William and Harry (16 page)

Despite being turned down, William went to see the play that November and also went to support Fergus, who would often appear in productions at the Castle, an open-air theatre set in the castle ruins on the seafront close to Castle Sands, the beach where students traditionally strip off and dive into the sea every 1 May. ‘William was very loyal and would always go and watch Fergus on the first and last nights. Fergus was very much a budding actor and he starred in several plays, all of which William went to see several times no matter how cold it was,’ recalled a former student.

William enjoyed mingling with members of the drama society and during his first semester started dating a pretty English language and creative writing student called Carley Massy-Birch. Tall, dark and stunningly pretty, Carley made quite an impression on the prince, who would cycle to her house in Crail Lane, a cobbled mews off South Street, where they enjoyed reading the papers over a cappuccino at Cherry’s café at the end of the
street. Often William was invited to supper at Carley’s home, where he would fall over her muddy Hunter wellington boots in the hallway. Carley was a country girl and the couple had plenty in common. ‘I’m a real country bumpkin,’ Carley told me. ‘I think that was why we had a connection. William was in the year below and we just happened to meet through the general St Andrews melee. It’s such a small place that it was impossible not to bump into William, and after a while there was nothing weird about seeing him around. We got on well but I think we would have got on well even if nothing had been going on romantically. It was very much a university thing, just a regular university romance.’ Over supper they would discuss plays and literature and Carley would tell William all about her home life in Devon. Other evenings they would enjoy pints of cider at the Castle pub on North Street and play board games or enjoy dinner parties with their friends. ‘There wasn’t really a club at St Andrews, so we tended to go to pubs and bars and there was always a good dinner party going on,’ recalled Carley. What struck William about Carley was how down-to-earth and normal she was; she had been brought up on a farm in Axminster by her parents Mary and Hugh. On top of that she was gorgeous, and although Kate had been voted the prettiest girl at St Salvator’s, Carley’s derrière was voted the best at St Andrews.

‘We would joke that Carley’s bottom had been sculpted by the gods,’ recalled one of her friends. ‘William was very taken with her, which was completely understandable. She had beautiful long hair and a voluptuous body, which she loved to show off in perfectly fitted jeans and tight corduroy trousers. She was quite a catch and every girl at St Andrews was envious of her
because she was with William.’ Unlike the hordes of made-up pashmina-clad undergraduates who devoted their time to stalking William, Carley was happy to stay in and cook for him and their romance was so beneath the radar, it was only reported years after they had both graduated. Their affair was to be short-lived, however, and ended somewhat stickily when Carley told William he had to make a decision between her and a young woman hundreds of miles away who seemed to be proving something of a distraction.

It was the summer of 2001, William’s final holiday before he started St Andrews, when Arabella Musgrave first caught his eye. She was the eighteen-year-old daughter of Major Nicholas Musgrave, who managed the Cirencester Park Polo Club, and they had known each other since they were little. Although not titled aristocracy, Arabella was a close friend of Guy Pelly’s and Hugh Van Cutsem and part of the Glosse Posse. As she walked through the house party at the Van Cutsems’ family home, William did a double-take. Arabella had blossomed into a gorgeous-looking girl, and as she sashayed past him, her perfume lingering in the air, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed her properly until now. William knew he would make a move on her by the end of the night. They danced and drank into the early hours, and when Arabella said her goodnights, the prince quietly slipped out the room to follow her upstairs. It was the beginning of a passionate romance and the two spent as much time together that summer as possible.

They would dine at the Tunnel House Inn in Coates close to Highgrove, where collages of the regulars cover the old brick
walls. With its famous brass fox door knocker and bright-pink-painted entrance hall, it was one of their favourite haunts. Charles was aware of the relationship and had given it his blessing. While she was not the debutante Charles had hoped William would romance, he suspected the relationship would soon fizzle out and instructed William’s protection officers to give the couple plenty of leeway. Major Nicholas, however, took a firmer stance, and when he caught Arabella sitting on William’s knee while the prince kissed her neck at a party at the polo club, he had a quiet word. Although he was fond of William such displays of affection, he insisted, were not for public consumption

By the time William left for St Andrews in September he and Arabella had already made the mutual decision to end their relationship. William would be meeting new people at university and Arabella could not expect him to wait for her. The problem was that William became bored in Scotland. He missed his friends in Gloucestershire and going to his favourite nightclubs in London. The advantage of St Andrews being so small was that he was well protected, but the town could be claustrophobic. He also missed Arabella, and on Friday nights when he began his journey home to Highgrove he was comforted by the fact that she would be waiting for him.

