Queen Elizabeth II.
Stable master remembers last ride before her death
Queen Elizabeth and her stable master Terry Pendry always rode together, here in October 2008 in Windsor.
© Max Mumby/Indigo
Around eight weeks before her death in September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II rode out for the last time. Her former stable master now reports this.
Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) pursued her great passion until shortly before her death: horse riding. Her former stable master Terry Pendry (74) now tells us this in the podcast “Rosebud With Gyles Brandreth”. According to the podcast, the British monarch mounted her favorite pony Emma for the last time on July 18, 2022, around eight weeks before her death on September 8, 2022.
Pendry, who looked after the more than 100 horses in the royal stable for 28 years until the Queen’s death and was one of her closest confidants, describes her as “light, frail and small”. The 96-year-old came to the stable with a bag of carrots for her horse. She needed a riding stool to get on Emma. “As she got older, I had to add another step once a year. She could get on Emma, but I always lifted her off,” said Pendry.
Pendry ran next to the Queen on her last ride
Because Elizabeth seemed so weak, he did not ride beside her on her last ride as he usually did, but accompanied her on foot. “She said: ‘That hasn’t happened to me since I was a princess.’ I asked: ‘What?’ She said: ‘Someone walking beside me like that,'” the stable master said. He then offered to step back, but the Queen refused: “No, no, just keep walking beside her.”
Terry Pendry then took a photo of the Queen on her pony, which she stuck into an album. “Your pony is 26, you are 96, that must be a record,” he explained to the astonished Queen. She later jokingly reprimanded him for this statement. “She said: ‘You said my age’ – and then she burst into loud laughter. That’s how she was. That was the last time I saw her. I suspected that it would probably be the last time I would see her.”
Pendry and Emma are still a team
A day later, the Queen came to the stables again and said goodbye to her horse before travelling to Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where she eventually died. Terry Pendry “promised the Queen that I would take care of Emma’s funeral”. The ashes were to be scattered between two of her former favourite horses.
At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, Pendry and Emma created a moving moment: the stable master stood with the horse in a sea of flowers on the Long Walk in Windsor during the funeral procession as the coffin carrying the deceased passed by. The images of this scene went around the world.