William and Kate in “The Crown”
This is how close the series is to the true love story
© imago images/Mary Evans
William finds his Kate in the final season of “The Crown”. How close is the series to reality? This is the real love story.
The prince finds his princess: The final season of “The Crown” (part two from December 14th on Netflix) shows how the heir to the British throne, Prince William (41), fell in love with his Kate (41). A fashion show in which Kate wore a see-through dress played a crucial role – in the Netflix series and in reality. This is how William and Kate are said to have found each other in real life…
Did William and Kate know each other earlier than expected?
The common story goes that William and Kate first saw each other at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. However, royal expert Katie Nicholl assumes that the two had met before. Before university, Kate Middleton attended Marlborough College from 1995 to 2000. When she was in sixth grade, she is said to have met the prince through mutual friends, Nicholl once said in a show by Katie Couric (66), citing Kate’s environment at the time. According to further media reports, in her book “Kate: The Future Queen” the author also reports on hockey games where Kate allegedly saw the future prince during her school years.
Together and yet apart at breakfast
In St Andrews, where both studied from 2001, Prince William and Kate Middleton apparently often met each other in the morning for breakfast. An acquaintance from back then told “E! News” in 2011: “They sat at separate tables, he with the boys and she with the girls. But they would have noticed each other there, because not many people got up for breakfast at 8 a.m.”
But that didn’t make William and Kate a couple, on the contrary: he laughed at someone else! Her name was Carly Massy-Birch. However, the relationship was only short-lived, a “normal university romance”, as Massy-Birch recounted in Nicholls’ book, according to Vanity Fair.
The famous see-through dress
William apparently looked closely when Kate Middleton walked down the catwalk in a transparent dress at a university fashion show. At a subsequent party, the royal is said to have made an advance attempt, which she apparently did not respond to. The two became friends and – purely platonically – lived together in a shared apartment.
A former classmate later told People magazine, how Prince William’s budding love became noticeable at the time. There was “definitely good chemistry” between William and Kate, explained the American Laura Warshauer. She had lived in the same dorm as the couple in the early 2000s. “Whenever Kate was in the room, Will’s attention was obviously focused on her,” she elaborated. It was incredible “to see how naturally” the conversations between the two developed over lunch together in the cafeteria. “They had so much to say to each other.” Looking back, there were “all these little moments” in which Warshauer thought: “Wow, this could really be something.”
Friendship as a “good foundation”
William later explained in his engagement interview on ITV News: “When I first met Kate, I knew there was something really special about her. I knew there was potentially something there that I wanted to explore. We ended up being friends for a while and that was just a good one “Basic basis. Because I’m now generally convinced that being friends with each other is a huge advantage. And it just went from there.” Kate said: “I actually think I turned bright red when I met you and kind of ran away because I was very shy. But we became very close friends early on.”
Engagement 2010, wedding 2011
Eventually, the friendship turned into great love over the course of 2002: After a few brief separations, William asked for Kate’s hand in marriage on a trip to Kenya in 2010, and the big fairytale wedding followed on April 29, 2011 in Westminster Abbey in London .
The couple’s first son, Prince George (10), was born in July 2013. In May 2015 they became parents to a daughter, Princess Charlotte (8), and in April 2018 to another son, Prince Louis (5).
At their wedding in 2011, the couple received the titles “Duke and Duchess of Cambridge” from Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022), and upon the monarch’s death they took over the “Prince and Princess of Wales” from King Charles III. (75).