Charles knew he had a crisis on his hands when William returned home at Christmas and announced he did not want to go back to university for his second semester. He complained he was not enjoying the course and St Andrews was too far away. Charles listened patiently. He knew William could be temperamental and the situation was delicate. Of course William could leave if he was thoroughly miserable, but give it another term,
he suggested. As he often did in a crisis, Charles consulted his private secretary Sir Stephen Lamport and press adviser Mark Bolland as well as William’s former housemaster at Eton Dr Andrew Gailey who agreed that they would do everything to persuade the prince to stay. The main problem appeared to be that, apart from being homesick, William had no interest in his course and was finding the workload challenging. Despite growing up in palaces where Rembrandts, Vermeers, Canalettos and Van Dycks lined the walls, he had not enjoyed studying baroque and rococo art during his first term. ‘It was really no different from what many first-year students go through,’ Mark Bolland recalled. ‘We approached the whole thing as a wobble which was entirely normal.’

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were kept abreast of the situation. ‘He needs to knuckle down and not wimp out,’ was Philip’s typically blunt response. It could have been disastrous for the monarchy if William had pulled out. The Royal Family enjoyed close ties with Scotland and did not want to alienate the Scots. They were also reminded of the criticism that Prince Edward had faced when he had left the Royal Marines in the spring of 1987. After some frank discussions with William’s deans, a deal was struck.

‘It would have been a PR disaster for St Andrews if he had left after one term, and we worked very hard to keep him,’ said Andrew Neil.

‘I don’t think I was homesick; I was more daunted,’ William later admitted. ‘My father was very understanding about it and realised I had the same problem as he probably had. We chatted a lot and in the end we both realised – I definitely realised – that I had to come back.’ Returning to St Andrews, he was much happier with his switch to geography.

However, the following Easter his beloved great-grandmother passed away at the age of 101. William, Harry and Charles were two days into a holiday in Klosters when they received the sad news, and they immediately flew to RAF Northolt in west London. Charles was inconsolable, and this time it was William and Harry who needed to be strong. The Queen, whose sister Margaret had died seven weeks earlier, was also said to be greatly saddened. It was the year of her golden jubilee, but it seemed she had little to celebrate. The sight of William and Harry walking behind their great-grandmother’s coffin from Westminster Abbey brought other tragic memories flooding back.

* * *

William wasn’t always a model student. Dr Declan Quigley recalled the prince once fell asleep during one of his anthropology lectures.

It was ironic that William was attending lectures on the very subject he struggled to come to terms with. As a very modern royal, his views about the monarchy were at odds with Dr Quigley’s, who believed that the king must not be ordinary but
extraordinary. ‘The really crucial thing about kingship is that a king or queen must be initiated through a ritual to transform him or her from their ordinary status into something quite extraordinary,’ explained Quigley, who has written a book called
The Character of Kingship
. ‘All these would-be modernisers of the royal family have got it completely wrong. The more like one of us the king becomes, the less there is any reason for having a king. A king is a symbol, not a person.’ Perhaps it was exactly what William didn’t want to hear, or maybe he was just so bored he switched off. Either way he wanted to enjoy St Andrews and revel in four years of being ordinary, not extraordinary.

It was the night of the annual Don’t Walk charity fashion show on 27 March 2002 during William’s second semester, when the moment of realisation suddenly hit him. As Kate shimmied down the catwalk at the five-star St Andrews Bay Hotel William turned to Fergus. ‘Wow, Fergus,’ he whispered. ‘Kate’s hot!’ He had paid £200 for his front-row ticket, and when Kate appeared in black underwear and a see-through dress William barely knew where to look. ‘Kate looked amazing,’ recalled one of the models. ‘Her hair was slightly frizzy and with her wasp-like waist and washboard stomach she stole the show. She always had a complex about her legs, which she complained were too short, but she was great on the catwalk, and everyone including William knew it.’

At a party at 14 Hope Street after the fashion show William decided to make his move. As the music throbbed and beautiful young things sat sipping home-made cocktails on the winding staircase of the student house, William and Kate were huddled in a quiet corner deep in conversation. As they clinked their
glasses to toast Kate’s success, William leaned in to kiss her. It was Kate who pulled away, momentarily stunned that he had been so bold in a room full of strangers. At the time she was dating Rupert Finch, a fourth-year student, but William didn’t seem to care. ‘It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate,’ remembered one of their friends who was at the party and witnessed the moment. ‘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.’

It was a rebuff, but Kate had wavered. The attraction was evidently mutual. Kate had been hugely relieved when William returned to St Andrews for the second semester of his first year. They had kept in touch over the Christmas break and she had encouraged him to give St Andrews a second chance. She had been homesick too and had become, quite unexpectedly, dependent on William’s friendship. She was completely unaffected by the fact that he was a prince; to her he was just William, which was one of the reasons he was always so comfortable with her.

After her impressive debut on the catwalk, things would never be quite the same between William and Kate. William had insisted in an interview on his twenty-first birthday that he was single, but the truth was he had fallen for his pretty friend. One problem was Kate’s relationship with Rupert Finch. It wasn’t terribly serious, but Kate, as she would show many times over in the following years, was nothing if not loyal, and William’s title was not going to change that. But William was giving off mixed signals, including the romance with Carley, who Kate could not stand. In later years Kate would be nicknamed ‘Waity Katie’ by the British press as she waited patiently for her prince to propose, but back then in the beginning it was William who had to do the waiting, and the irony of the role reversal has never been lost on Kate.