The older son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana spent the first week of his life as “Baby Wales” while his parents argued over what to name him. They settled on William Arthur Philip Louis—for the Conqueror, the king of Camelot, the infant’s paternal grandfather, and for Charles’s mentor Earl Mountbatten, who was assassinated by an IRA bomb in the summer of 1979. Diana’s empathetic comment to Charles about the earl’s funeral as the pair of them sat on a hay bale made the prince view the rosy-cheeked teenager as marriage material in the first place. Theirs was one of the great mismatches of royal history—but socially it was nearly a marriage of equals. Although Diana was a commoner, she was the youngest daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer, the descendant of an aristocratic house whose English lineage stretches back farther back than the Windsors’ does.
As a brief aside, during the coverage of William’s engagement and wedding, American journalists, particularly the television broadcasters, appeared completely confused by the word “commoner”; most couldn’t comprehend how someone who had a title could still be referred to as a commoner, and for some reason, they thought the word was pejorative, uncomfortable about applying it to Catherine Middleton, fearing they were somehow insulting her. The word is not derogatory, but it is a class distinction, and one that is extremely easy to remember. A commoner is anyone who is not of royal blood, whether he or she hails from the aristocracy, the middle classes, or the working class. Diana and the Queen Mother were commoners, even though their fathers were earls. These women became royal only by virtue of their marriages.
Diana was keen to afford her sons, Prince William, born in June 1982, and Prince Harry, born in September 1984, the most “normal” upbringing two royal boys could have. She took them to McDonald’s and insisted that they be given pocket money for sweets (royals traditionally never carry cash). But most crucial to experiencing life in the real world was going to school with other children. Their lives would be uncommon as it was, and royal obligations would come all too soon; she wanted them to have the chance to be kids. Sadly, William and Harry’s first official engagement would be to walk behind the gun carriage that bore the coffin of their mother on September 6, 1997. While 750 million people worldwide had watched Diana marry Charles in St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981, an estimated 2.5 billion were glued to their televisions for her funeral.
One of those people was fifteen-year-old Kate Middleton, a half year older than Prince William. In the days following Diana’s death, like millions of others across the globe, she found herself shaking her head at the apparent indifference of the royal family toward the passing of the woman who had been their greatest asset, difficult at times, to be sure, but nonetheless the mother of a future king. “It’s too little, too late,” Kate murmured, in response to the queen’s taking to the airwaves, under increasing pressure from the people, the press, and her new prime minister, Tony Blair. “The Queen really doesn’t get it, does she?” the teen commiserated with one of her schoolmates. “None of them seem to get it. The Royal Family is a pretty heartless bunch. But I feel so sorry for Prince William and Prince Harry.” Her empathy for the young prince began early. Who knew then that the “heartless bunch” she criticized for their callousness and cluelessness would someday become her in-laws?
Diana had died as a result of a horrific car accident in a Paris tunnel as the sedan in which she was riding with her boyfriend, Emad “Dodi” Al Fayed, was chased by a hellish cavalcade of paparazzi. Several inquests blamed the incident on the blood alcohol level of their chauffeur, Henri Paul. Prince William would always blame the paparazzi, whom he called the “hounds of hell.” Very early in his childhood Diana had noticed her older son’s sensitivity and vulnerability, referring to William as a male version of herself, and a “very old soul,” even at the age of nine. “We are like two peas in a pod,” she observed. “He feels everything too much. He needs to be protected.”
From himself, perhaps. William was such a rambunctious toddler, and so destructive around the house (which happened to be Kensington Palace), that he earned the nickname “the basher.” And at Mrs. Mynor’s Nursery School, where he was enrolled in September 1985, the little prince was quite the tyrannical tyke. He tormented his teachers and fellow classmates, drawing his make-believe sword and threatening to lop off their heads if they didn’t let him have his way, shouting, “My daddy’s a real prince and my daddy can beat up your daddy!”
Appalled by the general chilliness of the Windsors, both in the specific and the abstract, Princess Diana made certain that her sons learned how to be kind. William’s “basher” behavior and rude treatment of the staff and students at Mrs. Mynor’s had been deemed intolerable, and a new nanny was hired, charged with making sure the spoiled brat ceased being a royal pain. Using Diana herself as a model of the necessary virtues of kindness and compassion, Ruth Wallace, or “Nanny Roof,” as William called her, instilled in him a sense of empathy that replaced his anger. It worked, and in just a few months the little boy had become his mother’s chief protector. In no time at all he was a changed child—almost too sensitive and vulnerable.
The Waleses’ marital discord at the time caused palace staffers to become concerned about the emotional stability of William and his younger brother, Harry. William was often caught in the cross fire of his parents’ screaming matches as the royal marriage disintegrated before his eyes. According to his biographer Christopher Andersen, during one skirmish he saw his father lob a riding boot across the room at his mother. And it became a habit for him to pass tissues through the closed door to his sobbing mummy, insisting, “I hate to see you sad.”
If his beloved papa wasn’t tormenting Mummy enough, the paparazzi made it worse. Years later, William endured recurring nightmares in which a beautiful woman was trapped in a speeding car, chased down by members of the media, but in his dreams the river wasn’t the Seine; it was the Thames. And the woman was his girlfriend, Kate Middleton.
They affectionately call each other “Big Willy” and “Babykins.”
Although his parents’ royal marriage was both arranged and unhappy, Prince William chose his own bride, a woman who appears to be his best friend, perhaps even his soul mate. However, in a country founded, and still grounded, in class structure, Kate Middleton is the most common of any royal consort in British history. While William’s four-times-great-grandmother Queen Victoria was transforming England into an empire, his fiancée’s maternal ancestors endured a Dickensian existence in the coal mines of Newcastle.
Catherine, as Buckingham Palace reminds us that her name is from now on, is the first woman not born of aristocratic blood to wed an heir presumptive to Britain’s throne since the clandestine wedding in 1660 of James, Duke of York, to Anne Hyde, whose scandalous relationship was profiled in Royal Affairs. But even Anne was not from such humble stock as Catherine. Anne was the daughter of a Wiltshire lawyer, but at the time of her secret wedding, her father was the Chancellor of the Realm.
Kate Middleton’s lineage is significantly less grand than Anne Hyde’s, although her father’s ancestors included upwardly mobile businessmen and industrialists whose investments enabled their children to enjoy the privileges of the upper middle class. Over the generations, by dint of hard work, ambition, and entrepreneurship, her family became what we might call nouveau riche. Kate’s mother, the vivacious Carole Goldsmith, was an air hostess at British Airways when she met the quiet, self-effacing Michael Middleton, a flight dispatcher. They married on June 21, 1980, with Carole arriving at the picturesque village church princess-style, in a horse-drawn carriage. Catherine was born on January 9, 1982, and her sister, Philippa, known as Pippa, followed in 1983. After having two children, Carole decided to become more earthbound and immersed herself in village life.
