(cont.) Even Anne’s role in the days surrounding the queen’s death reinforced her reputation for hard work. She was on hand for her mother’s final hours at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and then accompanied the coffin on a six-hour trip to Edinburgh, where the queen lay in state. Anne rode in a car behind the hearse with Mr. Laurence, a vice admiral in the Royal Navy whom she met when he was serving on the royal yacht Britannia.
In the solemn procession of the queen’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall on Wednesday, Anne walked in the front row, to the king’s left. She wore a ceremonial uniform of the Royal Navy with the rank of admiral, according to the palace, glittering with 10 medals, a Garter star and a Garter sash.
Andrew was to her left in a morning suit, which reflected his banishment from official duties after the settlement of a sexual abuse case brought against him in the United States by Virginia Giuffre. Walking in the row behind, Prince Harry wore a dark suit, as well, signifying his status as a nonworking royal, since he and his American-born wife, Meghan, moved to Southern California in 2020.
The loss of Andrew and Harry as working royals has put a burden on those who remain, not least Anne, since hundreds of obligations a year must be parceled out to a smaller number of royals. That burden became even heavier with the death of the queen’s husband, Prince Philip, in 2021. Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was the patron of dozens of charities, jobs that the king will have to reassign to other royals.
The king himself founded and oversaw a major charity, the Prince’s Trust, and is a patron of hundreds of other charities. He acknowledged that as the monarch, he will not be able to continue much of that work.
“It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply,” Charles said in a televised speech last Friday. “But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.”
Beyond her workload, royal experts say, Anne has been a common sense presence in the royal family. Aside from a brief period of turbulence when her marriage to Mr. Phillips foundered in 1989, she has provided little grist for London’s tabloids. She chose not to give her two children, Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, royal titles.
“I think it was probably easier for them, and I think most people would argue that there are downsides to having titles,” Anne said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2020. “I think that was probably the right thing to do.”
Like her mother and father, Anne has particularly close ties to Scotland and will most likely serve as the royal family’s unofficial emissary to the Scots. On Thursday, the Princess Royal told an affectionate crowd in Glasgow that the floral tributes to her mother were “really and truly out of this world.” She accepted bouquets, knelt to talk to children and comforted tearful well-wishers in the city’s George Square.
For all of Anne’s responsibilities, a superannuated law on male royal primogeniture puts limits on her role. She does not, for example, have the title counselor of state, a designation that entitles members of the royal family to stand in for the king in certain duties and makes them members of the Privy Council. The current lineup is Queen Camilla, William, Harry, Andrew and Andrew’s elder daughter, Princess Beatrice.
“It is absolutely unfortunate,” Mr. Owens, the historian, said, “but it’s the nature of gender politics in the royal family that women were not taken seriously for too long.”
