by Dylan Howard
William was easing his way into the role of a senior Royal, but he was also planning ahead. His life was to be one of duty and service. Like every male member of the family, a stint in the military awaited. But mindful of his position as a future King, he wanted to develop as much as possible. To that end, ahead of his term at Sandhurst, William embarked on a sort of postcollege gap year, in which he undertook three stretches of work experience.
First up was a spell at the stately Chatsworth House, where he spent a fortnight shadowing various staff and learning how the 35,000-square-acre ranch estate worked, from the inside out. He then spent a week at HSBC in the city of London as an intern, studying the machinations of the financial services at the heart of the UK economy. Finally, and most aligned to his immediate future, was a two-week attachment to the RAF’s rescue team in North Wales. William came in for some criticism when it was revealed that he had flown from Anglesey to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire in a Hawk jet so that he could collect a pair of boots.
William needed to break in the boots, it was explained, ahead of his arrival at Sandhurst, scheduled for January 8, 2006, the day before Kate’s twenty-fourth birthday.
Like Harry two years previously, the Prince arrived at Sandhurst with his father to be deposited with his iron, ironing board, and shoe-shine kit (and his presumably now-comfortable boots).
“I can assure you,” boomed the commandant of Sandhurst, Major General Andrew Ritchie, “He will be treated the same as ever other cadet. Everyone is judged on merit, there are no exceptions made.”
William’s experience at Sandhurst largely followed the same lines as Harry’s. He would be up every morning at 5 a.m., brush his teeth (leaving toothbrush and toothpaste at right angles), and make his bed with military precision. His room and floor had to be spotlessly clean. He would arrange his clothes in the wardrobe by color, leaving a space of exactly four fingers between each hanger. His shoes were given a new coat of polish and the soles scrubbed with a toothbrush. It would now be 6 a.m., and Cadet Officer Wales would be obliged to stand at attention outside his bedroom door, to sing the national anthem and await inspection.
His day would be taken up with military, strategic, and fitness training, including handling weapons such as the SA80 5.56mm rifle, light mortars, and hand pistols. In deference to the augmented protocols the royal cadet necessitated, extra precautions were put in place, such as fake training schedules to throw the media off the scent, while the real programs were printed out and circulated to a limited few.
Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing the future King going through his paces during training was irresistible to the press, and so, as with Harry, there were several attempts by photographers to break into the grounds, using near-military levels of cunning and perseverance themselves.
After a grueling five-week immersion period, William had a weekend off. He celebrated in style with Harry—“passed out” from the Academy, ranking him above William for once—by staying out late partying at a London nightclub. The following night, William and Kate enjoyed a huge night out at Boujis with friends, managing to run up a bar tab in excess of two thousand pounds. Undaunted, the couple flew out for a week’s luxury holiday in Mustique, following in the notoriously decadent footsteps of his late aunt Princess Margaret, whose villa had hosted some wild scenes in the 1970s.
William returned to Sandhurst and Kate continued with her life, going to fashion events, swanky parties, balls, receptions, and, in September, another week abroad with her boyfriend, aboard a yacht sailing around the Balearics.
The lather of excitement over Kate in the press had settled to a steadily bubbling froth of speculation on when the by-now inevitable proposal would take place. The couple was being snapped together at every possible opportunity, whether at the races, on holiday, or emerging rosy-cheeked from Boujis in the early hours. But given William’s perceived slowness in proposing, the unfortunate sobriquet “Waity Katie”—which Kate loathed—became a running joke in the papers.
By autumn 2006, Kate had found a job as an accessories buyer at Jigsaw, the high-street chain, run by a friend of hers, Bella Robinson. The role was flexible and challenging, ensuring Kate could juggle her increasingly public profile by William’s side with a meaningful and creative career.
