Harriet Sperling joins Peter Phillips at Ascot for the couple’s most high-profile outing to date. What do we know about the royal’s new flame? Peter Phillips looked proud as punch as he posed with Harriet Sperling, his new girlfriend, at Royal Ascot on Friday. It was the couple’s most high-profile outing to date after they embarked on a relationship just weeks after Phillips, 46, separated from Lindsay Wallace, his partner of three years .
The couple were first pictured together at the Badminton Horse Trials in May and a friend of Phillips, the King’s nephew, told The Telegraph on Saturday that they were “enjoying each other’s company and spending time together like any normal couple”. They are said to be “taking it one step at a time”. Sperling, 44, is an NHS paediatric nurse and freelance writer who has recently written about her struggles as a single mother .
However, The Telegraph can now reveal she is related, through marriage, to the Duke of Gloucester and also, via Dorothy Courage, her paternal great-grandmother, to the Courage brewing dynasty. Her great-great-uncle owned Edgcote Manor, perhaps most recognisable as Charles Bingley’s Netherfield Park in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . Ms Sperling was born Harriet Eleanor Sanders in 1980, the third of four children.
Nine years earlier, in 1971, Mary Hoskins, her mother, posed as one of Country Life magazine’s “girls in pearls”, a feature originally created as a means of intr.
