Kate’s lack of confidence was also picked up on by another school friend, Gemma Williamson, who was in Mill Mead House, on the other side of the school grounds. ‘Catherine arrived suddenly during the middle of the year,’ she told the Daily Mail in an interview about their friendship. ‘She had very little confidence.’
Initially, Kate was terribly homesick at Marlborough and did not spend time with the other girls after eating her supper at Norwood Hall, instead hiding away in her boarding house studying and doing her homework, all the while missing her family.
Many of Kate’s fellow pupils were the offspring of earls, dukes and barons. One student, for example, was Sebastian Seymour, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, who went on to Cirencester Agricultural College, the traditional stamping-ground of upper-class farmers. The atmosphere of privilege must have been somewhat overwhelming, but the well-behaved schoolgirl gradually made friends – despite her unwillingness to rebel. Nicknamed ‘Middlebum’, a play on her name, she became known for her fun-loving behaviour, loyalty and reliability – although she rarely joined in the wilder antics. Jessica recalled that when her dorm mates held parties, getting drunk on bottles of wine and vodka that they’d sneaked in, Kate would watch from the sidelines. She did not drink or smoke but kept a clear head, maintaining a vigil for the house matron in case her friends were caught. Jessica told the News of the World: ‘I never once saw her drunk. Even after our GCSEs finished, she only drank a couple of glugs of vodka.’
Kate’s confidence would have been boosted in 1997 when her sister Pippa arrived at the school, but instead of rebelling and exploring ways to break the rules, she concentrated on studying for her 11 subjects. Kathryn Solari, who was in her biology set, remembers: ‘Catherine was always really sweet and lovely. She treated everybody alike. She was a good girl and quite preppy – she always did the right thing – and she was very, very sporty. I wouldn’t say she was the brightest button, but she was very hard-working. I don’t think you would find anyone to say a bad word about her.’
Virginia Fowler, a former pupil who had a friend in Elmhurst, recalls her as always being kind to new arrivals. ‘She was always quite welcoming. She didn’t look down on the new girls like some of the other girls.’
The diligent teenager played hockey for the school, was in the first pair at tennis, was a keen netball player and cross-country runner and used to beat the boys at high jump, as she had done before at primary school. She was apparently awarded so many honours at speech day that she barely had a chance to return to her seat between presentations.
Charlie Leslie, a keen sportsman a few years above Kate, has described her to reporters as ‘an absolutely phenomenal girl’. She was ‘really popular, talented, creative and sporty’, he remembered. ‘She was captain of the school hockey team and played in the first pair at tennis,’ but despite her achievements, she was ‘very level-headed and down-to-earth’.
After taking her GCSEs, which she passed with flying colours, Kate returned home to Bucklebury for the summer holidays. It was there that she underwent a miraculous transformation.
It was on the first day of the autumn term in 1998, when she returned to Marlborough as a sixth-former, wearing the long skirt that was the uniform of the upper school, that Kate finally showed the steely determination to improve herself that had become a family trait. Gone were the wan cheeks, lanky hair and nerdy image. She had blossomed into one of the most attractive girls in the school.
‘It happened quite suddenly,’ Gemma recounted to the Daily Mail. ‘Catherine came back after the long summer break the following year an absolute beauty . . . She never wore particularly fashionable or revealing clothes – just jeans and jumpers – but she had an innate sense of style.’
It was that sense of style, as well as the transformation in her appearance, that would attract the boys in the school. But unlike her wilder classmates, she remained discreet and maintained her dignity, showing the good judgement and reserve that would make her an ideal consort for a prince. ‘It’s fair to say that Catherine wasn’t much of a party animal,’ Gemma said, adding that she believed Kate’s parents had ensured she had ‘a strong moral compass’. She recalled: ‘A group of us used to sneak off out to Reading to go out drinking but she would never join us. She used to giggle when we would tell her what we got up to, but it just wasn’t her thing.’
