The first Her Royal HOTNESS
As a Palace aide writes a film script about Princess Anne’s startlingly racy love life . . .
THOUGH her enduring work ethic outshines her extended family — she completed 544 public engagements at home and abroad last year — Princess Anne remains a largely overlooked member of our royal tribe.
But now a cheeky reappraisal from an unlikely quarter threatens to bring her back into the limelight.
As the Mail revealed this week, an enterprising member of the royal staff has written a saucy screenplay called Anne: The Frisky Princess, which dwells on her younger days.
To those who know her only for her stern countenance, cottage-loaf hairdo and denial of all things fashionable, it may come as a surprise to learn that underneath the formidable exterior beats a passionate heart.
Bouncing about in the back of a horsebox, avoiding photographers while secretly meeting a married lover, even engendering the suspicion that one of her offspring was not her husband’s — the staid Princess Royal was not always so starchy as she appears.
The storyline would start with Gerald Ward, an Eton-educated ex-cavalry officer who later became Prince Harry’s godfather. They were an item in Anne’s late teens after she left Benenden school and began her public duties. Ward, a landowner and pillar of the establishment, went on to marry twice.
Then came Richard Meade, a dashing horseman who after Cambridge and the Royal Hussars went on to win three Olympic gold medals for eventing. His son, James Meade, is Prince William’s closest friend. All very appropriate, all very sensible.
But then through a chance meeting at Royal Lodge, Windsor, the 19-year-old Anne came to know Andrew Parker Bowles, a young captain in the Royal Horse Guards destined for greater things having served as ADC to the Governor-General in New Zealand.
Until then, Anne’s love-life had been varied, but now it became considerably more sophisticated. It helped that Andrew was a little over ten years older and handsome. It helped, too, that his father Derek Parker Bowles was the Queen Mother’s closest male friend, and that he was an outstanding horseman who rode in the Grand National.
Most of all, it helped that APB, as he was known, was vastly experienced in the ways of love.
At the time they met, he was ‘sort of’ engaged to a certain ex-deb called Camilla Shand, but that did not prevent him enjoying the charms of other women including Lady Caroline Percy, daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and Lady Amabel Lindsay, daughter of the Earl of Hardwicke. He’d already been engaged to Sue Morley, the daughter of a brigadier. But these three were merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of his skirt-chasing.
Anne had most recently been having an affair with Brian Alexander, younger son of war hero Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis. But though they’d been together the best part of a year, he wasn’t made of the right stuff for Anne. ‘A dear, lovely man, but too wet,’ observed her acidic aunt, Princess Margaret.
And so the affair began — despite the age gap, despite APB’s past. A friend recalled: ‘Andrew could never resist a challenge, and there’s nothing so aphrodisiac as the unattainable. Women had no hesitation in falling for him — he seemed to compel them into loving him.’
It fizzled out when Andrew was posted to Germany, but Anne was never to forget APB — a man once described by one grateful partner as ‘the greatest lover in London’.
Parker Bowles would go on to marry Camilla in 1973, but despite their relationship already having survived seven bumpy years, he led her a merry dance all the way to the altar.
Many believe that it was revenge which fuelled Camilla’s very determined attempts to get Prince Charles into bed — that if Andrew was going to have the Queen’s daughter as his lover, she would have Her Majesty’s son. She did not have to try very hard.
But just as Charles and Camilla could not then marry — he was too young, she’d had too many lovers — neither could Andrew and Anne. Parker Bowles was a Roman Catholic, and in those days that alone was sufficient to scupper a royal romance.
So Andrew went back to Camilla, and Charles went on to marry Diana. On July 15, 1973, the love of Anne’s life tied the knot with his girlfriend of seven years, Camilla Shand. Within four months, Anne had stalked up the aisle to a waiting Captain Mark Phillips.
Marriage on the rebound? It seems entirely possible. One friend at the time remarked: ‘She was in pieces over Andrew’s marriage to Camilla. But she’s made of stern stuff — she sought out and found a Photofit of Andrew, and married him.’
Phillips, said the snobs, was a pale imitation of APB — a cavalryman but from a less fashionable regiment, public-school-educated but less aristocratic, good looking but less handsome, and altogether less sexy.
Nonetheless, he was a magnificent horseman — Olympic gold standard — and stimulated Anne to the extent that when they attended showjumping events together, their horsebox could often be seen bouncing from side to side.
The marriage lasted 19 years, but the wheels had fallen off long before. Temperamental differences could be said to have driven a wedge between them. But there was something else.
Zara Phillips, their second child — Peter was the first — was born nearly eight years into the marriage in 1981, but there was speculation at the time that she was not the daughter of the Captain.
Anne was often attended to at public engagements by a handsome personal bodyguard, Sergeant Peter Cross of the Royal Protection Squad. That there was an affair is beyond doubt — Anne was seen by a Buckingham Palace official kissing the policeman, who was quietly removed by Scotland Yard.
Upset at having been fired for something which was not entirely his fault, Cross went to a red-top newspaper and spilled the beans.
Anne would call him when he was off-duty, he confessed, and ask if he would ‘like to spend a day in the country’. Sometimes they would meet at a cottage on her Gloucestershire estate, sometimes at an anonymous house in Surrey.
When Anne went into hospital in May 1981 to give birth to Zara, she called Cross to let him know her movements. And it was Cross who said he received the first telephone call from the Princess once she’d given birth: ‘I’ve had my baby — it’s a girl. We’re both fine.’
Buckingham Palace, deeply disgruntled at his revelations appearing in print, put it about that Cross was ‘a vain man who indulged in several extramarital affairs’. They did not, however, say he was a liar.
Before too long, Anne was involved with a royal equerry, Timothy Laurence. He was unmarried, but somehow, letters he wrote to Anne pledging his undying love got into the hands of a tabloid newspaper.
Anne squashed any chance of the incident turning into a scandal by announcing, in her usual crisply decisive way, that she and Laurence would marry, which they did in December 1992, eight months after her divorce from Mark Phillips.
That might have been the end of the royal romancing, but for the fact that rumours of Anne’s infatuation for Andrew Parker Bowles continued to bob to the surface.
Andrew and Camilla had divorced in the wake of the ‘Camillagate’ tapes, which exposed his wife’s affair with Prince Charles, and he went on to marry old flame Rosemary Pitman.
But after Rosemary’s death from cancer in 2010, the Princess and APB were spotted chatting animatedly at Royal Ascot. They were rumoured to be once again spending time in each other’s company, although doubters pooh-poohed speculation by some friends and family that they might reignite their relationship.
Although chinks had appeared in Anne’s marriage to Laurence, these days it seems as strong as ever it was.
So what is it about Princess Anne and her attitude to love? ‘She followed her instincts with aggressive openness,’ wrote her biographer Brian Hoey. She took her chances, she had her fun. For any film-maker, the Princess Royal’s love-life is rich territory indeed.
Parker Bowles was vastly experienced in the ways of love Anne was seen kissing her bodyguard