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egun in the 1960s and epitomized to a relative degree by Margaret’s marriage to a
man who earned his living taking photographs (even if his mother had married an earl)
was in full flood. Captain Mark Phillips, a professional soldier with decent, reasonably
well-off parents and a respectable middle-class background, was an acceptable husband;
whether he was a long-term prospect or merely a passing phase in the Princess’s life was
another matter. A remark Elizabeth is said to have made at the time indicates that she
had diagnosed the true cause of his attraction: ‘I shouldn’t wonder if their children are
four-legged.’ The Queen Mother, displaying a similar flippancy, delivered the verdict
that ‘They could almost have been computer-dated.’ 1 Privately it seems that Anne’s
parents were not overly impressed by her choice (‘they were frightfully against it’, a
relation said), but relieved to see her safely married. Charles received the news of his
sister’s engagement in a letter from his father while serving in the Navy in the
Caribbean. He experienced, he told a friend, ‘a spasm of shock and amazement’ at the
prospect of ‘such a ghastly mismatch’; later, according to reports, he dubbed his brotherin-law
‘Fog’. The general opinion at court was that once the physical attraction had
passed, Anne might find her husband dull, but, since childhood, what Anne wanted she
got. They hoped that the shared interest in horses would carry the couple through. In an
informal engagement photograph of the two families together with the engaged couple,
Elizabeth, characteristically, seemed more interested in their ‘his and hers’ black
labradors, Flora and Moriarty.
Mark Phillips had appealed to Anne as the man who could beat her at eventing and
whose superior horsemanship she could admire. Outsiders might find his conversation
limited – ‘if you ever sat next to Mark Phillips you had to know about army manoeuvres
or dressage,’ a royal relation said, ‘and if you didn’t know about either of those subjects
you’d had it…’ For Anne, however, such things were a mutual interest. Mark Phillips
was handsome enough to be attractive and, being quiet, calm and rather shy and
inarticulate, he could never compete with her on a personal level. Their engagement
was announced on 30 May 1973, and they were married with due royal splendour in
Westminster Abbey on 14 November, Charles’s twenty-fifth birthday. Beforehand the
royal image-makers had been at work; Norman Parkinson photographed Anne, a
contemporary fairy princess in a filmy Zandra Rhodes long dress, a diamond tiara set
on her fashionably coiffed long blonde hair, standing in the Long Gallery at Windsor
Castle, loving and submissive in front of her handsome soldier husband, gallant in
regimental mess kit and spurs. There was a television interview with the couple, when a
clearly camera-shy Phillips stumbled through (perhaps unnerved by his army instructor’s
advice to ‘keep quiet and keep smiling’), but Anne, utterly relaxed and direct,
demonstrated to a wider public for the first time that she was a television natural.
Suddenly she was popular again, a popularity briefly renewed by her cool bravery in
the face of a determined kidnap attempt by an armed man in the Mall the following
year. It was a serious incident; the attacker, with a history of mental illness, seized Anne
by the arm and tried to drag her out of the car. Her detective, the chauffeur, a
policeman and a journalist were shot, the detective three times.