In November 1973, half a billion people watched Princess Anne marry Captain Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey. Nineteen years later, her second wedding drew roughly thirty guests to a small stone church in the Scottish Highlands. The contrast between those two ceremonies tells the story of how Anne’s first marriage quietly collapsed—and how she rebuilt her life without a single word of public blame.
Anne met Mark Phillips in 1968 at a horse enthusiasts’ gathering in Mexico City tied to the Olympics. He was a lieutenant in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards with no title, no aristocratic lineage, and no royal connections. He was also one of Britain’s best event riders, later winning Olympic gold with the British team in Munich in 1972.
The couple kept their relationship hidden for five years, with Anne reportedly even concealing Mark in her tack box at equestrian events to avoid press attention.
When their engagement was announced on May 29, 1973, it caught most people off guard. Anne appeared the next day wearing a deliberately modest sapphire and diamond ring, mindful of Britain’s economic crisis. Asked whether the marriage could survive public scrutiny, she gave a five-word answer that would follow her for decades: “It’s got to, hasn’t it?”
The Queen offered Mark an earldom, standard practice for an untitled man marrying into the royal family. Anne and Mark refused. The decision meant their children would be born as commoners—the first commoner-born children of a senior royal in over 500 years.
At the time it looked modern and progressive. In hindsight, it was Anne protecting her future children from a world she wasn’t sure she trusted.
The wedding took place on November 14, 1973, at Westminster Abbey. Two thousand guests filled the church, and the day was declared a special bank holiday. Anne wore Queen Mary’s fringe tiara and a dress with a seven-foot train.
The five-tier cake stood as tall as Anne herself. Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco were among the guests. Standing at the altar in full dress uniform was Mark Phillips—described by royal butler Paul Burrell as “an ordinary boy” who had just married into the most extraordinary family on earth.
Four months later, Anne faced something far more dangerous than any royal wedding. On March 20, 1974, a white Ford Escort forced her limousine to stop on The Mall in London. A man named Ian Ball got out, armed with a pistol.
He shot Anne’s protection officer, then her chauffeur, then a journalist who tried to intervene. Ball approached the royal car, opened the door, and told Anne he was kidnapping her for ransom.
Anne was 23 years old and four months married. Her reply: “Not bloody likely.”
A physical struggle followed. Ball grabbed Anne’s arm; Mark pulled her back inside. A former heavyweight boxer passing by punched Ball in the head.
Police arrived moments later. In Ball’s car they found handcuffs, tranquilizers, and a ransom letter addressed to the Queen. Four people had been shot; nobody was killed.
Anne went back to the palace and reportedly had a cup of tea.
Peter Phillips was born in 1977, the Queen’s first grandchild. Zara followed in 1981. Neither child received a title.
They grew up at Gatcombe Park, a 730-acre estate in Gloucestershire, with horses, dogs, and muddy boots—a degree of normality almost unheard of for the Queen’s grandchildren.
But after Zara’s birth, the marriage began to shift. Mark stopped attending royal engagements and poured himself into equestrian business. Anne went the other direction, logging more official duties than any other member of the family.
They traveled separately, routinely booking different hotel rooms. Prince Charles gave Mark a nickname that stuck: “Fog,” because he was, in Charles’s estimation, thick and wet. Anne’s younger brothers turned it into a game, timing how long before “Foggy” mentioned horses.
By the mid-1980s, the distance was obvious to anyone paying attention. Mark’s own father told a reporter, “What Mark and Anne have is not what I would think of as married life.” Still, Anne said nothing.
Around this time, a detective sergeant named Peter Cross was assigned as Anne’s personal bodyguard. Within a year he was removed from royal duties. The official explanation was that he had become “overfamiliar” with the princess—a carefully chosen phrase that everyone understood.
Contact reportedly continued afterward, with Anne allegedly using the code name “Mrs. Wallace” when calling him. Cross later sold his story to the tabloids.
Anne never responded, never confirmed, never denied.
Mark was not faithful either. He was linked to several women, but one relationship could not be denied. In November 1984, while in Auckland, New Zealand, for an equestrian clinic, he met Heather Tonkin, a local art teacher.
