For decades, Queen Elizabeth's beloved corgis were a constant and delightful presence by her side, becoming an iconic symbol of the British monarch. With their adorable faces and wagging tails, the queens' loyal companions offered her comfort, companionship, and no small amount of mischief over the years (with an emphasis on the mischief). There have been many tales of staff members and visitors encountering a misbehaving corgi, and in Craig Brown's book Q: A Voyage Around The Queen, he shares a particularly handy trick Her Majesty used to get her dogs to calm down.
In a chapter detailing the late queen's relationship with her four-legged friends, Brown recalls a number of wild stories about her pack of corgis and other family dogs, including the legendary tale of Princess Anne's dog leaving her with a criminal record after biting two children in Windsor.
But when it came to her own corgis and dorgis (a dachshund/corgi mix), it turns out Queen Elizabeth used a trick that was very royal indeed. "Coincidentally, the way to scare off a belligerent corgi is the same as for a belligerent human being: a blast from the bagpipes," Brown wrote in Q, adding, "Happily, the queen always kept a set of bagpipes to hand."
How one always keeps bagpipes "to hand" is a question I'd love to go back in time and ask, but the royal biographer continued on to quote Jim Motherwell, who served as Queen Elizabeth's official piper in the late 1990s. "The pitch of the pipes seems to hurt most dogs' ears," Motherwell told author Penny Junor, per Brown.
As soon as they hear the very Scottish sound, "most corgis stop whatever they are doing and slink away, as though in pain," the author noted. Misbehaving dog owners, take note.
Brown also shared a story of how former British prime minister Gordon Brown once visited Balmoral with his family and what his kids thought of the famous dogs. The Queen "was surrounded by her corgis and the boys were delighted and shocked in equal measure when she told one of her dogs to 'shut up,'" the author wrote.
Q: A Voyage Around The Queen shares that multiple people had been bitten by The Queen's corgis over the years, describing the dogs as "an unpredictable, temperamental bunch, one minute cuddly, the next psycho, the Corleones of the dog world."
While their antics might have been legendary, Brown dove into why the corgis were so important to The Queen in his book, pointing out that her dogs were "rebellious in a way that Queen Elizabeth II could never be. Their clamour was her refuge, their indifference her comfort."
It turns out that in a strictly regimented world, Elizabeth loved a bit of chaos—and her last two beloved corgis, Sandy and Muick, stayed with her until the very end.
