Princess Anne was still married to Captain Mark Phillips when her husband fathered a daughter with another woman on the far side of the world. The girl was born in New Zealand in August 1985 to Heather Tonkin, an art teacher from Auckland. Phillips did not put his name on the birth certificate, and the child was told her father was dead. Money to support the girl was routed through an associate and entered in account books as fees for a consultant on equestrian matters.
Phillips and Anne did not separate until August 1989, and their divorce was not finalized until 1992, meaning Felicity was born squarely inside the marriage. Anne, who had been moved down the line of succession by the births of her two younger brothers under the rules of male-preference primogeniture, never publicly acknowledged any of it. Born at Clarence House on August 15, 1950, Anne was the second child and only daughter of the future Queen Elizabeth II. At birth she stood third in line to the throne, but the arrival of Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964 pushed her further down.
When the succession law was finally reformed in 2015, it applied only to children born after October 2011, leaving Anne exactly where the old rule had put her. She never remarked on any of it. Before her marriage, Anne had been linked to Andrew Parker Bowles, a Catholic cavalry officer she could not marry under the Act of Settlement. The relationship ended quietly, and Parker Bowles went on to marry Camilla Shand.
The two families remained close, with Parker Bowles serving as godfather to Anne’s daughter Zara. Anne married Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey on November 14, 1973, in a wedding watched by an estimated 100 to 500 million people. Four months earlier, Parker Bowles had married Camilla in London. The couple declined a title for Phillips, meaning their children, Peter and Zara, grew up as the first grandchildren of a reigning monarch in modern times to carry no title at all.
On March 20, 1974, a man named Ian Ball blocked Anne’s car on the Mall and tried to pull her out at gunpoint, demanding a ransom. Four men were shot trying to stop him, including her protection officer, Inspector James Beaton, who took three bullets and was awarded the George Cross. Anne remained remarkably calm throughout, reportedly telling Ball to go away and not be such a silly man. Ball was later detained under mental health law and remained in secure detention for around 45 years.
The marriage cooled over the years. By the late 1980s, the couple were rarely seen together in public. In April 1989, a small number of private letters written to Anne by Commander Timothy Lawrence, the Queen’s equerry, were stolen from inside Buckingham Palace and handed to The Sun. The paper published nothing and handed the letters to police.
No one was ever identified, arrested, or charged. On August 31, 1989, Buckingham Palace announced the separation of the Princess Royal and Captain Mark Phillips. The announcement was made while Anne was in Puerto Rico at a session of the International Olympic Committee. The divorce was granted 10 days after proceedings began in April 1992, in a hearing that lasted four minutes.
The paternity suit was filed in Auckland in March 1991. Heather Tonkin did not go to court to force Phillips to start paying; he had been paying for years. She went to court seeking legal acknowledgement that he was the father, fearing the payments might stop. Phillips, through his solicitor, said he was extremely concerned at the distressing effect of the press speculation and that any claims would be contested.
The case dragged on for five years. An alleged financial settlement and an alleged admission of paternity surfaced only in 1996, reported secondhand and never confirmed by Phillips. On December 12, 1992, Anne married Timothy Lawrence at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral. The wedding could not take place in England because the Church of England would not at that time solemnize the marriage of a divorced person whose former spouse was still living.
Around 30 guests attended, against the 1,500 who had filled Westminster Abbey 19 years earlier. The marriage has lasted more than 30 years. Felicity was raised in Auckland believing her father was dead. She attended a girls’ school, studied veterinary science at Massey University, and graduated in 2010, winning a prize for her work with horses.
She is now Felicity Wade, a veterinarian and a director of an equine practice near Auckland. She married an English polo player in 2015 and has a son. There has never been any documented contact between Phillips and Felicity. The closest near-miss came in 1999 at an equestrian event in Auckland, where Phillips was designing the cross-country course.
Felicity and her mother were among the spectators, passing within about 15 yards of him. Asked about the moment, Phillips called it the wrong subject. Phillips has a second daughter, Stephanie, born in 1997 after his remarriage to an American rider. Stephanie grew up at Aston Farm on the Gatcombe estate and was a bridesmaid at Zara’s wedding.
When she married in 2022, Princess Anne attended. Felicity has never been invited to any family wedding. Anne has never commented on any of it. She has carried out more than 20,000 official engagements and has topped the royal engagement tally repeatedly, including in 2024, after being hospitalized with concussion following an incident believed to involve a horse.
She has no memory of the incident, just as she had no memory of the part of her Olympic cross-country ride in 1976 after a fall. Her brother Charles admitted adultery on television in 1994. Diana gave her famous interview. Andrew submitted to an hour of questions that ended his working life.
Anne gave the cameras nothing. The entire record of her response to the stolen letters, the divorce, and her husband’s second family consists of a palace statement of 38 words, a police officer’s apology for failing to find the thief, and a court file in Auckland. She once said that people expected her to neigh and grind her teeth and paw the ground and swish her tail, none of which, she added dryly, was easy.
It is about the closest she has ever come to explaining herself.