Following Charles and Camilla’s marriage the previous April, the now openly acknowledged romance between William and Kate had become Britain’s top royal story, with a succession of pundits confidently predicting the imminence of their marriage. William Hill and other bookmakers had started accepting bets on the date of the wedding, and the couple themselves were said to keep a calendar of the media’s projections in Kate’s kitchen, where they took amused turns over breakfast to add the ticks. Woolworth’s was even reported to have designed a set of William-and-Kate china.
The prince’s father and grandmother knew this pattern of public interest all too well, but they were both warmly in favour of Kate as their latest recruit. Charles sent her a personal invitation to his November birthday party – a definite sign of approval – while the Queen invited her to join the traditional family Boxing Day shoot at Sandringham. William had been giving his girlfriend shooting lessons and he would present her with a set of binoculars that Christmas.
There seemed every reason to expect the announcement of a royal engagement before too long. But the twenty-three-year-old who would have to get down on one knee and actually make the proposal remained as adamant as ever about his long-term schedule of ‘no marriage before thirty’. William was not going to repeat his parents’ mistakes – and his upcoming year at the Royal Military Academy intensified the complications. In itself Sandhurst would constitute a year of all-consuming, twenty-four-hour-a-day activity, and the prince was hoping to follow that with a posting to the elite Blues and Royals Guards regiment, towards which Harry was also moving. There was no space in this timetable for all the frivolity and folderol of a grand royal wedding.
Through his tough year at Sandhurst the prince appeared in public with Kate from time to time – at a polo match where the couple were spotted kissing, and more formally at the marriage of Camilla’s daughter Laura that summer. Then in December 2006 Kate sat in the front row at Sandhurst beside her parents at William’s final graduation smiling proudly like a young wife or fiancée – except that she wasn’t.
The tensions behind the scenes had been growing. Kate was less than a month away from her twenty-fifth birthday, and the couple had been dating seriously for the best part of five years – time enough, surely, for any reasonable boyfriend to commit. When William invited her to join him that year at Sandringham for the royal family’s traditional Christmas lunch, she refused. It was the first time the Queen had ever extended such an invitation to an unregistered ‘girlfriend’, but Kate had her own take on that break with tradition: she would go to Sandringham on Christmas Day only when she had been registered and had a ring to prove it. She went off to Scotland to spend the holiday with her family instead.
Pressurising William, however, was not the way to make him change his mind. The prince’s time away from Kate and the intensity of his RMA training had affected his thinking. The newly commissioned officer had begun to worry whether he had not, perhaps, found the right girl at the wrong time. His fun-loving fellow cadets at Sandhurst had demonstrated how much living he still had to do before he settled down. The Spectator had recently run an article anointing Kate as ‘The Next People’s Princess’, and that had raised all the old anxieties about his parents’ over-rapidly-arranged marriage.
William turned to his father and grandmother for guidance. The Queen had grown very fond of Kate, but she did not wish to interfere – and there were the lessons of the relatively brief courtships of Charles, Anne and Andrew. All their marriages had ended in disaster. She told her grandson that he should not rush into a commitment if he was feeling any doubts – and his father advised the same. Equally fond of Kate, Prince Charles was not happy with the idea that William might be seen by public opinion to be ‘stringing her along’ – and having himself been pressured into marriage by his father, he did not want to follow that path with his elder son.
Kate’s birthday on 9 January 2007 was marked by the arrival of the largest scrum of photographers yet seen outside the door of her Chelsea home, waiting for the ‘pre-engagement’ or ‘engagement day’ photo that had been widely predicted. When Kate came out that morning she looked positively frightened. Charles was by this point providing her with a car and driver, but she received full royal protection only when she was in William’s company, and here she was on her own, with William down on the south coast somewhere near Bournemouth on his latest army training course. It might be her birthday, but she did not offer the press her usual bright smile – and as she headed alone to work, it was clear that she was feeling under pressure.
William, meanwhile, was enjoying the life of a hard-drinking army officer. Not for nothing was his new regiment known as the ‘Booze and Royals’. The prince was spotted in London dancing wildly at Boujis and at Mahiki, Guy Pelly’s joint, and also in Bournemouth, where one of his dancing partners described the experience vividly.
‘He has big, manly hands,’ reported eighteen-year-old Anna Ferreira, a glamorous Brazilian brunette who described
