Kate
Page 15
By the time Kate and William went on their skiing trip to Klosters – six weeks before their final exams – the two St Andrews undergraduates had endured endless speculation, both in the newspapers and on the Internet, about their romance. But, ironically, whilst before their first trip to Klosters everybody had wanted to know whether they were a couple, after it there was constant conjecture about whether they were breaking up.
The rumours began when William went on two holidays without his girlfriend during their three-month summer vacation and reached fever pitch on 25 September 2004, two days before they were due to return to St Andrews for their final year, when Kate failed to appear at the wedding of former debutante Davina Duckworth-Chad, 25, and baronet’s son and old Etonian Tom Barber, 31.
Davina, a distant cousin of the princes, who once posed for Country Life magazine’s website in a revealing rubber dress, earning herself the nickname ‘the Deb on the Web’, is the daughter of landowner Anthony Duckworth-Chad, former High Sheriff of Norfolk, and his wife Elizabeth. She was brought up with her two older brothers, James, later a Coldstream Guards officer and equerry to the Queen, and William, at their country seat Pynkney Hall in Norfolk. Her name was romantically linked to William’s when she was invited on a ten-day Mediterranean cruise with the royals during the summer of 1999, alongside Kate’s former Marlborough colleague Emilia d’Erlanger. Davina, a history of art graduate, kept in touch with the princes after she left Bristol University and went to work at the West End art gallery owned by Lady Helen Taylor’s husband Tim. Now she had invited William and Harry to her wedding, at St Mary’s Church in West Raynham, Norfolk. The two princes arrived in a minibus and were joined by their uncle Earl Spencer, a cousin of Davina’s mother Elizabeth, who had chosen the boys’ mother Princess Diana to be her own bridesmaid 35 years earlier.
Five weeks later, on 6 November, there was yet more conjecture over the state of Kate and William’s relationship when Kate failed to arrive on the prince’s arm at the society wedding of the year – between Prince Charles’s godson Edward van Cutsem, 31, and the Duke of Westminster’s daughter Lady Tamara Grosvenor, 23. Unfortunately for Kate and William, the prince’s old flame Jecca Craig, by then a student at London’s University College, was spotted slipping into Chester Cathedral in a striking brown suede coat scattered with turquoise ribbons, which she teamed with an Australian-style bush hat. Kate, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Although Jecca was an old friend of the groom, having once dated his younger brother Nicholas, and kept a low profile at the wedding – keeping her distance as the royal guests left with the bridal party for the reception, held at Eaton Hall, the Duke of Westminster’s grand country house – her presence reignited conjecture that William was still enamoured with her.
What onlookers failed to realise, however, was that protocol would in any case have prevented Kate from arriving with her royal beau and the numbers might have prohibited inviting her. The etiquette of the seating plan for the society wedding, attended by the Queen and Prince Philip, had already proved a headache for Natalia, Duchess of Westminster, who compared it to ‘wading through treacle’. While William and Harry, who are close friends of the four van Cutsem brothers – Edward, Hugh, 30, Nicholas, 27, and William, 25 – had agreed to be ushers, wearing tails and pink rosebuds in their buttonholes, Prince Charles, who met the boys’ father at Cambridge, was officially reported to be absent because he was visiting the families of soldiers serving with the Black Watch in Iraq. Many newspapers rumoured, however, that he boycotted the event after it emerged that his consort, Camilla Parker Bowles, was not to be included in the royal party. Instead, she was to have been seated several rows behind Charles, and unlike the other VIPs, who would walk to the cathedral through the grand West Gate, she was expected to enter the cathedral through a side entrance like the rest of the guests. Charles was reported to have deemed it an unacceptable slight.
His son, however, was happy to party, with or without his girlfriend, chatting to other guests, watching the stunning fireworks display and dining on scallops and prawns, fillet of beef and petits fours, before leaving the reception – alone – at 5.30 a.m., the same time as the bride and groom.
