The title of Princess Michael of Kent is very much like herself: it is opaque, complex and linked to another person, it does not define them. Like the princess herself, who usually hides under her radiant smile and behind the arm of her husband (the aforementioned Michael de Kent) to give few clues about herself. However, María Cristina Inés Eduvigis Ida de Reibnitz, as she is really called, is one of the most curious characters in the British royal family, one of the most unknown and one of the most discreetly screwed up.
These weeks the always indefatigable princess, a woman with many chores and interests and sometimes a representative of Queen Elizabeth II as her cousin’s wife, is in the media precisely because of her fatigue. She has suffered from covid, which at 75 has left her with “extreme fatigue” for a little over a month and has kept the couple in isolation in their 10 rooms at Kensington Palace, where they reside. The princess’s husband is the first cousin of Elizabeth II, son of Prince George (brother of the father of the Queen of England), and at his birth he became sixth in the line of succession to the throne, although he now occupies 45th.
This time it was because of the coronavirus, but the princes were regular on the UK society pages. Without overdoing it, yes. To count her troubles, the princess has her own website, in addition to his articles in the magazine Orient Express, a blog in the HuffPost and, of course, half a dozen romantic and historical novels, including a trilogy written between 2014 and 2016. For her work, the princess locks herself in her Kensington office, surrounded by cats and memories, until she gives birth to her media volumes.
Because it is always a good idea to have a princess on television or in the press, either with the excuse of talking about her book. Every time she throws them, she does promo and Buckingham Palace shakes. Out-of-tones have become commonplace for Michael’s wife from Kent. Born in what is now the Czech Republic, then Nazi Germany, in 1945, her past has already been controversial. In the mid-1980s, a book claimed that her father, Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, had joined the Nazi party in 1930, something she said she did not know but which she finally confirmed. That would have been three years before Hitler’s rise to power, although in 1933 he enlisted in the troops of the Third Reich, the infamous SS. With the arrival of fascism to power, her mother separated from her father and went to live with her in Sydney, where she opened a beauty salon, raised her daughter and remarried another aristocrat, this time Polish.
Their wedding in 1978 was controversial for being a foreign, Catholic and divorced Maria Cristina, something that had echoes of the Wallis Simpson scandal with her husband’s uncle who almost ruined the crown. In fact, Michael of Kent lost his dynastic rights when he married her in Vienna in 1978 – they have two children, Lord Frederick and Lady Gabriela. Not because María Cristina was divorced only months ago, as she achieved a dynastic annulment, but because she was Catholic. However, he recovered them in 2013 thanks to a new law. Trained in school at Eton and in the military at Sandhurst, Michael de Kent became part of the UN peacekeepers and had an extensive military career over more than 20 years.
María Cristina, for her part, studied in Vienna and London, where she followed courses in decorative arts at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the 1970s and later spent time as an apprentice in interior design studies until opening her own. Now Princess Michael of Kent – only the daughters and granddaughters of kings can be princesses with their own names, such as Princess Anne or Eugenie and Beatrice of York; that’s why Meghan Markle or Kate Middleton, with marriage titles, are not — she defines herself as a “writer, historian, lecturer, interior designer, and art consultant.” But he also commands the boards of more than 40 organizations, schools and hospitals.
However, in the end she is known more for her gaffes. The most notorious and recent one starred in Christmas 2017, at the Christmas dinner that Elizabeth II celebrates annually with her entire family. It was Meghan Markle’s first. For her, she put on a gold brooch with the bust of a black man, a piece often called Blackamoor o Moretti, original from Venice in the 16th century. It was considered a racist symbol against Markle and the princess, who denied it, ended up having to apologize and said she was “shocked at having caused this offense.”
It was not his first outing of a racist tone: according to a relative, he baptized two black sheep that he had in Kensington Palace with the names of Venus and Serena, after the famous tennis sisters Williams. Also, at a dinner in New York she told a group of black diners close to her to go back “to the colonies.” In 2013 he stated that they had stopped eating out “so as not to waste.” In an interview in the US in 2014 to promote his books, he did not hesitate to say that “the oldest members of royalty are boring”; in 2015, that “animals have no rights because they do not vote or pay taxes.” But for the story will remain, above all, his statement about the most mediatic of the princesses: “Diana was ignorant, she did not know how to face fame because she did not have a strict mother.” However, who Isabel II even said was “too big for us” was precisely hers.
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