Corgi Culture

Has Queen Elizabeth Adopted Another Corgi?

With a reportedly cute name to boot.
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Queen Elizabeth II poses with her corgis at Sandringham in 1980.By Anwar Hussein/Getty Images.

Queen Elizabeth II is getting another dog—reportedly! She said she wouldn’t, but now, at least according to The Sun’s anonymous source, she is! The dog’s name is Whisper and it belonged to her Sandringham’s groundskeeper Bill Fenwick, who died in January. He and his late wife, Nancy, had helped raise the Queen’s brood (of dogs, not Prince Charles, et. al.).

“She couldn’t resist Whisper,” The Sun’s shadowy source said. “Now she has asked Bill’s family if she can keep him.”

In January after Fenwick died, it was rumored—and not at all certain—that she would assume responsibility for his little one, raising the grand total of dogs under the Queen’s care to four once again. The palace has declined to comment on such a personal matter to Vanity Fair, but it would stand to reason. The Fenwicks often kept and trained the Queen’s corgis. It’s even said that they were given a two-story home so that the corgis could practice going up and down stairs in anticipation on getting on and off airplanes. After the Fenwicks did so much for her dogs, it seems natural that she might welcome Whisper into the fold.

The Queen currently has a corgi named Willow, and two corgi-dachshund mixes (i.e. dorgis) named Vulcan and Candy. She sat for Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz in 2015 with her four pups (the 13-year-old corgi, Holly, died last October).

In the accompanying article, Monty Roberts, a sort of palace animal adviser, told Vanity Fair that the Queen was reticent even to get a new corgi after the death of a fifth dog, Monty, in 2012. “[S]he didn’t want to have any more young dogs,” Roberts said. “She didn’t want to leave any young dog behind. She wanted to put an end to it.”