Head of Britain’s royal monarchy–Queen Elizabeth may be close to 100-years-old but is still playful. The Queen’s playful side came out in a series of letters to her former equerry — written from her beloved corgis to the staff member’s dogs! In the new ITV documentary, The Queen and her Cousins, English actor and presenter Alexander Armstrong said that he discovered handwritten notes framed in the bathroom of the Queen’s former equerry Sir Blair Stewart-Wilson.
“He would write these letters from their Jack Russell to the corgis, and the Queen would write these letters back,” Armstrong recalled, according to The Telegraph. “And they put this series of letters up, and they are so funny. I wish I could remember them.” Armstrong added that the notes were so “wickedly funny” that he had to hold his stomach from laughing.
Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith previously told People magazine that while the 94-year-old monarch is known for her stoic nature, she is “much livelier in private than what the public sees.” The author quoted a source at the Queen’s country estate in Norfolk once saying, ” ‘You can hear her laugh throughout that big house.’ She has a big laugh!”
The Queen can also be surprisingly self-deprecating. Not long after Prince Charles’ 1981 wedding to Princess Diana, a rerun of the ceremony was playing on TV during a party in London that the monarch was attending. Spotting herself on the screen, “The Queen said, ‘Oh, there’s my Miss Piggy face,’ ” Bedell Smith recalled. “She has the ability to laugh at herself.”
