The idea that someone has been looking through your private letters would be unpleasant enough.
But imagine finding out that the same correspondence (all relating to your marital status) was being sold on eBay for a price of “£65 or best offer” per item.
However, I can reveal that this is the indignity currently being suffered by Princess Michael of Kent, who, until I alerted her, was blissfully unaware of what was happening.
“Princess Michael knew nothing about the sale of letters,” her spokesperson assures me.
“And, at this time, there will be no further comment.”
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 possession.
On the contrary, the unidentified seller intensifies the intrigue.
“They are original and have been auctioned,” is the first emailed response to my question about how they came to be 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 arrive at Westminster Abbey in central London on May 6, 2023.
British Royal Prince Michael of Kent and his bride, German Princess Michael of Kent, pose in front of the British Embassy in Vienna, Austria, June 30, 1978.
Subsequent responses are more defensive. The cards, the seller claims, have not recently been at auction.
When asked if he or she knows when they first went on sale, he (or she) replies, “I’m sorry.” I don’t need to share my sources.’
The author of each and every letter, all of them addressed solely to Princess Michael, was an eminent priest, Monsignor Ralph Brown.
He died in 2014. But it can be assumed that he would have been mortified by their sale, not, of course, because there was anything indelicate about any of them, but because he was doing his best, 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 their problems.
In 1971, she married Old Etonian banker Tom Troubridge at Chelsea Old Church, but only after they had “a hot row” in the vestry.
The ill-fated union broke up within two years when Troubridge was sent to Bahrain.
His wife remained at home. By then she was friends with Prince Michael.
The Troubridges divorced in 1977. Marie-Christine, whose friendship with Prince Michael now became much more intense, obtained a papal annulment of their 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 a civil ceremony at Vienna City Hall in 1978, and later celebrated with a ball at Schwarzenberg Palace.
Others might have left things there. Not Princess Michael.
Intending to have their new union blessed by the Roman Catholic Church and with the help of an Italian friend, Prince Galeazzo Ruspoli, he obtained an audience with a cardinal.
His campaign paid off… in the end. In 1983, her marriage to Prince Michael was finally blessed in a Roman Catholic ceremony.