When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle bought their $14.65 million estate in lush Montecito last month, it was a particularly lavish way of putting down roots—but they are, of course, far from the first of the royals to spend big.
Queen Anne, subject of The Favourite, is said to have spent the equivalent of 11,000 pounds on drinking chocolate alone. In more recent history, the beloved Queen Mother racked up 4 million pounds of debt. Sarah Ferguson has also found herself massively in debt, and her ex-husband Prince Andrew has spent so recklessly on private planes that he has been nicknamed “Air Miles Andy.”
It goes beyond the British royal family too. Queen Letizia of Spain’s 2004 wedding dress by designer Manuel Pertegaz is rumored to have cost around $8 million, while Queen Margrethe of Denmark has allegedly spent $5 million on her own modernist silver and glass coffin by famed sculptor Bjørn Nørgaard. And then there is Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, whose expenses were once said to add up to $50 million a month.
These modern royals may want to heed stories of past rulers, whose extravagant ways often led to derision, controversy, and the loss of their crowns.
Cleopatra
Of all the legends of Cleopatra’s extravagance and largesse, none is more evocative than a story told by the ancient Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder. According to Pliny, Cleopatra bet Mark Antony, her Roman lover and partner in world domination, that she could spend the equivalent of 60,000 pounds of gold on one luxurious dinner. He accepted the bet. The next night, Cleopatra threw a banquet much like her average fetes, seemingly not spending any more money than usual. This led Antony to believe that he had won another round of their endless game of one-upmanship-as-foreplay. But suddenly, Cleopatra, who was wearing the most valuable pearl earrings in the world, called for a cup of vinegar.
“She took one earring off, and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was wasted away, swallowed it,” Pliny writes. To Antony’s astonishment, Cleopatra had won the bet (and recent experiments have shown the story could have happened).
During her reign (c. 52–31 BCE), Cleopatra, whose family gold reserve was “the equivalent of all of the hedge fund managers of yesteryear rolled into one,” according to historian Roger Bagnall, would use her status as the wealthiest person in the Mediterranean as a form of statecraft to shock, awe, and buy off political allies.
In Cleopatra: A Life, historian Stacy Schiff documents the numerous parties, banquets, pageants, and parades Cleopatra threw, at enormous personal expense. Guests dined on gold plates, which she called her “ordinary ware,” and they would often leave laden with a “place setting of solid silver, a slave, a gazelle, a gold sofa, a horse in silver armor.” At one party, according to Schiff, the florist bill alone was said to have equaled the salary of six doctors for a year.
She and Antony formed a drinking society called the “Inimitable Livers.” “The members,” Plutarch explains, “entertained one another daily in turn, with an extravagance of expenditure beyond measure or belief.”
In 31 BCE, with the forces of the Roman emperor Augustus closing in, Cleopatra barricaded herself in Alexandria. “Into the mausoleum she heaped gems, jewelry, works of art, coffers of gold, royal robes, stores of cinnamon and frankincense, necessities to her, luxuries to the rest of the world,” Schiff writes. There, she died by suicide on a golden couch, surrounded by her priceless possessions.
Mansa Musa of Mali
It’s easy to be a big spender when you are thought to be the richest man who has ever lived. Mansa Musa (c. 1280–c. 1337) was the beloved ruler of the secluded West African empire of Mali; his fortune has been estimated at $400 billion in today’s dollars. According to Barron’s, so rich was Mali in gold and salt that bags of gold dust were used as currency, and buildings were made of slabs of salt.