A sassy princess who refused to be kidnapped? Getting it on
with Camilla's first husband? Princess Anne puts the spice in the royal tea.
To judge by "The Crown," Queen Elizabeth II was not the most available mother,
or the most caring. Even without a Netflix drama coloring public perception, it's long been thought
that the queen was a distant mom, putting duty and "the firm" ahead of family. But Princess
Anne has long pushed back on that assumption, revealing in the “Queen and Country” documentary:
"I simply don't believe that there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest
that she wasn't caring. It just beggars belief."
If the queen was physically distant, she had good reason: she was already taking up royal
duties on her father King George VI's behalf by the time the future King Charles III and
Princess Anne were born, and took on even more work and travel responsibilities as monarch.
It was also typical of her generation, and her father's generation, to entrust a good
portion of childcare to nursery staff and private tutors. Various biographies
of Charles have used this to imply a distance between mother and children,
but Anne has insisted she and her brothers understood that the queen's heavy workload
would take up her time. She added, in her "Queen and Country" interview:
"I don't believe any of us for a second thought she didn't care
for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think
it extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true."
Per the royal family's official website, "Princess Royal" is a title reserved for
the reigning sovereign's eldest daughter. That means Princess Anne's daughter Zara
won't be taking the title when Anne passes. But Prince William's daughter Charlotte may
not necessarily get it either. That's because "Princess Royal" is an honorary
title awarded by the monarch, not something automatically inherited.
The Princess Royal title was created by Charles I for his daughter Mary around 1642, but it
didn't take at the time. Even when Mary married William II of Orange, and their son William III
married his own Mary and ruled with her after the Glorious Revolution, they didn't bring it back.
"Princess Royal" was reintroduced by George II for his daughter and has stuck around ever
since. Technically, however, the monarch awards the title at their discretion,
so it could be withheld for whatever reason. Once granted, the title is held for life.
This is why the queen was never Princess Royal, despite being eligible for it. Her
great-aunt Mary, daughter of George V, was still Princess Royal when
George VI was crowned and remained so until Elizabeth took the throne.
No eldest daughter of a sitting sovereign has been refused the title when it was available,
but it's never been awarded immediately upon the death of the last Princess Royal. When Mary died
in 1965, Anne went without it for 22 years. The queen finally named her Princess Royal in 1987.
At first glance, it's more like something out of "Game of Thrones" than "The Crown":
Princess Anne dated the husband of Camilla, future wife to Prince
Charles. "The Crown" jumped at the chance to make intrigue out of the relationships,
insinuating that Anne and Andrew Parker Bowles were sleeping together, and Bowles with Camilla,
at the same time that Camilla began seeing Charles. But the truth isn't all that scandalous.
“It was all very straightforward. He got what he wanted, which was
to make Camilla jealous. I got what I wanted, which was a bit of fun.”
According to Sally Bedell Smith's "Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life",
Anne's romance with Andrew Parker Bowles was a brief fling, destined to never go further due
to Bowles' faith: to this day, royals in the line of succession who marry Catholics have
to give up any claim to the throne. But after the romance fizzled, Anne and Bowles maintained
a friendship that has lasted to this day. Bowles even stood as godfather to Anne's daughter Zara.
Rumors persist that Anne and Bowles had an on-off affair during the 1980s when
both their marriages were beginning to fail. But there's no evidence that their
time in a relationship overlapped with Charles and Camilla's early romance.
Bendell Smith told Elle that the latter couple didn't meet until 1972,
two years after Anne and Bowles got together. Bendell Smith also doubts "The Crown's" scenes
of Anne discussing her relationships with Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother ever happened;
sex isn't a subject for dinnertime conversation in the royal family.
Princess Anne loves horses. She comes from a family mad for horses. According to Biography,
her father was an avid polo player, and according to The Telegraph,
her mother bred horses, and her siblings all started riding by age three. But Anne
has had the opportunity to carry it much further. She started competing in
eventing when she was 11 years old and it didn't take long to start winning. By 21,
she was the European Eventing Champion, having ridden her mother's horse Doublet to victory.
While she took up royal duties after completing her education,
Anne stayed active as a competitive horsewoman. In 1976, despite a fractured vertebra, she joined
the British team for the Olympics in Montreal, the first British royal to participate in the games.
She seemed bound for the Munich Olympics four years earlier until Doublet suffered an
accident and had to be put down. Montreal could have been an even greater disaster for Anne;
she suffered a concussion when she fell off her horse halfway through the event. She remounted
and completed the course, though, to this day, she has no memory of the back half.
"The Crown" has made storylines out of several royal brushes with violence:
Michael Fagan's break-in to Buckingham Palace, Lord Mountbatten's assassination,
and his flirtation with a planned coup against Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
But it skipped over the harrowing experience of Princess Anne in 1974 when a 26-year-old
burglar attempted to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. According to the BBC,
Ian Ball drove Anne's limo off the road with his Ford Escort one March night in London.
Ball got out and started firing, injuring two policemen, Anne's driver,
and a tabloid journalist who tried to intervene. Anne, her husband, and her lady-in-waiting were on
the floor of the limo when Ball confronted them, according to the Age, telling Anne:
"I want you to come with me for a day or two because I want £2 million. Will you come?"
