Fall of the Royal Fortune.

"Kings, Queens and Despots," a short list of the world's most wealthy rulers published by Forbes magazine, comes with a number of caveats. Valuing these multibillion-dollar private fortunes is a "tricky business," says Forbes. Most royal families decline to comment on their wealth. But last December, as the 2003 list was being compiled, a prominent member of the Netherland's illustrious House of Orange broke the family's long silence on the issue. Prince Bernhard, feisty 92- year-old father of Queen Beatrix, phoned Christopher Forbes, who is married to his German niece, and demanded that he stop printing "bulls- -t" exaggerations of his family fortune. Forbes told him to call editor Luisa Kroll, who wanted evidence. Bernhard faxed a handwritten letter with enough detail about holdings in companies like Royal Dutch Shell and ABN AMRO to persuade her to slash the estimate from $2.5 billion in 2002 to $250 million. The Oranges would have been in the billionaire class occupied by the House of Saud and Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein. But when the list was published earlier this year, they were wedged in among the lowly multimillionaires, like Yasir Arafat and Fidel Castro.

It was the first time Kroll had ever gotten a call from a complaining prince, but the plainspoken Bernhard is not your typical royal. In an increasingly transparent financial world, the massive restatement is a reminder of how difficult it remains to penetrate the regal sphere. Dutch stipends are a matter of public record--Queen Beatrix takes home 3.8 euros million per year in "salary" and other expenses. But support for the family is spread across so many departments and "hidden posts" that "nobody, no member of Parliament," knows the real total, according to the Republican Association, a Dutch group of royal reformers. As for the Orange family fortune, which goes back to the early-19th-century spice-, rubber-, tea- and coffee-trading exploits of King Willem I in the East Indies, the discreet Dutch generally consider the subject off- limits. "We are not so rich," Bernhard said in a brief phone interview. "People think we are stingy with money and the truth is that we have to be careful with money."

So why would a prince bother downplaying his fortune for the commoners? According to people who have spoken to Bernhard recently, he worries that exaggerated estimates could inspire personal attacks--either from criminals like those who tried to kidnap his wife, ...