In June 1978, Prince Michael of Kent and Marie Christine von Reibnitz announced their engagement. Photographs from the announcement show a relaxed, sunlit couple walking a garden path at Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park. The prince wears a light suit. The baroness laughs at something just out of frame.
Nothing in those images suggests the years of paperwork that had barely cleared in time to make the photograph possible. Three weeks earlier, a tribunal inside the Catholic Church had reached a ruling that made the announcement possible at all. The ruling did not end a marriage. It declared that a marriage, in the eyes of the church that had performed it, had never actually existed.
Marie Christine had married a different man seven years earlier at Chelsea Old Church in London. There were photographs of that wedding, too. There was a reception, a bride in white, and a signed parish register. For two years she lived as Mrs. Thomas Trobridge in a marriage that by every ordinary measure had happened.
Then Rome looked at the facts and ruled otherwise. The marriage was not ended but erased, treated from that point forward as though it had never taken place at all.
To get an annulment from the Catholic Church, you cannot simply say a marriage did not work out. You have to convince a tribunal that something was wrong with it from the very moment the vows were exchanged. A defect present at the start rather than a problem that developed later. Marie Christine’s case took years to work through that process.
By the time it concluded, she and Prince Michael had already been central to each other’s lives for the better part of six years. Most of that time, she was still on paper somebody else’s wife.
Michael George Charles Franklin was born on the 4th of July 1942. He was the youngest of three children belonging to Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. He was seven weeks old when his father died in a wartime flying boat crash near Dunbeath in Caithness.
Michael grew up without a single memory of his father. He was educated at Sunningdale and Eton, then commissioned into the 11th Hussars in 1963. Over the next 18 years, he served in Germany, Hong Kong, and Cyprus. He stayed in uniform until 1981, longer than almost any other member of his generation of the family.
Marie Christine was born Baroness Marie Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz on the 15th of January 1945 in Carlsbad, in what was then the German-occupied Sudetenland. The war had five months left to run. Her mother had recently been released after her arrest for taking part in a demonstration against the Nazi party. Her father was being held as a prisoner of war.
As the Red Army advanced that winter, the family fled west into American-occupied Bavaria. On her mother’s side, the bloodline was genuinely old, tracing back through the House of Windisch-Graetz. Marie Christine would later point out, not entirely joking, that she carried more royal blood in her veins than almost anyone who had married into the British royal family since Prince Philip.
Her parents’ own marriage collapsed once it became clear that her father’s first marriage to a different woman had never been properly annulled. Her mother took Marie Christine and her older brother and rebuilt a life in Sydney, eventually remarrying a Polish nobleman and opening a hair salon to support the family.
Marie Christine was educated by nuns. She did not see her father again until she was 16, when her mother sent her to spend two years on his farm in what was then Portuguese East Africa. She later settled in London in the late 1960s, trained in the history of fine and decorative art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and opened her own interior design business.
Her design work put her in front of exactly the kind of clientele who could later vouch for her in exactly the rooms that would come to matter. By the end of the decade, she could count a real cross-section of London society among her clients.
She met Thomas Trobridge at a boar hunt on a family estate in Germany. He was an English banker, the younger brother of a baronet. Their engagement was announced on the 25th of May 1971. Because she was Catholic and he was not, the wedding required a formal church dispensation for what canon law calls a mixed marriage.
The wedding took place on the 14th of September 1971 at Chelsea Old Church in London. Her father was too unwell to attend, so she was given away by her uncle. Nobody covering it that September had any particular reason to think the marriage would not last.
Then, sometime in 1972, at the home of a mutual friend named Prince William of Gloucester, Marie Christine met Prince Michael of Kent. By her own later account, the meeting did not register as anything romantic at first. She found him funny and easy to talk to. What stayed with her afterward was an ease, the sense of having found someone she did not have to perform for.
People who saw them together in that period describe an easy running rapport rather than anything obviously romantic. Dinner parties, weekends at other people’s country houses, the ordinary overlapping calendar of a small social world. Nobody involved has ever described a single dramatic turning point.
Her marriage to Trobridge was already under strain that had nothing directly to do with Prince Michael. The marriage was showing real cracks well before 1973, the year she and Trobridge formally separated.
Civil divorce came first, granted in 1977 after four years of separation. It ended the marriage under British law. It did almost nothing under the law of the church that had performed the wedding. As far as Rome was concerned in 1977, Marie Christine was still a married woman.
The annulment process took years. The church’s tribunal system for these cases typically works in two stages. A first hearing, and then if the marriage is judged invalid, an automatic review by a second tribunal before the ruling becomes final. Throughout the process, a church official called the defender of the bond argues for the marriage’s validity.