Around the time of her son James’s birth in 1987, Carole established a business selling unique grab bags for children’s birthday parties. Business expanded with demand, and then, with the advent of the Internet, what had begun as a local business took off. Michael quit his job to work for Party Pieces full-time. The venture soon became England’s premier party-planning company, enabling the Middletons to move to a £2 million home in Bucklebury, a posh suburb of West Berkshire, and to send Kate and her siblings to expensive schools, where they could hobnob with the offspring of the aristocracy. Kate was a miniature princess even then; she and Pippa modeled sparkly tulle dresses, girly tiaras, and plastic jewelry for the Party Pieces catalog.
Fate brought William and Catherine together like the plot of a Jane Austen novel. They met during their first, or “freshers,” year of college at the University of St. Andrews, but Kate almost didn’t enroll there. Her excellent grades and test scores enabled to her attend any school she wished, and her initial choice was the University of Edinburgh, which had the best art history curriculum (her chosen major) in the UK. However, as far as her extracurricular activities went, in addition to captaining her high school’s field hockey team and playing in the first pair at tennis, the teenage Catherine had also been an assiduous scholar of William Wales. As a lanky, geeky schoolgirl, one of the tallest in her class at the tony Marlborough College, a public (in the United States it would be called “private”) prep school in Wiltshire, eighty miles west of London, she made a hobby out of clipping every news article she could find about the young prince. She followed William’s schedule by logging into the Court Calendar to see where the members of the royal family were slated to appear. She studied his photographs and imagined the personality that lay beneath the rosy cheeks, fair complexion, and blue eyes, all of which earned her the nickname “Princess in Waiting” from her friends. “She was besotted,” said her classmate Jessica Hay, whose boyfriend at the time was Nicholas Knatchbull, one of Prince Charles’s godsons and William’s cousin and mentor at Eton. From Jessica, who had met William, Kate got a bit of an inside scoop on the heir, which served to solidify the positive opinions she’d already formed about him. “He was shyer than I ever thought. I got the feeling he wasn’t used to normal girls being around him,” Jessica observed.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday Jessica Hay confided, “We would sit around talking about all the boys at school we fancied, but Catherine would always say, ‘I don’t like any of them. They’re all a bit of rough.’ Then she would joke, ‘There’s no one quite like William….’ She always used to say, ‘I bet he’s really kind. You can tell just by looking at him.’”
When the prince’s coat of arms was revealed on his eighteenth birthday, Catherine was both touched and impressed that William had incorporated into it the three red scallop shells from Diana’s crest that Charles had erased upon their divorce. “It’s wonderful that he is paying tribute to his mother like that. It shows he’s still his own man,” Kate (who had still never met William) proudly told her classmates. She was also impressed that he had insisted on being addressed simply as William, rather than as Your Royal Highness, or “Sir.” It was modern, yet showed the common touch without being common.
Even then, and even if it was only in jest, she felt oddly proprietary about the prince, and grew very introspective when the television blared stories about his latest potential romance, such as the time when the gorgeous blond heiress Mili d’Erlanger was invited to joined the Waleses’ family cruise. One school chum observed of Kate, “She’s very sweet and reserved, so it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking, really. But she always turned very quiet when people started talking about Mili and Prince William.”
Still, their paths almost never crossed. English students typically take a gap year between the end of high school and the start of college. While William (under an alias) participated in the grueling Raleigh International program, an educational development charity located in Chile, Kate spent her gap year in Florence, learning Italian and immersing herself in Renaissance art. She happened to catch a televised press conference with princes Charles and William after Diana’s former press secretary P. D. Jephson had published a tell-all memoir, pegging the late Princess of Wales as neurotic and manipulative. William was expressing the family’s sense of sorrow and betrayal. Glued to the TV, empathy exuding from every pore, she exclaimed to her friends, “My God, that voice! Isn’t he sexy?” A Columbia University student who knew Kate in Florence noticed that she was “maybe a little more enthusiastic about Prince William than the rest of us. She kept saying, ‘He’s mine, you know.’ Joking, of course, since she’d never even met him.”
When Kate’s ambitious mother learned that William planned to attend St. Andrews, Carole, who has been compared to Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet, urged Kate to change her mind about Edinburgh and switch schools. Kate needed a bit of convincing. It wasn’t such a sure thing as sending Jane off in a rainstorm to meet the wealthy Mr. Bingley. But by Christmas of 2000, Kate had ditched her plans for Edinburgh and had been accepted to the university on the windy coast of Fife, a Scottish town most famous for being the birthplace of golf.
William Wales met tall, willowy Catherine Middleton in September 2001, during their first term at St. Andrews, slyly known as the top matchmaking university in Britain. They were both history of art majors and both assigned to St. Salvator’s residence hall. Romance blossomed slowly and organically, born out of genuine friendship and a shared interest in sports, dramatics, literature, and the arts—very much the antithesis of William’s parents’ manufactured, whirlwind courtship. In fact, both William and Kate were dating other classmates before they began to fall for each other. William was seeing another fresher in St. Salvator’s: the dark-haired, voluptuous Carly Massy-Birch, an aspiring actress who was voted “best derriere” at the school (though Kate had been voted prettiest in their dorm). Kate, meanwhile, was dating the athletic Rupert Finch, a six-foot-two senior. Unlike William, whose name seemed to be linked with numerous society beauties, and whose pickup line had once been positively Hanoverian (“I’m a prince, wanna pull?”), Kate had limited romantic experience. She was popular and preppy, had been sporty and studious in high school, and although she enjoyed a good time and was a little bit of a prankster, she was never a wild child, hating to lose control. A Marlborough biology classmate, Kathryn Solari, described her as “always really sweet and lovely. She was a good girl and…she always did the right thing…. I wouldn’t say she was the brightest button, but she was very hard-working. I don’t think you would find anyone to say a bad word about her.”
Kate had seen William once when they were prep school students. His Eton hockey team had come to Marlborough College to play Kate’s school. As captain of the girls’ team she was permitted a close view of the players, and was impressed with the way the tall prince took charge. She had studied the way Camilla Parker Bowles first captured Prince Charles’s attention in 1970 by standing apart from the crowd. It was indeed an effective way to get noticed, so Kate remained apart from her team, but the best she got that day was an exchanged glance.
By the time Kate properly met William, he had fortunately ditched the smarmy pickup line. He arrived at St. Andrews to find a throng of several thousand people waiting to greet him, most of whom were coeds. Among them was Catherine Middleton, eager to be there, but nonetheless embarrassed about it, so she hung back, blending into the crowd. Predictably, she had read about the sort of people the prince would be interested in befriending at St. Andrews. He was not looking to find chums among his own social class. “It’s about their character and who they are and whether we get on. I just hope I meet people I get on with.”
