Queen Elizabeth’s only daughter, Princess Anne, is said to enjoy a close relationship with her sister-in-law, Queen Camilla.
But a little-known fact is that, in the early 1970s, the Princess Royal was being courted by the man who would end up giving Camilla Shand her more famous surname: Parker Bowles.
In the Channel 4 documentary The Real Princess Anne, experts delved into the press interest around the young princess’s love life in the Seventies.
It looked at some of Anne’s early courters, particularly that which would become a “love quadrangle” between Anne, Andrew, Camilla and then-Prince Charles.
Royal experts believe that Anne and Andrew dated for “some time”, but a now-defunct royal rule — the Act of Settlement 1701 — prevented the relationship from going further.
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The Act of Settlement was done away with in 2013 with the introduction of the Succession to the Crown Act.
It removed the historical disqualification of a person who married a Catholic from the line of succession and removed the requirement of those outside the first six people in line to the throne to seek the Sovereign’s approval to marry.
The Act also removed the male primogeniture, which gives sons preference over daughters in the line of succession.
But by then, of course, both Anne and Andrew had long moved on with their lives.
Anne went on to marry Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, with whom she had two children, Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall ‒ and she now has five grandchildren too.
However, Anne and Mark’s was a rather unhappy marriage that ended in divorce in 1992. Anne eventually remarried with the Queen’s Equerry Commander Timothy Laurence.
Meanwhile, Andrew married Camilla in 1973, also having two children together, Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Lopes, but divorced in 1995 after both had affairs. Andrew remarried Rosemary Pitman in 1996, who he remained with until her death in 2010.
Despite their history, Anne and Andrew are believed to remain good friends to this day.
