The royal chefs prepared their meals. Psychologists treated them, biographers documented their lives. They slept in straw baskets with pillows. 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 her ostentatious hats and wicked sense of humor. In her lifetime, she had more than 30 of the herding dogs, with names like Plover, Disco and Mint. A bunch of them raced ahead of her wherever she went, in what Princess Diana once described, perhaps not so affectionately, as “a moving carpet”. Queen Elizabeth’s last remaining corgi, Willow, died on April 15. Here are the puppies loved by British royalty for over 150 years. (Video: The Royal Family/YouTube) Her love of pups has long been celebrated, having played a central role in the seeming corgi social media renaissance the past decade has helped fuel. Three of her corgis were featured 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 Elizabeth’s tenure 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 not clear what will happen to the Queen’s beloved pets. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward said they might go to her children. “I imagine the dogs would be looked after by the family, probably Andrew [as] he is the one who gave them to her. they’re quite young, corgis and dorgis,” Seward told Newsweek. As she approached her 90s, Elizabeth decided to end the decades-long Corgi breeding program she oversaw at Windsor Castle, where 14 generations of dogs had been raised and trained. The program seemed to slow down around 2002, after her mother’s death, according to the American Kennel Club. In 2012, Monty Roberts, the Queen’s equine adviser, told Vanity Fair that the death of one of her dogs – a corgi who co-starred in a James Bond skit – had affected her deeply. “He didn’t want to have any more young dogs,” she said. “He didn’t want to leave any young dog behind. He wanted to put an end to it. I understood that we would discuss this further at a later date.” Queen Elizabeth II: A visual timeline of her 70 years on the throne However, it was difficult to separate the monarch from her face. Candy, an elderly corgi, was with her until the end. She also had two smaller puppies, Muick and Sandy. Her cocker spaniel is named Lissy. According to the BBC, the royal family had a term for the calming effect corgis have had on the Queen over the years: “the dog mechanism.” “If the going gets really tough, she’ll sometimes literally walk away from it and take the dogs outside,” wrote Penny Junior, author of All the Queen’s Corgis. “Prince Andrew is said to have taken three weeks to walk the dogs to tell his mother his marriage to Sarah Ferguson was in trouble.” “Dogs and horses are her passion,” Junor wrote, “and it is with them, and with the people who share that passion, that she truly relaxes.”
