Queen Elizabeth II's Letters About Her Horses and Their Vets Go to Auction
A archive of letters written by Queen Elizabeth II to a former royal stable chief is going up for sale in Britain, with an estimate of £8,000 to £12,000 (about $10,600 to $16,000). The auction house Bonhams, based in London, will offer the collection as a single lot in an online sale that closes December 3.
The letters are mostly about horses, and the queen was not always calm about them. In July 1960 she wrote that she was "furious" after a veterinarian questioned the health of the foal of her horse Dove. In a note about the foal, she added a line that sounds like any horse owner's complaint: "I'm allergic to vets and I can't help it," according to Town & Country.
The archive holds seven letters signed "Elizabeth R," 37 handwritten memos signed "ER," and 12 Christmas cards dating from 1954 to 1961. "R" stands for Regina, the Latin word for queen. Most of the material went to Brigadier Walter Morley Sale, who served as Crown Equerry from 1955 to 1960. A Crown Equerry is the officer in charge of the royal horses and the stables that look after them. Sale's family kept the letters for 65 years before sending them to auction.
The queen also wrote about her own riding with a light touch. About her horse Sea Breeze, she said that "he might even be Olympic one day." She added that she and the horse were "not in the same equine category." The line shows a woman who knew her horses well and enjoyed describing them.
Bonhams does not usually sell letters from a living monarch's household in such volume, and the estimate reflects the small, personal nature of the material. The lot gives a close look at the queen's day-to-day interest in her stables during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a period when she was still in her early thirties. For American readers, the closest comparison is a president's private correspondence with a White House staffer, although the British royal household works under different rules and traditions.
The sale closes December 3. The listing and estimate are set by Bonhams.
