They strolled around Buckingham Palace like they owned the place.
Royal cooks prepared their meals. Psychologists treated them, biographers documented their lives. They slept in padded wicker baskets. At Christmas, everyone had their own stocking.
The many corgis owned by Queen Elizabeth II during her seven-decade reign were furry little monarchs in their own right, as iconic as their extravagant hats and wicked sense of humor. Throughout his life, he had more than 30 shepherd dogs, with names like Plover, Disco and Mint. A group of them trotted ahead of her wherever she went, in what Princess Diana once described, perhaps not so fondly, as “a moving carpet”.
Queen Elizabeth’s last remaining corgi, Willow, died on April 15. These are the puppies that British royalty have loved for over 150 years. (Video: The Royal Family/YouTube)
His love of puppies has long been celebrated, playing a central role in the apparent corgi social media renaissance he’s helped fuel over the past decade. Three of his corgis appeared in a James Bond skit with the Queen and Daniel Craig that aired at the 2012 Olympics. The dogs have also made frequent appearances in the Netflix series “The Crown,” which depicts the mandate of ‘Elizabeth as head of state.
When she died this week aged 96, Elizabeth reportedly left behind two Pembroke Welsh corgis, a corgi-dachshund mix known as a dorgi and a cocker spaniel.
It is unclear what will happen to the Queen’s beloved pets. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward said they could go to her children.
“I imagine the dogs would be looked after by family, probably Andrew [as] he’s the one who gave it to him,” Seward told Newsweek. “They’re pretty young, the corgi and the dorgi.”
As Elizabeth got older, she seemed worried about the prospect of her dogs living without her there to care for them.
At some point, he decided to end the decades-long corgi breeding program he oversaw at Windsor Castle, where 14 generations of dogs were bred and trained. According to the American Kennel Club, the show seemed to have gone quiet around 2002, after his mother’s death.
In 2012, Monty Roberts, the Queen’s equine adviser, told Vanity Fair that the death of one of his dogs, a corgi who starred in a James Bond skit, had affected him deeply.
“She didn’t want to have any more young dogs,” he said. “She didn’t want to leave any young dog behind.”
“I wanted to put an end to it,” Roberts said of the queen’s corgi breeding. “I understood we’d talk about it later. Well, we never talked about it later, and I have no right to try to force her to continue carrying small puppies if she doesn’t want to. That’s not my right.”
Queen Elizabeth II: A visual timeline of her 70 years on the throne
Still, it was hard to separate the monarch from her mutts.
Candy, a large corgi, was with her until the end. She also had two younger puppies, Muick and Sandy, given away by the family in recent years. Her cocker spaniel is called Lissy.
According to the BBC, the royal family had a term for the calming effect corgis had on the Queen over the years: “the dog mechanism.”
“If the going gets too tough, she will sometimes literally walk away and take the dogs out,” wrote Penny Junor, author of “All the Queen’s Corgis.” “Prince Andrew is said to have taken three weeks to beat the dogs to tell his mother his marriage to Sarah Ferguson was in trouble.”
“Dogs and horses are his passion,” Junor wrote, “and it is with them, and with people who share that passion, that he truly relaxes.”