2. The Student Prince

0:00 Crown and Controversy is a production of Calaroga Media, executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott. This series uses AI narration in its production. While no one truly knows what happens behind closed palace doors, this series uses news sources, on-the-record quotes and some artistic licence to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been dramatised for storytelling effect. where appropriate character perspectives and motivations are drawn from reported accounts, interviews and biographical sources. To keep up with the modern-day royal family, follow our podcast Palace Intrigue, a seven-day-a-week, ten-minute update on the royals.

1:05 The morning after the Don't Walk fashion show, St. Andrews looked exactly as it always did. The ancient grey stone of the town, the cold North Sea light, the narrow streets that had looked the same for centuries and would look the same for centuries more. Nothing had officially changed. No announcement had been made. No one had said anything out loud. Kate Middleton and Prince William had been friendly since the autumn. Neighbors in St. Salvatore's Hall, companions in the same history of art lectures, part of the same loose, easy circle of first-year friends that forms in universities the world over. By the spring of 2002, they knew each other well enough to be comfortable. What they were to each other beyond that was, at this point, perhaps still simply friendship. That would change, but not yet. There was, it should be said, a particular complexity to William's side of this friendship. He was not, at St. Andrews, simply a fellow student. He was the future king of the United Kingdom. The son of Charles, Prince of Wales, and the late Princess Diana, the most photographed woman who had ever lived. He carried with him, always, the awareness that the world beyond the North Sea town was watching, and waiting, and would, given any opening at all, descend. This is

2:37 Crown and Controversy, Kate Middleton, Episode 2, The Student Prince. His first year at university had been, by most accounts, a difficult one. He was not always happy. He reportedly considered, during that first year, whether to leave St. Andrews entirely. That he did not is attributed in royal biographical accounts to a number of factors, including discussions with his father and with university officials. He also made the decision to change his academic direction, stepping away from the history of art course he and Kate had begun together, and switching to geography. It was, by most accounts, the right call for him. He settled, and when the summer ended and the new academic year began, both of them returned to St.

3:28 Andrews for their second year, and the story between them entered a new phase. An informal agreement between the palace and the British media had, since William's arrival, provided a measure of protection for his university life. Editors had largely agreed to leave William alone during term time, in exchange for controlled access at designated moments. It was an uneasy arrangement, never perfectly observed. When Prince Edward's production company had attempted to film around St. Andrews almost immediately after William's arrival, the resulting controversy had made clear how fragile the agreement was. But it held well enough, for long enough, to give William something he had almost never had. Normalcy. Or something close enough to count. And it was inside that protected space, in the autumn of 2002, that something significant happened. Kate Middleton and Prince William moved into a flat together. The flat at 13 Hope Street was shared with two other friends, Fergus Boyd and Olivia Bleasdale. It was a practical arrangement of the kind that second-year students make everywhere, wanting more space and independence than the halls had offered. They moved in, by the account William himself later gave, as friends. We

5:01 moved in together as friends, he said, in the engagement interview he and Kate gave in 2010. It just sort of blossomed from there, really. Living together, even with others present, is a different thing entirely from being neighbors in a hall. or companions in a lecture theater. It means seeing someone in the morning. It means sharing the tedium of the ordinary, as well as the pleasure of the eventful. It means knowing someone in a way that no amount of evenings out can fully replicate. Former classmates who were around them at the time have recalled them spending increasing amounts of time together, being very good friends before anything more formal took shape. By most biographical accounts, the romance began somewhere in this period. The precise moment has never been established, and neither of them has ever offered one. What later accounts make clear is that by the time they left St. Andrews, they had been a couple, privately and then semi-publicly, for the better part of two years. The question of privacy had, from the beginning, been a serious one. Kate was not a royal. She had no press office of her own, no official role, and none of the institutional experience that came with William's position. She was a private individual who had chosen, by degrees, to be near someone who was among the most scrutinized people on earth. Whatever she felt about that, she gave, by the accounts of those around her,

6:33 very little away. She was warm. She was steady. She was, in the word that kept appearing in descriptions of her, composed. The circle of people who knew the true nature of their relationship appears to have remained small. It was maintained within the close group of friends who shared their life in St. Andrews, people who understood what was at stake and who kept their confidence with a discretion that held for longer than might have been expected. It held, that is, until March of 2004. William had traveled to Closters, in Switzerland, for a skiing holiday. Closters was familiar royal territory, a resort the family had visited often enough that its rhythms were well understood by the press. There was a formal arrangement in place. Photographers would be given controlled access to William at designated moments, and the private parts of the holiday were supposed to remain private. In March of 2004, paparazzi photographs captured something the official photo call had not.

7:42 William was skiing with Kate Middleton. The Sun published the photographs under a headline that made the implication unmistakable. Finally, it announced, Will's gets a girl. Clarence House was furious. The Palace regarded the private portion of the holiday as exactly that, private, and the publication of the photographs as a direct violation of the understanding with the press. The Sun was subsequently banned from future royal photo calls. It was a significant institutional response, and it underlined how seriously the palace took the breach. But the photographs were already out, and the world, which had been waiting for years to know who the future king might love, responded with the full force of its considerable attention. Kate Middleton, who had been until that moment largely unknown to the general public, was suddenly a name, a face, a subject of fascination and speculation, and from certain corners of the press, immediate and intense scrutiny. Within a remarkably short time, journalists had found her family home in Bucklebury, her parents' business, her school records, her history. The machinery of celebrity, which operates

9:13 with impressive efficiency when sufficiently motivated, turned its attention fully in her direction. She was 22 years old. By outward appearances, Kate adjusted. She did not give interviews. She did not issue statements. She did not attempt to manage the narrative through friendly briefings or carefully arranged access. She returned to St. Andrews, to her flat, to her friends, to her course, and she continued to live her life with a self-possession that struck those around her as remarkable, given the circumstances. She endured all of it without apparent complaint. The remaining months at St. Andrew's passed in a rhythm that was, within its particular constraints, still something like ordinary life. student life.

10:01 There were lectures and essays and evenings with friends. There were the rhythms of a relationship, finding its footing under unusual pressure. And then, in June of 2005, it was over. Both Kate and William graduated from the University of St. Andrews on the 23rd of June. Both received two-one honours, William in Geography, Kate in the History of Art. The ceremony was attended by the Prince of Wales and by Carol and Michael Middleton, who posed for photographs with the kind of composed pleasantness that suggested they understood, at least partially, what the moment meant beyond the academic. The world watched and drew its own conclusions. Kate Middleton had spent four years living unusually close to one of the most scrutinized people in the world, but St. Andrews had also given them something they would never quite have again. Brian Lang, the university's principal at the time, later reflected that St.

11:04 Andrews had offered William and Kate four years of something close to normal life. Relatively free from the daily glare of the British press, A protected space in which two young people could get to know each other, slowly and without the world watching every moment. That protection was now gone. University, for all its intensity, is still a contained world. A small town. A known circle. A set of structures that, however unusual, become familiar over time. What came next was different. The real world. and with it, the questions that had been quietly building for four years and could no longer be deferred. If William was serious about Kate, what did that mean? And if he was not quite ready to say so, what did that mean for her? The waiting, it turned out, was only just beginning.

12:03 Next time on Crown and Controversy University is over. The relationship continues, but without the cocoon of St Andrews to protect it, the press grows bolder. The question everyone is asking, out loud now, is whether William will propose. The years pass, and a cruel nickname begins to circulate. Next time. Waitie Katie.