The education of Princess Anne was not as constitutionally important or sensitive, and neither the Queen nor Prince Philip took much interest in Anne’s academic progress. Before she was sent away to Benenden, a girls’ boarding school in Kent, like her brother she had been educated privately at Buckingham Palace under the tutelage of Miss Peebles. The schoolroom was in the old nursery wing, and the Queen’s rooms were close by on the floor directly below, yet Anne does not recall her mother paying even one visit to her classroom to see how she was progressing.

It was left to Princess Margaret to monitor her niece’s work, and she did so with enthusiasm, going into the schoolroom to speak with the governess and even conducting oral examinations of her own. It was the foundation of a relationship between aunt and niece that matured into an adult friendship that few outside the family circle knew about.

Being educated in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom with a few carefully selected friends was an idealised, hugely privileged style of education, and in any previous generation it would have continued to its conclusion. Philip had other ideas. As with Charles, he wanted Anne to experience life on the other side of the palace walls. It was, he argued, a vital preparation for dealing with the exigencies of the modern world. Benenden, a traditional establishment for ‘young ladies’, was duly chosen and at the age of thirteen Anne became, not the first princess (that honour belongs to her cousin, Princess Alexandra), but the only daughter of a reigning sovereign ever to be sent away to school. Anne’s own memories of Benenden were pleasant ones. ‘I enjoyed my time at school, and no doubt my riding experiences helped,’ she wrote.

Charles could not say the same when he went to Gordonstoun. Philip had thrived there, but it did not suit his son. The hearty outdoor life, if never as Spartan as legend made out (there were always hot showers to go with the cold, and the early-morning runs were little more than fifty-yard trots up the road and then never when it was raining), was still tougher than he would have wished. ‘I hated the institution, just as I hated leaving home,’ he would later say. ‘I did not enjoy school as much as I might have, but this was because I am happier at home than anywhere else.’