

This commercialisation of the monarchy is little known to British people, since we tend not to be tourists in our own country. But when Harry and Meghan are sneered at for selling their ‘product’ – ie, themselves – I do wonder if their critics are aware of the large-scale commercial enterprise, courtesy of The Firm, that’s right under our noses, not in California.

In fact, our royal family’s ventures are vastly more energetic than those of any other ruling entity. The Swedish, Danish, Dutch and Spanish monarchies do have official gift shops, but on a tiny scale. The Vatican has low key, tasteful gift shops.

The White House Historical Association shop, founded in 1961 by Jacqueline Kennedy, is a non-profit and sells mainly US-made goods. The Kremlin Museums gift shop has no Lenin, no Stalin, no Putin goods, but Peter the Great brooches for £3.31. The Élysée Palace shop sells only French-made goods and was opened, controversially at that, by President Macron as late as 2018.

But here’s the funniest thing about the licensed royal mementos business. It isn’t a platform for the best of British craftsmanship. Much of the merch, especially the cheaper stuff, is made in China. No surprise there, perhaps. But who are the most enthusiastic buyers, outnumbering even the Americans? Yup, Chinese tourists. At one of the Chinese restaurants just yards from Windsor Castle’s walls, 50 or more Chinese tourists were almost all carrying bags of souvenirs to take back to where they were made.

Some might be asking at this point: isn’t it all just a little, well, undignified? Is it, indeed, disturbing evidence that our royal family, now that the dear late Queen, with her thrifty rugs and electric-bar heaters, is no longer with us, is becoming too commercial?

Royal money-making extends beyond the gift shops. When he was still Prince Charles, in 1990 the King started Duchy Originals, now Waitrose Duchy Organic, which reported a profit of £3.6 million in 2021. And, at his country place, Highgrove, there’s yet another royal enterprise, called simply Highgrove, selling a range of Charles products, from signed lithographs of His Majesty’s paintings (£3,500) to jars of organic mustard (£5.95).

Of course, the royal family’s commercial revenue, it’s only fair to say, is not used to keep the family in treats. Well, not exactly. The Royal Collection Trust shops’ profit (or surplus as it’s called, being a charity), totalling £14 million in 2025, maintain the Royal Collection – all those Holbeins and Canalettos don’t conserve themselves. The 2025 review of the Royal Collection Trust charity itself says more than half of its total £90 million income from 2024-25 went on access and conservation costs.

But even if the King doesn’t profit personally from retailing expensive cups of coffee, it does save the royals from having to fund conservation themselves, or going to the government holding out a begging bowl.

Nevertheless, the full-on commercialism of Charles III’s royal house brings to mind an awkward truth: that before their little earners are taken into consideration, the British royals are already extremely rich, because of an accident of birth.

How rich? Well, they’re pretty secretive and the royals’ finances are notoriously immensely complicated, but the best estimates extracted by experts combing through the reports put King Charles’s personal wealth at £1.8 billion and Prince William’s at £1 billion. Some estimate Charles’s pile to be smaller and William’s larger.

The Crown Estate, the palaces, estates, duchies, collections, livestock, whole villages, coastline, seabed, even the petrol stations (yes, the Barthomley Service Station on the M6), along with the private and Crown Jewels, which can’t technically be sold off, but it’s fun to work out their value anyway, total around £160 billion.

It’s fair to say the late Queen and her father would have been embarrassed by it all.

But on a wet Thursday in Windsor, as you see a troop of 90 Chinese schoolchildren in orange rain capes march up to the visitor gates from their lunch at the Yangtze restaurant, all bursting to spend their school-trip pocket money on knick-knacks, the business acumen of Kerching Charles III is there for all to see.