As a result of Kate’s absence from the two weddings – the most important in the social calendar – the gossips had a field day, speculating that William was feeling claustrophobic, that there were cracks in their relationship and that the couple were talking of a trial separation. But things in the world of this complex young man, who believes that his private life is not for public consumption, can never be taken at face value, and some royal commentators speculated that Kate might have stayed away from the high-profile weddings in order to throw people off the scent.
Certainly, three days earlier the couple had been together at a private dinner party in Scotland, where friends noticed nothing amiss, and two weeks later, on 14 November, after William had for the first time joined the Queen at the Cenotaph for the Remembrance Day service, the couple spent the evening at Highgrove, celebrating Prince Charles’s 56th birthday – hardly a sign of a relationship on the rocks.
Indeed, the new year saw the beginning of a period of togetherness that would send out signals to the world that their romance was firmly back on track. On 22 January 2005, they headed for a weekend in the privacy of Birkhall, and towards the end of February the couple spent another long weekend together, in the Swiss mountain resort of Verbier, once the preferred resort of Prince Andrew, the Duchess of york and their friend the playboy and motor-racing millionaire Paddy McNally. They rented a chalet with six friends, skiing during the daytime, dining out in the evenings and watching the Carling Cup final in the local pub. On the Saturday night, they paid a visit to the renowned Farm nightclub, where during its flashy heyday the bar was lined with expensive bottles of vodka, each marked with the name of a regular. Although they largely avoided overt displays of affection in public, the two students barely left each other’s side, skiing together and stealing the odd kiss when they thought nobody was looking. Kate’s gallant boyfriend even carried her skis over his shoulders for her.
The royal couple showed the same modesty a month later – the night before they flew to Klosters – when they joined Prince Harry and some other friends at the Sugar Hut nightclub in Fulham, south-west London, billed as a ‘romantic hotspot for lovers’ and located in a dimly lit converted church in the North End Road. In those days, the club, with its award-winning Thai restaurant and bar, where guests lounged on lavish beds and sipped cocktails, was a favourite haunt of celebrities and the royals, although it no longer has the same cachet. The paparazzi would gather outside to photograph the stars, and William and Kate went to great lengths to avoid being snapped together. First, William was driven away with Prince Harry. Then Kate emerged ten minutes later, arm in arm with a friend, and climbed into another car. It was an extraordinary display of caution, bearing in mind that 24 hours later the couple would openly show their affection for each other in front of Prince Charles at Klosters.
Although Kate joined the royals on their skiing holiday, commonly described as Prince Charles’s stag week, she was not invited to the royal wedding on 9 April 2005, because of protocol. Instead, she revised for her finals, which began five weeks later. It would be a testing time for the 23-year-old student, who had been living with the prince for nearly three years. Within a couple of months, they would be graduating and their lives would never be the same again.
Kate and William finished their exams on 25 May and, with their flatmate Fergus, walked down to the beach at Castle Sands to reminisce about their experiences at university. It was the first night of a month of celebrations that would culminate with their long-awaited graduation ball on 24 June, three days after Prince William’s 23rd birthday. But before then, Kate and William had a very important date in their diaries.
The wedding of Hugh van Cutsem, 30, to landowner’s daughter Rose Astor, 25, on 4 June, was the first society event that Kate and William would attend to
gether, showing how far their relationship had blossomed since the groom’s elder brother Edward’s marriage seven months earlier. The wedding was held in the idyllic setting of the Church of St John the Baptist in the Cotswold village of Burford – described by Simon Jenkins in his England’s Thousand Best Churches as ‘the Queen of oxfordshire’.
Kate, who wore a cream jacket, black skirt and black hat, was confident enough to stroll into the church alone, while her royal boyfriend, who was an usher, showed guests, including Jecca Craig, in a poncho and cowboy hat, into the pews. There was some speculation about the two love rivals coming face to face, but in fact it was not the first time they had been in the same room, as they had both been guests at William’s 21st and had met before.
Afterwards, when the newly-weds retired to their 12-ft teepee in the grounds of the Astor estate at nearby Bruern, William and Kate joined friends at the King’s Head Inn, four miles away in the village of Bledington, for a post-reception drink. They stayed the night at the sixteenth-century inn, where, according to local legend, William was following in the footsteps of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who is said to have stayed there in 1646 before fighting in the Battle of Stow. After an English breakfast, the couple, both casually dressed in jeans, left by a side door and drove off in William’s black VW Golf, trailed by two protection officers.
