Kate (24 page)
Authors: Claudia Joseph
Prince William and his girlfriend stayed in a villa belonging to the multimillionaire owners of the Jigsaw and Kew fashion chains, Belle and John Robinson, who live with their five children in a former hunting lodge, once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh, in the Wiltshire countryside. They count actors Natasha McElhone and Richard E. Grant as personal friends. The Robinsons did not know the young lovebirds but lent their £8,000-a-week luxury mansion to them in return for a donation to the hospital on St Vincent.
The stone-built clifftop villa, high above Macaroni Beach, had everything the couple could desire, with five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a maid, gardener and cook, not to mention spectacular views over the island’s picture-perfect Caribbean beaches, azure sea and volcanic peaks. Kate arrived at the house on 26 April, flying from Heathrow (where she was given VIP treatment) to Barbados before taking a private jet to the island. William, who was on a sailing course at Sandhurst, flew out two days later.
The couple spent the week playing volleyball with friends and challenging locals to a Frisbee match, drinking pina coladas and vodka and cranberry juice at Basil’s Bar and Firefly, cruising on a luxury catamaran and playing tennis with its owner, multimillionaire Sir Richard Branson (his daughter Holly is a friend of William). They returned home on 6 May for the wedding of William’s stepsister Laura Parker Bowles the following day.
Although the couple had attended a society wedding together, Laura’s wedding to Harry Lopes, an old Etonian and former Calvin Klein model who is the grandson of the late Lord Astor of Hever, was the first time that Kate had been invited to a family wedding, showing the extent to which she had been assimilated into the royal family. She had turned down an invitation the previous year to attend the wedding of Laura’s brother Tom to
Harpers & Queen
fashion journalist Sara Buys for fear that the media interest in her would disrupt the couple’s big day.
Now, as Kate and William arrived by coach for the wedding at St Cyriac’s Church in Lacock, Wiltshire, and went on to the reception afterwards at Camilla’s former home Ray Mill House, the talk was that they had taken another step towards a royal engagement.
While William returned to Sandhurst after the wedding for his second term at the academy, Kate remained a fixture on the social scene, showing little inclination to get a job. One of her first engagements, the week after the wedding, was the launch of The Shop at Bluebird, a boutique below Terence Conran’s exclusive eaterie, in the former garage that once housed Donald Campbell’s land speed record-breaking Bluebird car. Kate attended the event with her younger sister Pippa, chatting to the fashion crowd and supporting the shop’s owners, the couple who had lent her and William their villa, Belle and John Robinson. The fashion crowd who attended the party would soon be taking notice of a young pretender.
It was at the Boodles Boxing Ball, held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 3 June and organised by Charlie Gilkes, an Edinburgh University student and friend of Kate and William, in aid of the paediatric medical research charity Sparks, that Kate first unveiled her true potential as a designer clothes-horse. Wearing a stunning turquoise gown by American designer BCBG Max Azria, which she bought from Harvey Nichols for £354, she really sparked the interest of the fashion press for the first time. Kate attended the £100-a-night champagne reception, dinner and amateur boxing event with William to support their friend Hugh ‘Hunter’ van Cutsem, who was fighting a chartered surveyor and Cambridge boxing blue, Huw ‘The Welsh Whirlwind’ Williams.
After that glamorous evening, William returned to Sandhurst and she was back to the social whirl alone. On 23 June, when he was on a military training exercise in Wales, she attended a party at The Roof Gardens in Kensington hosted by Sir Richard Branson to celebrate the start of Wimbledon. Arriving in a group that included Sir Richard’s daughter Holly, she spent the night dancing with Guy Pelly and chatting to tennis player Maria Sharapova. It was around this time that Kate first caught the eye of the American celebrity magazine
People
, which compared her wardrobe in favourable terms with Princess Diana’s under the subheading ‘Kate steps up her style to royal heights’. In fashion terms, she had arrived.
Sadly, however, during the same period both Kate’s grandmothers were suffering from cancer and did not have long to live. Carole’s widowed mother Dorothy was the first to die, on 21 July, three years after her beloved husband. Carole was at her 71-year-old mother’s bedside in the Royal Marsden Hospital in Reading when she lost her four-month battle against lung cancer.
