She would be grateful for that in years to come. She developed a healthy view of her position in the royal hierarchy. ‘I’m the Queen’s daughter and as a daughter I get less involved than the boys,’ she said. That allowed her to develop her own interests, in her own way, without the pressures of a centre-stage royal role that so inhibited Charles. ‘I’m me, I’m a person, I’m an individual, and I think it’s better for everybody that I shouldn’t pretend to be anything that I’m not,’ she once remarked.

There was no place for her, though, at the great occasion of the Coronation of her mother. She was too young to witness that pivotal transition not just from one reign to the next, but from one era to another. Anne, not quite three, remained at Buckingham Palace, suffering ‘the normal sisterly fury at being left behind’. There was a party for all the children in the Madame Vacani dancing class. They watched the ceremony on a flickering black-and-white television set.

Anne’s memories of the day itself are inevitably vague. What she does remember was being taken out onto the balcony afterwards with the rest of the family and being told to ‘wave to the people’. It was a public lesson in the demands that came with being a princess. There was no escape from being royal. As she would later say, ‘The idea of opting out is a non-starter.’

‘The pattern of my life from birth until I went to boarding school, at the age of thirteen, was living in London during the week and at Windsor at the weekends,’ she said. ‘The holidays were divided between Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor and most of the summer holidays at Balmoral.’

She settled into the time-honoured routine of country life. Schoolwork would occasionally intrude and, to help improve their French, a tutor, a certain Mlle de Roujoux, was employed. But football seemed to play as important part in the curriculum as irregular verbs. ‘The Queen is always goalkeeper and Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and the children join in,’ Mlle de Roujoux recalled. ‘Charles and Anne were real little devils and never stopped playing tricks on me. The last words they shouted at me as I left for the train back home were “Cafe au lait, au lit”, which I had taught them and which they had found most amusing. It means, “coffee with milk in bed”.’