Unusual Aspects of King Charles and Princess Anne’s Relationship

Royals, like the rest of us, can be a little unusual at times. While King Charles III and Princess Anne’s relationship may seem comparable to any other sibling bond, the pair aren’t immune from exhibiting some rather eye-popping eccentricities. Whether these quirks were born out of the siblings’ admittedly unusual upbringing, or a reflection of a discordant dynamic evident in many families, is up to interpretation.

Time and time again, Princess Anne has proved she’s a total boss. As one might expect from the rowdy royal, she has long taken a joshing approach to her relationship with Charles. Notably, when Anne was mistakenly introduced as her brother at an event, she lightened the mood with a story of another time the siblings were mistaken for each other. “My brother tells a story of having visited an elderly care home in Scotland, and at the time he was in a kilt,” recalled Anne. “He actually heard when he was engaged in conversation… an old lady say ‘Is that the Princess Royal?’ He thought it was quite funny — and I’m not even wearing trousers today.”

Ribbing aside, there are some aspects to Charles and Anne’s relationship that are just plain odd. From a bizarre childhood to a ménage à quatre, let’s take a deep dive into strange things everyone just ignores about King Charles and Princess Anne’s relationship.

Prince Philip’s relationship with King Charles III was fraught at best. Despite being firstborn, Charles had to contend with his father favoring his younger sister, Princess Anne. In fact, Philip apparently considered Anne his “favorite son.” “Because she, in Philip’s eyes, showed a lot more strength of character than any of his sons,” Charles’ biographer, Anthony Holden, revealed in the documentary “Prince Charles at 50: Heir to Sadness.” “Particularly in childhood, Charles could be reduced to tears by Philip driving him on, thinking he was a bit of a wimp, that Anne was the tougher one and that’s what he wanted his son to be. That’s remained true in adulthood.”

Anne appeared to revel in being the favorite. While Charles was a quiet, timid boy, Anne was boisterous and headstrong. Unusually, it was Anne, rather than Charles, who behaved as if she were next in line to the throne. This led to her allegedly dominating and bullying her big brother, even instilling fear into him. “I’m not surprised Charles was frightened of Anne — even her bloody horses were terrified of her!” a stable hand remarked. “She behaved as if she had every intention of being the next monarch rather than her brother.”

On one occasion, Anne reportedly attacked Charles with her riding crop, causing him to burst into tears. “Why can’t you behave yourselves!” a furious Queen Elizabeth II responded.

Love triangles are messy enough without family members getting involved, not least being the main characters. In King Charles III and Princess Anne’s case, their love square was a family affair. In a development that appears as though it was plucked straight out of the “Days of Our Lives” writers’ room, Charles was once vying for the attention of Queen Camilla, who was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles, who was courting Anne.

The drama first began in 1970, by which point Camilla had known Parker Bowles for four years. However, he wasn’t ready to commit himself to her, and his eye subsequently wandered to Anne, who was his date for Ascot week. The pair reportedly grew smitten with one another. Meanwhile, Camilla, having been snubbed by Parker Bowles, turned her attention to Charles. To woo her love rival’s brother, Camilla had to bring out the big guns. “My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers. So how about it?” Camilla reportedly quipped upon meeting him.

It’s been alleged that Camilla pursued Charles as revenge against Parker Bowles and Anne. “She thought ‘Andrew is at the moment off with Princess Anne, you know her brother, teach Andrew a lesson.’ So she had a fling with Charles,” royal author Penny Junor said. Well, the ’70s was a time of debauchery, but even the most uninhibited post-hippies had their limits.

Petty fights with family members are commonplace, but Princess Anne took pettiness to a whole new level when she allegedly used her nephew’s christening as leverage against her brother. When Prince Harry was christened in 1984, Anne snubbed King Charles III and Princess Diana, instead choosing to go and shoot rabbits with her first husband, Mark Phillips. According to Robert Lacey’s book “Battle of Brothers,” Anne was angry that she hadn’t been appointed godmother to either Harry or Prince William, particularly since she had chosen Charles as godfather to her son, Peter Phillips. “The Prince did not return the compliment when it came to William — or, rather, according to rumor, he had very much wanted to invite his sister, only to be blocked by his wife,” wrote Lacey.

