Out in Belize, where he was on military exercise with the Welsh Guards, Prince William received similarly welcome news – he had achieved the A, B and C grades that he needed to secure his place at the University of St Andrews to study history of art the following year, and the details of his results and university destination were made public.
It was the first time the world knew that the prince was planning to study at this pleasant Scottish seaside town between Edinburgh and Dundee, starting at its highly rated, Oxbridge-level university in 2001 – and Kate promptly changed her mind about her own degree arrangements. She told Alice and Emilia that she would not be joining them in Edinburgh after all. She had decided to switch to St Andrews to study history of art, like William – and she would also take a gap year so that, if she did get a place, she would go up at the same time, and join the very same course, as the prince.
‘If’ was the operative word. The moment the news of William’s intentions became public, applications to St Andrews rocketed by 44 per cent – with many of the new applicants being female and from America.
But Kate persevered. Sometime at the end of August or the beginning of September 2000, she wrote formally to Edinburgh turning down her place through the UCAS clearing system – Marlborough had insisted she write to the university to apologise – then made a new application to join the history of art course the following year at St Andrews, all with the help of her Marlborough advisors.
‘After she left school,’ recalled her housemistress, Ann Patching, ‘Catherine made some different decisions. But why she made those decisions, I don’t know.’
A few years later the well-connected society journalist Matthew Bell presented his interpretation of Kate’s life-changing switch, based on a ‘reliable’ inside source who, according to Bell, ‘knew Kate very well’.
‘Some insiders wonder,’ wrote Bell for the Spectator on 6 August 2005, ‘whether her university meeting with Prince William can really be ascribed to coincidence. Although, at the time of making her application to universities, it was unknown where the prince was intending to go, it has been suggested that her mother persuaded Kate to reject her first choice on hearing the news.’
So the spirit of Lady Dorothy and her Silver Cross rode again, possibly in Carole Middleton, and certainly in her ambitious daughter who was willing to throw away the security of a place at Edinburgh and take her chances with St Andrews for the sake of a good history of art course – and, oh yes, the associated chance of meeting a prince and becoming ‘the top brick in the chimney’. Kate Middleton’s dramatic last-moment switch of university in August 2000 and her decision to delay her studies by twelve months would seem to display our future consort in a more ambitious and socially striving light than we have previously imagined …
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. What is wrong with a bright and striving girl nursing the ambition to become England’s sixth Queen Catherine?
* Anglo-American editor Tina Brown cannily took The Daily Beast as the title of the online news magazine that she created in 2008 with businessman Barry Diller.
7
An Heir and a ‘Spare’
‘I felt the whole country was in labour with me.’
(Diana, Princess of Wales, Panorama, November 1995)
Diana, Princess of Wales was on Valium when she conceived her first son and sovereign-for-the-twenty-first-century, William, in the autumn of 1981 – ‘high doses of Valium,’ as she later recalled, ‘and everything else’.
So her pregnancy was a reprieve – she could come off all the drugs. ‘Thank heavens for William!’
But with the Valium-assisted future monarch came morning sickness. ‘Couldn’t sleep, didn’t eat, whole world was collapsing around me,’ she described to Andrew Morton. ‘Very very difficult pregnancy indeed … All the analysts and psychiatrists came plodding in to try and sort me out.’
The experts’ diagnosis was sympathetic, but they could hardly offer the princess a solution, since their verdict basically set out the dilemma in which this less-than-prepared twenty-year-old found herself trapped – ‘One minute I was nobody. The next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of this family, you name it …’
Matters came to a head that Christmas of 1981, when the family decamped to Sandringham for what was supposed to be a holiday.
‘I threw myself down the stairs,’ Diana told Morton. ‘Charles said I was crying wolf, and I said I felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out and he said: “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me. I’m going riding now.” So I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened … Charles went out riding and when he came back, you know, it was just dismissal. Total dismissal. He just carried on out of the door.’
The Prince of Wales’s behaviour reflected the advice of some of his trusted friends who had come to feel he should be tougher with what they interpreted as Diana’s self-indulgence – they felt that the princess needed to ‘pull herself together’. But Charles quickly abandoned that tactic. He could see that his young wife would not be in such misery if it were not for her extraordinary and scrutinised position bearing a future heir to the throne – ‘the demands were too great, the pressures too daunting, the loss of freedom too stifling’.
As the delivery date grew closer he spent more and more time with his wife, eventually taking her to St
