Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (18 page)

As for Charles, relations with his ex-wife had warmed to such an extent that he was preparing to make his first public appearance with Diana since they enrolled William at Eton nearly six months earlier. The royal yacht
Britannia
, which cost nearly $20 million a year to run, had become such a symbol of royal excess at the taxpayers’ expense that the Queen made what for her was a painful personal decision to decommission the vessel. In October, the 412-foot ship was to begin its farewell tour around Britain, and, fittingly, the Prince of Wales was to board at Cardiff. Diana
was ecstatic when Charles invited her and the boys to join him. For reasons both personal and strategic, the Princess was happy to “be seen in public as a family again. I know it will please the Queen.”

Elizabeth was glad to hear that Diana was finally returning to England, and hoped that the adventure with Dodi—and any future connection to Mohamed Al Fayed—was over.

While Charles prepared to return to London with William and Harry, the Queen stayed behind at her beloved Balmoral.

“It’s nice,” she said, “to hibernate for a bit.”

Be careful, Paul. There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.

—THE QUEEN, TO PAUL BURRELL

My darling, what is going to happen to us now?

—CAMILLA TO CHARLES, ON HEARING NEWS OF DIANA’S DEATH

ST. ANDREWS COLLEGE

MARCH 27, 2002

“Prince William is out there,” one of the student models said, sending a palpable ripple of excitement through the crowd backstage. One of the models was not surprised; Kate Middleton and the Prince were already friends, and she knew he wasn’t about to miss St. Andrews University’s annual Don’t Walk charity fashion show sponsored by Yves Saint Laurent. Kate had also told William that she was making her debut on the runway to conquer her inhibitions, and he promised to be there with a few of their mutual pals to lend moral support. In fact, the Prince paid two hundred pounds for a front-row seat.

As with everything else she did, Kate took considerable care in deciding which garment to wear—and, just as important, how to wear it. She settled on a sheer black, gold, and green piece with
blue ribbon trim. What she didn’t know at the time was that the piece (total cost for materials: fifty dollars) had been made two years earlier by budding designer Charlotte Todd for a college project titled, appropriately enough, “The Art of Seduction.”

Slipping into a bandeau bra and black bikini panties, Kate started to pull the shift over her head, resting the top just above her breasts so that the hem hit her midthigh. “No, no, that’s not right. It’s a skirt, a floor-length skirt,” a dresser said, handing her a black blouse. “Here, this goes on top. Put this on.”

Kate refused. “I like it this way,” she insisted, studying herself in the mirror. “This is much sexier.”

Moments later, she strode out confidently in what looked like a naughty negligee, chestnut curls bouncing on her bare white shoulders. William clapped and cheered the loudest, but Kate did not break her model-serious pose for an instant. When she returned to the catwalk in white lace bra and white lace panties, the Prince and their friends, fortified with champagne, whooped and whistled.

“It was a side to her we didn’t know existed, and it was a turning point in people’s perception of her,” said their classmate and friend Jules Knight. “Everyone took note, including Will.”

Their first meeting more than six months earlier had been awkward, and mercifully brief. Kate remembered that when they first met at their dormitory, St. Salvatore’s, she “turned bright red and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting him.”

Yet, like the young women who accounted for a 44 percent surge in applications to St. Andrews in the fall of 2001, Kate was at the Scottish university for that very purpose—to meet (and perhaps even someday marry) the future King of England. Like so many English schoolgirls of her generation—and more than a
few Americans—Kate had a crush on Princess Diana’s handsome young son. Her bedroom at Marlborough College, the exclusive boarding school she attended not that far from Camilla’s house in Wiltshire, was dominated by a color photo of William and Charles at Balmoral.

Kate—until she turned fifteen she was nearly always called Catherine—kept track of William’s hectic royal schedule online and on television. She also lapped up every newspaper story, magazine article, and juicy gossip column tidbit about the young Prince. “You cannot tell me anything about Prince William,” she once told a schoolmate, “that I don’t already know.”

