Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (25 page)

The Queen could not disguise her true feelings as the April 9, 2005, wedding date for Prince Charles and “Mrs. PB” approached. There would also be several last-minute complications, most notably the death of Pope John Paul II; the wedding was hastily postponed one day so that Charles could represent his country at the pontiff’s funeral in Rome.

Ironically, Charles, who was destined to replace his mother as head of the Church of England, was forced to abandon his hope of being married by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Despite changes in church policy that would technically have allowed the divorced future king to marry his divorced mistress in a religious ceremony, it would simply ruffle too many feathers. The solution, a brief civil wedding ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, obviously did not satisfy everyone; guests tried to disregard protesters who stood outside waving placards and booing.

Inside the Guildhall, William and Harry looked on as Charles placed the Welsh gold wedding band on his bride’s finger. Then Camilla slipped a wedding ring on the pinky finger of their father’s left hand, which Charles immediately covered up with the three-feathered Prince of Wales signet ring he wore at all times. At one point, Harry leaned into his brother. “Where’s Granny?” he asked. The Queen, William whispered in reply, was not coming.

Having delivered an unmistakable message to the newlyweds by boycotting the marriage ceremony itself, the Queen did join 750 others at the carefully titled “Service of Prayer and Dedication Following the Marriage” that took place in St. George’s Chapel. The fact that the newlyweds were required by the Archbishop of Canterbury to get on their knees and beg God’s forgiveness for “provoking thy wrath and indignation” did little to cheer up the monarch. She stared straight ahead, and her expression conveyed a mood of sullen indifference.

Kate, by now the object of endless gossip and speculation, was conspicuously absent from both the civil ceremony and the prayer service at Windsor Castle—all thanks to the woman who would eventually become her mother-in-law. “This was, at long,
long last, Camilla’s moment,” observed a longtime friend of the Parker Bowles family. “She was not about to be upstaged by any other woman—and certainly not by someone as stunning as Kate Middleton who might someday be a court rival. Camilla is no fool.” Her former roommate Jane Churchill claimed she had “never, ever seen Camilla look so happy as when she walked down the aisle. But, you know, when they walk past you must curtsy. And, I tell you, it’s just sort of surreal to curtsy to your former flatmate.”

After the ceremony at St. George’s, Camilla, dressed in an elegant porcelain-blue shantung silk coat dress with gold embroidery and a flamboyant Philip Treacy “half-halo” hat festooned with baby ostrich feathers, exited arm-in-arm with her husband out the chapel’s West Door. The Queen, right behind them, announced to Charles that she was leaving and abruptly took off, ignoring his plea that she stick around for at least one family photo on the chapel steps.

It was enough, the Queen reasoned, that she agreed to host a reception at the castle for eight hundred guests, including King Constantine and Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, King Hamad of Bahrain, Sir David Frost, Tony and Cherie Blair, rocker Phil Collins, and Charles’s old friend, comedian and QVC jewelry designer Joan Rivers. “I’m going on
Larry King
tonight,” Rivers told the Queen as she pointed to the magnificent yellow-and-blue-white diamond Australian Wattle Brooch glittering on Her Majesty’s lapel, “and I’m going to tell him how beautiful your pin is!” The Queen appeared confused, but thanked Rivers anyway.

In her speech that afternoon, Britain’s horse-obsessed Queen made sly reference to the Grand National steeplechase, which had just taken place. After telling her guests that Hedgehunter
had won the legendary race, she went on to say that her son was “home and dry with the woman he loves. They have been over difficult jumps,” she continued, “and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. And now they’re in the winners enclosure.”

At no time did Charles and Camilla kiss—not when the well-wishers were begging them to outside the chapel, and not now as they left the reception. Camilla’s new stepsons, however, were not so shy. By way of making it abundantly clear that they approved of the woman who destroyed their parents’ marriage, William and Harry each kissed Camilla on both cheeks—the first time they had done so publicly.

Even more significantly, as the newlyweds paused on the steps outside before leaving Windsor for their honeymoon in Scotland, the Queen and Camilla kissed good-bye. The choreographed gesture was designed to convey harmony in the House of Windsor, and left Camilla visibly shaking.