By this time, Kate’s friend Jessica was dating Nicholas Knatchbull, one of Prince Charles’s godsons, who was Prince William’s ‘shepherd’, or mentor, at Eton. She had met the heir to the Mountbatten fortune at the wedding of Tim Knatchbull, Nicholas’s cousin, and Isabella Norman, a friend of Jessica’s family. In another interview, with The Mail on Sunday, she delighted in talking about being introduced to the Queen and other members of the royal family, including Prince William, at her boyfriend’s family seat Broadlands, a Palladian mansion in the Hampshire countryside.
Unlike her school friend, Kate had yet to meet Britain’s most eligible schoolboy, but it seems she still dreamed of capturing the heart of her prince. Even in those days, Kate was nicknamed ‘Princess in Waiting’ – not then by an impatient press but by her giggly school friends as a joke. According to Jessica, she, Kate and another girl, Hannah Gillingham, who was in the same sports teams, used to hang out in the kitchen of the boarding house eating microwaved Marmite sandwiches, a favourite of Kate’s, and joking about the possibility of her marrying the prince.
‘We would sit around talking about all the boys at school we fancied,’ revealed Jessica to The Mail on Sunday, ‘but Catherine would always say, “I don’t like any of them. They’re all a bit of rough.” Then she would joke, “There’s no one quite like William.” . . . She always used to say, “I bet he’s really kind. You can just tell by looking at him.”’
Jessica was not the only girl in Kate’s year to mix in royal circles. Emilia d’Erlanger, niece of the 10th Viscount Exmouth, was one of Prince William’s closest girlfriends. The youngest of five children of Robin d’Erlanger, a chartered accountant and commercial pilot like Kate’s grandfather, and his wife Elizabeth, a regional director of Sotheby’s in Devon, Emilia, who was in Kate’s history of art class at Marlborough, was once touted as a possible bride for the prince. In the summer holidays after the lower sixth, she was invited by William on a ten-day cruise, hosted by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, aboard a 400-ft luxury yacht, the Alexander, owned by the billionaire Greek shipping tycoon John Latsis.
While Emilia holidayed with the prince, Kate had to make do with the more prosaic company of her parents. She returned to school the following autumn and was made a prefect. ‘Catherine was a very hard-working, responsible girl,’ recalls former pupil William Garthwaite, who was in the same year. ‘She arrived late [at the school] and became a prefect. That says a lot. She did very well.’
Like most teenagers, the girls at Marlborough would spend hours gossiping about the opposite sex. But while some of the other girls lost their virginity, Kate was apparently made of sterner stuff. ‘She is very good-looking and a lot of the boys liked her,’ Jessica remembered in The Mail on Sunday, ‘but it just used to go over her head. She wasn’t really interested and she had very high morals.’
‘I got the distinct impression that Catherine wanted to save herself for someone special,’ Gemma told the Mail. ‘It was quite an old-fashioned approach . . . Not that anyone ever said anything to her, though . . . she was such a genuinely nice person that all the girls liked her as much as the boys.’
Although Kate stood out from the crowd as being a model of propriety, she reportedly had several admirers at school, with whom she may or may not have been romantically involved. One of the names in the frame was Charlie Von Mol, whom former pupils describe as ‘the school legend’. He was two years above Kate and shared her passion for sport – he was in the first rugby team. Jessica recalled an evening when Kate, after much deliberation, slipped off to the woods for a snog with Charles, but said that it seemed to
her that ‘she just did it because of peer pressure’.
Two other boys at Marlborough have been named as former boyfriends of Kate, but in fact they may well have been platonic friends. There has been speculation that Willem Marx, the son of a Dutch father and English mother, who was a mathematics genius, may have been her first love. The two have remained friends and Willem, an oxford graduate who works as a journalist, has since squired Kate when Prince William is not around. She was photographed with him in May 2008 leaving the nightclub Boujis, where they had been drinking Crack Daddies – a champagne cocktail – and dancing until the early hours.
