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Andrew Parker Bowles

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Brigadier Andrew Henry Parker Bowles OBE, (born December 27,1939) is an English soldier and aristocrat. He is best known as the former husband of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall (who is known as the Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland), wife of HRH The Prince of Wales.

He is the son of Derek Henry Parker Bowles, a great-grandson of the 6th Earl of Macclesfield, and his Roman Catholic wife, Dame Ann de Trafford, a daughter of the multimillionaire racehorse owner Sir Humphrey de Trafford, who was descended from a notable recusant English Catholic family. It is said that his godmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, but his christening announcement in The Times, February 13 1940 (p. 9, col. C) does not mention her name. (The Times mentions only Sir Humphrey de Trafford, the Marquess of Hartingdon, Miss Mary de Trafford and Miss Swinnerton-Dyer.) Educated at the Benedictine Ampleforth College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Andrew Parker Bowles married Camilla Rosemary Shand in a Catholic ceremony in 1973; she was briefly a former girlfriend of the Prince of Wales. They have two children, Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Parker Bowles, who were raised nominally Catholic, at least while their paternal grandmother, Dame Ann Parker Bowles, was alive. Laura attended St. Mary's, Shaftesbury, a Catholic girls school in Dorset, England, while Tom attended a secular school, Eton College.

Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles divorced in 1995. A year later he married his longtime companion, Rosemary Pitman. Rosemary (née Dickinson) was first married to Lieutenant-Colonel (John) Hugh Pitman, a descendant of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of the Pitman system of shorthand (stenography). Rosemary is not to be confused with Virginia Pitman, a flatmate of Diana, Princess of Wales before Diana's marriage to the Prince of Wales. Andrew and Rosemary Parker Bowles attended the marriage of Camilla and the Prince of Wales, which took place on April 9, 2005.

Parker Bowles has had various positions including aide-de-camp to Christopher Soames, Baron Soames, when he was Governor of Rhodesia during its transition to the majority rule state of Zimbabwe in 1979. Earlier in the 1970s he was Colonel Commanding the Household Cavalry and Silver Stick in Waiting to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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(see "Old Amplefordians")

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