None of the surviving reporting on Marie Christine’s specific case names which ground her tribunal ultimately accepted. What is documented is only that the process took years, moved through at least the standard two-stage review, and concluded in her favor in May of 1978.
Somewhere in the middle of that long process, in 1976, Lord Mountbatten told Marie Christine plainly that she should marry Michael. He had played no small role twenty years earlier in steering his own nephew Philip toward the young Princess Elizabeth. He would not live to see much of what came after. An IRA bomb killed him off the coast of County Sligo in August 1979.
By the time Rome’s tribunal issued its ruling in May 1978, Marie Christine was for the first time in years neither legally married nor formally divorced in any meaningful sense. Three weeks later, on the 31st of May, the Queen gave her consent at the Privy Council, and the engagement became public that same day.
Press coverage in the days that followed leaned hard into the contrast between two women dominating royal headlines that same season. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s divorce, finalized that May, was itself a genuine first for the modern monarchy. Commentators could not resist pointing out that the family appeared to be losing one marriage and gaining another built on almost identical grounds that same year.
The Queen’s consent required under the Royal Marriages Act came without much public hesitation on her part by most accounts. What her consent could not do was undo the part of the law that had already decided the outcome. The Act of Settlement of 1701 disqualified anyone in the succession who married a Catholic. Full stop.
Michael was and remained Church of England. None of that mattered under the statute. The instant he married a Catholic, he would drop out of the succession entirely. At the time, that place was somewhere in the mid-teens. He gave it up publicly and told reporters it made no real difference to him.
The fight that actually determined where and how the wedding would take place was the religious one. Marie Christine wanted a full Catholic wedding properly blessed. To get one required a papal dispensation for a mixed marriage. She and Michael petitioned Pope Paul VI directly, offering as a real concession to raise any children of the marriage in the Church of England rather than as Catholics.
Rome said no. Vatican officials in that period were notably cautious about high-profile mixed marriage requests. A Church of England ceremony was never realistically on the table either.
That left the option almost nobody in this story had originally wanted. A civil ceremony held outside England in a country where neither family’s church had any say at all.
They married on the 30th of June 1978 at the Rathaus in Vienna, Austria’s civil registry office. The royal guest list was kept deliberately small. The Duke of Kent came with his daughter. Princess Alexandra attended with her husband. Princess Anne was there. So was Lord Mountbatten.
The Queen did not attend. Neither did Prince Philip. Nobody involved ever described the absence as a deliberate snub on the record, but it was noticed.
Upon marriage, Marie Christine took the style and title of Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent. The woman who had spent years carefully managing which version of her own history got told publicly now carried a name that quietly overwrote her maiden identity almost as thoroughly as that tribunal in Rome had already overwritten her first marriage.
For five years, that civil ceremony in an Austrian town hall was the only wedding on the record. By then the couple had two young children. Lord Frederick Windsor, born in 1979, and Lady Gabriella, born in 1981. Both baptized and raised within the Church of England.
Then on the 29th of June 1983, almost exactly five years to the day after the Rathaus ceremony, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent received a formal blessing of their marriage in a Catholic ceremony at Archbishop’s House in London. The permission that had been refused five years earlier was granted by a different pope. Paul VI, who had turned down their original request, died in August 1978. It was his successor, John Paul II, who eventually approved the blessing.
There is one more piece of erasure in this story. In 1984, a researcher named Philip Hall, researching a book about the royal family, came across records showing that Baron von Reibnitz had joined the Nazi party in the early 1930s and later served in the Waffen-SS. The Daily Mirror published the story in April 1985.
Buckingham Palace’s press office initially said the newspaper’s inquiry was the first the princess had ever heard of any of it. Within the same day, Princess Michael sat for a television interview and gave a rather different account, admitting she had known for years that her father had been a Nazi party member, just not specifically that he had served in the SS.
Baron von Reibnitz himself had died in Bavaria in 1983, two years before the story broke. The revelation landed entirely on his daughter. Her father’s wartime record had not been formally erased the way her first marriage had. It had simply been buried, unmentioned rather than undone.
Prince and Princess Michael of Kent are still married, longer now than almost any other pairing in their generation of the family. The first fiancée in this story, in the loosest possible sense of the phrase, was never a person. It was a marriage real, witnessed, legally documented, lived in for two years, and then formally declared by the very institution that had performed it to have never validly happened at all.
Cleared out of the way just in time for the one that actually lasted.