For all the pageantry that surrounded Elizabeth II, little spoke
more plainly of her private affections than the low-slung
procession of corgis that padded faithfully after her. From Susan –
presented to the then-Princess Elizabeth on her 18th birthday in
1944 – sprang a canine dynasty more enduring than many a court
appointment; the Queen ultimately kept more than 30 of Susan’s
descendants.
Yet not everyone within the royal orbit shared the monarch’s
enthusiasm for her famously yappy companions. Princess Michael of
Kent, long dogged by a reputation for saying what she ought not, is
said to have delivered one of the most ill-judged remarks ever
uttered about the Queen’s beloved pets.
The episode, retold in Karen Dolby’s The Wicked Wit of Queen
Elizabeth II, began innocently enough. Asked for her opinion
of the corgis, the princess reportedly declared that the dogs
“should be shot” – a line so blunt it would have floored most
listeners.
The late Queen however, was not easily rattled.
Her Majesty is said to have paused only long enough to deliver a
drier-than-dry riposte: “They’re better behaved than she is.”
The Princess, now 80, has accumulated a back catalogue of barbed
asides over the years, a habit that once led to reports she had
been discouraged from giving interviews. Her promotional tour in
2014, which included an appearance with Conrad Black on Canadian
television, brought fresh controversy after she dismissed older
royals as “boring” and suggested Princess Diana lacked
education.
Born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz into Silesian nobility, she
arrived in Britain with impeccable lineage and considerable
self-assurance — once claiming, according to royal observers, that
she possessed “more royal blood” than any spouse admitted to the
family since the Duke of Edinburgh. Courtiers often recall the late
Queen’s humorous rejoinder: that the princess might be “a bit too
grand for us”.
Princess Michael’s private life, like her public one, has never
been short on drama. Her first marriage, to the banker Thomas
Troubridge, ended in the early 1970s and was annulled shortly
before she wed Prince Michael in Vienna in 1978. A subsequent Papal
annulment allowed the couple to marry again in a Roman Catholic
ceremony five years later.
Reflecting on meeting her future husband, she once told a
newspaper interviewer that she thought Prince Michael “the funniest
man” she had ever encountered – a line delivered with evident
warmth. But it is another of her remarks, the one aimed at the
Queen’s dogs, that appears destined to linger longest. In the royal
family’s long history, few people have managed to insult a corgi
and earn a royal zinger in return.