It is a sight rarely seen: Catherine, the Princess of Wales, serious and unsmiling, eyes distant, seemingly lost in deep thought. Elegant in navy and white, hair in her signature sleek, formal updo, she was photographed through the window of a royal car en route to the Trooping the Colour one year ago, almost to the day. For the British public, it was a symbolic and moving moment: The first official appearance of the young Queen-in-waiting, three months after she had chosen to sit alone on a bench, a flurry of daffodils behind her, to announce her cancer diagnosis to the world.
Looking back, that fleeting car snap represents the only unguarded glimpse into the period Prince William later described as the family’s most “brutal” and “lowest point”, when both his wife and father were diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other – only to be followed by an avalanche of ugly online conspiracy theories over the Princess’ whereabouts. Less than half an hour later, she was ensconced in the royal carriage amid the pomp and pageantry of the day, smiling as always.
“Being the mother of young children and being treated for cancer is bad enough without the weeks and weeks of trolling on social media … At one point there were even questions about her diagnosis and suggestions of the use of a body double when she was spotted in Windsor,” Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to the late Queen and author of On Duty with the Queen, tells The Weekly.
A monarchy slimmed down and reshaped by King Charles may have been a popular reform, the veteran broadcaster adds, but it weighed heavily during this time of crisis: “It was an immense burden because obviously William knew Catherine had cancer before she announced it to the world. He wanted to be there for his wife and for his children, but also had public duties and needed and wanted to support his father, too. With reduced numbers, it has been a very, very difficult time for them all.”
Fast forward 12 month,s and Princess Catherine and her family are in a vastly different, and much happier and more hopeful, place. Since Christmas, she has taken on more and more regular engagements, around three or four each month, and is steadily reclaiming her role front and centre in public and ceremonial life.
During her triumphant solo return to the Irish Guards parade on Saint Patrick’s Day, she even talked about plans to take the children to Australia: “George finds it fascinating that he has already been to Australia and New Zealand … I would like to go back there with them … It’s finding the time to do that,” she said, chatting to Aussie reservist, Corporal Adam Hamilton. “It’s making sure that you can combine a bit of work with the children … I might see you down there!”
The family has also managed to take a couple of brief and much-needed holidays, joining the Middleton siblings skiing in January and old family friends in Mustique during the February term break.
“Remember, just because we’re still not seeing her out every day, it doesn’t mean she’s not working,” says Dickie. “She’s not idle – Zoom calls, virtual meetings, they’re the norm now … She’s picking her time to do things, managing her time. Her team are very loyal and she’s loyal to them. They won’t push her to do something she doesn’t want to – or isn’t ready to do.”
Author Hugo Vickers, the Queen Mother’s biographer, says last year’s Trooping the Colour, and just a few weeks afterwards her attendance in the Royal Box at Wimbledon with Princess Charlotte, were both significant moments in the Princess’ journey back.
“The standing ovation and the warmth and respect she was shown that day was moving for everyone who saw it,” he explains, “but it must also have reassured Catherine herself at this incredibly difficult time that she had a strong place in the affection of the nation.
“In many ways, she is the great hope of the royal family – I would say the main star now – and from that point of view, she has never once put a foot wrong. You cannot fault her … She is amazing.”
It was, however, a rare misstep by Catherine that marked the beginning of the young royals’ annus horribilis, when an admission that she had altered a family photo – one meant to reassure the public – misfired terribly. Shot by Prince William, the picture of the Princess surrounded by her three children was released by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day in the UK but also to try to quell frenzied speculation about her health in the wake of a two-month absence after abdominal surgery.
Instead, it renewed wild conspiracy theories about her ‘disappearance’ and warnings from veteran royal commentators of a loss of trust in the Royals’ word: “They knew there would be intense interest in any picture they released of Kate. Their challenge is that people will now question whether they can be trusted and believed when they next issue a health update,” said Peter Hunt, a former BBC correspondent.