Then it was off to Balmoral and Birkhall on the banks of the River Muick, where the Queen Mother never had a kind word about either Diana or Camilla. “The Queen Mum loved Prince Charles more than anything,” said a Balmoral groundskeeper who worked for the Royal Family for more than forty years. “But if the old girl hadn’t died already, this would have killed her.”

By any measure, it was a long-delayed victory for Camilla—if, as the Men in Gray argued, not necessarily for the monarchy. “There was a real sense of triumph,” said Charles’s goddaughter, Santa Sebag Montefiore. “Everybody was filled with this feeling that they’re together at last, and without any doubt about Camilla’s position,
finally
.”

KATE MIDDLETON, MEANWHILE, WAS HOLED
up in the farmhouse she now shared with William on the outskirts of St. Andrews, dividing her time between studying for final exams and watching live coverage of the wedding on television. Kate knew William and Harry planned to decorate their father’s Bentley, and laughed as she watched it pull away from Windsor Castle trailing Mylar balloons, the words PRINCE+DUCHESS scribbled across its windshield. When cameras showed the young Princes tossing confetti, then waving their arms wildly as they chased the car down the road, Kate doubled over laughing.

It had been three years since Kate, at her mother Carole’s insistence, agreed to share a four-bedroom ground-floor flat in St. Andrews’s Old Town district with William and their friend Fergus Boyd. As was to be expected, this move sparked the usual over-the-top headlines, including the
Sun
’s
WILLIAM SHACKS UP WITH STUNNING UNDIES MODEL
and
WILLIAM AND HIS UNDIE-GRADUATE FRIEND KATE TO SHARE A STUDENT FLAT
in the
Mail on Sunday
.

Within days of moving in together, William and Kate were lovers—a fact that, due to the Palace’s special hands-off arrangement with the press, went unconfirmed for two years. During that time, the coeds essentially lived like any young married couple, shopping at the local Tesco supermarket (William called himself an “enthusiastic food shopper—I get very carried away”), renting videos, dining on take-out from Ruby’s Chinese and Pizza Express, playing chess.

When they did go shopping, William and Kate often debated about whether to pay using a credit card or “grannys.” Since the Queen’s face was on Britain’s brightly colored currency, William and Harry called five-pound notes “green grannys,” ten-pound notes “brown grannys,” twenty-pound notes “purple grannys,”
and fifty-pound notes “pink grannys.” When they did opt to pay with a credit card, they used Kate’s. “If you’re working as a clerk at a gas station,” their friend Jules Knight said, “looking down and seeing ‘William Windsor’ on the credit card can be quite a shock.

“We were all in a safe bubble at St. Andrews,” Knight added. “There was no intrusion. Kate and Will could go for a drink and hold hands and no one batted an eyelid.” William was the first to agree that it was all “quite a cozy setup.” For the most part, Knight added, “it was a carefree existence.”

There were times, of course, when they all climbed into Land Rovers and escaped to Edinburgh and London for a little club-hopping with William’s old pals. In sharp contrast to some of the other girls William had been involved with, Kate easily adjusted to the constant presence of royal bodyguards and the cloak-and-dagger climate surrounding William’s comings and goings. In an effort to remain beneath the radar, they arrived at restaurants and dinner parties separately, and agreed to no public displays of affection—not even hand-holding.

Kate went the extra step of getting to know the men and women assigned to protect the man she loved. “Kate knew all their names, asked about their families, wanted to make sure they got enough to eat and drink,” Knight said. “She’s a very kind, very caring, very down-to-earth person.” According to one Royal Protection officer, “She insisted we call her Kate and treated us like human beings, which isn’t always the case with members of the Royal Family and their posh friends.”

Months into the relationship, the Middletons weren’t exactly sure how serious things were between the Prince and their Kate. Fearing that Pippa would let the secret slip, Kate insisted to her parents that she and William were merely roomies and friends.

Nevertheless, Carole decided that, if William was going to be spending many weekends at Windsor, Highgrove, and Sandringham, then Kate would need a toehold in London. Toward that end, the Middletons plunked down $2 million for a two-bedroom pied-à-terre in Chelsea.

Kate got her first real taste of what it’s like to be royal in December 2002, when she was invited to a shooting party at Sandringham. To throw off the press, fourteen friends bunked with them at Wood Farm, a six-bedroom guest house on the grounds of the estate. William hoped to introduce Kate to his father, but Prince Charles was too busy playing host to the Queen of Denmark at the main residence on the estate, Sandringham House.

