At the end of 2023, it was no surprise when Anne, Princess Royal, was yet again crowned the hardest-working royal, reported to participate in an astonishing 457 engagements in a single year. Appreciation for the dutiful 73-year-old princess and her no-nonsense, drama-free style has gained her increasing respect in a family rife with turmoil and squabbles. It has also caused some to wistfully wonder what might have been. “Anne, the Princess Royal,” Autumn Brewington wrote in The Washington Post, “is the best king Britain will never have.”

This has been a sentiment shared about the clutch Princesses Royal in British history. Even today, eight-year-old Princess Charlotte, who may one day be given the Princess Royal title, has become beloved for her bold, outgoing attitude and leadership (particularly noticeable with her brothers). Her mother, Kate Middleton, has said that Charlotte is “the one in charge.”

A purely honorific title, “Princess Royal” is bestowed at the discretion of reigning monarchs to their eldest daughter at any time during her life. Along with Anne, the seven Princesses Royal have been Princess Mary, Princess of Orange (1631–1660); Anne, Princess of Orange (1709–1759); Charlotte, Queen Consort of Württemberg (1766–1828); Victoria, Empress of Germany and Queen Consort of Prussia (1840–1901); Louise, Duchess of Fife (1867–1931); and Mary, Countess of Harewood (1897–1965).

Princesses Royal have proven to be great assets to the crown at home and abroad. Much like Princess Anne, they have tended to be headstrong, bold, hard workers, with spines of steel and a commitment to duty. Family stalwarts, they have served as mentors to their sometimes wayward brothers, and dutifully carried out the wishes of their parents—at times to the detriment of their own happiness and full potential.

According to The Princess Royal: From Princess Mary to Princess Anne by Helen Cathcart, the origin of the Princess Royal title is murky at best. Long before Princess Mary, eldest daughter of the doomed King Charles I and his French wife, Henrietta Maria, was referred to as “Princess Royal” in 1642, the oldest daughter of French kings was dubbed “Madame Royale.” Likewise, the eldest daughter of Scottish kings was known as the “first daughter of Scotland.”

From the Archive: A Royal Spark

While it has been stated that Queen Henrietta Maria, a French princess by birth, pushed for her daughter Mary to have the title, Cathcart believes the idea may have originated within Dutch royal circles to increase the prestige of Princess Mary when she married William, Prince of Orange, in 1641. “It may seem conclusive,” she writes, “that the distinction thus originated in 1642 as a courtesy title improvised by a Dutchman.”

Whatever the truth, the title would bring the proud, beautiful Mary little happiness.

After her father, Charles I, was executed in 1649, and her husband died the next year, Mary worked tirelessly to support her exiled family, her court becoming a “nest of vipers” conspiring against Cromwell’s England. Constantly in a power struggle with her mother-in-law during their coregency of her minor son William, Mary would live to see her beloved brother Charles II win back the English throne in 1660, only to die of smallpox while visiting England that same year. In 1689, her son was crowned King William III of England.

The next Princess Royal would find herself living a life that almost mirrored her predecessor. Born in 1709, Princess Anne was the second child of the future King George II and his wife, Caroline of Ansbach. Clever and headstrong, Anne was gifted musically and close to her music teacher, the legendary George Handel. As a child, she was apparently jealous of her older brother Frederick, heir to the throne, claiming, “I would gladly die tomorrow if I could be queen today.”

In her early 20s, Anne finally got her wish when she married William IV, Prince of Orange. Desperate to escape her sheltered life, she told her mother, according to The Princess Royal, “I would marry him if he were a monkey.” Although hardworking, she was considered imperious and convinced of the superiority of the British, making her disliked by the Dutch (and another powerful mother-in-law). After her husband’s death in 1751, she became regent of her son William until her death in 1759.

The title Princess Royal would not be used again until the birth of Charlotte, the eldest daughter of King George III and Queen Charlotte, in 1766. Although the title was not formally given to her until 1789, from birth she was called “the Princess Royal” by her family. “Governess” to her 14 royal siblings, she was a contradiction—dowdy and shy but with an enormous amount of majesty and dignity.

“At the core of her shyness was her rank, the strange special distinction of being Princess Royal, setting her apart,” Cathcart writes. “Her own mother spoke of her and addressed her as Princess Royal, never Charlotte. To her brothers and sisters near her own age she was always Princess Royal, though the younger children called her ‘Royal.’”