That December, William was watched by a beaming Kate and their proud families as he passed out from Sandhurst. The festive season saw William and Kate spend Christmas day with their respective families, before William was due to join up with Kate in Scotland with the Middletons, for the traditional Scottish Hogmanay celebrations. For whatever reason, he didn’t make it.
Life for William was now all about his military career. Like Harry, he was relishing the relative freedom he paradoxically found in the most controlled environment he had yet been in, and with alacrity, he embraced his new life as a second lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry.
William considered a number of regiments before applying to join the Household Cavalry. He based his decision on the variety of roles that the regiment undertakes, from reconnaissance support to airborne forces, right through to ceremonial duties. The Prince was also attracted by the regiment’s outstanding record in recent decades, most notably during the Falklands Conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, in Iraq and in Northern Ireland.
The Prince spent the first year or so continuing his training to become a fully qualified armored reconnaissance troop leader and experiencing life as a young officer at regimental duty.
He also spent much of his downtime helping maintain the regiment’s reputation as a hard-partying, boisterous bunch. Known appropriately as the “Booze ‘n’ Royals,” the soldiers enjoyed themselves to the fullest, on weekends, letting off steam after a week’s tough training.
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There is a wonderfully concise and accurate means of discerning the key differences between William and Harry: their military training. For Harry, the military was intended to be a lifelong career that could fulfill his childhood ambitions of being a soldier as well as providing him with a strict routine and structure to his life, and above all, the blissful anonymity in its ranks that he craved and within which he thrived. Harry confessed in 2017 he had been so disillusioned with being part of the Royal Family that at some point he simply wanted out. The army, he revealed, was “the best escape” he had ever had until he had to abandon his military career, finding himself at a crossroads between royal duties and the military life.
For William, however, his years in the army served as little “more than window dressing,” according to royal biographer Duncan Larcombe. In his biography of Harry, Larcombe asserted accurately that William’s military career was never really going to be more than part of his long-term strategy, preparing for his reign as King. William told the biographer, in 2005, that it was important for him to “understand the military and to be able to look soldiers in the eye with at least a tiny bit of knowledge of what they have gone through.”
To this end, when William graduated from Sandhurst, he decided to spend the immediate future gaining experience across the military. He knew that his destiny decreed that he would one day be the commander in chief.
This is why, at the start of January 2008, William, or rather, Flying Officer William Wales, began a four-month spell with the Royal Air Force at RAF Cranwell. During an intensive sixteen weeks, he spent time across the entire RAF network, learning to fly light aircraft, and then, following his spell at Cranwell, flying helicopters at RAF Shawcross. He was regarded as a steady and reliable pilot, not given to flashy air acrobatics. William gravitated toward search and rescue operations, initially observing and then participating in rescues at sea.
He also fulfilled a personal ambition and made it to the front line in Afghanistan—if only for thirty hours. Flying as part of a crew to Kandahar, to return with the body of a young paratrooper killed in action, William took the controls of the massive Globemaster plane for part of the flight and spent a f
ew hours on the ground at the Afghan airbase, meeting troops. When he landed back in the United Kingdom, he sought a private audience with the soldier’s parents, to express his condolences.
While stationed at Odiham, he managed to hit the headlines when he flew a Chinook helicopter to the Isle of Wight, for cousin Peter Phillip’s stag party—picking up Harry on the way, in London. At a cost of over eighty thousand pounds to the taxpayer (the cost of flying a Chinook for about an hour), William beat the traffic and arrived at the weekend in style. The newspapers tutted their collective heads, as it seemed William was using expensive RAF vehicles as a personal taxi service.
As it turned out, William had actually been offered a lift by the pilots of the Chinook, who had flown up to Odiham and were returning to Cranwell, so there had been no breaking of rules, just bending them in the case of picking up of Harry en route as well as not properly informing his supervisors about the exact nature of the flight.
