The Queen was a strict granny who’d shake naughty Zara

SIGNIFICANTLY, only Princess Anne has managed to break free from the royal conventions to bring up her children in a relaxed and truly normal way.

She was the first of the royal children to marry. In keeping with tradition, the Queen offered her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, an earldom on their wedding day, but he declined, thus denying his future children a title.

Anne had said that she’d prefer a quiet wedding, but in deference to her mother she eventually agreed to Westminster Abbey, the traditional venue for royal weddings.

The Queen and Philip had high hopes for the marriage. When their first grandchild, Peter, was born on November 15, 1977, Elizabeth was about to conduct an investiture in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. But she was so overjoyed that she delayed the ceremony to call Philip, who was in Germany at the time.

He was equally delighted. He admired his forthright daughter and was convinced motherhood would soften her edges and give another dimension to her life.

Four years later, Anne gave birth to Zara; and as the children grew up, they often went to stay with the Queen — along with their nanny. But for all that Elizabeth was a doting granny, she was a strict one, too.

‘She was always chastising them,’ a rating on board the Royal Yacht Britannia recalled. ‘I’ve seen her shake Zara as she was so naughty, running up and down the main stairs on board the yacht and refusing to stop even when the Queen told her to do so.’

From the start, Anne refused to be influenced by her parents on how her children should be brought up.

Thus the Queen and Prince Philip’s first grandchild began his education, not with a governess but in a local nursery school in Minchinhampton in the Cotswolds.

‘I think the Queen found it all rather alarming,’ said a former footman. ‘But Anne wanted to do things her way and deal with the children herself.’

Her father understood. ‘It’s only too easy to think of education as a process of teaching young people about conventional academic subjects in schools,’ he said.

‘That is a very important aspect, but to give education this exclusive quality is to imply that young people need no other instruction or experience to prepare them for adult life.’

PROUD of his no-nonsense daughter, he was happy for her to get on with motherhood and to run her working life in whatever way she wished.

He took a similarly relaxed attitude when a cache of Anne’s love letters to Timothy Laurence, the Queen’s former equerry — was offered for sale to one of the Murdoch newspapers.

With a shrug, Philip just said: ‘Let them get on with it.’ He knew that Anne had a similar personality to his and would cope.

In the end, the letters weren’t published, and Anne went on to marry Laurence.

Philip was hopeful that she would find happiness with her second husband — but to this day, he continues to worry about her.