The Crown bizarrely skipped a huge event that rocked the Royal family – which was the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne.
On March 20, 1974, an armed man named Ian Ball attempted to kidnap the Queen’s daughter outside Buckingham Palace.
The incident took place just four months after Anne married her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips.
The Princess later opened up about the attack during an interview with journalist Sir Michael Parkinson.
She explained: “This car overtook us and stopped. There was an exchange of shots…”
Anne, who was just 23 at the time, said the man walked up to the car’s door – armed with two handguns.
“He opened the door, and we had a sort of ‘discussion’ about where or where not we were going to go….”
“I said I don’t think I wanted to go. I was scrupulously polite because I thought it was silly to be too rude at that stage.”
Explaining how she escaped, Anne said: “The whole thing rather collapsed in a sort of a heap. But I could reach the door handle from behind my head and I opened the door and literally pulled my feet over my head and did a sort of backward somersault onto the road.”
Ian Ball was arrested by Metropolitan Police moments later, and after the attack, it emerged that he was planning to ransom Anne for £2 million.
He was later sentenced to life imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital.
