Before she became Queen Consort, Camilla was famously Charles's 'mistress' during his marriage to Princess Diana. 

But some royal commentators believe her true love was to her first husband Andrew Parker Bowles, with whom she had two children.

However the retired army officer was not one for settling down, and reportedly behaved 'very naughty with women' throughout the 22-year marriage.

The discreet Brigadier has always batted away the more exaggerated stories of his bedroom conquests but he was branded a charming lothario who was always 'terribly misbehaving'.

He was at one time described as 'London's best — and busiest — lover'. 

So busy, in fact, that he temporarily ditched Camilla to embark on a fling with the then 19-year-old Princess Anne — a scenario gratuitously immortalised in season three of The Crown where the pair enjoy a post-sex Bloody Mary. 

The notorious ladies' man has also been revealed as the inspiration for the  philandering character Rupert Campbell-Black on Disney+'s hit version of Jilly Cooper's Rivals.

But he has now seemingly hung up his boots and changed his ways, settling down with the deadpan former host of The Weakest Link and Countdown Anne Robinson in 2023.

Now on the day he turns 85, MailOnline looks back on the life of Queen Camilla's colourful ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles.

Close to the Royal Family since boyhood, Andrew was the eldest of four children to Derek Henry Parker Bowles of Donnington Castle House in Berkshire.

His father and formidable mother Anne, chief commissioner of the Girl Guides, were friends of the Queen Mother.

As a 13-year-old, he served as a page to Lord Simonds, then the Lord High Chancellor, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

‘My mother was a good friend of the Duke of Norfolk,’ he recalled. ‘The Lord Chancellor had no children so Bernard Norfolk suggested me to Lord Simonds. I have to say that he was the nicest man alive and gave me a very nice set of cufflinks.’

He described a sword fight during the dress rehearsal, saying: ‘All the pages had these little swords. If a group of bored small boys all have swords, you know what’s going to happen.’

After the death of his parents Parker Bowles found himself elevated to the status of royal favourite. 

After going to school at Ampleforth College he went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards in 1960 serving in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, where he was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery.

He was one of the first on the scene when the IRA detonated a bomb in Hyde Park killing four soldiers and slaughtering seven horses.

A courageous horseman himself, he rode in the 1969 Grand National, finishing a creditable 11th. He also played polo on the same team as Charles when both men were young. 

He was 25 when he met the teenage Camilla at her coming out party as a debutante in March 1965.

They met again at a party in Scotland the following year, when legend has it that she arrived with one boyfriend and left having replaced him with Parker Bowles, a dashing subaltern.

It was a tempestuous relationship but Parker Bowles was an unreliable and unfaithful boyfriend who couldn't resist other women, including Camilla's friends, and found to his considerable pleasure that the ladies found him irresistible.

He then had a fling with the 19-year-old Princess Anne, but marriage with the Queen's daughter was out of the question because of his faith, but they have remained life-long pals and Parker Bowles is godfather to the princess's daughter Zara.

He married Camilla in 1973 following several years of dating on and off. 

But being married to Camilla did not see Parker Bowles ending his bachelor habits and his philandering continued.

The marriage survived until Charles' TV confession in which he admitted his adultery and the couple divorced in 1995.

A year later, Parker Bowles quietly remarried divorcee Rose Pitman — whose former husband was part of the famous Pitman shorthand family — and with whom he remained until her death 14 years ago.

Throughout these turbulent years, he stayed discreet not just about his royal connections but also his womanising.

The Daily Mail's Richard Kay wrote in 2017: 'All too often, the women were indeed friends of his wife, and showed scant loyalty to her by succumbing to his charms.'

But the royal expert claimed that 'Andrew’s affairs were just a fact of life and not something Camilla often spoke about', noting how there 'was never a tense atmosphere in the couple’s home'.

Indeed, Parker Bowles and Camilla, who divorced after 22 years of marriage and two children: food writer Tom, 50 and Laura Lopes, 46, an artist, still remain good friends.

