When King Charles III assembled the working members of the royal household for his Might coronation, he gave his sister Princess Anne a particular position for the day. As Gold Stick in Ready, she rode by way of the coronation procession on horseback to represent the traditional position of the king’s protector, and when the royals posed for formal portraits, the princess stood proper subsequent to her older brother. However Anne’s position in her brother’s reign isn’t simply symbolic—she’s lengthy been one of many hardest working royals. In line with information assembled by The Telegraph, Anne as soon as once more racked up 457 official engagements on the Court docket Round, as in comparison with the king’s 425.
The tally doesn’t essentially imply that Anne put in additional hours than Charles throughout his first full 12 months as king. Solely a phase of a royal’s precise work makes it to the round, and most of Charles’s work as monarch has to do with assessing authorities paperwork and taking personal conferences. However the information does emphasize Anne’s position as a public-facing supporter of the king and forging connections with a selected phase of the nation.
Anne and Charles had been in competitors on the high of the charts ever since Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip started lightening their royal roles due age within the early 2010s. However for the final three years, Anne has pulled out forward, due partially to her listing of greater than 300 charity patronages, big selection of hobbies, and her former skilled profession as an equestrian.
The start of a brand new reign additionally got here with new alternatives for the 73-year-old princess. This 12 months, Princess Anne took on a brand new position as Deputy Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, and on Remembrance Sunday, she was introduced as the brand new president of the Commonwealth Conflict Graves Fee. She additionally undertook a state go to to Canada in Might and one other to Gibraltar in November.
Although tallying up the annual variety of royal engagements has lengthy been an exercise of royal watchers, Prince Harry talked about that the household does do a little bit of counting—and competing—amongst themselves in his January memoir Spare.
“The Court docket Round was an historical doc, nevertheless it had recently morphed right into a round firing squad,” he wrote. “It didn’t create the emotions of competitiveness that ran in my household, nevertheless it amplified them, weaponized them. Although none of us ever spoke in regards to the Court docket Round straight, or talked about it by title, that solely created extra pressure beneath the floor, which constructed invisibly because the final day of the calendar 12 months approached.”
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