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.