The next social event in the diary, on 18 June, was the Argentine Cup, one of the highlights of the polo season, at which Kate showed a rare moment of public affection towards her boyfriend, holding his hand and stroking his leg. It was five days before their graduation ceremony, when the eyes of the world would be upon them.
Kate and William graduated from St Andrews University on 23 June 2005, in the most high-profile ceremony the institution had ever witnessed, having spent four years studying alongside each other and three years living together. At the ceremony, witnessed by the Queen and Prince Philip – who had never before attended a family graduation ceremony – as well as Kate’s parents and William’s father and stepmother, they were the centre of attention as they both received their 2:1 degrees.
Wearing black gowns, believed to have been hired for £29.50 each, they entered the younger Hall together, looking every inch the regal couple, but sat five rows apart. Kate, who was wearing a short black skirt and high heels under her gown, graduated first, 80 students ahead of William. Then it was the prince’s turn.
Too nervous to walk through the auditorium, William walked onto the stage through a side door, his head bowed, and approached the pulpit, where he was capped by chancellor Sir Kenneth Dover, who tapped his head with a seventeenth-century scarlet cloth cap bearing a fragment from the trousers of the religious reformer John Knox. The university’s bedellus, or beadle, James Douglas, then lifted the hood of his gown over his head.
Afterwards, William kissed his grandmother, who was dressed in primrose yellow, and was congratulated by his father before he went off to find his girlfriend. She was amongst a select few who were invited to mingle with the royal family on the university lawns after the ceremony, but she did not talk to the royals, discreetly keeping her distance from them on the edge of St Salvator’s Quadrangle with Carole and Michael.
In a speech to the graduates of 2005, Dr Brian Lang, the university’s vice chancellor, said: ‘you will have made lifelong friends. I say this every year to all new graduates: “you may have met your husband or wife.” our title as the top matchmaking university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply – but in the positive sense that I earlier urged you to adopt.’
It was a sentiment that echoed the thoughts of the nation as they willed William and Kate towards giving Britain a royal wedding.
Chapter 19
The Real World
Sitting on the veranda of a remote African hideaway, 15 miles north of the equator on land owned by the Masai warrior tribe in the foothills of snow-capped Mount Kenya, Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton sipped their cocktails and took in the magnificent view.
Together for the first time since leaving university, the couple shared a romantic moment watching the sunset in the exclusive Il Ngwesi, an award-winning eco-lodge. That night, 17 July 2005 – three weeks after William had flown out for his first solo overseas tour, a brief trip to New Zealand – ended speculation that the couple would drift apart when they had left St Andrews and were living in the ‘real world’, as William had referred to life after university.
Kate was in a party of William’s closest friends, including old Etonian Thomas van Straubenzee, the nephew of Princess Diana’s childhood friend Willie, who had known the prince since their days at Ludgrove, the exclusive prep school in Berkshire. The group joined William towards the start of his time at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, run by Jecca Craig’s parents, where he was spending a month helping out.
That morning, while William had been working on the estate, his friends had trekked for hours, exploring the bush as they made their way to the lodge, perched 5,600 ft up the Mukogodo Hills, on the edge of the Ngare Ndare River, looking down over northern Kenya. William and Jecca joined the group before nightfall for cocktails and a barbecue.
It was the third time that William had been to stay on the estate, but it was the first time he had taken Kate to visit the country he had fallen in love with during his gap year in 2001. The fact that he had invited his girlfriend to stay at Lewa Downs finally put an end to conjecture about his feelings for his childhood sweetheart. Both he and Kate were now friends with Jecca and her new boyfriend, financier Hugh Crossley, the son of a Norfolk landowner whom she had been dating since he had recuperated at her family’s ranch following a climbing accident on Mount Kenya.