Another possible former boyfriend is rugby player oliver Bowen, who was in the year above her, although Jessica, talking to the News of the World, remembered the pair as being close, she thought the relationship seemed more platonic than romantic.
All this might make Kate sound like an over-serious ice queen, but old school friends have described her as ‘goofy’, and she clearly enjoyed a joke and had the same anxieties and preoccupations as any teenage girl. One schoolmate wrote in the leavers’ yearbook for 2000: ‘Catherine’s perfect looks are renowned but her obsessions with her tits are not. She is often found squinting down her top screaming: “They’re growing.”’
However, Kate’s demure behaviour and hard work at Marlborough certainly paid off, as she gained three A levels – A grades in mathematics and art and a B in English – meaning that she could go to the university of her choice. The question was which university to choose.
Chapter 14
A Florentine Interlude
Wandering along the cobbled streets of the medieval city of Florence, exploring its renowned art galleries, piazzas and churches, Kate Middleton marvelled at the beauty of the city that was the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and inspired E.M. Forster to write his novel A Room with a View. Following in the footsteps of the book’s beautiful young heroine Lucy Honeychurch and her chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, the 18-year-old, who was a keen photographer, captured on film some of the architectural jewels of the Renaissance era.
A promising artist as well as a talented photographer, Kate had left Marlborough College that summer with an A grade in art at A level under her belt and a thirst to learn more about her favourite subject. Now, two months later, the teenage ingénue was living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, roaming the streets and studying the paintings and sculptures she loved.
With its pink, green and white marble Duomo, or cathedral, dominating the Tuscan skyline, famous medieval bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, spanning the River Arno and wealth of treasures such as Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Florence is a haven for art lovers and tourists. Known as ‘the cradle of the Renaissance’, it has become a traditional place of pilgrimage for public-school boys and girls hoping to study history of art at one of Britain’s top universities. A trip to the city, once ruled by the Medici family and now home to some of the greatest treasures in the art world, has become a rite of passage for well-heeled teenagers in the same manner as the Grand Tour was a prerequisite for privileged aristocrats during the nineteenth century. Kate had applied to study art history at several universities and it was almost a given that she would spend a portion of her gap year in Italy before she knuckled down to the everyday rigours of student life.
Kate arrived in Florence at the beginning of September 2000 to do a 12-week course in Italian at the world-renowned British Institute. She was one of about a dozen girls in her class at the Institute, which had been founded at the turn of the century to foster cultural relations between Italy and the English-speaking world, and was based in the Palazzo Strozzino, in the heart of the city.
More than 5,500 miles away, on the other side of the world, Prince William was spending a month working on a scientific and ecological research programme, the Shoals of Capricorn Project, for the Royal Geographical Society on the tiny island of Rodrigues, 400 miles north-east of Mauritius in the Indian ocean. Registering as Mr Brian Woods, he arrived on the island on 28 August and worked on the project for a month. Initially, he stayed in le Domaine de Décidé, a tin-roofed guesthouse with whitewashed walls and dark shutters, located down a track half an hour from the capital, Port Mathurin. Afterwards, he moved into a private house in Anse aux Anglais – English Bay – which was closer to civilisation.
Like Kate, he had received his A level results (an A in geography, a B in history of art and a C in biology) on 17 August, when Prince Charles had sent his first-ever email to pass them on to his son, who was on an army survival exercise deep in the Belize jungle. But unlike Kate, he had already chosen which university he was going to attend: St Andrews.
A fellow student at the British Institute remembers that when Kate arrived in Florence she had not decided where she would be studying. ‘She hadn’t confirmed where she was going,’ she says. ‘She certainly wasn’t going to St Andrews at that point.’
It was a formative time for Kate, on the cusp of adulthood. Although she had already been away from home at boarding school, it was the first time she had lived independently from her parents. Having not yet developed the fashion sense that has more recently seen her compared to the late Princess Diana, she looked much like a typical Sloane Ranger, with her long curly hair, Ralph Lauren shirts and V-neck jumpers. Her only concession to student style was the ethnic jewellery she wore.