“I turned bright red and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting him,” Kate confessed about their first encounter. “[H]e takes your breath away,” she confided to a friend. William was certainly an imposing presence: six-foot-three to her five-ten, making him the tallest (future) king in England’s history, topping Henry VIII by an inch. But the heir soon proved himself to be charmingly human, spilling a drink on himself. “That’s the idea,” said Kate, after she grew to know him well. “Will can be clumsy, actually, but most of the time it’s really just an act. Otherwise people would just keep gawping at him.”
William and Kate made an impression on each other, even if it wasn’t a romantic one at the time. Still, the prince recalled, “When I first met Kate, I knew there was something special about her. I knew there was something I wanted to explore there….”
However, during William’s gap year he had made inroads into other uncharted territory that it seemed he had an interest in exploring as well. He journeyed to the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, an African preserve run by the parents of then-nineteen-year-old Jessica (Jecca) Craig. Enchanted by the beauty of Africa, William developed a special affinity for the continent. He also became enchanted by the beauty of Jecca Craig, and during that trip he proposed to her on bended knee beside a lake on Mount Kenya, 12,500 feet above sea level. As William was still a teen, a student, and a commitment-phobe at the time, and had pretty much convinced himself that he wouldn’t wed before he turned thirty, neither of them took their engagement very seriously. But in the years to come Jecca Craig would remain on the media’s short list of potential girlfriends and brides for William as he kept his relationship with Kate under wraps, maintaining the subterfuge that he was still available.
Both Jecca and William’s first college girlfriend, Carly Massy-Birch, were unprepared to deal with the constant media attention and the perpetual invasions of privacy that came with being his sweetheart. Other family friends to whom he was linked, society belles with hyphenated names, felt the same way.
The first semester at St. Andrews was a daunting one for William. He didn’t like the art history curriculum after all, and wasn’t doing well in it academically. He’d made a concerted effort not to become involved with the social whirl either on or off campus, so he had made only a few trusted friends from his residence hall. Fife was rainy and geographically remote from London. He was almost ready to drop out of school. But after a family meeting, it was decided that William should stick it out at least for another year, so as not to embarrass crown and country, not to mention relations with Scotland.
Over the Christmas holidays he’d stayed in touch with Kate. She was a wee bit homesick and wasn’t sure she wanted to remain at St. Andrews either. But she urged the prince to stick with it, making a pact that if they were both unhappy after another year of school, they’d depart together. Catherine was also instrumental in encouraging William to switch majors to geography in the second term, a course in which he’d received an A at Eton. After that, he became much happier and began to settle in.
William’s relationship with Carly Massy-Birch had lasted only about seven weeks. And the nature of his friendship with Kate began to shift after the “Don’t Walk” charity fashion show held at the St. Andrews Bay Hotel on March 27, 2002. The prince, who had paid £200 for a front-row seat, went gaga when Kate, a volunteer model, strutted the catwalk in (among other things) a diaphanous black knit dress that revealed her lingerie (and her athletic body) beneath. Her hair was a mass of tangled curls. She’d always been self-conscious about her legs, thinking they were too short, but that night she was all confidence. William turned to his friend Fergus Boyd and exclaimed, “Wow, Fergus, Kate’s hot!”
As a brief aside, the most famous LBD in history has a denouement of its own. The black silk dress designed by St. Andrews textile student Charlotte Todd, and fittingly titled “The Art of Seduction,” was sold to an anonymous male bidder at a charity auction on March 17, 2011, for $125,871. Todd originally conceived the garment as a skirt; it was Kate’s idea to boldly restyle it as a minidress.
At the “Don’t Walk” fashion show’s after party the prince made his move. One of the guests recalled, “It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate. He actually told her she was a knockout that night, which caused her to blush. There was definitely chemistry between them, and Kate had really made an impression on William. She played it very cool, and at one point when William seemed to lean in to kiss her, she pulled away. She didn’t want to give off the wrong impression or make it too easy for Will.”
In fact, Kate was still dating Rupert Finch at the time. Rupert graduated after Kate’s and William’s first year, and had a law trainee job lined up in London. She wished him the best of luck, sure that he had a successful future ahead of him. William was glad to see Finch moving out of Kate’s life, because he was about to ask her to move off campus with him and their friend Fergus Boyd. Kate hesitated, unsure about being the only female in the arrangement. She laid the burden at her mother’s doorstep, as in “My mother wouldn’t approve….” But (to the chagrin of her daughter) Carole Middleton, à la Mrs. Bennet, couldn’t have been more delighted. Ultimately, another St. Salvator’s coed, Olivia Bleasdale, became the fourth housemate.
Kate’s modeling debut had caused something of a sensation, and the heir’s reaction had been duly noted. Although the palace had brokered a media moratorium on William’s college experience, the newspapers couldn’t resist such headlines as, WILLIAM AND HIS UNDIE-GRADUATE FRIEND KATE TO SHARE A STUDENT FLAT (The Mail on Sunday), and, WILLIAM SHACKS UP WITH STUNNING UNDIES MODEL (The Sun).
Despite the headlines, the palace was quick to point out that because William and Kate had separate bedrooms, they were not sleeping together.
The students enjoyed dinner parties at friends’ houses and made the rounds of local pubs and nightclubs. When it came to entertaining at home, the girls did the cooking while the boys headed to Tesco to shop for groceries. William admitted to being “absolutely useless” in the kitchen, but found food shopping therapeutic. Often, however, they ordered pizza or takeaway, and nestled in to watch DVDs or play drinking games.
One night, Kate’s rival Carly Massy-Birch was present. The drinking game was “I’ve Never,” where one player has to admit something he or she has never done, but if someone else in the room has done it, he or she has to down a shot. “I’ve never dated two people in this room,” Carly declared. The whole room went silent. “I can’t believe you just said that,” William muttered to her before he took his drink. She had outed the burgeoning relationship with Kate that the prince and their other friends had managed to discreetly keep under wraps.
In June, the housemates went their separate ways for the summer. Catherine and William remained in touch while she worked off her student loan as a barmaid for a posh catering firm with the unfortunate name of Snatch. “[Y]ou could see her face light up every time he called. She was walking on air,” observed one of her coworkers.
William spent a good deal of the summer boozily cruising aboard a friend’s yacht, the Alexander, in the company of a gaggle of tanned and toned beauties. If he was trying to put the media off the scent of his relationship with Kate, he was doing a good job. The photos of her beau cozying up to any number of gorgeous girls amid press speculation that they were his girlfriend must have been hurtful.
William’s friends thought highly of Kate. Jules Knight, a classmate and founder of the band Blake, said of the two of them, “Kate’s a sweet, unassuming kind of girl. She felt something for Will straightaway, and he was all in for her, completely…. Kate always offered a sympathetic ear. She is very compassionate, very kind.”
Another mutual acquaintance observed that she had what “none of the other girls had. Take a close look at Kate. There is a serenity about her, a kind of calm. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but so many of these other beautiful girls don’t know when to shut up and listen, and she did.”
