Royal heartbreak: How Princess Anne was forced to deny divorce claims
PRINCESS ANNE was forced to deny divorce claims in a TV interview with Michael Parkinson, unearthed footage has revealed.
Princess Anne dismisses divorce ‘gossip’ in 1980
The Princess Royal and her then-husband Mark Phillips were asked about the state of their marriage in a joint TV interview in 1980, amid rumours of unhappiness and potential divorce. At first, they looked at each other, laughed awkwardly and made light of it, Anne saying: “What are we doing here?” and Mark jokingly suggesting they “leave by different doors”. Then, Anne got serious and dismissed the rumours as “ill-informed gossip”.
She said: “No, I think there are a lot of areas, in fact, where ill-informed gossip has been going on for years in one sort or another.
“And when they’ve got nothing better to do, they’ll just think up a story, they'll think, ‘Oh well it fits. They don't do this and that together.’
“And the sort of lives we lead, we are apart quite a lot of the time.
“But there are an awful lot of working couples who suffer from the same problems.”
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Mark added that he felt this issue was more accentuated at that time, because Anne was currently riding novice horses, so was going to different competitions to him.
This in turn meant they saw each other less and, importantly, were not seen out in public together very much.
Mr Parkinson asked Mark how the rumours made him feel.
Laughing nervously, he replied: “Well, that's a difficult question to answer really, it depends.
“I think, to a large extent you ignore them, but then they start to persist and go on and on and on and then it starts to become a bit trying, and I eventually I feel like I'm dying to get an opportunity to say something to knock it all over.”
Of course, while the couple denied it at the time, there was tension and unhappiness in their marriage.
This became clear when, in 1989, it was exposed that Anne was having an affair with the Queen’s equerry, Commander Timothy Laurence.
Love letters belonging to the princess were stolen from her personal briefcase and sent to The Sun newspaper, who in turn handed them over to Scotland Yard.
The police launched a four-month investigation, but never found out who stole the letters.
However, in a stunning statement, the Palace admitted that the letters had been from Timothy and soon after Anne and Mark separated.
They finally divorced in 1992 and within the year Anne had married her new beau, Timothy, in a small ceremony in Scotland.
Timothy moved into the family home at Gatcombe, while Mark moved into a cottage nearby.
Princess Anne makes a joke about Jane Fonda workouts in 1985
To this day, Anne and Mark remain in close contact however, due to their children Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, as well as their shared grandchildren.
Mark also remarried, to Sandy Pfleuger in 1997, with whom he had a daughter called Stephanie, but the couple split in 2012.
Part of the reason for the breakdown of Anne and Mark’s marriage is believed to be the amount of time they were apart.
Former royal reporter for the Daily Express Ashley Walton told the 2002 Channel 4 documentary ‘The Real Princess Anne’ how Mark decided to have a life of his own and left Anne alone in their house.
He said: “I think the lowest point was when Mark decided to have a life of his own and didn’t want to just be the appendage, wandering around doing public engagements and wanted to run his own horse business, building jumps and courses around the world.
“He went off, she was lonely, and that’s when her life started to go wrong.
“She was in a house, mostly by herself – I know it sounds hard to believe, but she was alone in a house.”
Royal reporter for The Sun, Harry Arnold, added that, despite their unhappiness, most people thought they would still stay together at first.
He said: “I know that even their closest servants believed they would remain married forever.
“After all, monarchs in the past have soldiered on when they’ve been miserable with their spouses.
“But this was the one that was going to break the mould.”