Queen Elizabeth was always most at home with her horses and dogs, but according to actor Ian Ogilvy, she was almost killed by a runaway horse in Windsor—and her reenactment was something he’d never forget.
In Gyles Brandreth’s biography Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, he details a polo match when English actor Ogilvy ran into the late Queen in a refreshment tent. Queen Elizabeth was dressed down in “tweeds, headscarf, muddy wellington boots” at the time, and when trying to think of something to say, Ogilvy asked about one of her favorite horses.
“I was wondering, ma’am—what ever happened to Burmese?” he said, referring to the black mare she rode for Trooping the Colour between 1969 and 1986. Unsurprisingly, the topic of horses made the late Queen brighten up, and she shared what happened when she encountered an out-of-control fieldmate of her beloved horse.
“Well it’s funny you should ask, because I’ve just been to see her,” Queen Elizabeth said, per Brandreth. “So I went into her field, you see, and she came trotting over, as always, because we know each other terribly well, of course—great old friends, in fact—and I always take her a carrot or an apple or something.”
The late Queen said that while she was giving a snack to her “very old” friend, a renegade horse came racing towards her. The monarch recalled hearing “this awful snorting and thumping noise,” only to see a “huge stallion charging at me! At full gallop!”
Continuing her story, the late Queen went into full horse impersonation mode.”I had no idea what he was doing in Burmese’s field, but here he was, pounding towards me, and his eyes were all red and his ears were bared—just like this!” she shared. Brandreth wrote that "here Ian Ogilvy claims to be one of the few of the late Queen's subjects to have seen Her Majesty "performing her homicidal horse routine."
The animated Queen told Ogilvy, "And I knew without a shadow of doubt that he was going to kill me so I ran, quite literally ran, as fast as I could to the gate and got out just seconds before he attacked me and—well, the fact is—you very nearly lost your sovereign."
Brandreth added that the late Queen "loved a story of a runaway horse," sharing a tale one military man told him after Elizabeth's 2022 death. Major-General Sir Sebastian Roberts recalled one horse story that was "his happiest memory of Her Majesty" while waiting for Queen Elizabeth's body to return to Buckingham Palace from Balmoral.
During a rehearsal for Trooping the Colour one year, the horse Roberts was riding took off "down the Mall at 40 miles per hour." He told Brandreth that there was a cry from a sergeant-major "ringing in his ears" of "Pull the effing reins 'til the bridle comes out of his arse," and Roberts later told the story to the late Queen.
"She laughed and laughed and laughed," Roberts told Brandreth. "I've never seen her laugh so much."