Still, it gave Kate a chance to show off her marksmanship skills. Unlike the Queen, Camilla, and most of William’s friends, Kate was not schooled in what British aristocracy referred to as “country pursuits” or familiar with firearms of any kind. Before meeting William, she, like most of her contemporaries, was actually sharply critical of foxhunting, deer hunting, game bird shoots, and other blood sports. “The Middletons didn’t go in for that sort of thing at all,” said a Marlborough classmate. “They knew absolutely nothing about firearms. Kate agreed with Princess Diana. She thought killing animals was disgusting.”

Until William, that is. When he offered to give her some pointers in shooting at St. Andrews, Kate balked at first. But Carole, who understood how important such things were to all the Royals, quickly convinced her daughter that it would be rude to refuse the Prince’s offer. By the time she set foot on the grounds of Sandringham, Kate was, in the words of one of the beaters whose job was to flush out game, “not a bad shot—not at all bad for a beginner.”

It was not long before Kate scored another major coup by becoming the first girl William had ever felt worthy of being invited to Balmoral. Kate no longer needed coaching from her mother on this score; at Sandringham she had seen firsthand what a key role outdoor pursuits played in the lives of the Windsors—a part of royal life Diana had rejected outright.

With William as her guide, Kate nimbly negotiated the rocky banks of the River Dee, then watched carefully as he showed her the proper way to cast a fishing line. Soon she was angling for fish and trout “as if she’d been doing it her whole life,” the Prince remarked.

It was not William Kate had come to impress, however. It was at Balmoral that she met the Prince of Wales for the first time. Charles was instantly charmed by the fact that Kate “is clearly a country girl,” a senior aide said. That alone was “a huge advantage.” William’s father even forgave her when she tried to sit in Queen Victoria’s chair, kept vacant since the monarch’s death out of respect—usually considered a major, if common, faux pas. During predinner drinks, Kate had begun to lower herself into the chair when William, Charles, and the other guests yelled for her to stop. “Every new person goes for it,” said Jean Carnarvon, whose husband, the seventh Earl of Carnarvon, owned Highclere Castle of
Downton Abbey
fame, “and everyone screams.”

Later in the spring of 2003, William made a surprise visit to Kate’s delayed twenty-first birthday party at the Middleton home in Bucklebury. It marked the first time he met Kate’s parents, who stopped asking their daughter if the Prince was coming only when his Land Rover pulled up to their front door.

Once the press got wind of William’s visit to Oak Acre, the Middletons decided to issue a flat denial that their daughter and
the Prince were anything more than “good friends . . . the best of pals. We are very amused at the thought of being in-laws to Prince William,” Michael Middleton added disingenuously, “but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Unfortunately, at his
Out of Africa
–themed twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle, it seemed that William had turned his attention away from Kate and toward an old flame. The $800,000 bash, which featured elephant rides and monkeys swinging overhead on vines, was most memorable for the guests who showed up in costume. William and Kate wore Tarzan-and-Jane costumes—a loincloth for him, a skimpy animal-print dress for her—while Charles donned a dashiki, Camilla wore a multicolored caftan with a red-feathered headdress, and Elizabeth, as the Queen of Swaziland, opted for a white headdress, a white shift dress gown, and a white fur cape.

But it was Jecca Craig, William’s old gap-year love, who stole the show. With Kate’s blessing, William had invited Jecca, and stuck by her side the entire evening. Not surprisingly, the press promptly shifted its attention away from Kate and toward Jecca. Since she was dating his old Etonian buddy Henry Ropner at the time, William asked his father to issue a public statement denying that he had ever had a serious relationship with Jecca—or, for that matter, with anyone. “If and when Prince William gets his first serious girlfriend,” a St. James’s Palace spokesman said, “we will work out something to say.”

Incredibly, the ruse worked. Leaving Fergus Boyd behind, Babykins and Big Willy—their pet names for each other—moved into Balgove House, a four-bedroom farmhouse on a sprawling private estate about a quarter of a mile outside St. Andrews. Bombproof windows and doors were installed, along with surveillance
cameras and alarms—all to the tune of 2.5 million taxpayer dollars. William’s Close Protection detail, meanwhile, operated out of a separate building on the property.