Dickie Arbiter believes last year’s photo debacle was a good example of when the Royal Family’s time-honoured rule of ‘never complain, never explain’ should have been embraced: “If you comment, people come back. Margaret Thatcher had a similar mantra when she was under pressure and would say ‘why give them the oxygen of publicity’. You could say that about Harry and Meghan … Why give the story legs?”
This year, the Princess of Wales marked Mother’s Day with a video clip of mountains, ocean, rain and snow, animals and flowers and a simple tribute to Mother Nature: “Over the past year, nature has been our sanctuary. This Mother’s Day, let us celebrate Mother Nature and recognise how our bond with the natural world can help not only nurture our inner selves, but remind us too of the role we play within the rich tapestry of life. C”
It is a theme that is important to her, and perhaps gives insight into her inner life. On a recent ramble with the Scouts, she confessed: “I find it a very spiritual and very intense emotional reconnection, I suppose – these environments. Not everyone has that same relationship perhaps with nature. But it is … meaningful for me as a place to balance and find a place of peace …”
Certainly, as the Princess continues to step back into her life as a working royal, it is clear the return to ‘normal’ has brought with it many lessons learned and some significant changes. The Princess herself talked about finding “a new perspective on everything” in the much-analysed video released to announce the end of her chemotherapy and cancer remission. Remarkable mainly for its unprecedented intimate tone, the video also seemed to herald a palpable change in the way the young royal couple choose to communicate with their subjects. Let’s face it, who could ever have envisaged official footage of a royal heir lying with his wife on a picnic blanket, or pieces to camera delivered with the Prince kissing his Princess, entwined hands resting gently on her thigh?
Since Princess Catherine’s illness, on the @princeandprincessofwales Instagram account (16.7 million followers and rising), the usual day-to-day news posts are now interlaced with the occasional, much more emotional and personal message, signed just with their initials and even xxx kisses.
A poignant example was posted when Princess Catherine was photographed meeting and hugging the late Liz Hatton, 17, an aspiring photographer battling a rare, terminal cancer. The young girl had created a bucket list of portrait subjects and was invited to take pictures of the Prince at an investiture. “Thank you, Liz,” they posted simply afterwards, “W and C”.
William’s own birthday message to his wife on January 9 was signed with an affectionate “We love you, W”.
Then there was the announcement that, as the Princess returned to public-facing duties, Kensington Palace would no longer make any official statement on her clothing. The message – that she wants a greater focus on substance over style – fits too with a decisive streamlining of the charities and projects to which the couple will devote time and energy. Princess Catherine’s passionate commitment to early childhood development and her husband’s interest in homelessness and environmental and climate change projects continue apace, but it is clear they have no desire to be just ‘letterhead’ royals.
The late Queen was patron or involved with an estimated 600 charities, while the Wales’ appear to be associated only with projects they can devote real time and energy to and, say observers, these are fewer in number than has been traditional.
That said, there has also been a steely, renewed commitment to ring-fencing family time and prioritising the children despite regular rumbles of discontent from some parts of the UK media. The family moved from their sumptuous Kensington Palace apartments in 2022 and now live in a five-bedroom ‘cottage’ on the Windsor estate, without live-in staff and with proximity to the children’s school.
Dickie Arbiter says the couple’s commitment to being parents before members of the Royal Family should be applauded, not criticised: “Catherine sees that as very important, and she was fortunate in that her grandmother-in-law encouraged that.
“If you go back historically, when the late Queen married Philip in 1947, her father was ill and she took on lots of his duties and wasn’t able to be there in the early days of their children growing up … at breakfast or bedtime. It was not so different for William and Harry …”
Hugo Vickers notes that, when Charles was a little boy, Princess Elizabeth even missed Christmas twice, and adds: “Pictures of William seeing George into the car in an open shirt or driving him to school with no chauffeur in sight; Kate at school sports … This is a new generation and they are doing things differently.”