But the story broke around the same time as another apparently flagrant flouting of the rules, when William landed a Chinook in a field by Kate’s house. It was seen as showing off. But William hadn’t descended from the helicopter to sweep up an adoring Kate in his arms—he had just taken off again. He was simply doing what every flying student did and practicing his takeoffs and landings using familiar landmarks, such as properties belonging to friends and family. Admittedly, not every student had a girlfriend with a country manor conveniently outfitted with an adjacent field.
That April, William also decided to buzz over Highgrove, to surprise his dad, a 106-mile round trip to Gloucestershire and back. A few days after that, he undertook more low-level flying training by swooping over his grandmother’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk. (She wasn’t home at the time.) More controversially, he appeared to be trolling entirely when he traveled 260 miles to Northumberland, from where another pilot took the chopper back to base while the Prince popped up to Scotland to attend a friend’s wedding with Kate. A slightly sheepish Ministry of Defense told the press it was a “legitimate training sortie” although there were plenty of rumors that behind the scenes, top brass had hit the ceiling when news of William’s little jaunts had become public. There were further grumblings in the media about the time and money spent on William’s training, given that his position made it highly unlikely he would ever be seeing active service.
Once he had his wings, William followed in his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather’s footsteps and joined the Royal Navy, to undergo their training program. This was a young man who really intended to scrutinize the inner workings of the British military with unprecedented commitment. He completed a grueling four-week induction, which included war-gaming on a nuclear sub, and then was sent to the West Indies, where he joined the crew of the frigate HMS Iron Duke. There, William roughed it with the rest of the crew, sleeping in cramped cabins with other recruits, participating in all manner of sea exercises, including swooping on a boat loaded with narcotics heading for Europe, and gaming a disaster scenario on the island of Montserrat. He also was consistently punished for running late for his PT classes, meaning he had to invariably do extra push-ups in front of everyone else.
The final stage of William’s military training came when, after two years of fairly entry-level stuff, he took full advantage of his position to intern at the Ministry of Defense, under the direction of the secretary of state. He attended high-powered meetings among Chiefs of Defense staff and witnessed the nuts and bolts of the running of the military. Now, after years of hands-on learning and experiencing, William was uniquely qualified to empathize with the needs and challenges facing Britain’s twenty-first-century military, from the lowliest Army recruit to the commander and Field and Air marshals at the very top.
In January 2009, William returned to his beloved helicopters and began training in earnest as a Sea King pilot with the RAF’s Search and Rescue team. Once he passed his initial tests in helicopter rescue, he moved to Anglesey in North Wales, where he joined the Search and Rescue Training Unit at RAF Valley. Based in Wales, the country of his surname, he settled into a spartan military issue cottage, which was to be his base for the next few years. Assigned to C Flight, 22 Squadron, he started out undertaking copilot duties.
On October 2, 2010, William’s months and months of training all came to a head when he undertook his first rescue mission as the copilot of an RAF Sea King. Following an emergency call from the Liverpool Coastguard, William and three crew members flew from their base at RAF Valley to an offshore gas rig where a worker had suffered a suspected heart attack and needed to be airlifted to a hospital. The man’s reaction to knowing his mercy flight was being piloted by the future King might have had an adverse effect on his cardiac health, so that little fact wasn’t relayed to him at the time. William performed splendidly and went on to participate in further rescue missions, including one in November 2011, when he rescued two sailors who were on board a cargo ship that was sinking in the Irish Sea.
Between February and March 2012, the Prince was seconded to 1564 Flight to Argentina, much to the annoyance of the Argentinian government, who clearly remembered the 1982 Falklands War, even if the Royals didn’t. In any event, it turned out that rather than promote British sovereignty over the once-disputed islands, he just occasionally rescued Argentinian fishermen stranded at sea. But his steady and calm presence at the helicopter controls, his knack for teamwork and easygoing manner, and his diligence in adhering to exacting military standards ensured his popularity and success. All of this led to his promotion to becoming captain, or pilot in command, of a Sea King helicopter, in June 2012.