Anne snapped back:
"Not bloody likely — and I haven't got £2 million."
Anne struggled to remain polite with Ball as the stand-off continued. Recounting the
experience for Michael Parkinson, she said she was eventually able to escape
out the other side of the car, and that Ball was apprehended trying to escape.
Greatly impressed by Anne's coolness under pressure, Prime Minister Harold
Wilson summed the whole incident up as quote, "a very good story" in the government file.
“We got the door back open, but in the process of getting the door back open,
the back of my dress split.”
Princess Anne's reputation as the hardest-working member of the royal
family hasn't come about by chance. According to the royal family's official website,
she started her public service at the age of 18. In the years since, per the site:
"Her Royal Highness [has become] involved with over 300 charities, organizations,
and military regiments in the U.K. and overseas,
and she devotes a large part of her working life to official engagements and visits."
According to The Times, she carried out 387 royal engagements, and in some years,
that number has passed 500. Anne's dedication to her work — and her sometimes cutting
manner — haven't always brought her praise. Camilla Tominey of the The Telegraph wrote
about Anne's early reputation for haughtiness, earning her the unflattering nickname of quote,
"her royal rudeness." Over the years, however, that reputation has shifted, as Tominey wrote:
"She is now hailed as one of the great English eccentrics whose unparalleled
royal work ethic ... has rightly earned her national treasure status.”
The sentiment that Anne is committed to her causes is felt elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
According to the former Canadian Secretary to the Queen of Canada, Kevin MacLeod, her credo is:
"Keep me busy. I'm here to work. I'm here to do good
things. I'm here to meet as many as possible."
Princess Anne seems to have issues holding to the speed limit, especially when she's
on her way to an engagement. Her most recent incident happened in 2000, according to the BBC,
when she raced through Gloucestershire at 93 mph before a police car began pursuit.
"Fire up the roof."
"that was brilliant."
Anne believed that the car was there to escort her to an engagement in Hartpury and kept going,
even speeding around a lane of slow-moving traffic as the police car flashed its lights. For this,
the princess incurred a £400 fine and five points on her license.
It wasn't the first time she'd been fined. In 1990, two speeding offenses cost her £150,
according to the Latin Times, and a one-month ban on driving along with the fine. Before that,
she was caught speeding twice during the 1970s. The first time, in 1972, brought her a written
warning; the second, in 1977, cost her £40. On the two occasions where her fines crossed the
£100 line, Anne didn't put up any protest. She pleaded guilty and accepted the fines.
Among Britons, constitutional monarchy remains the preferred form of government,
even if support has shrunk in recent years. Yet there have been few critics
of the monarchy with the acidity and facility of Christopher Hitchens. Throughout his life,
Hitchens railed against the principle of a hereditary head of state and the suitability
of any of the House of Windsor for the job. Back in 1979, he wrote in New Statesman:
"The British royal family is a rather uninspiring and dowdy crew of people."
Hitchens never minced words,
and he rarely eased up on public targets once he'd set his sights on them.
"For a supposedly serious and grown-up country
to submit itself to being lectured by a spoiled and pampered lordling is something embarrassing."
But he could pay compliments to his foes — though not always with grace,
and not always without making a critical point about someone else.
Speaking on C-SPAN, he offered some grudging admiration for the charity work Princess Anne
was often involved in, despite delivering the compliment in a fairly backhanded way.
"She's not photogenic, for one thing. She's a boring frump.
But she really is a spade-work charity worker."
All the royal family members serve as patrons of charities, but Princess Anne has been particularly
hands-on in this area of public service. The greatest share of her attention has
gone to the Save the Children Fund, the first charity she became involved with, in 1970,
according to the royal family's official website. The charity was founded in 1919,
and over a hundred years later, it operates in nearly 120 countries, with its site listing
programs in education, health care, emergency response, and protection against harm.
"All funds raised are helping Save the Children to support families who have
been hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis."
Anne took a large role in Save the Children as
soon as she became connected to the organization. In the same year she got involved, she became Save
the Children's president, a role she continued to play until 2017. When she stepped down from
that role, it was to take over from Queen Elizabeth II as the patron of the charity.
Amidst other Cold War tensions, the hostility between royalty and
communism held fewer international risks, but still ran deep. Before World War I,
all the royal houses of Europe were related. George V, Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather,
and Tsar [ZAR] Nicholas II were first cousins, close friends,
and so physically similar that they could pass for twins. Family bonds did not keep George from
denying Nicholas and his family asylum when they were overthrown by the Russian Revolution in 1917.
More than 70 years later, Princess Anne, Nicholas' third cousin,
received an invitation from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to visit his country.
According to UPI, Anne had previously visited the Soviet Union in 1973 as part of the British
team competing in the European Equestrian Championships, accompanied by her father
Prince Philip. But the two-week 1990 trip was an official state visit, the first made
by a royal to the Soviet Union since Nicholas' assassination. It was hoped that Anne might pave
the way for Queen Elizabeth II herself to visit. That wasn't to be; the Soviet Union collapsed the
following year. But the queen did visit the newly organized Russian Federation in 1994.