To try to cheer his girlfriend up, William whisked her away at the beginning of September to the holiday island of Ibiza. They chartered a yacht with friends on the Balearic island and spent a week partying in the sunshine.
After their seven-day break, the couple enjoyed one final night on the tiles before William returned to Sandhurst for his third and final term. But that night, Friday, 8 September 2006, would send the media into a frenzy of speculation about a royal wedding. The evening began normally enough when William and Kate arrived at their favourite club, Boujis, walking through the doorway separately in order not to be photographed together by the waiting press. But, at 3.30 a.m., when the couple left the club, they abandoned their normal cat-and-mouse behaviour. Instead, William ushered his girlfriend through a crowd of paparazzi before they collapsed giggling into the back of their chauffeured Range Rover. The resulting photograph of the couple smiling at each other is perhaps the most candid ever taken of them. Their tender gaze at one another was described as ‘the look of love’, and their obvious affection noted with some relief by commentators who pointed out that here was a real love match. William’s evident happiness and natural air were contrasted with his father’s response when asked on his engagement to Diana whether he was in love, to which he replied that he was, ‘whatever love means’.
But another cloud was looming on the horizon. Just two days after William had returned to Sandhurst, Kate’s paternal grandmother, Valerie Middleton, succumbed to lymphoma at the age of 82 at the Countess of Brecknock House Memorial Hospital in Andover, Hampshire. The date was 13 September 2006. Kate had now lost three of her grandparents.
By now, Kate’s brother James had followed Pippa up to Edinburgh University. Kate, meanwhile, had still not found work. In a last-ditch attempt to find a job that suited her circumstances, she contacted Belle Robinson. Recognising Kate’s potential, she jumped at the chance to offer her a job as an accessories buyer at Jigsaw, working four days a week to enable her to juggle her commitments to William.
‘As a thank you to us,’ Belle said in an interview with the
Evening Standard
, ‘Kate supported a couple of Jigsaw events we did. Then she rang me up one day and said, “Could I come and talk to you about work?” She genuinely wanted a job but she needed an element of flexibility to continue the relationship with a very high-profile man and a life that she can’t dictate.’ In another interview, with
The Times
, she said: ‘People assumed it was a mercy act on our part, but Kate’s a bright girl. She set up the website for her parents’ business so we thought those skills would be useful.’
Kate apparently fitted in well at the company and became a popular member of the team. Talking to the
Standard
, Belle gave an insight into how Kate’s position as girlfriend to the prince affected her day-to-day life: ‘There were days when there were TV crews at the end of the drive. We’d say, “Listen, do you want to go out the back way?” And she’d say, “To be honest, they’re going to hound us until they’ve got the picture. So why don’t I just go, get the picture done, and then they’ll leave us alone.” I thought she was very mature for a 26-year-old, and I think she’s been quite good at neither courting the press nor sticking two fingers in the air at them.’
A couple of weeks after arriving at Jigsaw, Kate must have realised just how fortunate it was that she was working a four-day week when William requested her presence at a shooting party in Sandringham on the first weekend in December. That Sunday – two weeks before William’s passing out – Kate threw caution to the wind and allowed herself to be photographed for the first time on the Queen’s 20,000-acre Norfolk estate, watching William shooting pheasants and bagging dead birds. The pictures might have angered animal-rights protestors, but they also showed just how naturally Kate fitted into the royal family’s world.
By the end of a year that the couple had begun with a kiss on the ski slopes of Klosters and ended with a dance at the Sandhurst Ball, bookies William Hill had slashed the odds on a possible royal engagement from 5–1 to 2–1. For the first time since they had left university amidst a storm of speculation over their future, they both had jobs – William as an officer in the Household Cavalry and Kate in the fashion world. Yet dark clouds were looming on the horizon and the next year would be crunch time for Kate and William.
H
idden away behind the red-brick walls of her parents’ substantial house in the Home Counties village of Chapel Row in Berkshire, Kate Middleton spent the evening of Friday, 13 April 2007 mourning the end of her love affair with Prince William.
While her former boyfriend drowned his sorrows in the nightclub Mahiki, Mayfair’s latest celebrity haunt, quaffing champagne and drinking its legendary Treasure Chest cocktails, Kate, then 25 years old, spent a quieter and more subdued evening with her family.
