Camilla's ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles attends coronation ...

It is just under 90 years since a King was forced to abdicate his throne because he wanted to marry a divorced woman.

Things have certainly changed. Not only are King Charles III and Queen Camilla both divorced – but her ex-husband is even coming to the coronation. 

The announcement that Andrew Parker Bowles would be one of the relative few to get the golden ticket to the coronation surprised even royal watchers. There is certainly no precedent.

When Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953 there were 30,000 divorcees a year and divorcees were not meant to get too close to royal circles – which a few years later prevented Princess Margaret from marrying the dashing but divorced war hero pilot-turned-royal aide Group Captain Peter Townsend.

The Crown fans will recall how the Queen did not want to invite Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Bouvier to a State Visit dinner for the American president and his first lady in 1961 because she was divorced.

But the charming but rakish Andrew Parker Bowles, 83, has always been a figure who makes his own rules.

And also his five grandchildren from his marriage to Camilla – Lola and Freddy Parker Bowles, aged 15 and 13, and twins 13-year-old twins Louis and Gus Lopes and their sister Eliza, 15 – are all due to have starring roles at the coronation.

The boys were all pages to the Queen while all five are said to be holding the canopy over her as she is anointed with oil in the most sacred part of the ceremony. 

Andrew, a retired British army officer who is nicknamed the Brigadier for the rank he rose to, was born into royal circles – his aristocratic parents were close friends with the Queen Mother – and he was a page at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. 

He was always part of the royal social set and played polo with Prince Charles. His romance with Camilla (then Shand) was on and off for several years and at one point in the early 1970s he was in a “royal quadrangle’ when he was dating Princess Anne while her brother Charles was seeing Camilla. 

There was never likely to be any future with Anne. At the time, marrying a Catholic like Parker Bowles would have removed her from the line of succession to the throne.

Meanwhile, Charles was seriously in love with Camilla but there were forces within the Palace who did not want them to marry and when Charles travelled overseas with the Royal Navy the relationship ended and Camilla got back together with Andrew. 

According to rumor, Camilla and Andrew’s father’s Bruce Shand and Derek Parker Bowles forced him to propose by publishing an engagement announcement in the Times of London on March 15 1973.

He went down on one knee after it had been published and the two married later the same year. Camilla shared the news of the engagement with Charles in a letter which “broke his heart” according to royal author Penny Junor. 

Andrew was often away as a Guards cavalry officer in the Army, working in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, for which he was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. 

When he was stationed at home, his duties kept him in royal circles: the mounted guards are the most prestigious British military units, and play a key part in royal ceremonies, with the soldiers on horseback resplendent in their polished uniforms.

But his duties also brought heartbreak. He was commanding officer of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment in 1982 when men and horses from his regiment were killed by two IRA bombs.

The then Lieutenant Colonel Parker Bowles was one of the first at the horrific scene, which killed four men under his command, another seven soldiers from a military band, and seven horses. It was one of the terrorist group’s most notorious attacks, carried out just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace.

More happily his military service also made him Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen, and he sat in uniform for the British painter Lucian Freud, who called the work “Brigadier.”

A magnet for women, he was allegedly the first to be unfaithful in the marriage and was one of the inspirations for the literary seducer Rupert Campbell-Black in the British author Jilly Cooper’s “bonkbuster” novel The Riders.

In 1986 Camilla took up again with Charles and the relationship was kept as an open secret for many years. “They were part of this big friendship group and there was this unspoken arrangement which suited them all, until it blew up,” says royal commentator Joshua Rom. 

In 1993 the recording of an explicit phone conversation between Charles and Camilla – the first famous case of “phone sex” – was exposed. The relationship could no longer be hidden.  

Camilla and Andrew divorced in 1995 but to this day are apparently the best of friends. 

One of her friends and Queen’s Companions, the Marchioness of Lansdowne, told The Sunday Times of London of their relationship: “Everybody loves Andrew. He’s a real charmer but he’s always terribly misbehaving.

“Andrew will ring her up and tell her when she’s got something wrong and she’ll ring him up and say when he’s misbehaving.

“Through adversity they’ve kept a really good family ethic. It helps with their children and grandchildren.”

He has also remained on good terms with another ex, Princess Anne, and is godfather to her daughter Zara. 

After his divorce, Andrew married Rose Pitman who died of cancer aged 69 in 2010. 

One source who knows him well says: “He’s the most charming man imaginable – immensely attractive. He remains quite the lady’s man and has a host of women who visit him regularly.”