Jecca is descended from a wealthy British family who emigrated to Kenya after the First World War, settling on a cattle ranch in Lewa Downs in 1922, where eventually they began offering tourists luxury safari holidays. Keen conservationists, the Craig family set up the Ngare Sergoi rhino sanctuary in 1983 to protect the black rhino from poachers. This would evolve into the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a not-for-profit wildlife sanctuary. Housed inside a 70-mile solar-powered electric fence, it is patrolled by armed rangers and teems with rare species, including the highly endangered Grevy’s zebra.
Jecca’s parents, Ian and Jane, who played host to the prince during his gap year and whom he regards as a ‘second family’, and her uncle William and aunt Emma live in the grounds of the ranch, enjoying a colonial lifestyle fit for a prince. Under the name Lewa Wilderness Trails, they rent out eight luxury cottages, complete with fireplaces and verandas, in the gardens of their home. Guests can use a saltwater swimming pool, a clay tennis court and riding stables; they can choose to go on drives around the estate, bush walks with a professional tracker, jogs with a Masai warrior, or horse or camel rides.
William, however, was not there just for a holiday but to learn about conservation from Jecca’s family. The prince spent the majority of his African trip working on the ranch, but also took the opportunity for a long-awaited post-graduation holiday with his friends. He spent around £2,000 to hire the lodge for his friends to stay in, complete with a glorious swimming pool that looks as if it is overflowing into the wilderness below. Kate and William’s cottage had its own balcony and a double bed on castors, meaning that the royal lovebirds could sleep outside, protected by a mosquito net, under the stars. It would have been a wonderful experience for the group, who were spoiled for choice of what to do. They could have followed the river with local guides, toured the estate in a 4x4 looking for game, visited the baboon troop and the black rhinos, or simply relaxed at the lodge.
For Kate and William, the African break was the first chance they had had to spend time together since leaving St Andrews, and they must have wanted to enjoy every minute, away from the stresses and strains of their lives in Britain and the storm of speculation over their future.
Kate and William had left the sanctuary of the smal
l university town on Friday, 25 June 2005, after their graduation ball, knowing that their lives would never be the same again. They would no longer have the freedom they had enjoyed over the previous three years. It was a pivotal time for the young prince and his girlfriend, who both had to think hard about what they intended to do now that they had completed their degrees.
But before they addressed themselves to that task, there was one more night of carefree, student-style partying to enjoy, at the upper-crust private members’ club Boujis, a favourite haunt of the young royals, socialites and aristocrats, as well as the odd sports personality, Eurotrash banker and Hollywood star. It is there that Starsky & Hutch stars Ben Stiller and owen Wilson were smuggled out of a fire exit to avoid the paparazzi only to be spotted when their driver was nowhere to be found, and there too that England cricketers including Freddie Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen ended their 32-hour drinking marathon after the Ashes win in 2005. But its most famous clientele are William and Harry, who are drawn in by its exclusivity and discretion. It is located in Thurloe Street, South Kensington, just a few doors from the flat where Princess Diana lived before her marriage. One doesn’t get behind the Boujis rope unless one has serious connections, which gives it the advantage of being a WAG- and soap star-free zone. The doormen never tip off the paparazzi – they have to cruise around until they spot the royal protection officers – and the princes can retreat to the exclusive Brown Room for their own private party. At the club, the motto is ‘Rules Are Broken’ and the signature drink is the Crack Baby, a cocktail of vodka, passion-fruit juice, Chambord and champagne that arrives in a test tube. Kate has gained a reputation at the club for her demure behaviour. She drinks modestly and always touches up her make-up in the lavatories before leaving the venue and facing the waiting paparazzi.
Jake Parkinson-Smith, the grandson of the flamboyant fashion photographer Norman Parkinson, ran the club in 2005. (He has since been sacked – and reinstated – after accepting a caution for possessing cocaine.) ‘The princes are very ordinary, nice guys,’ he said once in a rare moment of indiscretion. ‘They remind me a lot of my friends. They feel very safe because their pals come – Guy Pelly, Freddie Windsor. It’s the English aristo set. They all know each other, they all went to Eton together and all play polo together, so it’s all very comfortable and happy.’