began when they were undergraduates at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi they fell in love and lived together, sharing such mundane chores as shopping at the supermarket and doing the dishes. Her advantages were modest, but important: a good education at the prestigious Marlborough College boarding school and an upbringing in a tightly knit and nurturing family with a sister and a brother and happily married parents. Michael and Carole Middleton achieved the ultimate middle-class dream by leaving their jobs as an airplane dispatcher and flight attendant to build a prosperous mail order business creating party products for busy mothers. William grew close to Kate’s parents, who were “loving and caring.”
After eight years of tabloid speculation, their engagement announcement on November 16, 2010, came first on Twitter, followed by the Queen’s Facebook page. When the two twenty-eight-year-olds appeared together in the splendor of the Entree Room at St. James’s Palace, they were as warm as they were dazzling, a marked contrast to Charles and Diana’s uneasy debut nearly three decades earlier.
Elizabeth II and Philip were “absolutely delighted” by William’s choice. The Queen had approved of the match from afar, but had actually spent little time with Catherine, as the Palace instantly began referring to her. They had met several times, but always in groups. Their first encounter was at the wedding of Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor in May 2008, when the Queen came over and “had a little chat.” Prince Charles said he was “thrilled” on hearing of the engagement and joked, “They have been practicing long enough!” David Cameron heard the news in a cabinet meeting and announced that it was met with “a great cheer” and a “banging of the table” by everyone in the room.
Both inside and outside the royal family, the consensus was that a well-grounded, middle-class British girl, the first future queen to be a university graduate, would be good news for the Windsors. After all the Queen’s heartaches over her children in the 1980s and 1990s, she accepted with equanimity the less conventional choices made by the next generation, including marriage to middle-class commoners, which had become the rule for the royal family.
While Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, was a student at Gordonstoun, she turned up at age seventeen with a metal stud in her tongue, and later fell in love with Yorkshire native Mike Tindall, a professional rugby player described as a “big, beer-loving lug” whose misshapen nose had been broken eight times. The Queen didn’t look askance when the couple lived together for five years before announcing their engagement, nor did she object when Zara’s brother, Peter, lived with his future wife, Autumn Kelly, for two years before they were married. Kelly was a Canadian management consultant who had studied Mandarin and Japanese history at McGill University and worked as a barmaid to pay her tuition. When the Phillipses’ daughter, Savannah, was born in December 2010, the Queen’s first great-grandchild was hailed by Canadians as one of their own.
Catherine Middleton’s enthusiastic welcome by the royal family was even more consequential, because she was marrying a man destined to be king. The Queen’s embrace of an “ordinary” young woman undercut a core republican argument that the monarchy is hidebound and remote from its subjects. Even Carole Middleton’s working-class roots in the coal mines of Durham were seen as an example of the monarchy’s more inclusive spirit. “From the pit to the Palace in three generations!” said longtime courtier Malcolm Ross.
In their first television interviews, William and his future queen presented an image that augured well for the monarchy’s future—self-possessed, contented, and clearly in love. Like William, Catherine came off as intelligent and reflective. “We’re both down-to-earth,” he said, “and take the mickey out of each other a lot.” Catherine paid homage to Diana, calling her an “inspirational woman to look up to.” But unlike the late princess, she seemed instinctively to understand that her “daunting” role would require her to keep her husband in the forefront. “Over the years, William’s really looked after me,” she said, calling him “a great, loving boyfriend.” William patted his fiancee’s hand protectively, emphasized that “there’s no pressure” to fill his mother’s shoes, and said that Kate would make her “own future and … destiny.”
William and Catherine timed their wedding to avoid any conflict with the Queen’s full schedule of engagements in the spring and summer. The wedding date, April 29, 2011, was also comfortably distant from two fraught milestones—Diana’s fiftieth birthday on July 1, and the thirtieth anniversary of Charles and Diana’s wedding on July 29.
