Why Princess Michael's a royal survivor

SHE'S haughty, gaffe-prone and been linked to other men but this month Princess Michael of Kent marks 30 years of a strange marriage few thought would last...

SURVIVOR Princess Michael of Kent SURVIVOR: Princess Michael of Kent

Should the Queen ever choose to kill an idle moment by surfing the net, she might be tickled to visit the personal website of her first cousin by marriage, Princess Michael of Kent. One of the first items on the biography page is a link to the princess’s step-by-step descent from both Cath­erine de’ Medici, wife of King Henry II of France, and his legendary mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

Previously she has also established kinship – courtesy of the Australian genealogist she commissioned to help her – with Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, William the Conqueror and the kings of Denmark, Sweden and Spain. As our own current monarch once mischievously remarked to Lord Mountbatten: “She sounds a bit too grand for us.”

It is now 30 gloriously gaffe-prone years since the former Mrs Marie-Christine Troubridge – raised in the Australian suburbs, for all her mysterious mid-European accent – married her way into the British Royal Family.

GOING STRONG Prince and Princess Michael GOING STRONG: Prince and Princess Michael

From the outset, her new in-laws seem to have loathed her. It was Princess Anne, not the irreverent tabloid press, who gave her the nickname Princess Pushy and Prince Charles who dubbed her and her husband the Rent-a-Kents.

Her next-door neighbour Viscount Linley, when asked what he would give his worst enemy, answered: “Dinner with Princess Michael.”

But she is still with us. For all her reported dalliances with other men and her habit of talking down Britain, the 63-year-old Princess Michael of Kent is still married to King George V’s youngest grandson – a beacon of unlikely marital endurance in a family not known for conjugal success.

‘They always have a bad girl in the family’

The ceremony took place in Vienna Town Hall in June 1978 and the venue speaks volumes about the controversy when the 16th in line to the British throne married a divorced Catholic.

Pope Paul VI had annulled her first marriage to Old Etonian banker Thomas Troubridge – who now omits any mention of her in his Who’s Who entry – but the couple were still not allowed to marry in church. Wedding a Catholic also meant that Prince Michael was struck off the order of succession to the British throne.

This is something that still  rankles with his wife. “In the Royal Family you can’t marry a Catholic by an Act of 1701 that is still on the statute books. They can marry a Moonie, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a Scientologist, a Muslim,” she complained more than 20 years after her marriage. “He didn’t renounce anything. He lost his place automatically. Were the law to change, he’d get it back automatically.”

Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz was born in Karlsbad, now in the Czech Republic, in 1945. Her father was an aristocratic German army officer and her mother, through whom she traces most of her gilded ancestry, was a Hungarian countess.

Fleeing the advancing Red Army at the end of the war, they reached Vienna where her parents split up – her father going to Africa where he became a big-game hunter and farmer  while her mother took Marie-Christine and her elder brother Freddie to Sydney and ended up running a hair salon. There, Marie-Christine had a quiet suburban upbringing, knowing little of her titled forebears.

On leaving school she travelled to Mozambique to visit the father she barely remembered. She later recalled her adventures in a manner reminiscent of her ancestor Marie Antoinette: “I had this adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people. I even pretended to be an African, a half-caste African.”

She travelled on to Austria and reached London at the age of 22. She worked in architecture, carpentry and advertising, studied at the Victoria & Albert Museum and launched an interior design company – a role she was told to give up when she eventually married into the Royal Family.

When she first met the introverted Prince Michael, who had been at school with her first husband, she was unimpressed.

She has even claimed she had to be persuaded to marry him by Lord Mountbatten as she was not “remotely interested” in the younger brother of the Duke of Kent. But marry they did – and the 6ft princess set about demonstrating that she was to the palace born.

“I live in the 18th century in my mind,” she told an early interviewer. “I see my whole life as a cultivation of taste. If I were asked what is the objective of my life – leaving apart my husband and my children – I would say it was to improve the quality of my life, intellectually, culturally and in the way I choose to live.”

She set about raising her profile in the media by throwing herself into charity events. But in 1986, her late father was revealed to have been an officer in the Nazi SS.

She produced evidence that Baron Günther von Reibnitz had actually been expelled from the Nazi party in 1944 and had been as good as exonerated after the war. Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal took her side, saying: “Look, the daughter is not guilty.”

But if she could not be held responsible for her father’s wartime conduct, she was earning brickbats of her own. The “Michaels” – as she and her husband were known – rapidly acquired a reputation as freeloaders. Although they often complain that they are not paid from the civil list yet still discharge duties for charity, they were accused of trading on their royal connections to further their own business ends.

Apparently the Queen was furious when Prince Michael appeared on television to plug a mail-order business selling House of Windsor souvenirs. Meanwhile, Marie-Christine wrote books about glamorous European princesses – the first two were dogged by accusations of plagiarism – and entertained wealthy Americans on the lecture circuit.

It all funded a grand lifestyle – reportedly the Queen was further disgusted by a £23,000 champagne party just hours after the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state ceremony – that was initially maintained at the taxpayer’s expense. They paid less than the average council house rent for their palatial apartments at Kensington Palace, which are financed from the public purse. But still Marie-Christine complained.

“There are more disadvantages than advantages [in being a princess] because, for me, I am somebody who likes to be very free,” she said, after the Queen had offered to pay £10,000 a month rent on the Michaels’ behalf until 2010.

Unable to stop herself confiding in journalists, she defended Prince Harry’s swastika antics (“if he had worn a hammer and sickle nobody would have got excited”) and complained: “The English distrust foreigners. They think the wogs begin at Calais.”

And in the most spectacular instance of royal foot-in-mouth since the Squidgygate tapes, she told a tabloid reporter posing as a potential buyer of her £6million country house that Princess Diana was “bitter”, “nasty” and “strange”; Prince Charles deeply resented his former wife’s popularity; and the Queen was still not reconciled to Charles’s marriage to Camilla.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Princess Michael’s survival in the Royal Family is the endurance of her marriage itself.

In 1985, she was photographed emerging from the London home of a Texan oil heir J Ward Hunt, having apparently spent the night there, and two years ago she spent what was said to be a romantic break in Venice with a Russian tycoon called Mikhail Kravchenko, 21 years her junior.

Although both parties denied they were anything more than friends, witnesses described them behaving “like young lovers”. Prince Michael was left looking like a cuckold.

It is possible that both episodes were innocent – or that the Michaels may have a marriage strong enough to cope with such buffeting. Either way, the couple will this month celebrate their pearl wedding anniversary with their children, Lady Gabriella, 27, and Lord Frederick Windsor, 29.

Perhaps the secret of Marie-Christine’s survival is that she just doesn’t care what anyone thinks. As she once said, in another of her regular moans: “They always have to have a bad girl in the family… but I’m not going to have sleepless nights worrying about what the good citizens of Newcastle are thinking about me.”

And harking back once more to Marie Antoinette, she added: “She was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. This is all par for the course for life at the top.”

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