Their daughter Felicity was born in August 1985. Mark denied paternity for years. Payments were sent to Heather, labeled “Equestrian Consultancy”—their way of calling it child support.
A DNA test in 1991 finally proved the truth. A settlement of approximately £350,000 was agreed, but Mark’s name never appeared on Felicity’s birth certificate. No one from the Phillips family ever reached out to the girl growing up on the other side of the world.
In April 1989, someone walked into Buckingham Palace, opened Princess Anne’s personal briefcase, and stole four handwritten letters. They were from Commander Timothy Lawrence, the Queen’s Equerry—one of the most trusted positions in the royal household. The Sun newspaper received the letters but did not publish them, handing them to police instead.
Scotland Yard launched an investigation that was never solved. The contents of those letters have never been made public.
The palace released a statement describing Lawrence carefully as “a friend.” Someone close to Lawrence told the press: “Tim has filled a loneliness in her life and given her a shoulder to cry on when she needed someone to tell her troubles to. He cares for her in the way her husband does not.”
Still, Anne said nothing.
On August 31, 1989, while Anne was in Puerto Rico for an International Olympic Committee meeting, Buckingham Palace announced that the Princess Royal and Captain Mark Phillips had separated. The statement added: “There are no plans for divorce proceedings.” Mark moved to Aston Farm, a smaller property on the same estate.
They shared the same driveway but no longer shared a life.
The divorce came in April 1992, after the DNA test forced the issue. Anne filed on April 13; a judge granted it ten days later. The hearing lasted less than five minutes.
Eighteen years of marriage dissolved in under five minutes, described as mutual, with no blame assigned. Peter was 14, Zara was 11. Anne made sure Mark could still see them whenever he wanted.
He kept Aston Farm. No custody battle, no tabloid war.
That same year, the royal family seemed to come apart all at once. In March, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson announced their separation. In June, Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story exposed the collapse of Charles and Diana’s marriage.
In November, Windsor Castle caught fire, destroying 115 rooms. Four days later, the Queen stood at a lectern and called 1992 an “annus horribilis.” On December 9, Prime Minister John Major announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales were separating.
Three days later, Anne married again—and almost nobody was talking about it.
December 12, 1992. The Duke of Edinburgh drove his daughter to Crathie Kirk, a stone church near Balmoral so small it could barely hold a Sunday congregation. Thirty people waited inside: Anne’s mother, her brothers, her children, a handful of close family.
Anne stepped out wearing a simple white suit. No tiara, no train, no veil—just white blossoms in her hair. Eleven-year-old Zara walked beside her as the only bridesmaid.
The Church of England would not allow a divorced person to remarry in an Anglican church, so the ceremony took place in Scotland, where the Church of Scotland had no such objection. Anne married Commander Timothy Lawrence, the man whose stolen letters had revealed what she never said publicly. He had been standing beside her inside the royal household during the loneliest years of her marriage.
Diana sent her best wishes but stayed away so the wedding would not become a media circus. After the ceremony, about 500 people gathered on the road outside Balmoral cheered as Anne and Timothy walked out into the December cold.
They have been married for over thirty years now, still at Gatcombe, still quiet. Anne never blamed Mark. She let him stay on the estate.
They co-parented without conflict and ran the Gatcombe horse trials together for decades. The man nicknamed “Fog” and the woman who never once told the press what he had done stood in the same fields at the same events, raising the same children year after year.
Royal journalist Angela Levin said of Anne: “She wasn’t spiteful. She wasn’t bitter.” Six words that tell you more about her than a hundred interviews could.
Years later, Anne was asked about her decision not to give her children royal titles. She did not frame it as a sacrifice or a statement. She said: “I think most people would argue that there are downsides to having titles, so I think that was probably the right thing to do.”
Her daughter Zara confirmed it herself in 2023: “From my point of view, I was obviously very lucky that my mother didn’t give us any titles. So I really commend her on that. We were very lucky that we got to do it a bit our own way.”
The Land Rover, the small church, the thirty guests. It was not a downgrade from the first wedding. It was an upgrade.
Anne had spent nineteen years inside a marriage that was too big, too public, and too broken. When she finally found the right person, she made sure the wedding was the right size too.
She had found the right size for a life.