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With the 'big day' nearly upon us, we look at the background of 'commoner' Kate Middleton, and how her family made the money to send her to Malborough College and on course for a Royal Wedding.
Although called a 'commoner', Kate Middleton's Royal Wedding is hardly a case of Prince and the Pauper. Michael and Carole Middleton, Kate's parents, could be worth in the region of £30m, according to City analysts.
That's based on the value of their online party gift business Party Pieces and the the new link to the Royal Family, especially given the lucrative new market it could now exploit: the US.
Without that connection, prior to the wedding announcement, the company would have been worth an estimated £8m.
The business began when Carole was heavily pregnant with Kate in 1981. Unable to continue working as a British Airways air hostess, she started making up children's party bags which she sold to friends and neighbours.
Carole, who spent the first years of her life in a council flat in Southall, North-West London, then formalised her hobby as a business in 1987 with husband Michael.
Party Pieces is a mail order business that aims to help parents create 'magical' parties for their children at home. It has been run from a call centre, with eight staff before the wedding announcement, out of a barn near Reading in Berkshire.
In total, the business now employs 30 people.
Before the wedding was announced, the website - partypieces.co.uk - attracted around 150,000 potential customers a month. That leapt to 300,000 at the end of last year but fell back to 180,000 in early 2011. The website appears to have done a brisk trade in corgi cake toppers, bunting, paper plates and plastic crockery for coronation-style celebrations and plastic hats emblazoned with Union Flags. But the mail-order firm attracted criticism for launching Britannia scratch cards on British trivia. The cards, with crowns which can be scratched off to reveal the right answers, were withdrawn.
Although profit and loss accounts are not published because it is a partnership rather than a limited company, the income has contributed to a lifestyle that includes a £1m house in leafy Berkshire and putting their three children, Kate, Pippa and James, through the most expensive private schools - Marlborough College in Wiltshire in Kate's case, which would have cost an estimated £250,000.
Kate's parents are also contributing toward the £10m cost of the Royal Wedding, reportedly paying out £97,000 for her dress, maid of honour's dress, hotel rooms and the royal couple's honeymoon.
It won't be the first major outlay for their elder daughter. They also bought her a flat in Chelsea for £795,000, which is now worth £1.2m. There is no mortgage on the property, according to Land Registry records.
Research by author Claudia Joseph for her biography Kate: Princess in Waiting, suggests that money has also trickled down from ancestors on at least one side of the family.
Former air stewardess Carole Middleton (nee Goldsmith), now 55, was a builder's daughter and descended from a family of penniless Durham coal miners. But Kate's father Michael, 61 and the Leeds-born son of an airline pilot, comes from a wealthier background that includes an 18th century wool manufacturer and merchant from Leeds who left the equivalent of £33m in his will.
Although depleted somewhat on its way down the generations it is thought that at least some was left to help the modern Middletons fund their well-to-do lifestyle. The will also specified some money should be used to pay for descendants' education. The trusts still operate and are run by a firm of solicitors in Leeds.
There is only a small mortgage on their house in the village of Bucklebury in Oxfordshire, worth around £1.5m. And when they bought several acres of land near their home in 2005, they paid the £295,000 in cash. They have reportedly been looking to upgrade and have looked over Bolehyde Manor near Chippenham in Wiltshire, the 14th-century home of Earl and Countess Cairns and on the market for almost £5m.
At the age of 29 the future Queen of England has rather a thin CV for a bright, A grade Marlborough educated pupil who earned a 2:1 in History of Art from St Andrew's University.
Until recently she was working for the family firm after a brief post-graduate foray into the outside world working for retailer Jigsaw.
Prince Wiliam's wealth
Money and career will no longer be a concern to Kate. As consort to Prince William she will surely be looked after in the manner she has been hoping to become accustomed to since she first met her Prince at St Andrew's. The new level of wealth is seen from the start with the ring she's wearing - Diana's engagement ring - worth a cool £85,700.
Since the age of 25, Prince William (now 29) has enjoyed a lavish income from the £6.5m capital left to him by his mother Princess Diana, plus money from the estate of his great-grandmother the Queen Mother who died in 2002.
He also earns a decent salary as an officer in the RAF - a flight lieutenant earns £37,170 a year - and is given an allowance from his father from his own income from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. And should his father pre-decease him, his income will go stratospheric when the whole of that income is transferred to him.
Currently, Prince Charles receives the annual net surplus of the Duchy of Cornwall (he has no access to the capital) and uses a large proportion of the income to meet the cost of his public and charitable work and a part of the income to pay for his private life and those of his wife, Camilla, and his sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
As a Crown body, the Duchy is tax exempt, but Prince Charles opts to pays income tax (currently at 40%) on his taxable income from it. The land that he earns an income from is worth an estimated £750m-£1.2bn.
If or when William becomes king, then his income will take on a new dimension. The Queen's own assets are estimated at £290m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. She is also paid £14m each year from the Civil List. This system is due to be overhauled, although some claim it will leave the head of state better off.
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