It was barely a week since Britain’s most famous romance had drawn to a close – and hours before their separation hit the newsstands – yet the couple’s behaviour could not have been more different, underlining just how far apart they had grown since leaving university. Whereas Kate was looking for more commitment from William, the 24-year-old army officer, who had just left Sandhurst, was not ready to settle down.
News of the couple’s split came as a shock to the public, who had been following every twist and turn in their relationship since they had begun dating at St Andrews University four years earlier. An engagement announcement had been widely expected and few had noticed signs that the relationship was on its way out.
It had all seemed so different four months earlier in mid-December, when Kate and her parents had been invited to watch the prince pass out from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, a ceremony that must have been heart-warming for the Middletons, who had grown close to their daughter’s boyfriend. A regular visitor to their home, William would drive the 33-mile journey around the M25 to visit his girlfriend after training exercises and must have relished the time he spent with her tight-knit family, something he had missed out on to an extent during his own childhood. But everything changed the moment he left Sandhurst and embarked on the next stage of his army career.
For those who looked closely, the cracks began appearing over the festive season, when Kate’s parents decided to rent a £4,800-a-week mansion in Scotland for their extended family. Despite speculation that she might be, Kate had not been invited to spend Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham – only fiancées are afforded that honour, not girlfriends. Instead, the Middletons decided to invite William to spend Hogmanay with them at the Georgian mansion Jordanstone House on the outskirts of Alyth in Perthshire. Set in rambling grounds, the eighteenth-century mansion, which had belonged to the Conservative politician Sir James Duncan and his second wife Lady Beatrice (an actress known in her heyday for being the voice of Larry the Lamb in the Children’s Hour series
Toytown
), was certainly fit for a prince. Crammed with antiques and old masters, the house still has its original two staircases (one for staff), a vast kitchen and laundry downstairs, a library of rare books and wood-panelled reception rooms with vast fireplaces upstairs, and thirteen bedrooms furnished with four-poster beds. But William, who spent Christmas at Sandringham, 400 miles away, failed to make an appearance.
It would not be until the following weekend that Kate was reunited with her boyfriend, at Highgrove, but even then it was more of a farewell party for William than a birthday celebration for Kate. The future king was about to follow his younger brother into the Blues and Royals, a regiment with one of the longest histories of any in the British Army. He would wholeheartedly embrace his new role, teasing Harry that he would rise faster through the ranks because he had a university degree.
One of two regiments that make up the Household Cavalry (the other is the Life Guards), the Blues and Royals were formed in 1969 when the Royal Horse Guards (known as the Blues for the colour of their tunics) and the Royal Dragoons, both of whom could trace their origins back to the seventeenth century, were amalgamated. The only mounted cavalry unit in the British Army, the regiment has the unique role of guarding the Queen on ceremonial occasions as well as serving around the world. Its regimental emblem – an eagle worn on the left sleeve of the blue tunic – commemorates the occasion on which it seized an eagle standard from one of Napoleon’s infantry battalions at Waterloo. Now stationed at Combermere Barracks in Windsor, its Colonel of the Regiment is the Princess Royal.
Kate was working at Jigsaw on the morning of 8 January 2007, when Second Lieutenant Wales reported for duty. Little did she realise how much their lives would change in just a few months.
Stepping alone out of her front door 24 hours later to go to work on her 25th birthday, wearing a £40 black-and-white dress from Topshop (which subsequently sold out within days), she was greeted by a barrage of photographers fired up by the conviction that she and her royal boyfriend would soon be announcing their engagement. For the first time, she showed that the pressure was getting to her and she scowled.
The unprecedented paparazzi turnout provoked comparisons with the treatment of Princess Diana in the final years of her life and led the royal family to swing into action. While Kate’s lawyers Harbottle & Lewis, who also count Prince Charles among their clients, tried to work out a compromise with the media, Prince William authorised his press officer to make a statement on his behalf. ‘Prince William is very unhappy at the paparazzi harassment of his girlfriend,’ he said. ‘He wants more than anything for it to stop. Miss Middleton should, like any other private individual, be able to go about her everyday business without this kind of intrusion. The situation is proving unbearable for all those concerned.’