Is Catherine, Princess of Wales, the paragon of perfect parenting that we, the world, have blithely taken as a rock-solid given, asks Daniela Elser. Photo / Getty Images
Is Catherine, Princess of Wales, the paragon of perfect parenting that we, the world, have blithely taken as a rock-solid given, asks Daniela Elser. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
Sometimes I wonder what biographers of the future will write about Queen Catherine. Will they delve into her middling high school hockey career? That a woman who ended up on the throne started her working life as a boathand? That the fundamental turning point in her relationship with husband King William VI came when he spied her in her knickers and a hideous crocheted outfit? Or that prior to their marriage, her greatest individual achievement had been organising a charity roller disco?
No matter what those biographers decide to include in their books, and I for one am gagging for that roller disco outing to echo down through the ages, they will indisputably bang on about how Kate was a mother par excellence.
Kate with her two eldest children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, in 2019. Photo / Splash News
Unlike generations of Windsors, whose innate parenting skills tended to be about as strong as their paddling pool-depth gene pool, when the Princess of Wales pitched up in royal circles everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Her wealthy, but far from aristocratic upbringing, all jolly hockey sticks, Yorkshire puds and station wagons full of wet sports kits and dogs, looked like a game changer. Her attitude to raising kids surely meant that the next sovereign might not face the usual emotionally barren royal childhood.
Kate the wundermum has only become more entrenched in the narrative since then and today is all but etched into stone. Except, what if she is not quite the paragon of perfect parenting that we, the world, have blithely taken as a rock-solid given?
That’s one of the questions raised by biographer Tom Quinn’s new book Gilded Youth, a look at royal child-rearing through the ages, in which he offers a view of the mum-of-three that is not quite as flawlessly perfect as the royal family might want you to think.
One of the prevailing messages out of Kensington Palace for years has been just how gosh darn normal a childhood William and Kate are offering their three sproglets. She goes to the supermarket! They both do the school run! They go to parents’ drinks nights!
Except that Quinn’s take on life for the Wales family is that it is less bangers-and-mash middle England and much more toff gold-partridge-forks than you might think.
He writes that “Kate makes no effort – unlike Diana – to bring the children down to earth” and that she “revels in the fact that her children are royal” only paying “lip service to a vague idea of what constitutes a ‘normal’ childhood”.
Take the question of staff.
According to Gilded Youth, while younger HRHs “pay lip service” to the lofty notion of “normal”, a former royal staffer claims “the couple continue the royal tradition of farming out the main tasks of child-rearing to paid staff”.
When the Wales’s first boy and future crown wearer Prince George arrived in the world in 2013, it was reported with breathless admiration that the new parents would be doing the hard yards – the midnight feeds and nappy changes – themselves.
That lasted for all of two months. Quinn writes that, according to a former palace staffer, the couple were “so appalled by how tired they were that they gradually discarded this early enthusiasm, increasingly leaving the bulk of the childcare to paid staff”.
In September 2013 they rehired William’s childhood nanny Jessie Webb before hiring childcare pro Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo, a woman who still works for the family and dresses like a chorus member from a Mary Poppins panto.
Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo was brought in as Prince George's nanny. Photo / Getty Images
There is a certain irony in all of this: that while Kate, based on Gilded Youth, is happy to outsource the body fluid-filled, squalling-in-the-middle-of-night, “I-need-to-make-a-working-volcano-for-tomorrow” parts of parenting, her womb is the very reason she is now on the fast track to Queendom.
In what might be the ickiest royal revelation in years, Quinn reports that: “The usual precautions were taken before” the Wales’s marriage to “ensure a future queen is able to have children. If Kate had not been fertile, there is little doubt the marriage would have been off.”
He writes that Diana herself was subjected to the same prodding and poking but as the late royal told him “I was so innocent I just went along with everything at that stage”, and hadn’t twigged what the tests were really about.
It might have been put a tad bluntly but there is a high degree of uncomfortable truth to the late Booker Prize-winner Hilary Mantel’s highly controversial description of Kate as “her only point and purpose being to give birth”.
Luckily, Kate’s lady parts were in full working order and when she dutifully reproduced, the royal family was able to get out the specially encrypted phone so that William could tell his grandma, the late Queen Elizabeth, immediately.
It’s not just the various sets of helping hands that William and Kate enjoy but the space to keep their little ones out of sight when they just cannot bear hearing Let It Go another time.
Between their vast home and their 10-bedroom Norfolk estate they have four nurseries for three children, begging the question … why? How much playing can a few kids do?
However, this preponderance of staff and just how much the Prince and Princess do themselves has been “an area of some conflict” for them, Quinn reports: “She rarely tires of the daily grind of looking after three sometimes boisterous children. William, on the other hand, heaves a sigh of relief when the children are taken away by their nanny.”
As a source explained to Quinn, it is “nonsense” that the couple actually need such a vast retinue of helpers, so ostensibly full are their plates, and that: “When Kate suggested they might not need quite so many staff, William was baffled.”
(Elsewhere a staffer is quoted as saying: “[William] has never been alone and without paid staff in his life. He would be unable to function without staff. It would be like being abandoned on a desert island when you have no idea where food comes from or how to build a shelter.”)
So, while it sounds like the Princess might be more inclined to Play-Doh under her manicure and drive her tiny princelings and princess to their My First Polo Camps, that does not mean that she has any intention of giving her kids anything like a suburban upbringing.
As a former palace staffer explained to Quinn: “Kate wants to escape her middle-class childhood. She dislikes burgers and chips and wouldn’t dream of taking her children to McDonald’s, and she doesn’t rock the boat when the vast weight of traditional royal pursuits bears down on her children. Prince George, for example, has been taken to the annual Boxing Day shoot at Sandringham, and he’s been grouse shooting in Scotland with his father.”
Nothing like instilling a spot of blood lust while they’re young, right?
So what of George and his two spares, Princess Charlotte and Louis? Has a childhood of being dressed like haunted Victorian dolls and forced to take part in walkabouts when their contemporaries are on the couch watching Paw Patrol taken a toll?
Quinn has revealed, in what would have been a jawdropper for the ages, the Waleses reportedly considered sending their three to, prepare yourself, state schools, even just to start with, but the notion “caused panic” among courtiers and aides.
Instead, George and Charlotte started their schooling at the private Thomas’s Battersea where one of his former teachers has revealed he had “a slightly lordly … air about him.”
Princess Charlotte and Prince George arrive for their first day of school at Thomas's Battersea in London, 2019. Photo / Getty Images
“George, though delightful, knows that he is different from all the other children,” the former teacher told Quinn. “He already knows that one day he will be King, and children read story books where the King is always the special one. I overheard him ask another child, ‘Where is your palace?’”
Umm …
But don’t worry about Kate, who as a former royal staffer has said, “is a lovely person, but she is far more ambitious for her children even than Meghan. She is the Anne Boleyn of our time!”
In that same Mantel essay, called Royal Bodies, she writes at one point of Boleyn: “In the end she was valued for her body parts, not her intellect or her soul; it was her womb that was central to her story.”
Depressing that the same sentiment still holds true today.
