Peter Phillips is the eldest child and only son of the Princess Royal and her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips. He was born Peter Mark Andrew Phillips in 1977. Due to his distance from the British Royal throne – currently 11th in succession – Peter Mark Phillips currently holds no royal titles and is unlikely to gain one during his lifetime.
Peter Phillips first attended Shaftesbury school in Dorset and then he went to Gordonstoun in Scotland like many members of the British Royal Family, both male and female. There he was made Head Boy. Very proficient in sports, during his time at Gordonstoun, Peter Phillips played rugby for the Scottish Schools national team.
He attended Exeter University until his graduation in 2000 with a Sports Studies degree.
Peter Phillips then began working full time. First he was a hospitality manager for Jaguar cars and then he took up employment as the sponsorship manager for the Williams Formula 1 motor racing team. He has subsequently worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland since 2005. He currently heads up the Royal Bank of Scotland’s sponsorship activities in Hong Kong and lives there with his wife.
It was in 2003 that Peter Philips first met his now wife Autumn Kelly. Miss Kelly is Canadian and the couple met at the Montreal Canadian Grand Prix in 2003 while he was working for Jaguar. At the time she was working as a management consultant, work which she carried on in the UK, after she moved here to date him.
It is interesting to note that Miss Kelly, as a condition of their marriage to Peter Phillips, was asked by the British Royal Family to convert to Anglicanism from her initial Roman Catholic faith in order to preserve Peter Phillips’ place in the line of succession to the British throne, even though he is highly unlikely to be King. He would have lost that right under the Act of Settlement, 1701, whereby spouses of Roman Catholics were ineligible to take the throne of the United Kingdom. Autumn agreed to convert and permission was granted by the Queen for the couple to wed on 9 April 2008, and they were married on 17 May 2008. Photographs of the ceremony and later staged portraits were sold to Hello magazine.
The interest in the preservation of succession lineage is of particular interest since Peter was the first grand heir to a sovereign to be born as a commoner in more than 500 years. His parents, Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, refused the traditional honors and courtesies for their children in favor of a more private life. Since then Peter Philips has stayed primarily out of the Royal family limelight.
Peter Phillips has a sister, Zara (born 1981) and two half-sisters Felicity Tonkin (born 1985) and Stephanie Phillips (born 1992) as a result of his father’s extra-marital affair with Heather Tonkin and later a child born to his second wife Sandy Pflueger.
- Full Name: Peter Mark Andrew Phillips
- Father: Captain Mark Phillips
- Mother: Princess Anne
- Born: 22 December 1977
- Married: 17 May 2008 to Autumn Kelly
- Children: none