According to Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III by Flora Fraser, her notorious brothers were allowed to run amok, while she and her five sisters were kept in spinsterhood by her overbearing parents, with Charlotte working as her mother’s secretary. Her innate strength was noted during her father’s bouts with mental illness, which took an enormous toll on her family. Indeed, palace life, Charlotte noted, according to The Princess Royal, was like living “in a cloister not a kingdom.”

Supported by her brothers, the stifled Royal began to rebel, separating herself from her parents and appearing less at public events. In 1797, at the age of 30, she finally found a way out of her prison, when she married Hereditary Prince Frederick William of Württemberg, an older widower with a scandalous marital history.

And as Fraser notes, Charlotte flourished as Queen Consort of Württemberg, despite rumors of her husband’s violent temper. “She is born to preside…with equal softness and dignity…,” the novelist Fanny Burney wrote. Respected as a charitable ruler, she lovingly raised her three stepchildren, enduring estrangement from her English family during the Napoleonic Wars. After her husband died in 1816, she presided as a benevolent grande dame, her frame carried everywhere in a chair, a much better ruler than her beloved wastrel brother King George IV could ever be.

Perhaps, one of the greatest what-ifs in British history is the case of Princess Victoria, the first child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Born in 1840, “Vicky” was bestowed the title Princess Royal at two months old. In 1841, she was superseded in the line of succession by her younger brother Albert, known as Bertie (the future King Edward VII).

This did not stop Prince Albert from focusing much of his attention on the exceptionally intelligent and confident Vicky, who he believed would bring his liberal (for the time) ideals to the continent through a brilliant marriage.

“The depth of the prince’s adoration for his firstborn would not be repeated with any of the eight children who came after Vicky,” Jerrold M. Packard writes in Victoria’s Daughters. “A girl who started out and always remained truly extraordinary, her amazing future capabilities by all accounts apparent to her enchanted father from her earliest days.”

Victoria and Albert were far less enamored with the wild and unfocused Bertie, who Vicky bested at every turn. According to author Jane Ridley, author of The Heir Apparent, even the queen believed Bertie was “injured” by being compared to Vicky, who “put him down by a look—or a word.”

It is no surprise, then, that at eight, Bertie believed his sister was the one destined to rule. “You see,” he said, per Ridley, “Vicky will be Mama’s successor. Mama is now the Queen, and Vicky will have her crown, and you see Vicky will be Victoria the second.”

Vicky’s future as a crusading, progressive ruler seemed assured in 1858, when she married the handsome Frederick William, an heir to the Prussian throne. Although her chattiness, progressiveness, and confidence charmed Fritz, it appalled the militaristic, pompous Prussian court, which Vicky referred to as “humbug.”

Vicky was tragically misunderstood in Berlin from the start. Her parents expected her to promote English ideals and enlightenment, and Vicky, an unapologetic Anglophile, refused to bend to the ways of the cold, cruel Prussian Royal family. She and the equally liberal Fritz did what they could, rejecting antisemitism, promoting women’s education, a constitutional monarchy, and the arts. But they were thwarted at every turn by persecution, and the ultraconservative authoritarian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who in 1871 achieved his dream of consolidating the German empire.

During Queen Victoria’s widowhood, she and Vicky poured their hearts out to each other, and Vicky continued to be a powerful force in the English royal family. It was she who first suggested Bertie, the Prince of Wales, marry the enchanting Princess Alexandra of Denmark. But she held much less sway with her own family and was disgusted by her eldest son, Wilhelm, (later the notorious Wilhelm II, who abdicated in 1918) who adopted the hard-line stance of von Bismarck.

Vicky and Fritz seem to have been born under an unlucky star. Fritz was already dying of cancer when he was finally crowned King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany in 1888. He died 99 days later. With her despised son Wilhelm on the throne, Vicky was horrified when he stated that “the will of the king is the supreme law.” She wrote her mother in distress:

The Tsar, an infallible Pope…or our poor Charles I might have pronounced that phrase, but a monarch of the 19th century...My God, I think…Fritz's son and the grandson of my dear father took such a direction and also misunderstood the principles with which it is still possible to govern.

Displaced by her son, Vicky retreated to her new palace of “Friedrichshof,” which became a “mecca for Vicky’s huge extended family and far-ranging circle of friends and admirers,” per Victoria’s Daughters. She enjoyed a close relationship with her three youngest daughters, and seemed to be at peace with what might have been.

