Over 500 million people tuned in to watch Princess Anne’s wedding to Captain Mark Phillips on November 14, 1973. But The Weekly’s court correspondent Anne Matheson was one of the lucky few to have a seat in the chapel – as she recalled in our pages in 1981.
By the time Princess Anne married, royal weddings had become huge, popular television spectaculars. Fifty years before they’d been family affairs at Windsor, but the miracles of communication – first radio and then television – had made a royal wedding an excuse for much wider celebrations.
A TV audience of 500 million would be enough to strike terror into most girls’ hearts, but not Princess Anne’s. On her wedding day she gave the performance of a lifetime. Never before had the Princess looked so radiant.
How did she do it? Princess Anne, who didn’t come to championship class as a horsewoman without great dedication, commitment and discipline, applied exactly these qualities to her wedding preparations.
Mark Phillips, too, had a new confidence and from my seat in the North Transept of [Westminster] Abbey I could see many tender and moving exchanges between them. I saw Mark catch and hold his breath in a totally unrehearsed moment of surprise and joy when Princess Anne moved to take her place beside him at the altar. Mark’s boyish gasp of approval meant more to her than the approval of a whole wide world waiting to acclaim her. She dropped her eyes, shyly.
Anne’s new loveliness was partly because of the make-up Olivier Echaudemaison had given her on her wedding morning. A true professional, he is one of the world’s leading visagistes.
When Princess Anne was dressed and ready to leave Buckingham Palace in the glass wedding coach, the whole royal family trooped in to her rooms to see the final effect. ‘Are you sure it isn’t too much?’ queried Prince Charles with brotherly apprehension. But the Queen smiled her approval. Prince Philip showed his by taking one snapshot after another of his daughter from every conceivable angle. She looked so lovely.
“It was really quite touching,” said the sophisticated French make-up man. M. Echaudemaison then jumped into a fast car and, taking a back route, was rushed to Westminster Abbey to repair any damage and put the final touches to Anne’s make-up before the Princess, on Prince Philip’s arm, stepped into the Abbey’s fierce TV lights and cameras.
It was the famous photographer Norman Parkinson who had made Princess Anne aware she could make much more of herself. He had a touching belief in her beauty.
“That is how she really looks,” he exclaimed, when looking at the wedding pictures. “I photographed the Princess for her 21st birthday and she was already beautiful but, perhaps, a little gauche. Now she has blossomed, is complete. You can see she is in love.”
But it was not Princess Anne’s beauty alone that carried the royal wedding so triumphantly. She streamlined everything so that there was nothing superfluous. “I’m tired of all the fussy retinue of child attendants,” she said. (She had been a chief bridesmaid five times.)
Dispensing with this tradition, she had only Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, her cousin, and her brother Prince Edward. Maureen Baker, then designer to the ready-to-wear house of Susan Small, made the Princess’ wedding dress, which was a masterpiece of line with a romantic feeling that was faintly Elizabethan and, to complement her soldier bridegroom, had a military collar and epaulettes.
As the Princess moved down the aisle, she looked as though she was skating on ice. Royal shoemaker Edward Rayne, seated near me among the guests, whispered he had made her special flatties in white satin, so she could glide along, instead of on high heels. The shoes were lined with gold.
Captain Mark Phillips was a serving officer when he and Anne were married and, apart from his personal qualities, his choice of a career and love of horses, had appealed strongly to the royal family as well as to the British public. He was also rather old-fashioned in his attachment to his regiment, the 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, which had flown home from Germany to form the guard of honour and play the martial airs at the wedding breakfast.
So it was very much as the wife of a young soldier that Princess Anne left the Abbey, not to the traditional strains of the Wedding March, but at a spirited pace to Strauss’ stirring regimental Radetzky March.
Anne and Mark met through their love of horses, and nobody let them forget it. For wedding presents there were horse brasses, horse rugs, saddles, riding boots and riding crops. There were about three dozen lucky horseshoes.
“You can’t have too many,” said Anne and Mark gratefully.
