It was a soft summer’s day in 1993 and in the village of Scadabay, on the east coast of Harris, Mrs MacLeod was just thinking of getting her man’s tea on when she noticed a couple splashing up from the shore, their small but elegant yacht having dropped anchor.
They bought some of her homespun knitting; admired her Harris tweed. He was unremarkable; she, with her stately up-do, engaging grin and exquisitely elocuted voice, was rather striking.
When they parted, Mrs MacLeod asked them to sign her visitors’ book. And felt puzzled. ‘Just… Anne?’ she murmured. ‘Will you not be adding your surname?’
Her guest beamed. ‘I don’t use one’ – and, only then, did Mrs MacLeod realise who ‘Anne and Tim’ really were.
At 75, the Princess Royal has long lived down some of the spikier incidents of her youth.
Like the day she told photographers at the Badminton Horse Trials to naff orf or – rather more magnificently – when, the target of a terrifying kidnap attempt in March 1974 and when the gun-toting madman ordered her to step out of the limousine, Anne snapped: ‘Not bloody likely…’
She has long been a national treasure. Frugal, no-nonsense, an accomplished horsewoman and the hardest-working member of all the Royal Family.
In 2024 alone, Anne carried out 474 engagements. Nothing throws her. She once refused to abandon a visit to Madagascar despite a little local difficulty – bubonic plague; once kept a cool head as a loose horse pranced, out of control, at Trooping the Colour.
HRS Princess Anne the Princess Royal pictured at the Festival of British Eventing at Gatcombe Park
When a garrulous local councillor tried to hurry her along through people each desperate to meet her, she silenced him with a sharp: ‘Stop wittering, man…’
But her preferred weapon is the hard, sharp stare. Anne watches her weight like a hawk and is often, accordingly, sighted in elegant frocks and coat-dresses she was snapped in decades before. The floral-print dress she donned for her big brother’s wedding in July 1981 had a second coming, at the marriage feast of their cousin Lady Rose Windsor, in 2008.
L IKE her father, she does not suffer fools gladly; dislikes limp handshakes and people who overlard their sentences with ‘Your Royal Highness’. But, like her late mother, she feels no need for constant chatter.
‘She has a quality I value highly, which is companionable silence,’ says Lord Coe, often in her company as the Princess Royal is president of the British Olympic Association – indeed, she competed in the three-day equestrian event at the Montreal Games half a century ago. ‘If you walk around cross-country courses with her, it’s very easy – it’s not conversation for the sake of conversation.’
But she has a particular regard for Scotland. She has been for 40 years president of the Scottish Rugby Union, and was in the stands at Cardiff the other day; sings Flower of Scotland with decided relish.
She is a Knight of the Thistle, Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, and has twice served as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Her innumerable patronages, this side of the Tweed, include the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies.
She seems particularly to cherish the Western Isles; few years pass without Anne turning up for some low-key but delightful engagement in the Outer Hebrides. In August 2024, for instance, she hit the village of Carloway to open its former school, rather splendidly repurposed as a community centre and shop, amid other Lewis engagements.
In the days of the Royal Yacht Britannia, the Queen and her family enjoyed a cruise through the Hebrides every year. But Anne and Vice-Admiral Lawrence are regular private visitors too – slipping around in their yacht in the long days of summer, stepping discreetly ashore to buy provisions, queuing in some village Co-op like everyone else.
Not least in pursuit of the Princess Royal’s other passion, horses apart – she adores lighthouses. Anne has been a pharologist since the Queen paid her first official visit to Lewis and Harris in 1956, with Philip and her family in tow – and the assorted gigs included a tour of the Tiumpan Head light, at the extremity of the Eye Peninsula.
She has ever since been fascinated by storm-washed headlands, stately towers, timed ‘flash-signatures’ and round-room living – and, as Master of the Corporation of Trinity House in London and, since 1993, Patron to the Northern Lighthouse Board in Edinburgh, she is notionally in charge of every lighthouse, lightbuoy and lightship the length of the realm.
Someone in 2008 let slip that she planned, granted vitality and length of years, to visit every single lighthouse in Scotland. There are 208 and, to date, the Princess Royal is thought to have ticked off half of them.
In February 2023 she was delighted to pen the foreword for Christopher Nicholson’s Rock Lighthouses of Britain and Ireland. ‘Lighthouses are an enduring symbol of man’s tenacity, ingenuity, and altruism in the face of the unrelenting power and destructive force of nature,’ she began.
The Princess pictured at what is thought to be the world's smallest light in North Queensferry
‘Over the centuries they have enabled many lives to be saved, and in so doing have become part of our history, folklore, and engineering achievements.
‘Built by men of courage and vision they have become symbols of our determination to co-exist with nature.’ Her life is one of unpretentious simplicity. Anne often drives herself to her public engagements.
When entertaining visitors – at Gatcombe Park or in her apartment at St James’s Palace – Tim usually makes the tea. She dispensed decades ago with most of her staff: everyone is expected to muck in with the hoovering, laundry duties and that.
Gatcombe Park is run, indoors and out, by six people and in friendly informality. ‘The living room is a small, old-fashioned affair,’ one visitor has panted, ‘laden with books, trinkets, photographs and a dated television’.
These have not been easy years for this stately lady. She lost her father in 2021 and the Queen 17 months later. It was Anne who had to soothe the near-hysterical Prince Harry; who, the Sunday following, accompanied her mother’s coffin to Edinburgh.
In 2024 she was fortunate to survive a serious incident with her horse that left her dazed and hospitalised.
The King’s health travails, of late, have forced Anne to pick up much of the slack and her thoughts on the conduct of other close kin are probably unprintable.
Yet the Princess Royal battles on: shrewd, alert, indefatigable. Our greatest ‘Princess of the Blood’, and the best Queen we will never have.
