Strange Things Everyone Just Ignores About King Charles And Princess Anne's Relationship

Royals, like the rest of, 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, per Express. "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" (via Express). "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, per The Sun. "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, per Ingrid Seward's book, "My Husband and I."

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, per Vanity Fair.

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 at the Henley Literary Festival (via the Daily Mail). 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, per New Idea. "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 in her book "Prince Edward." "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, per PBS. "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" (via Express), 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 on "Royally Us" (via Us Weekly). "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 in a letter to a friend, per Express.

According to Howard Hodgson's biography "Charles: The Man Who Will be King," Charles was jealous of Phillips, as he feared that he would get more affection from Anne. "Initially he found this very hard to accept and it took him several days to be able to contemplate her marriage without a sense of despair," Hodgson wrote.

The monarchy is a family business, and like any familial enterprise, the royals are expected to work in close proximity with each other. But for Princess Anne, having to work alongside her brother was once an unbearable task.

As revealed in the Channel 4 documentary "The Real Princess Anne" (via Express), there was more than a hint of sibling rivalry between Anne and King Charles III. In their younger years, Anne hated being in the shadow of her big brother and would often act aloof and dismissive to communicate her disapproval. "Anne had quickly tired of playing second fiddle," the documentary claimed, with royal biographer Kitty Kelley noting that Anne's unsavory behavior only served to endear the public toward her brother.

As the decades have passed, there's been little change in the siblings' body language in public. As body language expert Judi James explained to Express in 2021, Charles still presents as that timid schoolboy when interacting with the public, whereas Anne has an air of confident superiority. "Her body language signals with her brother Charles suggested — almost from birth — that she was the one who had been gifted all the confidence," James offered. "While Charles looked dreamy, shy and hesitant Anne looked bubbling with happy self-esteem." However, the pair have grown closer over the years, with Anne seemingly happy to perform her duties alongside her brother, rather than resent it.

When King Charles III ascended the throne in 2022, he made a promise to downsize and modernize the monarchy. This meant, for instance, potentially cutting public funding to less senior royals and scaling down the institution so it's less about pageantry and more about the role of the head of state. But Princess Anne was less than thrilled about such proposals. 

In an interview with CBC News that year, Anne made no secret of her opposition to her brother's views. "Well, I think the 'slimmed down' was said in a day when there were a few more people around," she said. "It doesn't sound like a good idea from where I'm standing, I would say. I'm not quite sure what else we can do." Elsewhere, she suggested that things would remain the same under Charles' rule. "Well, you know what you're getting because he's been practicing for a bit, and I don't think he'll change," she said.

It was an odd move from Anne, who was essentially undermining her brother's authority as reigning monarch by publicly expressing her disapproval of a downsized monarchy. Anne's remarks may have inadvertently caused somewhat of a rift between the siblings. The Telegraph sided with Anne and argued that Charles would be a fool not to heed her warning. The following year, The Spectator claimed that Charles' cancer diagnosis was proof that a slimmed-down monarchy was a bad idea, with Anne supposedly having been right all along.

From the time he was a little boy, King Charles III knew that he would one day reign over the British people. His whole life was spent preparing for the lofty role, and yet he was somehow always outdone by Princess Anne when it came to performing duties. Indeed, Anne has exhibited a work ethic that far surpasses that of her monarchical brother. 

In 2017, The Times declared Anne the hardest working royal of the year. "The amount she crams in is extraordinary," said Tim O'Donovan, who compiled the list. "She can be up in Scotland then down to a dinner in London that evening." The following year, she was once again named the hardest working royal, this time by The Telegraph, with her efforts eclipsing those of her siblings.

Now that Charles is king, his work ethic is still being overshadowed by that of Anne. In 2023, which marked Charles' first year on the throne, Anne was yet again named the hardest working royal of the year, having undertaken dozens more engagements than her brother. "She just gets on with it, often carrying out multiple engagements in one day," Dickie Arbiter, Queen Elizabeth II's former spokesman, told The Telegraph. It's difficult to fathom how a sibling could be working harder than the head of state, but this anomaly once again speaks to the multiple eccentricities in Charles and Anne's relationship.

Like any of us, the royals have secret nicknames behind closed doors. Queen Elizabeth II was Lilibet or "gan-gan" to her great-grandchildren, Princess Charlotte is adorably known as Lottie, while Princess Anne has given King Charles an unusual nickname that says a lot about their relationship.

To Princess Anne, Charles is "Old Bean." The princess royal was heard referring to her brother by the quirky nickname in the 2023 documentary "Charles III: The Coronation Year" (via OK!). Having been popularized during WWI, "old bean" is a term that reflects a Britain of yesteryear and is rarely used in a modern context. Most commonly associated with the upper classes, it's essentially a friendly greeting for a man — sort of like an aristocratic "my dude." Though it's not the sort of nickname one would typically use to refer to their brother, in this context the unusual term of endearment has taken on a whimsy of its own.

Hosting The Telegraph's "Royal Insight" series, royal correspondent Hannah Furness suggested that the strange nickname is a reflection of the siblings' close bond. "There was a lovely moment in a documentary recently where we saw her calling Charles 'Old Bean,'" Furness said. "They have this very warm relationship and she is probably in a better position than anyone to give him advice, give him a bit of sympathy when he needs it, give him a bit of a pep talk."