The thought that someone’s been rifling through your private letters would be disagreeable enough.
But imagine learning that the same correspondence – all of it concerning your marital status – was being sold on eBay, priced ‘£65 or best offer’ per item.
Yet that’s the indignity, I can reveal, currently being suffered by Princess Michael of Kent, who, until I alerted her, was blissfully oblivious of what was going on.
‘Princess Michael didn’t know about the sale of letters,’ her spokesman assures me.
‘And, at this moment, there will be no further comment.’
The person hawking the letters – ten in all, 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 unidentified seller intensifies the intrigue.
‘They are original and has been pushed in auction house,’ is the first emailed response to my inquiry about how they came to be in the public domain.
‘Princess Michael didn’t know about the sale of letters,’ her spokesman said. Pictured: rincess Michael of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent arrive 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, 30th June 1978
Subsequent answers are more defensive. The letters, says the vendor, have ‘not recently’ been in an auction.
When asked if it’s known when they were first put up for sale, he (or she) replies: ‘I am sorry. I do not need to share my sources.’
The writer of each and every letter – all of them addressed to Princess Michael alone – was an eminent priest, Monsignor Ralph Brown.
He died in 2014. But it can fairly be assumed that he’d have been mortified by their sale – not, of course, because there was anything indelicate in any of them but because he was doing his utmost, in a very discreet manner, to help Princess Michael secure a Roman Catholic blessing for her marriage to Prince Michael.
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The fact that ‘Princess Pushy’ – born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz – was a Catholic, whereas Prince Michael was an Anglican, was the least of her problems.
In 1971, she’d married Old Etonian banker Tom Troubridge at Chelsea Old Church, but only after they’d had ‘a blazing row’ in the vestry.
The ill-starred union unravelled within two years when Troubridge was posted to Bahrain.
His wife remained at home. She was by then a friend of Prince Michael.
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 permit her to marry Prince Michael in a Roman Catholic ceremony.
But he did not, so they married in a civil ceremony in Vienna’s City Hall in 1978, celebrating afterwards with a ball at the Schwarzenberg Palace.
Others might have left matters there. Not Princess Michael.
Intent on having her new union blessed by the Roman Catholic Church, and aided by an Italian friend, Prince Galeazzo Ruspoli, she obtained an audience with a cardinal.
Her campaign paid off – eventually. In 1983, her marriage to Prince Michael was finally blessed in a Roman Catholic ceremony.