It was an image that spoke to a nation in mourning, and even those not deep in mourning felt the natural empathy of the dog-lover: Muick and Sandy, the Queen’s corgis, attended by footmen as they watched her funeral procession. What would be the dogs’ fate? Did they even understand that their destiny had changed for ever?
Queen Elizabeth II was in fact survived by four dogs: two corgis, a dorgi and a cocker spaniel. The last, Lissy, is a baffler, since she wasn’t of either breed for which the Queen had such pronounced preference, and Elizabeth named her after herself. The need for disambiguation must have been constant, although Lissy’s registered pedigree name is Wolferton Drama. Anyway, she is living with her trainer, Ian Openshaw, for the time being.
The remaining three dogs have been rehomed together. Candy, the dorgi – a portmanteau of dachshund and corgi, the result of a 1971 fling between Tiny, the Queen’s corgi, and Pipkin, Princess Margaret’s sausage dog – is the oldest, but cannot be retired or made redundant, since the dogs were on different employment terms from the rest of the royal household. Muick (pronounced Mick) was originally given to the Queen as part of a pair by Prince Andrew in spring 2021, weeks before Prince Philip died. The other one, Fergus, sadly went to the great kennel in the sky at five months, and then Sandy came along. Prince Andrew has therefore taken them back to live with him in the Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park. He already has five norfolk terriers (plus his ex-wife) living with him.
The royal household will neither confirm nor deny any of these arrangements, but luckily, someone in the family has a book to sell and will tell anybody anything. All these dogs “balance out”, said Sarah Ferguson at the Henley literary festival in October. “The carpet moves as I move, but I’ve got used to it now.”
You’re wondering, of course, why there were only two corgis, since throughout her reign, if you ever saw a picture of the Queen, the shot was teeming with them. As far back as 2003, dear old Liz stopped breeding from her corgi bloodline – which started in 1944 with Susan, an 18th birthday gift – specifically because she didn’t want her dogs to outlive her. The last of that extended litter was Willow, who died in 2018.
Plainly, she did not want to leave any corgis mourning her loss, so what Andrew was thinking is anyone’s guess, but for an insight into Muick and Sandy’s emotional lives, we hand over to Jamie Hodder-Williams, publisher of the book Where’s Ma’am, a portrait of loss and healing, seen through the eyes of Muick, who was named after the loch in Balmoral. In the book, Muick and Sandy watch the funeral procession on the way to the chapel, then later meet a horse who, “as you would expect”, Hodder-Williams tells me, “is a strong guiding influence, and it ends with an uplifting and hopeful message about the future, as Muick comes to terms with the change in circumstance”. This story is fashioned after Where’s Master, the 1910 work written by Hodder-Williams’s great-great uncle, in which a wire-haired fox terrier, Caesar, mourns the death of Edward VII. I’m not kidding.
The corgis’ accessories – chief among them raised wicker baskets with sheets that were changed daily – have travelled with them to the Royal Lodge, though again, history doesn’t relate how this is playing with the norfolk terriers.
