The Death Of The Queen’s Last Corgi Ends An 80-Year-Old Bloodline

Willow, the Queen of England’s last remaining corgi, has died after a battle with cancer. It’s always heartbreaking when a dog passes away, but the Queen’s love of her corgis has been legendary over the decades. They were shown flopping around in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, Netflix’s The Crown, and The King’s Speech, and there may not be a single dog breed more interlinked to a person than corgis and the Queen. Now, with the death of her final corgi that has been bred from a line reaching back to her first personal pup she received in the 1940s, it’s truly the end of an era.

A source in Buckingham Palace told the Daily Mail that the Queen is utterly devasted by the death of her last corgi, even after owning 30 of them since she was given her first, Dookie, by her father King George VI, in 1933. That’s 85 years of undeniable love for the goofy, stumpy herders.

A Buckingham Palace source said: “She has mourned every one of her corgis over the years, but she has been more upset about Willow’s death than any of them. It is probably because Willow was the last link to her parents and a pastime that goes back to her own childhood.”

“Willow represents a significant thread running through the Queen’s life from her teenage years to her 90s,’ says a courtier. ‘For many, many years she bred and raised corgis and to think that the last one has now gone is something of a milestone.”

The Queen explained to Vanity Fair in 2012 that she stopped breeding her dogs because “she didn’t want to leave any behind.” Now 91 years old, she thankfully isn’t completely without any sidekicks — she still has two dorgis (dachsund-corgi mixes), but the bloodline she bred since WWII is finished. Now if she wants any purebred corgi shenanigans, she’ll have to make do like so many and scroll through all the famous derps on Instagram.

(Via Daily Mail)