The Great Royal Woman-Hunt
Why Kate is prey - just like her mother-in-law
You cannot move, breathe, turn over a page or glance online currently without seeing more speculation. ‘Where’s Kate?’ is a global game of Where’s Wally that anyone can play, but the fun bit is, the more she tries to prove her continued existence - being spotted in a car, or visiting a farm shop, or disastrously releasing a mildly tweaked photo of her and the children - the more conspiracist grist is added to the tirelessly churning mill.
The spectrum of speculation runs from ‘they’re all lizards hiding their true form’ (some more effectively than others) to ‘she died months ago, it’s all a cover-up’ to ‘she and William have split up and he’s having an affair and he’s got a child with his mistress who is also pregnant and Kate has run away/is living alone at Adelaide Cottage/is determined to bring down the entire family.’
No part of the seething guesswork and wild assumption has gone with the Occam’s Razor explanation - the Palace said she’s be back after Easter, so she’ll be back after Easter when she’s recovered from surgery. Human nature abhors a vacuum, so it’s unthinkable simply to accept the reasonable. She owes us an appearance! No surgery takes this long to recover from! She must address the nation!
There was less pressure on the Queen to appear in public after Diana’s death, and that’s saying something, when half the country was hysterical and mourning weeds accessorised with pink teddies were the only acceptable clothing. The speed at which print and social media zipped from ‘wishing the Princess of Wales well’ to demanding her head on a pikestaff and a ducking stool for good measure was even faster than we went from ‘Meghan Sparkle, breathing fresh life into the royals’ to ‘WTF is low-rent Compton rapper Meghan doing cradling her bump, the self obsessed witch?’
And on the topic of saintly Diana, it was swiftly and conveniently forgotten just how brutally the press had been laying into her shortly before the accident, with acidic questions raised by teeth-sucking female columnists about her parenting choices and feverish speculation about what would happen if she had Dodi Fayed’s child. If we’d had social media back in 1997, it would have spontaneously combusted with #notmyprincess hashtags and vicious memes.
In fact, Senior Royal Women have always had a horrific time of it - one which many believe is a simple quid pro quo for a life of ease and riches, in the way that the Little Mermaid having her tail cut off was a small price to pay for being a commoner permitted to fall in love with a Prince. Camilla, too, was a commoner, and has been running the gauntlet of hurled tomatoes and rotten eggs ever since her role as Charles’ mistress became apparent. Not once has she ever complained, she’s simply stubbed her fag out, pasted on a grin, and strode out to shake hands with people who spent forty years cutting her dead.
This is all nothing to do with whether one is a royalist (I’m not) or likes them as people (I don’t know them, but I doubt we’d have much in common). It’s concerned only with how we as a nation treat Royal women, which veers queasily between forelock-tugging deference - people who buy creepy calendars of the Royal children and queue for three days with a pop-up tent to catch a glimpse of Sophie Wessex - and poisonous attack, with, somewhere in the middle, a whole bunch of people who don’t really care but are a bit bored and enjoy worrying at them like a puppy ragging a stuffed toy.
How many of the people posting ‘we need to know what’s happened to Kate!’ really care about the individual who is Catherine Wales, wife, daughter, sister, mother of three, stoical doer of jobs and cheerful exercise nut - and how many view her only as a dressing-doll cipher representing The Royals, the cardboard family on sticks, acting out their designated roles on the national stage? Hounding, bullying, insulting and demanding can’t touch her, they assume, because she isn’t really real - and if she is, she’s too padded with privilege to care. As if feeling the wrath of millions, being the topic of every gossip column, and having medical staff hacking into your private records can’t touch the sides, so long as you’re having a china cup of Earl Grey by a French window.
Becoming the most hounded woman of modern times, as her brother put it in her eulogy, was instrumental in driving Diana further into debilitating mental illness, and she was forced to beg for respite herself, in a speech. She didn’t get it.
Meghan may be annoying in many different ways- her earnestness, her capacity for self-promotion, the fact that she calls Harry ‘H’ - but she didn’t ask to become a pariah, either. She failed to be perfect, however, and now look. No more Princess Sparkle, and no cheery H to take on Royal jobs while his father’s having cancer treatment.
Kate has been perfect, though. She has ticked every box, smiled every smile, shaken every hand, even when her feet hurt and she’s just given birth and she’s bored out of her mind. She’s smiled through being called boring, and not good enough for her Prince, and a social climber, smiled through her mother being named ‘doors to manual’ because she was once cabin crew, smiled through her parenting being criticised, her weight being examined, her clothes being mocked, her husband’s alleged affairs being discussed… and then, perhaps not surprisingly, she got ill and needed surgery, and was prescribed a couple of months away from the spotlight to recover.
But she couldn’t even have that. Because royal women are not allowed to take anything for themselves - they are only allowed to give, in an eternal show of gratitude for their social position. It’s one rooted in class resentment and bitterness, an ongoing schadenfreude. As a quid pro quo, it benefits nobody. Yet we don’t revolt on the streets, and every survey proves that Britain ‘loves its Royal family.’
Maybe we do. But we don’t love its women - and by God, we’re determined to punish them, over and over again.
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En pointe! Great article.
Spot on!