After attending the weddings of twenty of their friends, William and Catherine had firm ideas about what they wanted for their own. The Queen was deeply involved in the planning as well. She tasted the food for the reception and approved the menu as well as the flowers. The celebration was intended to blend old and new, starting with the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, where Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were married, rather than St. Paul’s Cathedral, the choice of Charles and Diana. The 1,900 invitations to the Abbey came from the Queen, not Charles, using traditional royal wording specifying the marriage of William “with” Catherine rather than the more conventional “to.” Elizabeth II also invited 650 guests to a midday reception at Buckingham Palace. Instead of the customary seated “wedding breakfast,” guests were to be served Pol Roger vintage champagne and hot and cold canapes prepared by twenty-two Palace chefs. In another departure from past practice, William and Catherine designated twenty-six charities to receive donations in lieu of gifts.
The young couple controlled the guest list, which was heavily weighted toward their contemporaries and representatives of William’s charities. To accommodate the couple’s preferences, ambassadors were invited, but their spouses were not. Even the Queen and Prince Philip had an allocation of only forty places, not unlike most twenty-something weddings, where the grandparents’ circle is rarely in evidence. Elizabeth II was able to invite such members of her extended family as Margaret Rhodes (who had been one of her own bridesmaids), and she arranged for Angela Kelly’s staff of in-house seamstresses to make her cousin a pale blue dress, coat, and hat.
A MONTH BEFORE the nuptials, the Queen attended a private party at St. James’s Palace given by her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson to celebrate the fiftieth year of her party planning business. For more than ninety minutes, Elizabeth II mingled with the crowd of six hundred that included aristocrats as well as caterers and florists. “Usually when members of the royal family come into a room, there is a vacuum around them,” said one partygoer. “But tonight everyone is crowded in around her.” The Queen was in a merry mood, smiling and chatting informally with old friends and strangers alike, without the benefit of Palace aides to smooth her path. “Come on, you two, get together!” she said with an emphatic gesture as she made one spontaneous introduction. Later she remarked on how much she enjoyed spending time with such a diverse group of people. “And everyone was so friendly to me!” she exclaimed.
With eight days to go before her grandson’s big event, she celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday, which coincided with her annual Maundy Service, held at Westminster Abbey for the first time in a decade. She spent nearly a half hour presenting red and white purses of Maundy money to eighty-five men and eighty-five women, walking with a sure stride and showing no sign of the pain in one of her knees that had been bothering her for several months. (She had even given up riding for a while, but had resumed her daily outing on horseback when she and her court moved to Windsor for their annual stay during April.) Philip, looking trim in his morning suit, watched her intently as she carried out her solemn act of humility, and the elderly recipients greeted her with bows and curtsys. Midway through the service, he walked to the pulpit to read the second lesson, from the Book of Matthew, in a clear and strong voice. At the end, the congregation of nearly two thousand sang a thunderous “God Save the Queen” accompanied by military trumpeters and the organ at full volume.
By the following Friday, the Abbey had been transformed into a leafy bower, with the strategic placement along the nave of twenty-foot-tall maple and hornbeam trees in large planters brimming with lilies of the valley. Under the majestic Gothic arches, Catherine wanted to create the illusion of the countryside as she walked down the red-carpeted aisle with her father. It was a bold and successful move, one of numerous examples of the distinctly modern stamp she and William put on their day. The Order of Service not only featured a stunning photograph of the couple by Mario Testino, it included an informal message of thanks to the public for its “kindness” and “incredibly moving … affection” that “touched us both deeply.”
That morning the Queen had given them the titles of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. But even more significantly, they overrode protocol by announcing that they could be known by their own names as well. “It is absolutely natural that the public might want to call them Prince William and Princess Catherine,” said Paddy Harverson, press secretary to Prince Charles (technically, “princess” is used only for someone born a princess), “and no one is going to have any argument with that.”
At the heart of the celebration was the infectious joy of a young man and woman who both loved and understood each other. They showed a sense of restraint and respect for the monarchy’s one-thousand-year-old traditions, along with what Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called a “deeply unpretentious” style. Standing at the altar in the dashing scarlet and gold-braided uniform of the Irish Guards, his regiment as an
