When Peter Phillips marries Harriet Sperling on Saturday, June 6, his daughters Isla and Savannah won’t just be gaining a stepmother, but a new stepsister, too. NHS nurse Harriet is the mother to a 13-year-old daughter, Georgina Sperling, and the trio are said to get on famously already. But as the Telegraph’s royal editor, Hannah Furness, points out, their relationship will look much different than King Charles and Queen Camilla’s children.
Phillips and Sperling both put their girls at the forefront of their lives—in fact, they met at a sporting event attended by their respective daughters. Peter shares Savannah, 15, and Isla, 14, with his first wife, Autumn Kelly, while Georgina’s father is Harriet’s ex-husband, Antonio St. John Sperling. The girls appear to have much in common, and made their first public appearance together on Easter Sunday at St George’s Chapel in Windsor this April.
As Furness noted in the Telegraph’s “Your Royal Appointment” newsletter, Autumn and Peter’s split was played out “with very little public drama,” giving Georgina, Isla and Savannah a much smoother path to being stepsisters.
Comparatively, Charles and Diana’s very public divorce was marked by infidelity with Camilla, and Prince William and Prince Harry famously don't get along well with the now-Queen’s children, Laura Lopes and Tom Parker Bowles.
“Where other royal children were too old, or broken marriages too complicated, for them to grow up together, the Phillips-Sperling cohort could be a real blended family,” Furness wrote.
Noting that “Princes William and Harry did not grow-up with their Parker Bowles step-siblings in a meaningful sense,” the royal editor adds that The Princess Royal’s second husband, Sir Tim Laurence, “had no children to join the young Peter and Zara after he married Princess Anne.”
Of course, Princess Beatrice has a stepson, Christopher Woolf Mapelli Mozzi (aka Wolfie), who is Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi's child from a previous relationship. But Beatrice herself wasn't divorced and bringing her own kids into the picture like her cousin Peter or uncle Charles.
Pointing out that Harriet was welcomed into the royal fold “far earlier than any girlfriend or fiancée before her,” Furness notes that her acceptance “speaks of a family that is modernising calmly and slowly, alongside Britain.”
