This year has been one of the worst imaginable for the Royals. The King and the Princess of Wales are both battling cancer, and now Princess Anne has been hospitalised, suffering what is said to be ‘minor injuries and concussion’ following an incident involving a horse. The Princess Royal, who is 73, was rushed to hospital after she was hurt during an evening walk on her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire yesterday. Anne, who is being treated for concussion and minor injuries to her head, is expected to recover shortly. Nonetheless, the annus horribilis for her and her family is continuing, even before we reach the halfway point of this most eventful of years.
The news that the King’s sister is currently recuperating ‘as a precautionary measure’ in Southmead hospital in Bristol, and is thankfully expected to make ‘a full and swift recovery’, according to Buckingham Palace, is cheering indeed. (She is, apparently, awake and conscious, but few further details of her condition have been released.) Since the temporary withdrawal of the King from public life for his cancer treatment, Princess Anne – always the most stoic and no-nonsense of her siblings, a trait that she seemed to inherit from her father – has been putting in overtime when it comes to undertaking as many royal engagements as she can.
When the King let it be known that he wanted ‘a slimmed-down monarchy’, it was unclear as to whether he was referring to his non-disgraced siblings or not. But the high profile of both Anne and Prince Edward this year at official events is an indication that there are currently simply not enough available members of the royal family to undertake public obligations without widening the net considerably. This explains the continual chatter about whether Anne’s nieces Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice are going to be brought into the fold as working royals in some capacity or another, although no formal decision has been made on this score yet.
Princess Anne will, hopefully, recover swiftly and completely
The knock-on effect of the Princess Royal’s injury is that she has had to postpone a planned trip to Canada at the end of this week. It’s a great pity. The visit would have been an enjoyable and productive one from a personal perspective. But, more importantly, it would have enabled this most popular and hard-working of royals to press the flesh in one of the few countries that not only continues to retain the British monarchy, but actually seems grateful to have it.
As the Commonwealth seems to be an increasingly anachronistic concept – not helped by the Prince of Wales’s open antipathy to its continuing existence, if his previous remarks are to be believed – it is Canada and Australia that fly the flag for the continued existence of the monarchy in other countries. Any trips made by a serving royal to either country continue to be hugely popular and valuable from a PR perspective.
Princess Anne will, hopefully, recover swiftly and completely. This is not her first injury around horses; in 1976, she was thrown from her horse Goodwill, and described the event as how ‘as far as I’m concerned, the lights went out’. She soon recovered, but her brothers responded to her predicament then with black humour, teasing her that ‘you went so much better after your fall, we ought to bang you on the head before you start next time!’
This time, the King has offered a more restrained message in which he has wished her ‘his fondest love and well-wishes’ for a speedy recovery. It would be a hard-hearted subject who did not wish the most indomitable and determined – and likeable – senior royal similar good wishes to be back on her feet once again, too.
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