There was a time, not long ago, when nobody had a good word to say about the Princess Royal. She was the Frown Princess, the one with the sour face and the truculent manner, the one didn't suffer fools for one second, let alone gladly. She would snap at pensioners, and scorn photo opportunities that charities she supported had worked their socks off to manufacture. The upshot was neatly summed up by James Whitaker, the late royal correspondent: if Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Princess Royal were competing in a horse show, he said, photographers would 'line up at the finish to see Diana get her trophy, and at the water jump to see Anne fall in'.
That's changed, in a big way. Now the papers pullulate with charming pictures of a sunnily smiling (and 66-year-old) Anne at play with her grandchildren. She and her second husband, Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, are, friends say, contentedly 'at rest' together, after some rocky passages. Her austere personal style is favourably compared with the Prince of Wales's more apparently opulent tastes - she's into a slimline staff at her Gatcombe Park home, for instance, while he's surrounded by valets, aides de camp, harpists et al. And she's been seen beaming at her beloved Scottish rugby team as it at long, long last shows sparkle and elan - and one would have loved to be in the dressing room after the 2015 Rugby World Cup quarter-final in which what would have been a famous Scottish victory was ripped from their grasp by a wildly incorrect refereeing decision. Some reports had it that the Princess 'consoled' the team; others that she turned the air blue, something at which she has long been accomplished - one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, once threatened to jump out of a car the Princess was driving if her full-throated swearing didn't cease.
And, at a time when other members of the Royal Family are criticised as 'work-shy', she is a paragon of involvement, carrying out more engagements (544) in 2015 than almost all the younger members of the 'Firm' put together. 'She's got the duty gene,' says one very grand acquaintance. 'Absolutely admirably.' So admirable, indeed, he goes on to add, that she's 'the sort of woman you'd go into the jungle with'.
Anne has always had that quality. Richard Ralph, governor of the Falkland Islands when the Princess visited in 1996, hit the nail on the head. 'She does the tiara stuff beautifully,' he said, but was happiest in her 'jeans and Barbour'. No surprise there for those who saw her as a 19-year-old visiting the first regiment of which she was invited to be colonel-in-chief, the 14th/20th King's Hussars. Then, she scored eight bullseyes shooting a sub-machine gun from the hip, and drove a 52-ton Chieftain tank over three miles of rugged terrain - she was, enthused one young corporal, 'one of the few women who looks sexy in tank overalls'. It's the sort of look she's always been able to pull off precisely because 'she doesn't have an ounce of vanity in her', as one approving aristocrat told me. 'She'll recycle clothes without a care in the world - she doesn't give a tuppenny fuck.' At a time when brash has lost its lustre, that's a winning trait.
A pity, though, that she didn't have that sub-machine gun to hand in 1974 when the deluded Ian Ball attempted to kidnap her and hold her to ransom for £2m. It was far from funny: Ball cut in front of the Princess's limousine on the Mall and forced it to a halt. He had two guns and shot the Princess's bodyguard, the chauffeur, a young constable who ran to give help and a passing journalist, Brian McConnell, who'd approached him saying, 'Look, old man, these are friends of mine. Give me the gun.' (Later, McConnell continued to sound like a caricature British Second World War hero by remarking, 'Although the bullet cut a line across the front of my body, it missed all the clockwork.') Anne herself was both shrewd and forthright when Ball threatened her: 'I nearly lost my temper with him,' she later told an inquiry. 'But I knew that if I did, I should hit him and he would shoot me.' Still, when Ball pointed his gun at her and said, 'I want you to come with me for a day or two… I want two million. Will you get out of the car?', she replied, 'Not bloody likely - and I haven't got two million.' No wonder the Duke of Edinburgh pretended to a certain sympathy with Ball, sighing, 'If only he had known what he was getting into…'
So those no-nonsense, have-a-go virtues have always been part of the Princess's package. Sometimes, they were greeted enthusiastically, as when an 18-year-old Anne went to see the 'hippie musical' Hair and, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, 'listened to the show's crop of four-letter words and watched the nude scene without batting an eye. She rose to her feet immediately after the cast issued their nightly invitation for the audience to come on stage and dance. Cheers and applause rang out as the audience suddenly recognized her. "She was fantastic, really wild," said the company's manager.'
Groovy, baby, and she seemed for a moment to be in touch with the permissive times. There were even claims that she was a sex bomb, with a roving eye. One biographer, the invaluable Brian Hoey, wrote that, 'She followed her instincts with aggressive openness,' though Hoey also quoted one of her early (and Australian) suitors as very antipodeanly claiming: 'None of us got past the prickles to taste the goodies.' Perhaps he was a very early suitor: certainly, good-looking horsemen like Andrew Parker Bowles and Richard Meade preceded Captain Mark
Phillips, the Olympic equestrian gold-medallist she married in 1973. (The Princess herself took the individual title at the European Eventing Championship when only 21, and rode for Britain in the 1976 Montreal Olympics; later, she raced on both the flat and over jumps, remarking when
she retired that she had achieved at least one thing on behalf of ill-catered-for women riders: she had 'got them more lavatories'. She has a sense of humour and a quick wit
- check out her interview with Sir Terry Wogan on YouTube.)
Phillips - allegedly known in the Royal Family as 'Fog' because he was thick and wet - studiously avoided royal duties, preferring to concentrate on his career, an attitude at the polar opposite to the Princess's. They drifted apart. And it was during this marriage that attitudes towards Anne underwent a sea change. Her directness was construed as rudeness. Her shortness with the press earned her, well, a bad press. There even seemed to be a traitor in her ranks when billets doux written to her by Tim Laurence were leaked to The Sun before there was a public murmur of a possible divorce from Captain Phillips. And her preference for country matters was contrasted unfavourably with the glitter and glamour that surrounded Diana, Princess of Wales. Anne was cast as a grumpy old thing, interested only in horseflesh - 'When I appear in public,' she has ironically observed, 'people expect me to neigh, grind my teeth, paw the ground and swish my tail, none of which is easy' - as opposed to the saintly Diana. No love was lost between the two women.
