The Baroness Who Married Into the Royal Family — and Divided It

It is December 2017, and the most talked-about jewel at the Queen's Christmas lunch is not a tiara. It is a small brooch, pinned to a winter coat, the figure of a black man, carved and gilded in a style the jewellery trade once called Blackamore. The woman wearing it is Princess Michael of Kent. And the guest arriving for the very first time to that same family gathering is Meghan Markle, soon to marry Prince Harry. Within hours, the photograph is everywhere. Within a day, the Princess's office issues a statement. The brooch, it says, was a gift and has been worn many times before, and she is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offence. She will not, it is reported, wear it again. It is a very small object, but it is doing something that this woman's jewels have done for 40 years. It is dividing the room. Because that is the paradox of Princess Michael of Kent. She has worn some of the most storied jewels in Europe, Romanov pearls that survived a revolution, a tiara she quietly took apart and rebuilt, and, according to jewellery historians, pieces given to her personally by Wallis Simpson herself. She is, by training, an art historian, one of the very few people ever to marry into the House of Windsor who genuinely understood the provenance of the stones on her own head. And yet, for four decades, she has been the family's lightning rod. Too foreign, too grand, too much. The woman the tabloids christened Princess Pushy. How can one person be both the connoisseur and the scandal? To answer that, we have to go back, long before the palace, long before the jewels, to a baroness born in the ruins of a collapsing Europe. She was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz on the 15th of January, 1945, in Carlsbad, the town we now call Karlovy Vary, in the final violent months of the Second World War. Her title was quite real – Friend von Reibnitz, the daughter of a baron, from an old family of the Central European nobility. Her mother was a Hungarian countess, her father a German aristocrat with a Silesian name. On paper, she was grander than almost anyone she would ever go on to marry. But paper was about all that survived the war. Within a year, her parents' marriage had dissolved, and the family scattered to opposite ends of the earth. Her father sailed for Africa, for Mozambique, then Portuguese East Africa, where he farmed and worked as a big-game hunter. Her mother took Marie-Christine and her brother in the entirely opposite direction, to Sydney, Australia, where a countess who had lost everything ran a salon to keep her children in convent school. So the girl with the ancient European name grew up between worlds, a sacred heart convent in Sydney. Then, at around 16, two years on her father's farm in Africa, a childhood among wild animals that she would write about tenderly, decades later, in a memoir about a cheetah she had loved. Then Vienna, to stay with relatives. Then, at last, London. By the time she arrived in Britain as a young woman, she had lived on three continents and belonged, fully, to none of them. She grew up multilingual. The family, it is said, played Scrabble in English, German, French and Italian all at once. She was, in the truest sense, from everywhere and from nowhere. Remember that phrase. It is the single thread that runs through everything that follows. And in London, she did something unusual for a future royal. She studied. She took courses in the history of fine and decorative art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a serious grounding in objects, in how a thing is made, who owned it, where it has been. She apprenticed with London's leading interior designers and then founded her own firm, working on grand historic houses. She was not a woman who merely wore beautiful things. She was trained to read them, to look at an object and see its entire hidden history in a single glance. Hold on to that skill, because when the jewels arrive in this story, they will arrive in the hands of the one person in the room who truly knows what they are. She married once before the world knew her name, to an English banker named Thomas Trubridge, whom she had met, of all places, at a boar hunt on her family's German land. They wed in 1971. By 1973, they had separated. By 1977, they were divorced. And here the story turns. Because Marie Christine was a devout Roman Catholic, and the man who had fallen in love with her was Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen's own first cousin. In 1978, that combination, Catholic and divorced, was not merely a matter of gossip. It was a matter of law. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, a British prince who married a Roman Catholic was automatically struck from the line of succession to the throne. And when the couple approached the Vatican for the dispensation that would allow them a church wedding, on the understanding that their children would be raised Anglican, Rome refused. So they married where they could. On the 30th of June, 1978, in the City Hall of Vienna, in a plain civil ceremony, the first civil wedding of a British royal since Edward VIII married Wallis Simpson in 1937. To marry her, Prince Michael surrendered his place in the line of succession. Her first marriage had by then been formally annulled by Pope Paul VI. Years later, under Pope John Paul II, the church relented, and in 1983 the couple were finally able to marry again in a Roman Catholic ceremony in London. But in that summer of 1978, you can imagine exactly what the press did with it. A foreign-born, twice-married, dazzlingly glamorous