Kate also went out of her way to befriend William’s protection officers, a gesture that was gratefully appreciated. “She is a delightful girl. Very down-to-earth, very considerate. She says hello and treats you like a person, never acting like you’re not there,” one of them commented. It makes one wonder how they are treated by the Windsors.
During the fall term of 2002, William and Kate’s romance blossomed tentatively and discreetly. But the prince asked Kate not to tell her family about their relationship, even as Carole Middleton kept prodding her daughter for information, suspecting that Kate and His Royal Highness were more than housemates. Sensing that Kate’s social life might be expanding and improving in the near future, to ensure that she had a London base of operations, in November 2002 the Middletons purchased a $2 million pied-à-terre in Chelsea.
That month, Catherine got a taste of what life would be like amid the royal family. William invited a group of school friends to go shooting at Sandringham (the Windsors’ family pile in Norfolk), her first visit to a royal home, although the senior members of the royal family were not in residence at the time. Kate had not been accustomed to killing things for sport. As a little girl, when she read about William bagging rabbits or pheasants, she was certain that he was too kind to kill defenseless woodland creatures and would reassure herself by saying, “It’s all part of his training to be king…. He’s too kind a person to enjoy shooting animals,” or, “The Queen must have made him do it.” In fact, William is the best shot in the family.
Being an athletic and outdoorsy girl, Kate acclimated well, both to Sandringham and to Balmoral in Scotland, where she and William stayed in a cozy cabin that the Queen Mum set aside for her great-grandsons’ use. The staff was impressed; as far as they were concerned, Kate was a “keeper.” According to one of them, “Princess Diana looked like she could hardly wait to leave when she came, but Miss Middleton is a perfect fit. We said to ourselves, ‘The Queen is going to like this one.’”
It was William who didn’t seem so certain. Like many relationships, theirs was experiencing growing pains. To Kate’s delight, William would take one step forward, only, to her dismay, to fall two steps back. On January 9, 2003, Kate was at home with her family celebrating her twenty-first birthday when the prince surprised her by showing up on their doorstep. “I wouldn’t have missed the chance to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Kate for the world,” he told the dazed but delighted Michael and Carole Middleton.
Yet the couple had a tacit agreement to keep their romance under wraps. Even at St. Andrews, William and Kate rarely indulged in public displays of affection unless they were physically surrounded by a protective circle of friends. They left their residence separately and never held hands in public. So when Michael Middleton was asked about his daughter’s relationship with William, he coyly replied, “We are very amused at the thought of being in-laws to Prince William, but I don’t think it is going to happen.”
At that point, an engagement was not on the front burner. It was difficult enough to stave off the inquiries as to whether William had a girlfriend. Speculation that an engagement announcement would be made on his coming-of-age was deftly deflected. William’s twenty-first birthday party was quite the bash. Owing to his affinity for Africa, at Catherine’s suggestion Windsor Castle was turned into a sub-Saharan wonderland. Guests arrived in costume, and were advised ahead of time not to wear anything that could be construed as ethnically insulting and might create a media incident.
However, an incident of another sort was sparked that night: the attendance of Jecca Craig, all the way from Kenya. It was a two-steps-back moment for William, who went so far out of his way to deny a relationship with her that he disavowed being involved with anyone.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about every single girl I’m with, and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it’s a complete pain for the girls. These poor girls, whom I’ve either just met or are friends of mine, suddenly get thrown into the limelight and their parents get rung up and so on. I think it’s a little unfair on them, really. I’m used to it, because it happens quite a lot now. But it’s very difficult for them and I don’t like that at all.
“If I fancy a girl and she fancies me back, which is rare, I ask her out. But at the same time, I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation, because a lot of people don’t understand what comes with knowing me, for one—and secondly, if they were my girlfriend, the excitement it would probably cause.”
By the end of the summer of 2003, the royal romance was an open secret at St. Andrews, but William and Kate had managed to keep it from the world, maintaining a low profile. The couple moved into Balgove House, a four-bedroom cottage a quarter mile outside town. William installed a champagne fridge; Kate put up gingham curtains.
In the early spring of 2004, the couple went riding in the Middleton Hunt (no relation to Catherine’s family) in North Yorkshire, and William introduced her as his “girlfriend” for the first time. But it wasn’t until a paparazzo from the Sun photographed them skiing at Klosters in Switzerland and published the tabloid headline on April 1, FINALLY…WILLS GETS A GIRL, that people clamored to know everything about the shy, gorgeous brunette.
Naturally, the next question was, When would the prince propose? But William is his own man, and when he feels pressured to do something, he either pushes back or walks away from it.
That summer, it seemed as though the prince went out of his way to show the world that he was unattached. He partied hard at pubs and nightclubs in the company of male friends or his brother, and there were witnesses aplenty who saw him getting drunk and cuddling, groping, or fondling various and sundry girls who later sold their stories to the media.
William’s excessive attempts to hide his genuine romance or appear to redirect public attention from it with a little flirtatious sleight of hand smacks of a Hanoverian ancestor’s conduct 217 years earlier. In 1785 the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) illegally wed a Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert. He then behaved like a cad in public, resuming his liaisons with previous mistresses and embarking on affairs with new ones, to discredit any stories that he had married Mrs. Fitzherbert.
Kate, who was heartbroken by William’s behavior, wasn’t so sure that it was just “harmless flirting,” as her mother hastened to assure her. “I believe William loves me and would never do anything to intentionally hurt me,” she told Carole. Yet the Windsor men and the Hanovers before them were notorious womanizers; she feared it was in his genes. “But it’s that family….”
For the third year in a row William wished to return to the Craigs’ wildlife preserve in Kenya, giving rise to speculation that Jecca Craig remained in the romantic picture. The media brouhaha was not fair either to Jecca or to Kate. Ordinarily patient and discreet, Kate lost her customary cool; their arguments over it spilled out-of-doors. According to a mutual friend, Catherine “felt threatened and humiliated. It was one thing to never be publicly acknowledged, but quite another to have someone else bandied about in the press as the woman in his life. She knew that would happen all over again if he went to see Jecca Craig.”
But William is as stubborn as his father, and when it came to women, no one told him what to do. He insisted that he no longer had feelings for Jecca, but Kate reminded him that this wasn’t how it would appear to an outsider or how it would be spun by the media. She ultimately won what the press dubbed “the Battle of the Babes” when Charles and the palace agreed with her point of view. By then the Prince of Wales saw Kate as a daughter-in-law, even if William wasn’t quite there yet.
Every time his raunchily romantic antics made tabloid headlines, William would apologize to Kate with a posh vacation or a cozy retreat with the royals. Yet for every indication that William took their relationship seriously, old flames kept leaping out of the woodwork. He was seen partying with some of them, and flew to Tennessee to visit an American heiress, Anna Sloan. Another of his summer 2004 excursions was an all-male cruise featuring an all-girl crew. “Kate was speechless,” said a friend. “He saw nothing wrong with it, of course. But she was definitely humiliated. It was getting harder and harder for her to read him.”