Kate’s obsession mirrored that of her mother for William’s father, the Prince of Wales. Carole Goldsmith was six years older than Diana, and like the future Princess of Wales, dreamed of marrying the Queen’s eldest son. Unlike the Spencers, the Goldsmiths were decidedly working class—two-fisted, hard-drinking denizens of County Durham’s coal fields in northeastern England. Kate’s great-great-great-grandfather was thrown in jail for public drunkenness in 1881; her great-grandmother Edith, left to raise six children in a condemned flat following the death of her husband, worked long hours at a pickle factory. Most of Kate’s maternal ancestors succumbed to influenza, scarlet fever, and cholera, or fell on the battlefield during World War I.

Things were considerably more promising on her dad’s side of the family. The Middletons were related to Academy Award–winning actor Sir John Gielgud; author and illustrator Beatrix Potter; Britain’s leading Shakespearean actress, Ellen Terry; and—through seventeenth-century statesman Sir Thomas Fairfax—even to the Royal Family. (Known as “Black Tom” because of his swarthy complexion, Fairfax played a key role in the restoration of the
monarchy and the return of Charles II to the throne in 1660.) Kate and William were, it turned out, fifteenth cousins.

By the late nineteenth century, Kate’s Middleton forebears had amassed a fortune worth $50 million in today’s dollars, only to squander it all long before Michael Francis Middleton was born in 1949. There would, however, be a new Middleton fortune—this time thanks to the driving ambition of Kate’s Goldsmith relatives.

Given her impoverished background, it was understandable that Kate’s grandmother, Dorothy Harrison Goldsmith, would grow up with deep-seated doubts about her place in society. According to her niece Ann Terry, Dorothy developed expensive tastes to impress the neighbors and burdened her struggling housepainter-husband Ronald with the cost.

By the time Carole arrived in 1955, her mother had earned the nickname “Lady Dorothy”—despite the fact the family was still struggling to make ends meet at their cramped, unheated council flat in London’s downscale Southall district. The public housing project where they lived was directly under Heathrow’s flight path—not unlike Windsor Castle. “We really never stopped to think,” Carole later told a neighbor, “that those same planes were flying over the Queen’s head, too.” (At Windsor, guests were often surprised when the Queen nonchalantly ticked of the names of the aircraft roaring overhead. “That one’s a 777. No, I’m wrong . . . Airbus!”)

When Carole was eleven and her brother Gary not quite two, the Goldsmiths managed to relocate to a comfortable three-bedroom home in Norwood Green, a more affluent section of the west London borough of Ealing. Still very much a working-class girl with neither the means nor the desire to attend college, Carole graduated from high school in 1974 and went straight
into the British Airlines flight attendant program. “Back then, air travel was really quite glamorous compared to the way it is today,” recalled another retired BA stewardess who, like Carole, wore the airline’s dark-blue uniform of knee-length skirt, blazer, and pillbox hat. “It was a dream job for a young girl—we got to fly all around the world.” The pay “was awful, really, for all the hours you had to work. But there were other compensations.”

The “other compensations” included the opportunity to cull a rich husband from the ranks of well-heeled businessmen who flew first class. It really didn’t matter, the former BA flight attendant admitted, “whether they were already married or not.”

Finding love even closer to home, Carole fell in love with a fellow British Airways employee, a young flight dispatcher six years her senior. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had served in the RAF during World War II, Michael Middleton originally hoped to become a pilot. Instead, like Carole, he joined the ranks of British Airways’ flight attendants. From there, he became a dispatcher, and by the time he met Carole Goldsmith in 1977, Mike Middleton was in charge of ground operations at Heathrow and collecting a hefty salary.

“Love at first sight?” asked Carole, “Yes, absolutely!” Mike remembered being impressed not only by her “incredible beauty” but also by her “keen intelligence, her passion for life, and her sense of humor. From the very beginning, we laughed a
lot
.”

After living together for a year—first in a modest flat, then in a small brick house in the village of Bradfield Southend—Michael and Carole were wed on June 21, 1980, at Buckinghamshire’s picturesque twelfth-century Church of St. James the Less, just down the road from Windsor Castle. Apparently not wanting to expose the upper-middle-class Middletons to the working-class
relations on their side of the family, Carole and Dorothy excluded all but two out of more than twenty Goldsmiths from the guest list. “Carole,” a cousin said, “was a lot like her mother in that way.”