“The training has been challenging, but I have enjoyed it immensely,” he told the press when he qualified to fly rescue missions in the Sea King. “I absolutely love flying, so it will be an honor to serve operationally with the Search and Rescue Force.” With typical clipped military briefness, Officer Commanding 22 Squadron, Wing Commander Mark Dunlop, barked, “Flt Lt Wales demonstrated the required standards needed for the award of Operation Captaincy.”
Barely two months later, William captained his Sea King for a dramatic rescue of two teenage girls who had been swept out to sea while bodyboarding off the Anglesey coast. The RAF announced that the rescue was one of its “fastest and shortest” operations, with the helicopter taking only a remarkable thirty-eight seconds to arrive. William would continue to excel in his career as a search and rescue pilot, until September 2013.
THE SPLIT AND THE REUNION
Initially, William did his best to be a conscientious boyfriend to Kate, who was working most weeks at Jigsaw, while he was stationed near the South Coast. He would drive the 130 miles up to the capital on weekends and squire his girlfriend to the usual parade of clubs, parties, and events, much to the continued delight of the media, whose frantic panting at the couple’s every move was increasingly irritating them both.
Also becoming a source of irritation to Kate was William’s slowly waning lack of passion and energy for the relationship, according to one snitch. She was dealing with a horrendous amount of intrusion and stalking from the media on a daily basis, despite legal warnings—and receiving barely any help from the royal media machine. Her family was also being subjected to intense scrutiny, all thanks to her choice of partner. Meanwhile, William was gallivanting around seemingly unconcerned about Kate’s problems and taking her, in her eyes, for granted. The festering tension was exacerbated by the distance between them and William’s reluctance to make a commitment.
Matters came to a head during March 2007, thanks to William’s boorish antics at Elements nightclub in Bournemouth. Two girls with whom the future King was drunkenly flirting sold their stories to The Sun tabloid.
“Word went around that William was in [the club],” eighteen-year-old Ana Ferreira told the paper. “There were a lot of girls hanging around him and he was posing for pictures. He had me on one arm and my friend Cecilia on the other. I was a little bit dru
nk, but I felt something brush my breast. I thought it couldn’t be the future king, but now when I see the pictures, it’s no wonder he’s got a smile on his face.”
Worse was to follow. Another young woman, nineteen-year-old Lisa Agar, told The Sun’s rival tabloid, The Mirror, that William, after numerous shots of sambuca, had tugged at her arm onto a podium to dance with him.
“He was being very flirty,” she said. “I was quite taken aback, but just went for it. He was laughing his head off and waving his hands in the air.” Agar and some other friends were persuaded to join the Prince and his chums back at their barracks for a drunk afterparty, but, according to Agar, she left after only twenty minutes. “Strangely, I felt a bit sorry for William and I thought that maybe he was cheering himself up.”
Unsurprisingly, Kate, beset upon from all sides, was said to be furious.
The royal brothers were certainly letting off a bit of steam at this point. Harry was also enjoying life to the fullest at this time, falling in and out of his usual haunts around London’s Mayfair district, popped to the eyeballs with his favorite Crack Baby cocktails—a blend of vodka, passion fruit puree, syrup, Chambord, and champagne. Allegedly, he even headbutted a paparazzo outside Boujis nightclub at 3 a.m. Needless to say, the tabloid cycle of persecution and condemnation of the brothers’ behavior reached fever pitch.
That Easter, Kate and William’s relationship reached its lowest point. William turned down an invitation to stay with the Middletons over the holiday, and instead, the pair met up for a serious talk. Kate, badgered by her mother, wanted a firm commitment from her partner, said the family insider. He wasn’t prepared to be pressured. The following week, their relationship ended with an afternoon phone call from William while Kate was at work at Jigsaw. Kate fled the office that afternoon and stayed away all week, going back to her parents’ house in Berkshire. That Friday, April 13, 2007, William formally notified his grandmother, the Queen, that he and Kate had split up.