When an Australian TV station asked Anne about her being a no-show at Harry’s christening, she gave a bizarre, long-winded answer in which she explained why she chose to go hunting instead, though this has been deemed a poor excuse. “I was only given the choice of one day,” she said. “As far as we were concerned, it was a date my husband had fixed and he was away in Australia when all this came up. It was actually one of those rare occasions when we had actually made a plan a long way in advance, which is rare with us.”

It’s no secret that Princess Diana’s marriage to King Charles III was never going to last. But Charles had an ally in Princess Anne, with the siblings united in their jealousy of Diana. “Anne was indifferent to Diana from the very beginning,” Ingrid Seward wrote. “She treated the woman, who by marriage to her elder brother might have become her Queen, with withering disdain. She called her ‘a silly girl.'”

Anne allegedly referred to Diana as “The Dope” and was irritated by what she deemed her lack of work ethic. She saw Diana as attention-hungry, supposedly only appearing in public when she could steal the limelight, which was in contrast to what Anne considered her own commitment to relentless hard work. In fact, she was apparently so jealous of Diana that she complained about the princess’ neckline getting more media coverage than her.

It was a sentiment shared by Charles, who was reportedly extremely jealous of his wife and resented her being the center of attention at every engagement. “We’d be going round Australia, for instance, and all you could hear was, ‘Oh, she’s on the other side,'” Diana told the BBC’s Martin Bashir. “Now, if you’re a man, like my husband, a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks. And you feel low about it, instead of feeling happy and sharing it.”

Receiving extravagant gifts is one of the perks of being a royal. It’s routine for the Windsors to be lavished with jewels and finery, but sometimes they’re offered gifts that aren’t quite befitting royalty. Such gag gifts are made all the more bizarre when presented by fellow royals.

As revealed in the Channel 4 documentary “A Very Royal Christmas: Sandringham Secrets,” Princess Anne once gifted King Charles III a leather toilet seat for Christmas. It was an on-brand gag for Anne, who supposedly loves toilet humor, albeit a decidedly upper-class variation of it. “It’s the public school upbringing — and why wouldn’t Prince Charles like a white, leather loo seat from his sister Anne?” said former royal butler Paul Burrell. But the seemingly crude gift was a surprisingly apt one. As former royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter went on to explain, toilet seats were once colloquially referred to as the “throne.” “So buying a leather-bound loo seat was really Princess Anne’s way of saying, ‘Here you are, you’ve got your own personal throne,'” Arbiter quipped.

Anne’s light-hearted offering may have been an allusion to longstanding rumors that Charles takes his own personal toilet seat with him whenever he travels. Royal author Tom Bower referenced Charles’ alleged lavatorial quirk in his book “Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles.” However, Charles has dismissed such rumors as nonsense (though he didn’t quite use such SFW words).

Getting involved in the love lives of one’s siblings is sure to be messy business. Neither King Charles III nor Princess Anne seemed to know when to quit meddling in the other’s romantic affairs. Some of this bizarre busybody behavior stems from the siblings’ aforementioned love quadrangle with Queen Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles. It’s been claimed that Anne struggled to warm to Camilla due to her marrying Parker Bowles. “She’d also gone out with Camilla’s first husband,” Angela Levin explained. “They both sort of were crossing over with Andrew Parker Bowles, who had eyes for every woman he could see.” Anne allegedly opposed her brother’s marriage to Camilla, whom she declared would never be a proper queen.

Similarly, Charles was against Anne’s marriage to Mark Phillips, as he was apparently furious that his sister had wed before him. “I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable,” Charles wrote