Princess Charlotte certainly stole the show on her first walk about at Sandringham this week: in her smart little double-breasted coat, she wowed the crowd with aplomb.
Brandishing an inflatable flamingo, she plunged along the lines with glee, stepping forward to hug Gemma Clark in her wheelchair, and refusing to do the royal thing and hand over a bunch of roses to an aide (divas of any age don’t let go of flowers easily, OK?).
But this little girl knows her manners just as well as her more reserved brother, George, and she bobbed a dainty curtsy to her great-granny, the Queen, and shook hands with the vicar. Butter wouldn’t melt — but she did look as if she’d been doing this for years.
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge kisses Prince Louis as they pose next to Princess Charlotte and Prince George in Norfolk earlier this year
Maybe Charlotte understood that people have queued for hours to see her family, maybe not. When you’re four years old and wearing a new Christmas outfit and the world is full of admirers, you go for it with gusto.
Princess Charlotte of Cambridge attempts a curtsy to the Queen at the Christmas Day sevice
Until, perhaps, at some other time and in private, you morph into Violet Elizabeth Bott from the Just William books, fix your parents with a hard stare as fearsome as Paddington’s, and impose your iron will. I don’t know this for sure, but I can make an educated guess.
Little girls at that age are a power to be reckoned with. I’ve been one, had one, and babysat many of them in my time.
They tend to have, for a while, the strongest personality in any house: looking up defiantly at huge looming helpless fathers, sometimes (as I would to mine) with the menacing line: ‘Oh, give in, Dad! Give in!’
One such child whom I was supposed to be teaching to read laid down firm rules from the start. She insisted on wearing her Superman outfit and told me: ‘You sit there. Azackly there. I will sit here. And learn afrabet. Then go and see the ducks.’ And I was powerless to alter this rigid timetable.
Charlotte may have an elder brother but I think we can be in no doubt that for now she rules the roost between gentle, quiet George and baby Louis, perhaps in the style of Great-Aunt Anne or her more sociable and rebellious late Great-Great-Aunt Margaret.
Princess Charlotte, waves as she arrives for her first day at school, with her brother Prince George and her parents the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, at Thomas’s Battersea in London in September
We’ve seen the evidence, after all: the snaps of her beating her big brother to a bouncy slide at a fete, bestowing a flinty glare and telling photographers ‘you’re not coming!’ at her baby brother’s Christening.
And as for poking out her tongue she’s a serial offender — most notably at a regatta this summer to the embarrassment of her mum. But, when the mood takes her, she’s also fond of beaming a winning smile over her shoulder and giving a cheery wave.
Indeed, she seems to embrace every formal event with unselfconscious glee. It’s a four-year-old girl thing, and will probably last a good few years more. So it should.
Princess Charlotte and Prince George have fun playing football after the King Power Charity Polo Match
Nobody will dare tell Charlotte she should be seen and not heard, or that little girls must be ladylike and not ‘tomboys’. Maybe her active outdoor life will mean at some point she’ll opt for trousers, not frocks (that was my decision: I fought those damn velvet dresses for years, snarling in ragged shorts with a home-made bow and arrow strung for action).
If so, it’ll be uphill work for the Duchess of Cambridge getting her into those demure 1950s outfits. But good luck to Charlotte. Because lying in wait one day is adolescence with all the pressures on young girls: to be pretty, cute, giggly, passive and attractive to boys, who are scared of ‘bossy’ girls.
Princess Charlotte stands on the steps holding the hand of her mother the Duchess of Cambridge after attending the wedding ceremony of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle in May last year
She’ll have to get through that pressure, plus all the additional expectations and scrutiny that come with her royal status. Princess Anne did it by being a fearless, champion sportswoman and yelling ‘Naff orf!’ at journalists (actually, the reporters involved later admitted that it wasn’t naff but quite another word).
Charlotte will find her own way through, I am sure, become a grown-up woman and equal human being. Maybe gentle George will even be a help with the tough bit.
But right now, she rules: and if and when she does kick over the traces, she’ll have worked out that a well-timed curtsey gets most things forgiven.