Chapter 18
Graduates at Last

Sitting casually on Prince William’s knee during lunch on holiday in Klosters, Kate Middleton could not have found a more effective way of dispelling rumours that their romance was foundering. Engaging in friendly, relaxed conversation with Prince Charles – and laughing and joking with Prince Harry – she effectively showed the world that her relationship with his elder son had his family’s all-important approval.

It was 30 March 2005, almost a year since Kate and William had inadvertently allowed themselves to be photographed together on a ski lift in the Swiss resort, exposing their love affair to public scrutiny for the first time. Now, after a mountain of speculation about their future had accumulated, the publicity-shy couple were being openly affectionate, proving at a stroke that their relationship was still on course.

Kate’s presence on the family holiday seemed to be a sign that their relationship was becoming more serious and the strongest indication yet that they were not planning to go their separate ways after university.

The pretty Swiss village of Klosters, five miles from Davos and an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Zurich airport, is the ski resort of choice for the royal family. Its main cable car, which runs to the top of Gotschnagrat, has been christened ‘the Prince of Wales’. Charles has been skiing at the resort since his marriage to Princess Diana in 1981. The resort holds sad memories for the royal family. It was there that the Queen’s equerry Major Hugh Lindsay lost his life in March 1988, after being buried by an avalanche. On that holiday, Prince Charles was also accompanied by Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, a former olympic skier who had coached him in his younger days, and his wife Patty, who was airlifted to hospital in Davos with Major Lindsay after sustaining leg injuries.

On this trip, though, Charles was surely looking to the future rather than the past as he spent his final week as a bachelor skiing with his two sons, having chosen to visit the resort before his marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. The future Duchess of Cornwall, who is scared of heights and has never learned to ski, remained in England, putting the final touches to their wedding plans.

While Kate was in the royal party, Harry’s then girlfriend Chelsy Davy had turned down the chance to join them, preferring to stay in South Africa. In her place, Harry invited close friend Guy Pelly, who had been unfairly pilloried in the past for supposedly leading the young royal astray. On the first day of the trip, Kate, then 23, proved just how comfortable she was with the royal family, sitting next to Prince Charles at lunch, chatting happily with him throughout the day and sharing a cable-car carriage with him. It was the first time the history of art student had been photographed with the heir to the throne, but she seemed to take it all in her stride, showing a maturity beyond her years.

Despite their obvious ease in each other’s company, Kate and William, who had made great efforts to hide their romance during their third year at university, tried to keep their distance in public. At one point, William was seen walking some distance ahead of his girlfriend, who followed behind with other members of their party, the couple perhaps deliberately avoiding spending every minute together in front of the press and paparazzi.

That night, the group spent the evening at the Casa Antica, Princess Diana’s favourite nightclub. It was there that the Princess of Wales had earned the nickname ‘the Disco Queen of Klosters’. While William and Harry drank bottles of beer and danced, their exhibitionist friend Guy stripped down to his silk boxer shorts and ran around the room. The atmosphere was so relaxed that William gave an impromptu interview to the royal correspondent of The Sun, uttering words that haunted him for many years afterwards. When asked about marriage to his girlfriend, the blushing prince retorted: ‘Look, I’m only 22, for God’s sake. I’m too young to marry at my age. I don’t want to get married until I’m at least 28 or maybe 30.’

However, both William’s and Guy’s actions were overshadowed the following day by a photocall on the slopes during which Prince Charles showed that he could be every bit as gaffe-prone as his father. Without realising that he could be heard through the microphones at their feet in the snow, he moaned to his sons: ‘I hate doing this,’ before insulting the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell, saying: ‘I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is.’

His comments proved a PR nightmare for the prince’s aides. The forthcoming wedding had already been dogged by a series of criticisms and controversies over the choice of venue, the legality of the civil ceremony, the decision by the Queen not to attend and the role of Camilla when Charles succeeded as King. They had called a press conference in order to redress the balance of adverse publicity, and Witchell had asked an innocuous question about how the princes felt about the marriage. Unfortunately, William’s reply – ‘Very happy, very pleased. It will be a good day.’ – was followed by his father’s comments about the BBC reporter. The journalists who witnessed the heir to the throne’s outburst attributed it to his irritation with the press in general over paparazzi photographs of Kate and William taken the day before, which he saw as a breach of their agreement to give the prince privacy during his university years. Charles is also believed to have a dislike of Witchell stemming from a broadcast in which he compared the Prince of Wales’s extravagant holidays to those of his great-uncle Edward, Duke of Windsor, an obituary of Princess Margaret written by him and a report on Prince Harry taking drugs.

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 together, 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.