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parks the events were held and getting to know the horsy world in which she felt most
at home. It was in this hard-riding, raunchy circle that she was to meet her future
husband, Captain Mark Phillips, one of the principal eventing stars.
Since her eighteenth birthday in August 1968, Anne had been promoted, on Elizabeth’s
orders, to being referred to as Princess Anne and addressed by the household as ‘Ma’am’
and by the staff as ‘Your Royal Highness’. She had her own suite of rooms at
Buckingham Palace, sharing a sitting-room with her brother, and was entitled to
£15,000 from the Civil List. She had her own car, a Rover 2000, and was already an
expert driver, having learned early, like her brother, driving round the family estates.
She had carried out her first solo official engagement in March, when she presented the
1st Battalion, the Welsh Guards, with the Welsh emblem, the leek, on St David’s Day; for
that and for subsequent solo engagements, the Queen ‘lent’ her one of her younger
ladies-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey.
From being a dumpy schoolgirl, criticized by Women’s Wear Daily for her puppy fat,
her ‘frumpy fur stoles and middle-aged evening gowns’, she began to slim down,
wearing contemporary clothes – even trouser suits – and was seen dancing on stage at
the controversial musical Hair to the consternation of a senior duke, who described
himself as ‘very surprised with her. She’s not particularly pretty, yet she was wearing a
trouser suit, of all things. I’ve seen the show myself. Dreadful… People doing all sorts of
things under that blanket, and standing naked…’ 8 She was developing her own life,
apart from her brothers. She hardly saw Charles, although their rooms were at opposite
ends of the same corridor; Andrew and Edward were nine and fourteen years younger
than she was and she did not entirely relish their company. Seeing them during their
school holidays was ‘enough, quite frankly’, she admitted during a television interview
on the children’s programme Blue Peter, when she implied that she thought they were
rather spoiled: ‘you always consider that they’re not always getting the sort of discipline
you got when you were small’.
Meanwhile, she had gone from strength to strength in her favourite sport – three-day
eventing – so that by 1971 she had qualified for the Badminton horse trials, a royal
family occasion hosted by the Duke of Beaufort at his magnificent house in
Gloucestershire. Riding one of Philip’s former polo ponies, Doublet, and competing with
top British and European riders, she managed to come in fifth while her future husband,
Mark Phillips, won the championship. Later that year she won the European individual
championship at Burghley in front of her parents and 50,000 people; Elizabeth proudly
presented her with the trophy. She was only twenty-one and had been eventing for just
three years before she reached the top. BBC TV viewers voted her Sports Personality of
the Year and she polled the highest votes from the British Sportswriters’ Association as
‘the person who has done the most to enhance British sporting prestige internationally’.
She was completely fearless, a natural athlete and as expert at handling a London bus
on the Metropolitan Police skid-pan as she was at driving or even firing a gun from a
Chieftain tank when visiting the regiment of which she was Colonel-in-Chief, the 14/20
Hussars.