Princess Anne is officially the hardest working royal, but her story rarely gets told.

Anne, The Princess Royal, has recently been named the hardest working member of the royal family. It's not the first time her dedication to royal duty has flown under the radar. 

With King Charles and Catherine, The Princess of Wales, off-duty from public engagements due to serious health issues, a new study has found that Princess Anne now works a record 70 per cent of public engagements.

Meaning? The monarchy now relies heavily on the 73-year-old, who now undertakes the bulk of the public events. 

In fact, according to a recent analysis of the royal family’s official diary of public engagements by wellbeing experts at GoSmokeFree, Princess Ann is scheduled to undertake 55 of the 78 public engagements listed in the royal diary until May 10.

While the whole royal family will take at least a week off for the Easter holidays, Princess Anne will be the only one returning to public duties, for an intense 14-event agenda.

Known for being the most hard-working royal, previous data from 2022 reveals Princess Anne used to work around 50 per cent of all royal engagements.   

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As the only Windsor daughter, with a signature nonchalant approach and dry wit, Princess Anne's dedication to royal duty is often unsung — though, she has long stood out as a fan favourite royal.

While The Crown arguably won a new generation of fans for the Queen’s only daughter (played in the Netflix series by Erin Doherty), the real life Princess Anne is just as sharp with her deadpan one-liners as she is on the popular show.

In 1974, Princess Anne was ambushed by an armed kidnapper as she travelled by car to Buckingham Palace.

Ian Ball planned to abduct the young princess and hold her for a £2 million ransom, blocking her car and pulling out a firearm. He shot Anne’s chauffeur and her bodyguard, Jim Beaton, as well as a nearby tabloid journalist who tried to intervene. 

However, when the gunman told the royal to get out of the car, the Princess replied: "Not bloody likely."

Speaking of the incident on ITV’s documentary Anne: The Princess Royal at 70, the Queen’s daughter said: "One thing about horses and sport is you have to prepare for the unexpected and you've got to think through the problems that are likely to occur."

"I suppose that was the discipline which to some extent coloured my thought processes."

In a 1980 interview with British talk show host Michael Parkinson, Princess Anne spoke about how she refused to move, even as the kidnapper grabbed her arm and tackled her to the floor of the car.

"We had a sort of discussion about where or where not we were going to go," she shared, adding that "I was scrupulously polite because I thought it was silly to be too rude at that stage."

However, she recalled the moment when Ball ripped her dress as his biggest mistake.

"The back of my dress split and that was his most dangerous moment," she said. "I lost my rag at that stage."

The Princess also famously described the 1969 BBC Royal Family documentary as a "rotten idea" and told photographers in 1970 to "naff off". She even once hid from the media in a horsebox, saying "I’ve been a much better driver of horses ever since."

In 2020, athlete Sebastian Coe told ITV "she doesn’t suffer fools gladly, she doesn't speak for the sake of speaking", recalling how she once described a fellow Olympic committee member as "probably the most stupid person in world sport" while still wearing a microphone.

"This echoed around the room and she never flinched," said Coe. "It's probably one of my favourite moments."

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Feature image: Getty