Journalist Katie Nicholl reported their split that summer, although Clarence House, where Prince Charles lives and works in London, and where princes William and Harry resided at the time, issued a denial. Nonetheless, according to Nicholl, William had been unhappy in the relationship for some time, and felt claustrophobic.
As they entered their senior year at St. Andrews in the autumn of 2004, Catherine and William remained on the outs. Although they still lived together, on Carole Middleton’s advice Kate gave William breathing space and went home to Bucklebury on weekends. By Christmas 2004 they were back together, but she had issued William an ultimatum: If he was serious about their relationship, he was not to contact his heiress pals again—and one in particular: a stunning blond with the tongue-twisting name of Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe.
Yet not all of William’s acting out was attributable to a fear of commitment. The release of a second revealing book by Princess Diana’s former press secretary in October 2004 had sent him on a babes-and-booze bender. In the spring of 2005, with final exams looming, his nerves were again sorely tested. The prince wasn’t particularly studious to begin with, and he found himself cramming for his finals while Operation Paget, Scotland Yard’s inquest on Diana’s death, was lobbing one bombshell after another at the royal family, even suggesting that her body might have to be exhumed because of problematic issues with the toxicology report.
According to one of their classmates, “If it wasn’t for Kate, Will would have crumbled with all that was going on. She quizzed him, went over notes with him, just did whatever it took to keep his mind on what was important.” True to form, Kate remained steady and steadfast, keeping him on an even keel. The prince had once told his friend Guy Pelly (now a nightclub impresario), “I can rely on her totally. She is completely there for me. I’ve never had anyone in my life like Kate.”
On June 23, 2005, Kate received her degree in history of art, and William received his in geography. As Vice Chancellor Brian Lang told their graduating class, “You will have made lifelong friends…. You may have met your husband or wife. Our title as the top matchmaking university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St. Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply….”
The queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, attended the graduation ceremony. Her Majesty approved of Catherine, though they were not formally introduced at the time. Her mother was already so revved up about being in the same place with the royal family that Kate took a pass. “She is good for him, I think,” the queen said to Prince Charles. “But where do we go from here?”
Where, indeed? Kate herself seemed kind and pleasant. But the “men in gray,” as Princess Diana had called the palace courtiers, were concerned that the Middletons were not aristocratic enough to be Windsor in-laws, or that some crazy relative would emerge who would embarrass everyone. According to an unnamed courtier, “The Queen was sick of all the scandal and the drama. She wanted a nice, obedient girl from a lovely, hopefully rather boring, family.” In time, Kate’s uncle Gary Goldsmith, who calls his Ibiza residence the “Maison de Bang Bang,” would boast—to Prince William—of his own drug and prostitution connections.
After graduation William and Kate enjoyed a romantic holiday in Kenya. Then the prince began preparing for the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he would follow in his brother’s footsteps. Because Harry hadn’t gone to university first, he was already ahead of William. Kate moved to London and submitted her résumé to art galleries. On January 8, 2006, William began his military training. Four days earlier, he and Kate had shared their first public kiss, dispelling rumors that their romance was on the rocks. The media took note as well when Kate and her parents attended William’s graduation from Sandhurst that November. ITN hired a lip-reader to discern what Kate was saying to her mother as she watched William march past. The verdict: “I love the uniform. It’s so sexy!”
Two weeks earlier, Catherine had been invited to spend a weekend with the royal family at Sandringham in Norfolk. The Windsors seemed very comfortable with her, and the feeling was mutual. After the disastrous marriages of three of her four children (Anne, Charles, and Andrew), the queen had become a fan of long courtships, and now favored a relationship of at least five years before she approved of the resounding clang of wedding bells. How much had changed in a generation! Charles already considered Kate one of the family, but it took Camilla some time to come around. At first, she found Kate “pretty, but rather dim” and went out of her way to say something snide about her, even as Charles complimented her. Ironically, as she had the least patrician birthright in the room, Camilla felt that the Middletons weren’t blue-blooded enough and that William should marry a girl from an old aristocratic house, meddling in the heir’s affairs the same way she had in Charles’s marriage to Diana.
Mindful of Diana’s trial by fire during her engagement and of the chilly reception the royal family had given her, William was already taking pains to ease Catherine into The Firm. He had even requested that she be advised by family members and palace staffers on how to cope with the barrage of paparazzi and the media scrutiny, as well as how to handle the loneliness and isolation that his mother had endured. But unless Kate was in William’s company, or until they got engaged, she would not be entitled to a protection officer of her own.
And yet she was a princess-in-training with no assurance that William would propose. Purportedly, she was instructed to study footage of Princess Diana for lessons in everything from how to handle the press and work a crowd to gracefully getting in and out of a car without flashing any thigh. A target for every camera, Kate was always perfectly groomed and impeccably dressed when she stepped outside. Well coached, she never spoke to the press, nor posed, but smiled and kept going about her business.
According to Tatler’s Geordie Greig, Kate was “perfect princess material. She is the epitome of an effortlessly stylish English rose. She has qualities you can’t create or manufacture. Her unaffectedness makes her particularly attractive.”
While William had begun to learn the royal ropes, taking brief internships at Chatsworth, HSBC, and the Bank of England, and then embarking on a military career, Catherine had become a dabbler. Although she showed talent as a photographer, instead she enjoyed a brief stint as an accessories buyer, built a Web site for her parents’ business, and curated an art show, as she placed her royal relationship above all else.
Woolworth’s started manufacturing china tchotchkes with the couple’s images and initials on them in 2006. Kate was amused; William not so much. The press had expected he might pop the question on her twenty-fifth birthday, January 9, 2007, mobbing her when she left her London flat. She had hoped he would get down on bended knee on Valentine’s Day, 2007, but William gave her a diamond-encrusted antique compact instead of a ring. A former St. Andrews classmate described Kate as “crushed” by the disappointment.
During those early months of 2007, Catherine and William found themselves at a crossroads. The Middleton mantra was “Grin and bear it,” and Kate had to do a lot of both, because William was visibly pulling away. The relationship began to crumble when William was down in Dorset for a ten-week tank commander’s course at the Royal Army’s training camp in Bovington. The couple was separated by a distance of 130 miles, and William preferred to spend weekends with his fellow officers instead of going up to London to be with Kate. On March 22, 2007, at a nightclub in Bournemouth, he was caught in the flashbulbs with his arm around a pretty eighteen-year-old Brazilian student, Ana Ferreira, who was quite certain that William groped her breast, and she cheerfully told the press about it. Later in the evening the prince steamed up the dance floor with nineteen-year-old Lisa Agar, and then invited her back to his barracks to hang out with him and his friends. When the story hit the tabloids, Kate predictably became infuriated.
