Mourning her mother. Princess Anne honored Queen Elizabeth II with a touching gesture in the aftermath of her September 2022 death.
Anne, the only daughter of the late queen and the late Prince Philip, curtsied as her mother’s coffin passed by the royals’ Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, Scotland just days after Her Majesty’s passing at her Balmoral estate.
On September 12, 2022, the princess walked alongside her brothers, King Charles III, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, as they followed behind the coffin as it arrived at Edinburgh’s St. Giles’ Cathedral from Balmoral.
Anne, the second eldest child of Elizabeth and Philip, was only 3 years old when her mother assumed the throne in 1953 and became queen of England, the position she held for a historic 70 years. While Anne earned the title of Princess upon her mother’s ascension, Elizabeth declared her Princess Royal 30 years later, a distinction awarded at the monarch’s discretion to the eldest daughter of the royal family.
While Anne and her siblings may have had an unconventional upbringing as royals, the family of six enjoyed numerous vacations together throughout the years, a welcome respite from their busy lives and the glow of the spotlight.
As Anne recalled in the BBC’s September 2022 program, A Tribute To Her Majesty The Queen, her parents were able to spend more time with their children while they were on holiday.
“The holiday times were pretty well kept, actually, from our perspective,” she revealed, noting that Elizabeth and Philip were “nearly always around.”
The late queen loved her getaways, Anne added, “partly because it included all the things that she enjoyed, includ[ing] the countryside, the dogs, the horses and just being out and about and being able to get away a bit from that public gaze.”
The Princess Royal, like her siblings, greatly admired the late sovereign — for her service to her country, as a mother and when looking at her 73-year marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh, who passed away in April 2021 at the age of 99.
In a 2017 interview with ITV, Anne — who has been married twice: first to ex-husband Mark Phillips from 1973 to 1992, then to her husband, Timothy Laurence, since the year she and Phillips finalized their divorce — noted that for her parents, a “sense of partnership was really important.”
“It was a very much complimented each other’s strengths and skills and that continued to be true” throughout their seven decades of marriage.
Keep scrolling to see Anne and Elizabeth’s relationship throughout the years.
