A few times a year, we’re reminded of Andrew Parker Bowles’ existence and his constant presence around King Charles’s wife and sister. APB was Queen Camilla’s first husband and one of Princess Anne’s first boyfriends/lovers. APB has remained in both Camilla and Anne’s lives ever since. Andrew was invited to Camilla and Charles’s wedding and the 2023 coronation. He regularly attends Camilla and Anne’s favorite horse shows and horse races. He even steps in for Camilla and Anne at random funerals and semi-royal events as well. After all of these years, it still feels like Anne and Camilla are sharing him. Well, APB has done it again – he stepped in to represent Anne at a friend’s funeral.
He once temporarily ditched Queen Camilla to embark on a fling with Princess Anne when she was 19 – a scenario gratuitously immortalised in season three of The Crown where the pair enjoy a post-sex Bloody Mary. Now, at the age of 86, Andrew Parker Bowles, who inspired Rupert Campbell-Black in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, has slipped into a new, and rather more edifying role as a right-hand man to the royals.
On Sunday, Queen Camilla’s ex-husband represented Princess Anne at the memorial service for Clare Balding’s father Ian, according to Daily Mail columnist Richard Eden, after stepping in for the Princess Royal on several previous occasions.
‘I learn that Andrew Parker Bowles formally represented Princess Anne on Sunday at the thanksgiving service for Ian Balding, Queen Elizabeth II’s former race trainer, who died in January aged 87,’ Eden, the Daily Mail’s diary editor, wrote.
It’s the second time in two months that Parker Bowles has stepped in for his ex-girlfriend Anne, having previously stood in her place at Field Marshal Lord Guthrie’s memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel.
The pair are old friends – they got together after a chance meeting at Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s home at Windsor, when Andrew was adjutant in the newly formed Blues and Royals regiment, a former aide-de-camp to the Governor-General in New Zealand. Despite his reputation as a practised seducer and the age gap, the attraction between the Princess and the soldier was intense. Indeed, many believe it was revenge that fuelled Camilla’s determined attempts to seduce Prince Charles: if Andrew was going to have the Queen’s daughter as his lover, she would have Her Majesty’s son. She had no trouble attracting Charles, but was said to be truly in love with Andrew – whose Catholic faith meant he was never husband material for Anne.
The relationship fizzled out when he was posted to Germany and he reunited with Camilla. In July 1973, they were married at the Guards’ Chapel in Wellington Barracks, Central London. Despite their divorce 22 years later, Queen Camilla has maintained a strong and close friendship with Andrew – and he even had a special invitation on the guest list to the Coronation in May 2023.
The author Tina Brown has claimed it was Andrew, rather than Charles, who was the love of Camilla’s life. Whatever the truth, the man Brown describes as ‘a walking pink gin’ is said to remain one of her chief confidants.
The way that Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles have actually spent decades destroying the monarchy from within… it’s like the untold story of modern royal history, actually. Royal biographers are too busy banging their heads against the wall and screaming about Meghan Markle’s wedding tiara, when the real scandal has always been Camilla and APB and how their chaotic and toxic love affair changed the course of royal history. Anyway, it’s so funny to me that Anne would rather send her ex-boyfriend to a funeral… and not her actual husband, Tim Laurence. Or even one of her kids!!
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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