Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (64 page)

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.