RICHARD EDEN: Mystery as Princess Michael of Kent’s intimate private letters to eminent priest are flogged on eBay for £65 each
The thought that someone has searched through your private letters would be unpleasant enough.
But imagine hearing that the same correspondence – all about your marital status – is being sold on eBay for a price of ‘£65 or best offer’ per item.
Yet I can say that that is the outrage currently being suffered by Princess Michael of Kent, who, until I warned her, was completely unaware of what was going on.
“Princess Michael knew nothing about the sale of letters,” her spokesperson assures me.
“And there will be no further comment at this time.”
The person selling the letters – ten in total and all dating from 1979 or 1980 – on the online auction site is in no mood to dispel the mystery of how they came into his (or her) possession.
On the contrary, the unknown seller intensifies the intrigue.
“They are original and were pushed into an auction house,” is the first email response to my question about how they ended up in the public domain.
“Princess Michael knew nothing about the sale of letters,” her spokesperson said. Pictured: Princess Michael of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent arriving at Westminster Abbey in central London on May 6, 2023
British Royal Prince Michael of Kent and his bride, German nobility, Princess Michael of Kent, pose outside the British Embassy in Vienna, Austria, June 30, 1978
Subsequent answers are more defensive. The letters, the seller says, have been at auction “not recently.”
When asked whether it is known when they were first offered for sale, he (or she) answers: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have to share my sources.’
The writer of each letter – all addressed to Princess Michael alone – was an eminent priest, Monsignor Ralph Brown.
He died in 2014. But we can reasonably assume that he would have been aggrieved by its sale – not because there was anything indecent in it, of course, but because he did the best he could, in a very discreet way. to help Princess Michael obtain a Roman Catholic blessing for her marriage to Prince Michael.
The fact that ‘Princess Pushy’ – born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz – was Catholic, while Prince Michael was Anglican, was the least of her problems.
In 1971 she had married the old Etonian banker Tom Troubridge at Chelsea Old Church, but only after they had had ‘a blazing row’ in the vestry.
The poorly performing union collapsed within two years when Troubridge was transferred to Bahrain.
His wife stayed at home. She was a friend of Prince Michael at the time.
The Troubridges divorced in 1977. Marie-Christine, whose friendship with Prince Michael now became much more intense, obtained a papal annulment of her marriage and hoped that Pope Paul VI would allow her to marry Prince Michael in a Roman Catholic ceremony .
But he didn’t, so they married in 1978 in a civil ceremony at Vienna’s City Hall, then celebrated with a ball at Schwarzenberg Palace.
Others may have left things there. Not Princess Michael.
Intent on having her new union blessed by the Roman Catholic Church, and assisted by an Italian friend, Prince Galeazzo Ruspoli, she was granted an audience with a cardinal.
Her campaign ultimately paid off. In 1983, her marriage to Prince Michael was finally consecrated in a Roman Catholic ceremony.
