As a queen dowager, Anna left the royal palace, retired from court life and lived a private life. Her relationship with her son King William III was always a tense one and she once said contemptuously about him that he was happy to be a king of a constitutional empire. She did not get along with her daughter-in-law and niece, Sophie, who was the daughter of the sister she liked the least, Catherine, as she was allegedly jealous of Catherine's beauty and status as their mother's favourite child, and whom her son had married against her will. She had a better relationship to her two younger children, but as they were abroad, her last years were lonely. She had plans to return to Russia after a conflict with her son in 1855, but in the end, she did not.