But according to royal author Penny Junor, Camilla was 'bitterly hurt' by her ex-husband's 'infidelity', which started even when they were just going out.

Then during their marriage, Parker Bowles would apparently 'never be short of opportunities to be unfaithful' when spending his weekdays in London, where his regiment was based.

'Today, looking back, [Parker Bowles] would admit that if blame were to be apportioned for the way his marriage ended, he’d feel obliged to take a full 80 per cent of it,' wrote Junor.

British author Petronella Wyatt also previously discussed Parker Bowles' alleged unfaithfulness with the Daily Mail in 2022.

She wrote: 'For three decades, beginning in the late 1960s, Andrew was the lothario of London, and the name on everyone’s lips.

'Tall, handsome and athletic, he was sophisticated, witty, and priapic. Unusually for a man of his boarding school-educated class, he enjoyed talking to women and they responded. Half the women who knew him were in love with him and the other half panted to meet him.' 

Ms Wyatt reported one of Parker Bowles' exes as saying: ‘Andrew is like a drug. You can’t really get him out of your system.'

Meanwhile, the Marchioness of Lansdowne, one of Camilla’s Queen’s Companions, has said of Ms Cooper's muse: ‘Everybody loves Andrew. He’s a real charmer but he’s always terribly misbehaving.'

Having divorced from Camilla in 1995, Parker Bowles was a guest at Charles and Camilla’s wedding in April 2005, attending their service of blessing at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. 

The two are still the friendliest of exes, with the King's wife said to still be close despite infidelity on both sides during their 22-year marriage. 

‘They are joined at the hip,’ according to a friend. ‘He arranges so much for her. They have lunch together the whole time. He’s right in there. He was always, and still is, Camilla’s co-conspirator.’ 

Indeed the acclaimed royal author Tina Brown has claimed it was Parker Bowles, rather than Charles, who was the love of Camilla's life.

But Parker Bowles's special character has now won a legion of new admirers, thanks to Disney+'s Rivals.

The British author, 87, said Parker Bowles was the man who inspired the charming ex-Olympian show jumper turned Tory MP character, played by His Dark Materials actor Alex Hassell in the series. 

Speaking to the How To Fail podcast in October, Ms Cooper confirmed she based the aristocrat - described in her raunchy 1988 novel as 'the handsomest man in England' - on him. 

'He's been a great friend for a long time... so he's very like Rupert. He's beautiful and blond and stunning,' said Jilly. 

In her books, Campbell-Black is described as 'well-constructed. Usually, men with such long legs had short bodies but Rupert, from the broad flat shoulders to the lean muscular hips and powerful thighs, seemed perfectly in proportion'.

The writer has always maintained she gleaned only the best bits from her various high-society pals, saying she was inspired by 'their charm and glamour' and that her character's 'naughty behaviour’ didn't come from them.

Released in October, the highly-anticipated Disney+ adaptation has also won over a whole new audience to the author's literary talents. 

For most of his life, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles was a man about whom male chums would tell tales of his amorous adventures and legendary sexual prowess. 

However as he reached his 80s, the gossip relating to his womanising seemed to be fading.

But last year he once again proved to still be the subject of such admiring gossip, when the Daily Mail's Richard Kay revealed that he was dating the Weakest Link star Anne Robinson.

Ms Robinson, 79, the Lancashire-born daughter of a market trader was the icy deadpan former host of The Weakest Link and Countdown.

Reports of their late-life romance has enthralled not just the smart salons where the ex-soldier once cut a swathe, but those accustomed to the rolling countryside and drystone crannies of the Cotswolds where this improbable couple have become the most sought-after dinner table companions.

On the surface it would seem they have very little in common: Parker Bowles the ex-Household Cavalry officer, lampooned as the man who 'laid down his wife for his country'; and twice-divorced Ms Robinson, Annie to her friends, who boasts her own royal-style nickname — the 'queen of mean' for her withering TV put-downs.

So could Ms Robinson finally be the one to tame the silvery Parker Bowles?

