Timothy Laurence is a giant cinnamon roll and if you have a few hours to spare, I will gladly sit you down and tell you all of the reasons why you should love him as much as Anne does and as much as I do.
Mark Phillips is t r a s h and I also have the receipts for that if you want them 🙂
Update: you shall have the receipts, but probably not until later because I’m in college all day
Ok so I’m home, and here are your receipts.
BASICALLY
Mark cheated on Anne numerous times during their marriage. You’ll usually see a lot of Anne-haters talking about how she’s an adulteress because she cheated on Mark with Tim and this resulted in the end of her marriage. This is completely WRONG. And it’s pretty much the other way around.
When they first married, Anne and Mark were really happy together. Yes they had arguments like any other couple, but there were no major problems in the marriage. From the biographies I’ve read and the archived newspaper articles I’ve read, it’s pretty clear that Mark began to lose interest in her after Peter was born, and they started to drift apart. This was, I think, when he first started seeing other women behind her back.
Several stories were run by numerous newspapers that Mark had cheated on Anne with a number of women in his circle, the most infamous of these being Pamella Bordes, who received horse riding lessons from Mark and stayed in a cottage on the Gatcombe estate while Anne was abroad.
Now, none of the affair stories have ever been proven true, apart from one, which is enough to suggest that he was unfaithful with more than one woman, perhaps in more than one country. In 1985, Mark fathered a child in New Zealand after a one night stand with a woman called Heather Tonkin. He said the allegations were completely false at first, but it later emerged that he had been making payments to Tonkin for five years after initially asking her to have an abortion. After he and Anne had separated, it was confirmed after a DNA test in 1991 that Mark was indeed the father of the little girl. He has never met her, nor acknowledged her in public.
In the same year he fathered Felicity Tonkin, Peter Cross sold a story to the News of the World claiming that while he had been her protection officer from 1979 to 1980 before being dismissed for over-familiarity, he and Anne had had a ‘close’ relationship. That newspaper has since been shut down, but some of his claims were included in a biography I read about the Queen.
His claims have never been proven, nor has Anne ever even acknowledged them. Her staff that worked there at the same time have also called his claims ridiculous and completely false. Personally, I think that she was lonely and certainly had a close relationship with him at the time, but I don’t believe it ever became more than someone to confide in. I certainly don’t believe the rumours that came out of it that he is actually Zara’s father. It just doesn’t add up. Cross had been trying to sell his story in Fleet Street for years before one of them eventually took him up on his offer. He obviously wanted to cash in and exploit whatever trust she had in him. Another dick, basically.
ANYWAY, Mark fathering that child was enough to allow Anne to divorce him. This was finalised in April 1992, and in December of that same year she was finally able to marry Tim. Again, I don’t have enough time to tell you what a sweetheart Timothy Laurence is, but if you do want to read the story of how he and Anne fell in love, I suggest reading this. It includes a short summary of their early days together that I think is SO sweet and sums it up perfectly. This came from one of Tim’s friends at the time:
“Tim never stopped thinking about Princess Anne from soon after their first meeting…. Anne has treated him as her closest confidant for some considerable time. Obviously, Tim and the princess were physically attracted to each other, but their friendship goes deeper than that. 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 understands her tantrums and the bad publicity she attracts. But most of all, he cares for her in the way her husband does not.”
It’s also important to note that Mark hasn’t changed a bit. After he and Anne divorced, he married his second wife Sandy Pflueger in 1997 and had another daughter, Stephanie. Then in 2012, it emerged that he’d left his wife of 15 years for Lauren Hough, a show jumper who is the same age as his son Peter. What did he have to say on the matter? “I might only be alive for another five or ten years so I might as well be happy”. What a dick.Unfortunately for Lauren, if this post is anything to go by, she isn’t getting *ahem* much out of it.
SO, that’s pretty much my explanation as to why Mark Phillips was, is and always will be a fuckboi of the highest order and doesn’t hold a candle to the sweet cinnamon roll angel that is Tim Laurence. I’m sorry it’s so long, but there’s a lot to cover and this isn’t even all of it lol
House of Brat 