Despite her own grief at losing her mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, it’s been revealed that Princess Anne was a pillar of strength and support for all around her immediately following the Queen’s passing.
The Princess Royal has lived a full and interesting life, but among the things you might not know about Princess Anne, the one fact that seems universally known is how hard-working she is.
Such is her reputation that it doesn’t come as a surprise that she was “indispensable” to the family during a time of great sadness, with her brother, King Charles, turning to her for support and help.
In a new book by royal author Robert Hardman, he suggests that it was one of the newly appointed King Charles’s first acts to ask his sister, who recently let slip her sweet nickname for her brother, to take charge of the comings and goings at Balmoral Castle as they all came to terms with the loss of their matriarch and monarch.
“One of the King's first decisions was to ask Princess Anne to take charge of the house party now rapidly expanding at Balmoral Castle,” Hardman wrote in the book, serialised by Mail Online.
“The Princess Royal would prove indispensable over the next few days. She was there when Prince Harry eventually arrived.”
It was the Princess Royal who was there to greet Harry and provide a warm welcome after the Duke of Sussex travelled alone to Balmoral, finding out his grandmother had died by a breaking news alert.
The book recounts, “She greeted him with a hug and escorted him up to the Queen's bedroom, where he was left to pay his respects to his late grandmother. Harry then joined the family dinner downstairs.”
“Neither his father nor his brother was there, however. The King and Queen Camilla had, by now, returned to Birkhall, their home on the Balmoral estate.”
The book does suggest that the King had tried to get in touch with Harry himself, to share the news of the Queen’s death personally, but he was already in the air and unreachable.
When it was confirmed the Queen had passed away, her private secretary put the historic moment in a memo. With less than 20 words, the 70-year reign of Elizabeth II came to an end.
The memo, which is now part of the Royal Archives, read, “Very peaceful. In her sleep. Slipped away. Old age. She wouldn't have been aware of anything. No pain.”
Princess Anne herself shared some rare comments about being around her mother during her final days in the BBC documentary, Charles III: The Coronation Year.
Speaking on the feature, which aired on BBC One on Boxing Day 2023, the Princess Royal revealed her "relief" after the funeral, and that that her mother was still thinking of others as she knew her time was coming.
Anne said, “There was a moment when she felt that it would be more difficult if she died at Balmoral… I think we did try and persuade her that shouldn’t be part of the decision-making process. So I hope she felt that that was right in the end.”
Robert Hardman’s book supports this, as he writes, “Right to the end, she was endearingly conscious of causing unnecessary inconvenience to others.”
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