Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (65 page)

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, W
ILLIAM
AND
H
IS
U
NDIE
-G
RADUATE
F
RIEND
K
ATE
TO
S
HARE
A
S
TUDENT
F
LAT
(
The Mail on Sunday
), and, W
ILLIAM
S
HACKS
UP
W
ITH
S
TUNNING
U
NDIES
M
ODEL
(
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, F
INALLY
…W
ILLS
G
ETS
A
G
IRL
, 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?”