woman. A relative of the Sovereign, giving something up to be with her. A wedding held in exile from the Church of England. As some journalists put it at the time, was Britain watching a second Mrs. Simpson? The comparison was never quite fair. She was marrying a cousin, not a king. There was no throne at stake, only a place in a distant queue. But it stuck. And strangely, quietly, it would echo again decades later, inside a jewellery box. We will come back to that. It matters more than you think. For now, hold one image, the wedding ball in Vienna. Because on the outsider's head that night sat a diamond fringe tiara. And that tiara is where the jewels truly begin. The tiara was the Kent City of London fringe. A tall, spiked diamond fringe in the old Russian kokoshnik style, given to Prince Michael's mother, Princess Marina, as a wedding present in 1934 by the Lord Mayor and the City of London. Marina had worn it to a coronation. Marina's daughter, Princess Alexandra, had worn it as a bride. And now it crowned the newest, least British member of the family at her own wedding celebration. That single night set the pattern of her whole jewelled life. Because when Princess Marina died in 1968, her most historically fascinating jewels passed not to a daughter, but to her younger son, Prince Michael. And so through him, one by one, they came to his wife. Consider the tiara she became most associated with, the Kent Pearl festoon. It is a genuine mystery. It appears suddenly on Princess Marina in the early 1950s, in film premiere photographs, in studio portraits, with no maker's bill, no receipt, no certain origin. Historians place it around 1900 and murmur the name Cartier, but the truth is that nobody knows. What we do know is what happened next. Because this trained art historian, this woman who read objects for a living, did something almost no royal would dare. She took it apart. The tiara had rested on a line of collet diamonds. She had it rebuilt to sit instead on a row of round pearls, remaking a family heirloom into her own theatrical signature. Not many people marry into the House of Windsor and begin editing the jewels. She did, again and again. Then there are the pearls. Three enormous pear-shaped natural pearls, and their story is very nearly operatic. They came from the collection of the Grand Duchess Vladimir, one of the richest women of Imperial Russia, whose fabulous jewels were famously smuggled out of St Petersburg after the Revolution of 1917, spirited past the Bolsheviks to safety in the West. From the Grand Duchess, they passed to her daughter. From her daughter to Princess Marina. From Marina to Prince Michael. And so, at last, to the woman dancing in Vienna. Pearls that had outrun a revolution, hanging now from the ears of the family's most controversial princess. When she wore them with the festooned tiara at a state banquet, she was quite literally carrying the lost world of the Romanovs at her own shoulders. And there are the smaller jewels, each with its own history folded inside. The diamond daisies, three of them, made by Garrard in 1871 as wedding gifts for Princess Louise, the artistic daughter of Queen Victoria, flowers that had once held Louise's own bridal veil in place. They too descended through the Kents to Princess Michael, who had the smaller ones remade so she could wear them as earrings, and once assembled them into a little daisy tiara for a royal wedding in Monaco. A Victorian bride's flowers, worn by the very woman some thought insufficiently British. Or the diamond circle earrings, a single stone suspended within a detachable diamond ring, which she would casually reconfigure, swapping the diamond centre for a sapphire to echo Marina's Art Deco Cartier clips, building herself a matched set-out of the family's history. Or Marina's quiet Art Deco pearls, which by the 1990s she had rebuilt into an imposing statement necklace worn to the Queen's golden wedding anniversary. To Princess Michael, a jewel was never a sacred, untouchable relic. It was raw material for storytelling, and she was the storyteller. But of all of them, one small brooch carries the most feeling. A Cartier jewel in the shape of a pansy, set with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds. Given by Prince George, Duke of Kent, to Princess Marina to mark the birth of their son. That son was Prince Michael. Marina first wore it to his christening, and through inheritance, that most intimate of family mementos, the jewel that had celebrated her husband's very arrival in the world, ended up in the keeping of the outsider. The woman who never quite belonged, had become the guardian of the family's tenderest keepsake. This is the great quiet irony that the jewels reveal. The most foreign spouse the Kents ever took in, became the visible custodian of their entire history. And she kept it in trust for the next generation too. Because in 2019, that same City of London fringe, the tiara from the Vienna wedding ball, was worn down the aisle at Windsor by her own daughter Lady Gabriella. Three generations of brides beneath a single civic gift. And the outsider had been its guardian in between. So why, if she was the connoisseur, the custodian, the one who understood it all, was she also, for 40 years, the one the family so often winced at? Part of the answer is simply that she never once softened her edges. There is a story, told and retold, that the Queen herself remarked she was too grand for us, and that within royal circles she was nicknamed the Valkyrie. She was quoted, in an interview around the turn of the millennium, as having said she had more royal blood in her veins than anyone to marry into the family since Prince Philip. She would later insist the line had really come from Lord Mountbatten, the family's great enthusiast for genealogy, who had, she said, laid it on a bit thick about her ancestry. But the damage was done, and somewhere along the way the press handed her the name that would never quite come off, Princess Pushy. She has spoken of it with weariness, that it comes up endlessly, and that no one has ever actually been able to name a single moment when she pushed. Some of the controversy is far heavier and must be handled with care. Her father, it emerged publicly in 1985, had been a member of the Nazi party and of the SS, a fact that she confirmed through a palace spokesman when it surfaced in the press. It is important to be exact here. This is her father's record, not hers. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal himself noted that there was no evidence the man had committed atrocities, and there was none whatsoever that his daughter shared any of his politics. But in the theatre of royal reputation, a name is a name, and hers now carried a shadow she had done nothing to earn. And some of it she walked into herself. In 2004, in a New York restaurant, several diners and the establishment's owner alleged that, irritated by a noisy nearby table of prominent black guests, she had told them to go back to the colonies. Her spokesman flatly denied that she had made any racist remark, acknowledging only an argument about noise. She herself later said that what she had actually told them was that they should remember the colonies. The two accounts have never been reconciled. Years afterward, she protested to an interviewer, I would never have said that. I'm a historian. I know that America itself was a colony. To this day, it remains a contested story, one side's word against the other's. But it was exactly the kind of story that seemed to attach itself to her, again and again. There have been stranger allegations still. Her daughter's former boyfriend, the writer Artish Taseer, claimed in a 2018 magazine essay that she kept two black sheep on her Gloucestershire land and had named them after the Williams sisters. The family declined to comment. A friend of her daughter dismissed some of his claims outright as fiction. It rests on a single source, and it deserves to be held that lightly. But it too folded itself into the legend, because by then, where Princess Michael was concerned, the public had been primed to believe almost anything at all. Even her husband drew the storms in. In 2021, an undercover investigation filmed Prince Michael and a friend appearing to offer access to the Russian government for a fee, with Kensington Palace floated as a backdrop. His office insisted he had no special relationship with President Putin and that the friend had overpromised on his behalf. It was his affair, not hers, but it landed on the same family name, and it stirred the same long-running unease about the Kents and the blurred line between royal status and private business. Divided opinion over and over for four decades. That was the price of being the outsider who would not shrink. And yet. Remember the wedding in Vienna, and the whisper that she might be a second Mrs Simpson. Here is where that loop finally closes, and here is where it turns into something far more tender than a scandal. Because the two women knew each other. Prince Michael and his wife were genuinely fond of the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor. A surviving Christmas card from 1978 is addressed warmly to Aunt Wallis. And according to the jewellery historians who have traced these things, Wallis Simpson did something quietly remarkable. She gave Princess Michael jewels of her own, not to the Queen, not to any senior royal, to her. Cartier panther pieces, a cherries brooch, reportedly handed over as a wedding gift during the couple's honeymoon in Paris, described by those who study such matters as the only occasion on which the Duchess of Windsor gave her personal jewels directly to a member of the British royal family. One outsider, it seems, recognising another. So the comparison the newspapers reached for in 1978 came true, but in a way none of them ever intended. The woman once likened to a second Mrs Simpson did not repeat Wallis's story. She did something gentler and stranger. She inherited Wallis's jewels. Two women the family had struggled to place, linked across the decades by a small handful of Cartier stones. Today, Princess Michael of Kent has largely withdrawn from public life. She and Prince Michael stepped back around the time of his 80th birthday. She was unwell after contracting Covid, and the great white tie state banquets with their tiaras and their pearls go on now without her. The Kent jewels have mostly fallen quiet, brought out these days not by her, but by the generation that came after. And that, perhaps, is the truest measure of her. For all the controversy, the broach, the nicknames, the headlines that trailed her for 40 years, she was the one who kept these objects alive. She understood them, she altered them, wore them and passed them on. The outsider who never quite belonged became the woman who carried the family's history on her own shoulders and then handed it, whole and gleaming, to the brides who came after. She divided opinion to the very end. But the jewels, the Romanov pearls, the tiara she rebuilt, the little pansy that once celebrated her husband's birth, the fringe now worn by her daughter, the jewels never doubted her for a moment. They simply passed, as they always do, into the keeping of the one person left who truly understood them. The End