They met in hardly the most promising of occasions on which to light the fuse of romantic love: a reunion of old school friends gathered around a country house dining table, along with a retired monk as matchmaker.  

Once a year, Ms Robinson organises a lunch at her home, set in seven landscaped acres, for her older brother Peter who lives in San Francisco. One of his old friends at Ampleforth, the North Yorkshire boarding school known as the Catholic Eton, is Father Felix Stevens with whom he played cricket for the college and who later went into the priesthood.

It was Father Felix, a former master of St Benet's Hall, Oxford, and a neighbour of Ms Robinson's, who suggested she include the brigadier — also one of his contemporaries at Ampleforth — on the guest list.

Former newspaper columnist Ms Robinson has remained uncharacteristically silent about just what triggered the friendship, but I understand that the attraction on that first encounter was mutual.

According to friends, they discovered they had more shared interests than they thought.

Ms Robinson is no Cotswolds-weekender or media-townie (she has had roots in the region for 40 years) and, since her divorce from her ex-journalist second husband John Penrose 15 years ago, has lived there full-time.

Meanwhile Parker Bowles has remained at the former marital home of his dead second wife Rosemary in Wiltshire, with its close proximity to some of the country's best-known race tracks where he is a familiar figure. 

Ms Robinson too loves racing yet, incredibly, the pair have avoided being photographed together. The reason for this, Kay was told, is because they both wanted to keep things quiet for as long as possible. 

Parker Bowles has remained close to Camilla despite their divorce 28 years ago and has had a front seat at her remarkable transformation from the hated 'third person' in Princess Diana's marriage to the King's respected first lady.  

As for Ms Robinson, after two failed marriages — and a daughter Emma by her first husband, the late Times editor Charles Wilson, who like Parker Bowles was a member of the Jockey Club — she too has no wish for any attention.

So what is it about Parker Bowles that she finds attractive? 'Well,' says a figure who knows them both, 'Andrew is still jolly good looking. Of course she knows about his reputation.'

Perhaps we should look at what Ms Robinson has said on the subject of male company. Her ideal man, she once said, would be someone who is 'funny, clever, has integrity, will pick up the restaurant tab and not talk about himself all the time.'

According to another close figure, Parker Bowles ticks all those boxes. Ms Robinson finds the debonair ex-Guards officer 'funny, charming and a very competent cook'.

He is also remarkably unstuffy. 'One of the best things about APB is that he never complains,' says one long-time friend. 'When you think of all the c*** he has put up with over the past 40 years, he has just said nothing.' 

Age may have robbed him of some of that virility, but he has lost none of his celebrated charm. 'He's old school — dogs, sporting events, the country and Annie loves all that too,' said one of her circle.

'People have often misjudged her as some pushy upstart from Liverpool. She was expensively educated at Farnborough Hill, the private Catholic girls convent and at Les Ambassadrices, a finishing school in Paris.' 

But there is one other significant factor. For Ms Robinson is as blunt in private as she is direct in public. Indeed she once told Camilla (before she was Queen) to get a proper bra fitting.

'Andrew loves that,' says one Cotswolds neighbour. 'I would say there are similarities between Anne's sharp wit and Camilla's rather waspish turn of phrase.'

All the same it is difficult to reconcile Ms Robinson, whose autobiography Memoirs Of An Unfit Mother went into unflinching detail about her alcoholism, losing custody of her daughter and battle for sobriety before finding her TV success. 

One figure who has followed this intriguing match is Queen Camilla. She is understood to be amused by the flowering of romantic love between her ex-husband who is always scrupulously polite and acid-tongued Ms Robinson who famously dispatched quiz contestants with the withering phrase: 'You are the weakest link, goodbye.'

She is said to be supportive of the relationship.

In fact the more you look at the two, the more sensible the developing friendship seems. Both have been married twice, both have grandchildren they adore and both have long lived in the public eye.

It might just be that Parker Bowles could finally be changing his ways due to Ms Robinson.