But as the years have passed, so Anne has seemed to mellow, to have become more content, more at ease. She's still more than happy to chew the fat with such friends as Sir Jackie Stewart, the former Formula I champion, Mike Tucker, a Tetbury farmer, her one-time lady-in-waiting, Dame Shân Legge-Bourke, and her old flame, Andrew Parker Bowles. She is, too, particularly close to various of the numerous charities of which she's patron - Save the Children and Riding for the Disabled among them - and feels that people there know her best; she is, one otherwise studiedly discreet stalwart of Save the Children told me, 'our absolutely amazing patron. Very easy to talk to.' And she still relishes the Lucinda Greens and the Jane Holderness-Roddams of the horsey set of which she has long been an ornament - it's good to see the tradition continuing with Fox-Pitt offspring gambolling with her three-year-old granddaughter, Mia Tindall.
Indeed, anything equine still gets the Princess's vote: she regularly goes to the races at Cheltenham and the polo at Westonbirt, and her own Gatcombe Horse Trials are now a money-spinning must in the sporting calendar - as the Duke of Edinburgh waggishly put it, 'If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she's not interested.' She is still the apple of her father's eye, and it has become clearer than ever that what used to be reported to be a distant, formal relationship with the Queen was nothing of the sort: the two are both fond and admiring of each other - not least, on the Queen's part, of the cheese soufflés Anne used to cook for her during the darker days of her reign. As for the Prince of Wales, he has his views and Anne has hers, and she is not one to be overawed by position.
She and her husband revel in sailing their specially adapted Rustler 44 yacht, Ballochbuie, through Scottish waters, making a point of visiting lighthouses, a passion of hers - she's patron of the Northern Lighthouse Board and is keen to 'bag' all 205 of Scotland's main navigational beacons. Ballochbuie (named after an ancient Balmoral forest the couple love) is kept at Ardfern, a hamlet on Loch Craignish, in Argyll; the pair pop up to the village for a coffee at the Crafty Kitchen. The yacht has two cabins and a large galley - where, perhaps, the Princess knocks up the fish pies or macaroni cheese she favours for dinner, and the Vice Admiral conjures up his famous martinis, replete with olives and unwashed Sicilian lemon.
Their 'double-handed' sailing - that is, without a crew - is, says Yachting World, 'black run' cruising, and the seas around the Scottish isles are both famously difficult and rewarding; the Princess finds the Cairns of Coll 'pretty impressive', for instance, and waxes enthusiastic about the geese to be found there in winter. There are basking sharks too, and she 'once lost count at about 25 - that was extraordinary'. Another time a large pod of dolphins were 'coming at us from the top of the waves. They didn't quite jump over the top of the boat, but they looked like they were going to.' The one- and two-week sailing holidays she and Sir Tim fit into her demanding schedule are among the most pleasurable of her year, and the couple keep detailed records of the anchorages they've visited and the challenges these entail. No wonder a friend told me that sailing 'is the main thing' in the Princess's life, 'along with her children and horses, of course'.
There was, it's true, a wild time in her daughter Zara's life - the pierced tongue, the Ann Summers sex-toy party, the drunken rows with her then-boyfriend, the jockey Richard Johnson - that worried the Princess. But that is now past, after her marriage to Mike Tindall, the former England rugby centre, who himself courted controversy by chatting up an old flame and getting drunk in a dwarf-tossing bar in New Zealand just six weeks after his marriage to Zara. Now the couple live calmly and contentedly on the Gatcombe estate, and Anne recently opened the neighbouring Minchinhampton Rugby Football Club's new clubhouse, an event marked by a match between a Mike Tindall Invitation XV and
a Gloucestershire XV; Tindall, now retired from top-flight rugby, coaches and occasionally plays for Minchinhampton.
The Princess's elder child, Peter Phillips, was himself a good rugby player and studied sports science at Exeter University. Married to Autumn Kelly, a Canadian, he has two daughters - six-year-old Savannah and Isla, five - and has always managed to keep a low profile, save when he sold the rights to his wedding to Hello! for a reported £500,000. Like Mia Tindall, Savannah and Isla Phillips have been photographed with their grandmother at the Gatcombe Horse Trials, gleefully licking ice cream and running excitedly behind the Princess as she strode across the parkland, extra-tall walking stick at hand. Horses and grandchildren: what could make a princess happier, and more cherishable?
So it is that the Princess Royal's virtues have come into sharper, winning focus. The brave, medal-winning horsewoman. The punctilious public servant. The frugal housewife. The adept businesswoman who has turned her Gatcombe Horse Trials into a popular and profitable extravaganza. The stern but adoring grandmother. The serious-minded woman who rejected titles for her two children, Peter and Zara, the better for them to face the modern world. The dog-accompanied countrywoman. The woman who, with Vice Admiral Laurence, tacked Ballochbuie into safe harbour on the Isle of Eigg to track down the fan belt they needed to repair their engine - the only shock being that the gung-ho Princess did not rip off her tights and use them to fix it on the spot. And the battling woman who would not hesitate to hang, draw and quarter that referee who robbed Scotland of its glorious victory. At last Anne has got her due: she is both a National Treasure - and the Best King We Never Had.
[RelatedContent##default.23522##Display¬Normal##Looking for more?##KeepInline]
[RelatedContent##default.23369##Display¬Normal####KeepInline]
[RelatedContent##default.23653##Display¬Normal####KeepInline]