On arriving in the city, Kate began sharing a flat with a number of different girls, including the singer Chris Rea’s niece Alice Whitaker. They lived above an Italian delicatessen on the top floor of a traditional stone building that had been converted into several flats, reached by a stone staircase. The flat was in a tiny street between Piazza degli Strozzi and Piazza della Repubblica, within walking distance of the Institute. Over the next three months, Kate would immerse herself in the life of a student in Italy, shopping for delicacies at the covered food market opposite the historic San Lorenzo church, which houses the Medici family vault, and meeting friends in quaint cafés and lively bars.
It was in one of these bars, the trendy Antico Caffè del Moro – known as the Art Bar or Café des Artistes – that rumours about the possibility of Prince William spending time in the Tuscan capital after leaving Rodrigues first reached the British students in Italy. Prince Charles had lunched at Highgrove with the Mayor of Florence, inadvertently sparking rumours that his son would soon be joining seven other old Etonians on the prestigious £5,000 John Hall Pre-University Course in Venice, Florence and Rome. It was only when William flew out to the remote Chilean mountains of Patagonia on 1 October – to embark on seven weeks’ voluntary work with the charity Raleigh International – that the rumours were dispelled.
That night in the Café des Artistes, a tiny bohemian backstreet bar run by two brothers who had become renowned for their spectacular cocktails, Kate was sipping a glass of wine when the conversation turned to speculation that the prince would be joining them in the city. Despite the crush on the prince that Kate supposedly had at Marlborough, friends say that she seemed blasé about the news.
It transpires that she had set her sights on a more attainable target, an old Marlburian called Harry, who was studying in Florence on the John Hall course. One student who met Kate during her gap year reported that by the time she arrived in Florence, Harry had surpassed William in her affections. ‘The only time I ever remember her talking about William was when we found out that he was coming over to study in Florence,’ the unnamed friend reported. ‘We would speculate about hanging out with him, but to be honest Kate never really showed any interest in him, or talked about him that much. She certainly wasn’t going to St Andrews with the intention to snare him or anything like that. In fact, she was more hung up on a guy called Harry . . . They had been seeing each other, but he messed her around quite a bit and strung her along.’
Photographic Insert
Kate’s great-grandfather Charlie Goldsmith (bottom left) during the First World War.
(Cou
rtesy of Kim Sullivan)
Kate’s grandfather Ronald Goldsmith (front) with (l–r) his brother-in-law Henry ‘Titch’ Jones, his sister-in-law Emma Goldsmith, his sister Ede Jones, his brother Charlie Goldsmith, his mother, Edith Goldsmith, and his sister Joyce Plummer.
Kate’s great aunts, Ronald Goldsmith’s sisters (l–r): Hetty, Ede, carrying Joyce, and Alice.
Kate’s grandmother Dorothy Harrison and grandfather Ronald Goldsmith on their wedding day, 8 August 1953, at Holy Trinity Church, Southall.
Kate’s great-great-great-grandfather Frank Lupton.
(Courtesy of Arthur Lupton)
Kate’s great-grandmother Olive Lupton.
(Courtesy of Arthur Lupton)
Kate and Fergus Boyd at the Don’t Walk charity fashion show in St Andrews, 2002.
(© Getty Images)
Kate on the catwalk in St Andrews.
(© Getty Images)
Kate at the wedding of Hugh van Cutsem and Rose Astor in June 2005. It was the first time she and Prince William had attended a high-profile social event together.
(© Getty Images)
Kate at her graduation ceremony, St Andrews, 2005.
(© Getty Images)
Kate and William photographed kissing for the first time, Klosters, 2006.
(© David Parker)
Kate at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, 2006.
(© Getty Images)
Kate wearing BCBG Max Azria at the Boodles Boxing Ball, 2006.
Kate Page 11
