DDW magazine | don’t die wondering ®

The Princess Royal ran Harewood House for thirty-five years and never owned it. Mary was born on 25 April 1897, the only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. She became both Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood, and held both titles for the rest of her life. At Christmas 1914, aged seventeen, she lent her name to a gift fund that provided Christmas boxes for all British troops. In 1918 she took a nursing course and went on to work at Great Ormond Street Hospital. After her marriage in 1922, the Royal College of Surgeons of England elected her an Honorary Fellow, the first woman to receive the honour. Her husband Henry, then Viscount Lascelles, met the 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde at his London club in 1916. The marquess died some months later and left him a huge fortune, Old Master paintings included. Henry went on to add Italian pictures by Bellini, Titian, Veronese, Pollaiuolo and Tintoretto. Harewood itself was begun in 1759 by Edwin Lascelles, with John Carr as architect, Robert Adam on the interiors and Thomas Chippendale making the furniture. Mary and Henry moved in during 1930, after the 5th Earl died and Henry succeeded him. Henry died there in May 1947. The earldom passed to their elder son George, the 7th Earl, and Mary stayed on as dowager. She died at Harewood on 28 March 1965, out on a Sunday walk with her family in the park. The older Lascelles money came from plantations, enslaved people, ships and warehouses. Harewood says so on its own history page. The family's last West Indian plantation was sold in 1975. The Clanricarde money was a separate inheritance altogether. Harewood House Trust was incorporated on 25 March 1986. The Charity Commission register shows income of £6,020,464 for the year to 31 December 2025, with slightly less spent. Income has risen every year since 2021. Those accounts belong to the charity, not the family, and they put no value on the house or the pictures. No reliable net worth for Mary has ever been published. What Harewood does publish shows a house that pays for itself.

Louis Mountbatten had his earldom drafted so that it could pass to his daughters. Created Earl Mountbatten of Burma on 28 October 1947, he had no sons, and the usual drafting would have ended his titles with his death. Instead the letters patent let them descend to his daughters in order of birth, and then to their heirs male. Patricia, the elder, succeeded in 1979 and held the earldom until 2017, when it passed to her son Norton. Many fathers leave their daughters the silver; Mountbatten left his an earldom.

Oxford discussed a humanities building for more than a decade, and it took a New York financier with no notable Oxford connection to get it built. Stephen Schwarzman gave £150m through his foundation in June 2019. Schwarzman Philanthropies called it the largest single donation to Oxford since the Renaissance, and the University used the same phrase. Further gifts followed, and the University now puts the total at £185m. The University told Cherwell it had not had the funding until that gift. Louise Richardson, then Vice-Chancellor, called it "an investment in excellence". Oxford never claimed the money could not have come from elsewhere. It said only that, until 2019, it hadn't. What it bought: seven humanities faculties and research institutes under one roof, with libraries, collections, cinema, music and theatre. The Oxford Internet Institute and the Institute for Ethics in AI moved in alongside them. Academics arrived in October 2025. It is Europe's largest Passivhaus university building. The objections were real. Oxford Against Schwarzman began with 42 signatories in September 2019 and passed 100 by mid-November. By the royal opening, Cherwell counted 27 Oxford academics on the letter. It pointed to Schwarzman's support for Donald Trump's campaigns, and to a UN report singling out Blackstone, which called the claims false and wholly without merit. The University says donors have no influence on academic content, and the gift passed its Committee to Review Donations. Its one unforced error came in February 2020, when it declined to release the vetting documents to the Oxford Students' Union. A university confident in its homework should hand it in. Cambridge has since announced £190m from Chris Rokos, believed to be the biggest individual donation to a British university in modern times. The BBC noted that the previous record holder was Schwarzman's gift. If a name over the door costs a university its soul, both of England's oldest have now paid, and both are still taking applications. The objection worth keeping is upkeep. A Cherwell opinion piece in March 2026 argued that a one-off gift could put up the building but not keep it running. A gift builds once. Somebody still has to heat it every winter. The King opened the Centre on 10 July 2026. According to The Boar, the concert hall seats 500. Every name on the letter would fit, with room to spare.

George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, heir to the 12th Duke of Marlborough, has no published net worth, and the biggest figure near him belongs to a charity: £30,955,000 in income at Blenheim in the year to March 2025. The Blenheim Palace Heritage Foundation owns the company that runs the ticket desk, shop and café, with trustees meeting quarterly above it. Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg has put a number on the heir. The palace drew 980,678 visits in 2025, and the charity spent less than it took in for six of the last seven years. Nobody inherits a charity, which is rather the point of having one. 📸 Allan warren / Wikimedia Commons

Cnut, the Danish king of England from 1016 to 1035, is the reason Britain has earls. The word earl, from the Norse jarl, came in with him, and under his rule it came to mean the man who governed a region for the king. When the Normans arrived in 1066 with their comte, the English already had a title for the job and kept it. The result is a peerage with nearly 200 countesses, according to the Christian Science Monitor, and not a single count. A count is the same rank as an earl, simply in another language, which puts both in the exact middle of the five ranks of the peerage.

JUST IN: Oxford's biggest gift since the Renaissance, £185m, came from a man who never studied there. Stephen Schwarzman's name is now on the building where seven humanities faculties live together for the first time. The King opened it in July. More than 100 people signed a letter against it.

Central banks are not bringing their gold home. The best-documented move of 2026 ended mostly in London, and a good share of it never crossed the Atlantic. On 2 September, De Nederlandsche Bank announced that between March and August it had moved about 86 tonnes' worth of gold out of New York and Ottawa to London, citing "increasing geopolitical unrest". More than 27 tonnes were physically shipped to its vault at Zeist. The rest was done by selling around 59 tonnes in New York and buying gold in London with the proceeds. France went further. The Banque de France sold 129 tonnes held at the New York Fed, about 5% of its reserves, and replaced the older, non-standard bars with London Good Delivery bars stored in Paris. Its total holding stayed the same. RFI reported a profit of €12.8bn. Goldman Sachs says central-bank holdings at the New York Fed fell about 40 tonnes in August while those at the Bank of England rose about 46. It links the shift to "broader concerns around reserve security and cross-country trust". London's appeal is liquidity: when a central bank needs to sell, the buyers are there. In the World Gold Council's survey, 57% of respondents named the Bank of England as a place where they vault gold. Not everyone is moving. Germany still keeps 36.6% of its gold at the New York Fed. Italy holds about 1,100 tonnes at home and 1,061 tonnes at the Fed. Russia keeps all its physical gold domestically. The loudest figure is a silence. In that same survey, 20% of respondents would "prefer not to respond" when asked where they vault their gold, up from 8% a year earlier. The survey is anonymous, so these are reserve managers who kept the address private even with their names withheld. Central banks publish what they own far more readily than where it sits. Ownership is a matter of public record, and location is closer to a courtesy. The US Treasury's answer for its own gold has stayed the same all year: deep storage, at Denver, Fort Knox and West Point.

'I would pay them,' says Scott Kirby, United's chief executive on $32m a year, of inheritance taxes 'close to 100%'. The twist: a salary can't be inherited, so the bill would land on the heirs, not him. Should the people who'd pay it get a say?