Neither Carole nor Michael could have imagined how elevated their social status would ultimately be when Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born on January 9, 1982, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. The entire world would take note of another birth six months later, when Prince William arrived, curiously enough, on June 21—the Middletons’ second anniversary as a married couple.

Carole embraced full-time motherhood with gusto. Catherine was twenty months old when sister Philippa (“Pippa”) arrived, followed by their brother James in 1987. A born organizer, Carole did not hesitate to sign up for all the parent committees at nearby St. Peter’s Church preschool. Of all her many talents, one stood out: Mrs. Middleton had a special knack for assembling the fancifully decorated goodie bags stuffed with candy, toys, trinkets, and other treats that are handed out at children’s birthday parties. Word spread, and soon the other mothers in Bradfield Southend were paying Carole to make the goodie bags for their children’s parties.

It didn’t take long for Carole to expand the scope of her services, offering to plan and then oversee the parties themselves. Three months after she gave birth to James, she took the plunge and launched Party Pieces, a mail-order business that supplied anything and everything needed to throw a proper children’s party: balloons, streamers, glitter, paper plates, plastic utensils, party hats, costumes, even fireworks.

Within months, thousands of orders poured in. Michael quit his job at British Airways to pitch in, and soon Catherine and
Pippa were posing for brochures and ads. A neighbor remembered Catherine “in her sparkly princess dress and little rhinestone crown, watching Princess Diana on the television and imitating her.”

Meantime, the family income soared. Where Carole’s parents could never have afforded to send her to a private school, the Middletons effortlessly paid the $20,000 a year it took to send seven-year-old Catherine to St. Andrew’s School in the nearby town of Pangbourne. Catherine excelled at both sports and academics, and—not surprisingly given her established fondness for playing dress-up—sang the lead in the school’s musical productions.

During one of those performances, captured on video, Catherine plays the lead in the Victorian melodrama
Murder in the Barn
. In one eerily prophetic scene, a fortune-teller informs Catherine’s character that she will marry a rich, handsome stranger.

“Will he take me away from here?” she asks.

“Yes,” replies the fortune-teller, “to London.”

Eventually, the hero of the play asks her to marry him. “Yes, it’s all I’ve ever longed for,” Catherine gushes. “Yes, oh, yes, dear
William
.”

Thanks in large part to Carole’s canny decision to set up a Party Pieces website in 1992, the company was soon employing thirty people to fill orders at the company’s new, greatly expanded headquarters in Ashampstead Common, Berkshire. With an annual gross income exceeding $3 million, the Middletons were now able to purchase Oak Acre, a baronial, six-bedroom, brick-walled Tudor-style estate next to the privately owned Bucklebury Estate.

In the fall of 1995, the Middletons sent their tall (Catherine
always towered over most of her friends as a child), skinny, and awkward thirteen-year-old elder daughter to Downe House, an all-girls boarding school in the town of Cold Ash. Even though Downe House was just a ten-minute drive from Oak Acre, Catherine quickly grew homesick. For whatever reason, she was also being systematically bullied by several of the “mean girls” in the school.

The bullying continued despite the Middletons’ complaints, so in April 1996 Catherine transferred to Marlborough College. The coed atmosphere was evident from the moment she walked into the school’s dining hall and her looks were judged a “2” on a scale of 1 to 10 by a group of tittering adolescent boys.

Kate was about to be joined by her sister, Pippa, at Marlborough when, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana was killed along with her boyfriend Dodi and their driver in a horrific Paris car crash. For the next week, the Middletons, along with hundreds of millions of people around the world, sat glued to their television screens, transfixed by the unfolding royal drama. From Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, and Beijing to Moscow, New York, and Washington, D.C., thousands of mourners stood in line for hours to sign books of condolence and leave floral tributes at British consulates and embassies.

Nowhere, certainly, was there a more palpable sense of loss than in London. The images would be indelibly etched in everyone’s minds—waves of cards and flowers lapping at the iron gates of Kensington Palace, candlelight vigils, weeping in the streets.