William defended himself, insisting, at least to his friends, “I’m not 36 and I’m not married. I’m 24 and just want to have some fun.”
Kate had reached the point where she wanted a commitment but dared not ask for one. In fact, the more she yearned for William to get closer, the farther he pulled away. But instead of facing his insecurity or immaturity, the prince neatly deflected attention onto the perennial adversary, the media, blaming them for the problems in their relationship. “The press will make your life unbearable as long as we’re together,” he told Kate. “I don’t want you suffering the way my mother did.” But in trying to protect Kate, William was wounding her deeply. She reminded him how much they had invested in the relationship and how much they had already shared. According to one of Kate’s friends from Bucklebury, “She told him that he made her happy and that she believed she made him happy, and that was all that mattered in the end.”
But William demurred, insisting that for a man in his position, things weren’t that simple. Now twenty-five, he was under too much pressure to propose. He felt uncomfortable echoes of his mother’s marriage jitters as well as the pressure his father was given by his father to marry Diana because Charles had reached a certain age. William was also determined not to let Fleet Street turn him into a fiancé just because it sold newspapers. Kate assured him that she was in no hurry to settle down, but the truth was, she wanted security.
Citing claustrophobia, over several agonizing phone calls in which he insisted, “I can’t…. It just isn’t going to work. It isn’t fair to you,” he ended their romance on April 11, 2007. News of the royal breakup leaked out three days later.
As soon as Catherine was no longer a royal girlfriend, she and her family seemed fair game for the press. Stories surfaced about some of William’s class-bound friends who would mock Kate’s roots by mimicking a flight attendant’s doors-to-manual command. Then the footage was broadcast of Carole Middleton chewing gum during William’s graduation from Sandhurst (it turned out to be nicotine gum to help her kick a thirty-year smoking habit). It suddenly became news that in the presence of the queen she used the words “toilet” (instead of “lavatory”) and “pardon?” (rather than “what?”)—perhaps “pardon” is what the royal family does to traitors. The stories turned out to be spurious inventions; Mrs. Middleton and HRM had never been introduced. But the media wondered whether the ambitious, enterprising, social-climbing Carole was too common to be William’s mother-in-law and had damaged her daughter’s chances of becoming a princess.
Not wishing to lose the goodwill of her middle-class subjects, the queen was quick to ensure that Kate didn’t think the criticism came from her. “What rubbish. I have absolutely nothing against gum. I chew gum!” she exclaimed when she read the headlines. And William phoned Kate to assure her that none of his family or friends had spoken to the press about the Middletons.
William and Kate spent the next ten weeks partying separately, if frantically, as if to show the other that they could get on well enough alone. A few nights after their breakup, William racked up a bar tab of more than $17,000 with his friends at Mahiki, one of his favorite watering holes. While the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blasted through the speakers, he raised his arms high above his head and shouted, “I’m freeee!”
Meanwhile, Kate stepped out in a miniskirt, as if to remind William what he was missing. She flirted up a storm on the same dance floors they had frequented together, and William’s once-snooty friends rallied around her.
But by July 1, and the concert to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, the couple was covertly reunited, having made tentative steps to rekindle their romance since the end of May. They sat separately at the concert, but at the after party, as they danced to the Bodyrockers’ “I Like the Way (You Move)” (which they’d always called “their” song), guests noted that the couple was practically making out on the dance floor.
“I’m glad to hear it. She’s a nice girl,” the queen told her grandson when William informed her that he and Kate had reconciled. Nevertheless, an engagement announcement remained forthcoming.
But that August, during a romantic holiday in the Seychelles, William made Kate a promise. As one of their friends later divulged, “They didn’t agree to get married there and then; what they made was a pact. William told Kate she was the one, but he was not ready to get married. He promised her his commitment and said he would not let her down, and she in turn agreed to wait for him.”
The prince needed to be certain Catherine fully understood that his royal duty would always come first, and what it would mean to marry him—what came with the job on her end as well as his. First of all, he would be committing the next few years to training with the RAF, and if Kate thought that being a royal girlfriend was difficult, being the sweetheart of a serviceman was even harder.
On January 7, 2008, William arrived at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire, the oldest air force college in the world. This time he made a concerted effort to return to London on weekends. Kate would be waiting for him at Clarence House, having been cheerfully waved in like a member of the family, according to journalist and royal biographer Katie Nicholl. Kate would have a hot bath and a home-cooked meal waiting for her weary pilot-in-training. “She was almost motherly to him,” a mutual friend recalled. The couple enjoyed puttering about the kitchen, just like the old days at St. Andrews. Friends observed their natural, easy intimacy and their cozy domesticity. William could (and did) finish Kate’s sentences; she could read his body language and the look in his eyes, a keen judge of when he wanted to continue the party or kick the guests out.
On April 11, he qualified as a pilot. Kate attended his RAF graduation in a much-photographed white military-style coat and tall black boots. By that time, however, she had quit her job as a junior accessories buyer and been dubbed “Waity Katie” by the press. It seemed that all she was doing was waiting for her boyfriend to propose while he was busy with his military commitments, having embarked on a stint with the Royal Navy. His heavy schedule only spotlighted her own career of little consequence.
Catherine finally met the queen at the May 2008 wedding of another of Her Majesty’s grandsons, Peter Phillips, son of Anne, the Princess Royal. “It was in amongst a lot of other guests,” Kate later recalled, adding that the queen was “very friendly and welcoming.” Phillips’s marriage to Canadian Autumn Kelly marked a milestone in William and Kate’s relationship, because Kate attended the event without him. William had a competing wedding to attend in Kenya—that of Jecca Craig’s brother, Batian. Kate’s solo presence—without an engagement ring on her finger—was also a mark of acceptance into the royal family.
Her Majesty was concerned, however, that Catherine was not doing anything useful with her time. According to news reports, William had the same thoughts. It was admirable for her to be at his beck and call, but while he was occupied with his military training, it did not look well for a princess-in-waiting to do little but shop, take posh vacations, and go nightclubbing, even if she did most of those things on William’s arm. The queen is fond of career women. Kate had been working for Party Pieces, and she upped her presence at her parents’ company by including her photo on the Web site, but the move backfired, seen as self-serving for the Middletons. After the queen suggested that Catherine do some charity work, in September 2008 she became involved with the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which helps seriously ill children.
And yet Kate was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. Ungainly photos of her in a fun but tarty little costume, taken the moment after she landed flat on her back during the foundation’s Day-Glo Midnight Roller Disco fund-raiser, made it into the papers, and the palace expressed displeasure. A courtier told Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, “The Queen already thinks that Kate is something of a show-off” [which seems to contradict HRM’s other quoted opinions of her], and they were “appalled at what they saw as a most unladylike display,” a comment that was extremely unfair to the ordinarily elegant, athletic, and discreet Kate, who’d been snapped the moment she’d lost her balance. Splattering the crotch shot of the potential future queen all over the tabloids had surely been deliberate. In any case, the roller disco event, undoubtedly aided by Kate’s presence, raised more than $200,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, and Kate increased her involvement with the charity.