As Vicky was dying of breast cancer, the kaiser and her doctors refused to give her enough morphine. Her brother, the Prince of Wales, was appalled by her treatment and attempted to increase her medication. But he failed. Vicky died in August 1901. “Before the warmth had gone out of her body,” Packard writes, “Willy set his Prussian cavalry searching every cavity and cubbyhole of Friedrichshof in a vain attempt to find the letters he suspected would show the world just how he had treated the woman who brought him into the world.”

The most arguably impressive Princess Royal was followed by one of the least impressive. Princess Louise, eldest daughter of the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, was born in 1867. Retiring, awkward, and nicknamed “whispering Louise,” she preferred family life over any sort of public life.

But Louise would exhibit a secret strength in 1911, when her family was shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco. According to Edward VII’s Children by John Van der Kiste, Louise refused to leave her husband, the Duke of Fife, and they would not leave the ship until all other women and children had been evacuated. They waded to the shore clinging to their daughter Maud, who they had saved from a crashing wave.

Princess Louise’s death in 1931 paved the way for a much more public princess to be given the title of Princess Royal in 1932. Mary, the only daughter of the future King George V and Queen Mary, was born in 1897.

Though painfully shy in public, with a slight speech impediment, according to Princess Mary, Mary displayed an inner strength, common sense, and confidence that her brothers, the future Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor) and George VI did not possess.

“Mary was our close companion in many of our activities,” the Duke of Windsor wrote in A King’s Story. “Loving horses, she rode better than either Bertie or I, but her yellow curls concealed a fearlessness that commanded our respect. Mary could at times be quite a ‘tomboy,’ but at others…she wielded a sweet tyranny over our lives.”

Much like many a past and future Princess Royal, she was a diligent rule follower and threatened to “tell Mama.” “Bertie and I discovered…the power that little girls the world…exert over their brothers,” the duke recalled, according to Princess Mary.

According to Princess Mary, the Duke of Windsor once claimed that dutiful Mary would have made a much better monarch than he. However, the Duke of Windsor’s awe of his sister would turn to pity in early adulthood, as she was kept cloistered by her parents. “She never complains,” he wrote, per Princess Mary. “The trouble is that she is far too unselfish and conscientious.”

“You need not feel so sorry for me,” Princess Mary told him. “The only things I object to are those rather silent dinners you know so well, when Papa will read the paper.”

Indeed, Mary was quietly asserting her power, leading her biographer Elisabeth Basford, author of Princess Mary, to call her “Britain’s first modern Princess.” Still a teenager, she spearheaded a huge multiyear effort to give every Briton serving in World War I a Christmas gift, which consisted of a tin filled with tobacco, cigarette papers, and lighters.

In 1918, at her 21st birthday dinner, she pleaded with her father to let her train as a nurse, a shocking proposition for a princess. For two years, Mary worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she was noted for her unflappable, kindly manner, “never so happy as when allowed to do the ordinary work of the average commoner,” according to Princess Mary.

After her marriage to Henry Viscount Lascelles in 1922, Mary would become a workhorse for the royal family by traveling the world as a representative of the monarchy, becoming president of the Girl Guides, championing women’s education, war relief, and the medical profession with an “immense power of application.” She played peacemaker during the abdication crisis of 1936 and was the first female chancellor in Britain when she was elevated to the position at the University of Leeds in 1951.

According to Basford, Mary set the mold for modern princesses, particularly the current Princess Royal. “In lieu of charm,” diarist Cynthia Jebb wrote, “here was a person who was anxious to help, brought up in the old school, well-educated, intelligent, well-read, aware of what is going on in the world and forming a sensible judgment on it.”

As soon as Princess Mary died in 1965, the press began to ask when Princess Anne would be given the Princess Royal title by her mother. According to Cathcart, Princess Anne was annoyed by the constant queries, one time snapping, “It’s nothing to do with me!”

After years of constant service, Queen Elizabeth II gave her daughter the title in 1987. Prince Philip was the one to announce the gift to his daughter, with whom he shared a close bond, at his birthday luncheon that year, stating, “The Queen has been pleased to declare that our dear daughter shall henceforth bear the style and title of Princess Royal.” Anne was no doubt pleased, but she had to get on with it—that afternoon she was off to another charitable engagement.