There was some concern at Buckingham Palace after Princess Anne resumed her friendship with Andrew Parker Bowles after Camilla’s extramarital affair with then-Prince Charles became public.
“After the Camillagate tapes were released, they (Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles) prepared to admit that their situation was ‘rather unhappy,’ but with their children still in school – and they also have a teenage daughter, Laura – they were not ready to separate or divorce,” veteran journalist and author James Whitaker revealed in his explosive 1993 book, Diana Vs Charles.
“However, it is an open secret among their friends that until the arrival of Commander Timothy Laurence, the Brigadier (Parker Bowles) had again spent time in the company of Princess Anne, taking her to the cinema, the theater and dinner at several restaurants. She visited him at his home, then at Bolehyde Manor near Chipenham, and saw him extensively when he was Commandant at Knightsbridge Barracks,” the journalist wrote royal.
“It has been suggested that there was at times too little discretion and that Andrew and the Princess had resumed their friendship. Despite Andrew’s popularity with staff and the royal family, there was some concern at Buckingham Palace about the outcome of this relationship. But antagonizing the Princess is not something people do willingly, so little was said. As Anne became more and more interested in the man who would eventually become her second husband, she saw less minus Andrew Parker Bowles.”
Anne, only daughter of the late Queen Elizabeth II and sister of King Charles, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Prince Edward, married Timothy Laurence in December 1992.
At the time of her second marriage, the Princess Royal had two children, Peter and Zara, by her first husband, Captain Mark Philips, whom she married in 1973 and divorced in 1992.