On September 15, 2008, Clarence House announced that William would devote himself to flying, rather than to royal duties, fulfilling his dream of becoming a search-and-rescue pilot. Initially, he had wished to be deployed overseas when his unit was called up, but this was deemed too risky, not to mention the fact that he represented the future of the English monarchy and its best hope. However, the prince didn’t want his military training to be wasted and had discovered a way to serve his country that both fulfilled him and kept him out of combat areas. Nonetheless, even the palace was stunned by the announcement. So, too, was Catherine. By joining the RAF at age twenty-six, William could postpone his royal duties for up to five years, because the air force would occupy him full-time. What would that bode for a royal wedding? How long could Waity Katie wait?
According to biographer Christopher Andersen, after securing the blessing of the queen and Prince Charles, William finally proposed during a candlelit dinner in a cozy fishing cabin at Balmoral in January 2009. The royal family whipped out their calendars, hatching secret plans to announce both the royal engagement and a wedding date. The year 2012 was already crowded, with the queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Summer Olympics, and 2013 was deemed too far away by William. The groom would be spending the better part of 2010 earning his RAF wings, so that was eliminated as well—leaving 2011 as the best option. As Prince Philip would turn ninety on June 10, 2011, “What a lovely birthday present for your grandfather,” the queen told William.
Andersen’s contention about this proposal date, coming approximately twenty months before William’s formal proposal in Kenya (which evidently took Kate by surprise), seems confusing. Did William reassure Kate that he intended to marry her in January 2009, and the royal family penciled in a wedding date—another step toward the altar—but the prince didn’t actually pop the question on bended knee with a ring in hand for many months? Why? Was he waiting for the right moment to surprise Kate so the proposal would feel romantic and spontaneous and all about just the two of them, rather than like a massive troop maneuver?
Meanwhile, Kate continued to be an avid student of her royal beau, determined to understand, if not fully share, his passions, the better to ensure a more seamless transition from plebian to princess. Only a completely devoted girlfriend would sit apart from the champagne drinkers during her sweetheart’s polo matches, closely observing the action instead of socializing, and explaining to a guest, “I’ve got to pay attention to every second. I’ll be discussing the game in minute detail later on.” Asked why she didn’t play polo herself, Kate replied, “I’m allergic to horses.”
A member of the Beaufort Polo Club observed, “You certainly get the feeling that she works very hard at making Prince William happy. To the rest of us it might seem a little desperate, but then consider what’s at stake.”
Title, position, wealth—and love—were at stake, as well as all the energy and passion invested in a romance that had endured nearly a decade of ups, downs, and growing pains, and all in the public eye.
According to Christopher Andersen, somewhat contradicting his own anecdote about the events of January 2009 at Balmoral, in September 2010, William told his father that the time was finally right to pop the question. The Prince of Wales replied, “Well, you’ve certainly practiced long enough.” William secured the queen’s blessing as well, later remarking that she was “as happy and excited” as he’d ever seen her, adding, with tongue firmly in cheek, except possibly when “one of her horses is racing at Ascot.”
Whatever may have happened between them at Balmoral in January of 2009, William formally proposed to Kate in Kenya. They had gone to visit Lewa Downs, the Craigs’ game preserve. One morning the prince borrowed a helicopter and whisked Kate up to a lake nestled into the slope of Mount Kenya, about 12,500 feet above sea level—the same spot where he and Jecca Craig had plighted their troth when he was eighteen.
William knelt and offered Catherine his mother’s eighteen-carat sapphire engagement ring. Caught off guard, she burst into tears. “It was very romantic. There is a true romantic in there,” she later told the media. Of the ring, it was “my way of making sure my mother didn’t miss out on today,” William said.
On November 16, 2010, William and Kate, both twenty-eight years old, held a press conference and announced their engagement. The couple then sat down with ITV’s Tom Bradby and gave their first public interview. When asked whether they were nervous about getting married and everything that now lay before them, William admitted to being “like little ducks, very calm on the surface, but little feet going like crazy under the water.”
It was the first time that most people heard Catherine Elizabeth Middleton speak. Her voice was soft and breathy, with the same high-pitched upper-class diction that marks the vocal quality of the Windsor women. Regarding their ten-week split in 2007, Kate confessed, “I, at the time, wasn’t very happy about it, but actually it made me a stronger person. You find out things about yourself that maybe you hadn’t realized.” After William released a dramatic “Whew!” Kate added that the separation ended up being “all about finding a bit of space and finding ourselves, about growing up—and it all worked out for the better.”
William concurred, adding that their relationship now was “incredibly easy, because we took the time.”
And Kate admitted that the prospect of filling the shoes of the previous Princess of Wales is a daunting one, and fitting into the royal family “nerve-wracking. I don’t know the ropes…but I’m willing to learn quickly and work hard. I really hope I can make a difference.”
And one day the modest girl from Bucklebury will call Buckingham Palace home. She and William were married in 2011 on St. Catherine’s Day—April 29—in Westminster Abbey. They had approximately nineteen hundred invited guests, who represented the vast spectrum of society on both a state and a personal level, encompassing members of Britain’s royal family, foreign dignitaries and heads of state, representatives from charities with which William has had a long relationship, and locals from the Middletons’ hometown in Berkshire, including the butcher, the publican, and the convenience store proprietors. According to tradition, the Archbishop of Canterbury officiated over the vows with the participation of the Very Reverend Dr. John Hall, Dean of Westminster.
Catherine, who did her own makeup, was radiant in an ivory gown with a nine-foot train designed by Sarah Burton, of the house of Alexander McQueen. The long lace sleeves and corseted bodice with its nipped-in waist were reminiscent of the wedding gown worn by the late Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly, although in a nod to the bride’s personal sense of style, Kate’s dress sported a plunging neckline. The dress had been successfully kept a secret from everyone, even William, who was seen to murmur, “You look beautiful” to his bride when she met him at the altar.
The most-speculated-about garment in three decades was created by Sarah Burton, the lead designer for the atelier of the late English couturier Alexander McQueen. According to the palace’s official statement, “Miss Middleton wished for her dress to combine tradition and modernity” and “worked closely with Sarah Burton in formulating the design of her dress.”
The seamstresses from the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace, ranging in age from nineteen to seventy, did not know whose garment they were creating. They had been told they were building a dress for a period movie and were not even informed of the identity of the designer. In order to keep the fabric pristine, the women had to wash their hands every thirty minutes and switch to new needles every three hours in order to ensure the appropriate level of sharpness for such meticulous work.
The dress was constructed from ivory and white satin gazar, intended to resemble an opening flower, with white satin gazar arches and pleats. In keeping with Alexander McQueen’s looking-back-yet-fashion-forward signature approach to couture, the gown’s ivory satin bodice was narrowed at the waist and padded at the hips. It echoed both the Victorian tradition of corsetry as well as a very modern interpretation of sixteenth-century court fashion. The train measured two meters, seventy centimeters—nearly seven feet long—but was modest in comparison to Princess Diana’s dramatic twenty-five-foot train. The back of Kate’s wedding gown was finished with fifty-eight gazar-and-organza-covered buttons fastened in the traditional way, with Rouleau loops. The underskirt was constructed of silk tulle trimmed with Cluny lace.
Every bit of the lace appliqué for the bodice and skirt was handmade and then appliquéd onto the gown using the Carrickmacross lace-making technique, which originated in Ireland in the 1820s. The individual flowers incorporated emblems from across the United Kingdom: the English rose, Scottish thistle, Welsh daffodil, and Irish shamrock. They were hand-cut from lace, then painstakingly stitched onto ivory silk tulle to create a one-of-a-kind design, although bridal couturiers everywhere sought to emulate the gown’s silhouette as soon as Kate stepped out of the Rolls-Royce.
The vee-necked bodice and A-line skirt, as well as the trim on the underskirt of Kate’s gown, utilized hand-cut English lace as well as French Chantilly lace. Sarah Burton’s team vigilantly ensured that all of the floral lace embellishment, coming as it did from multiple sources, was the same shade of white.
There had also been much speculation as to whether Kate would wear a tiara, or, because it was assumed that she would enter the Abbey as a commoner, whether she might wear a wreath of flowers in her hair (even though it was Queen Victoria who set the fashion for orange blossoms). Catherine opted for the former. She wore a modest tiara with a delicate scroll-shaped design loaned to her by the queen. According to the palace’s official press release, Catherine’s
…veil [was] made of layers of soft ivory silk tulle with a trim of hand embroidered flowers…held in place by a Cartier “halo” tiara, lent to Miss Middleton by The Queen. The “halo” tiara was made by Cartier in 1936 and was purchased by The Duke of York (later King George VI) for his Duchess (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother) three weeks before he succeeded his brother as King. The tiara was presented to Princess Elizabeth (now The Queen) by her mother on the occasion of her 18th birthday.
Yet Kate did not enter Westminster Abbey as a commoner after all. On the morning of the wedding, Queen Elizabeth made Prince William and Catherine the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. William’s full title until the death of his father is Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and Baron Carrickfergus. His wife cannot officially be called Princess Catherine until she becomes Princess of Wales, owing to the passing of Prince Charles or the death of Queen Elizabeth and Charles’s immediate ascension to the throne.
William, who wore the scarlet tunic of a colonel of the Irish Guards, displayed some of his late mother’s charm and wicked sense of humor. Even at the altar, he put his visibly nervous bride at ease (after all, two billion people were watching them on television from around the world). “This was supposed to be a small family affair,” he whispered to Kate just before the wedding ceremony began, eliciting a grin from her, even as she gripped her father Michael’s hand.
During the recitation of the vows, William and Catherine maintained eye contact, the love between them abundantly evident. Meanwhile, Prince Harry, William’s best man, or “supporter,” as the English call it, looked straight ahead, or cast his eyes downward, pondering the solemnity of the occasion. He would coo, “You’re next,” to longtime girlfriend Chelsy Davy during the evening bash, but the couple has since split yet again.
As Catherine recited her vows in a soft, audibly nervous soprano, the look in William’s eyes seemed to provide his silent reassurance that not only was he there for her in that moment and that everything was going to be all right, but that he would always be there for her all the days of their lives. There was visible relief all around once the vows had been spoken and the couple was seated to listen to the address given by the Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dr. Richard Chartres, Lord Bishop of London and Dean of Her Majesty’s Chapels Royal. At one point during the sermon, William appeared to give Catherine a little wink.
Mindful of the current economic climate, the royal wedding was toned down from the lavish pageantry of William’s parents’ nuptials, but there were a number of modern twists. Catherine, who had mined her closet for the modestly priced dresses she wore in her engagement photos and at her first press conference with William, arrived at the Abbey in a car—albeit a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV—rather than in a coach. The couple had asked all but their immediate relations to give charitable donations in lieu of gifts. Fulfilling William’s desire to hold the first-ever “people’s wedding,” in addition to inviting the requisite heads of state, the bridal couple peppered their guest list with charity workers. On the night before the ceremony, William and Prince Harry went out to greet the fans who had been camping on the street outside Clarence House, securing a prime location to view the royal procession. These hard-core royal watchers, many of whom were sporting silly hats and faces painted with the Union Jack, were over the moon with delight.
The traditional kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the wedding ceremony turned out to be two smooches—and they meant it. “Oh, wow,” Kate breathed when the newlyweds first stepped out onto the balcony and saw a million well-wishers gathered below, stretching from the Victoria monument all the way down the Mall.
And in an extra treat for the public, the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge tootled from the palace down the Mall to Clarence House for a few hours of R & R between the queen’s three p.m. reception and Prince Charles’s evening bash, in the navy blue Aston Martin Volante convertible that the Prince of Wales had given to his oldest son as a twenty-first birthday present. William was behind the wheel, with his bride smiling and waving beside him. He had changed into a navy military tunic, but Catherine was still wearing her gown. Tin cans had been tied to the bumper, and the license plate read, JU5T WED.
In another modern shocker, Kate and William didn’t even jet off on an expensive honeymoon following the wedding reception. They enjoyed a private weekend at an undisclosed location before the new Duke of Cambridge returned to his RAF duties the following Tuesday morning. Although the twenty-room, four-story apartment in Kensington Palace once occupied by William’s great-aunt Princess Margaret is being renovated for the Cambridges, the refurbishment is not expected to be completed until 2013. Kate and William will be spending much of their first few years of married life in less-than-glamorous Anglesey, Wales, where the duke is completing his RAF training. There they reside in a modest rented cottage without a staff of servants, and as newlyweds they had not initially intended to make any changes to that routine. According to royal biographer Katie Nicholl, Kate “loves cooking. They like to make British dinner parties. Their favorite dish is ‘toad in the hole’—[a] very fattening—keep-you-warm-in-the-winter” English comfort-food staple.
The young couple’s very normal lifestyle couldn’t be more different from William’s father’s standard of living. Prince Charles has a staff of 149, including a butler just to squeeze the toothpaste onto the royal brush.
All too aware of the media circus that surrounded Diana’s lonely and painful transition into The Firm, William remains highly protective of Catherine, and always expressed his intention to ease her conversion from commoner to princess as gently as possible. In this exercise of good old-fashioned chivalry, he has behaved like a prince, his birthright notwithstanding. But more than that, William once said, “My mother was the People’s Princess. I want to be the People’s King.” As he and Catherine are determined to be a very modern royal couple, how he manages to strike the balance between centuries of tradition and his own vision of modernity remains to be seen. The future of England’s monarchy is in their hands.