According to Catherine Mayer, author of the bestselling biography Charles: The Heart of a King, media attention on the existential conundrums facing the King’s daughter-in-law as she balances motherhood, her illness and royal duties says much about the way royal women’s lives have been recorded and their stories told throughout history.
In her upcoming book, Send Them Victorious: Royal Women, Their Battles and Why We Should Care (to be published by HarperCollins in March next year), Catherine argues that royal women are “routinely underestimated and misunderstood”.
Chatting with The Weekly while taking an afternoon walk along the River Thames, Catherine Mayer (who co-founded the UK Women’s Equality Party with Sandi Toksvig) says her research into the lives of past royal women (such as Anne Boleyn, Victoria, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II) reveals that their experiences shadow – and sometimes foreshadow – those of the royal women that come after them. Throughout history, many royal women are characterised as the monarchy’s saviour or destroyer, a saint or a sinner, a vamp or a victim.
“Sometimes they are moved between these extremes, but they are never, ever left alone,” Catherine Mayer explains. “Things then get really interesting when royal women attempt to define themselves.”
Catherine Mayer says reporting of the Duchess of Sussex and the Princess of Wales is a good example of another narrative that repeats throughout history – that of royal women at loggerheads.
“You saw Meghan attacked as an avatar of progressive thinking and ‘woke’ values versus Kate as archetype of tradition and solid, old values,” she says. “While there may be some basis for this, a great deal of it and the supposed meanings of both women are foisted on them through the imposition of reductive narratives by old and new media.”
Critical and analytical discussion of the Royal Family and its role in public life or British culture is important to the national (and indeed international) discourse, but pitting women in the public eye against each other, defining them against each other, is an old trick which not only damages the women in question, but all women. “Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn? You don’t always need to pick a side,” Catherine Mayer says.
Princess Catherine has largely enjoyed a benign relationship with journalists, although it took some time to settle this way. Prince William and his then-girlfriend and fellow St Andrews University graduate, Kate Middleton, were first pictured together in April 2004 on the ski slopes of Klosters. Their relationship sparked thousands of headlines in the months, indeed years, that followed – from the early reports of secret “Trysts at Balmoral” to the mocking “Waity Katy” years to “Kate Can Save The House of Windsor”.
Throughout their long courtship, and even a separation in 2007, Catherine was followed assiduously by paparazzi: Going to work at the clothing chain Jigsaw, entering nightclubs, visiting friends and family, or returning to her flat in Chelsea. She had a police escort in the earliest days of their courtship to ensure she could return home safely.
At the couple’s favoured nightclub, Boujis, then the epicentre of London’s younger Sloane set, armies of photographers would wait to snap Kate and her royal suitor. There were stories of Kate carefully reapplying her make-up in the club’s loos late at night before facing the media scrum. “Kate fever” reached its absurd zenith when she was snapped taking her bins out and the Evening Standard published the shots with the headline “Bin There, Done That. William’s Girl Mucks In”.
Throughout it all the chic, young art history graduate said very little publicly. And her parents, Carole and Michael, who had begun their professional lives as airline staff and were then running a mail-order party supplies company, also kept a discreet and clearly much-appreciated silence.
The Middleton family still lives in what is described as a substantial but not grand house in Bucklebury, a pretty village in affluent West Berkshire. Much was made of the warm, informal family environment in which Prince William felt comfortable. At the time, local gossip suggested that the family even talked fondly of “William’s favourite sofa”.
In 2007, a good three years before their engagement was announced, The Guardian reported that Penny Junor, author of several books about the royal family, considered Kate and William to be a couple with excellent prospects: “She has made no mistakes at all. She seems self-assured. She’s got poise and grace. She could be a perfect bride for William.” Patrick Jephson, once Princess Diana’s private secretary, echoed Penny’s view, writing in the The Spectator that Kate could represent “a much-needed injection of fresh, young glamour for the royal family”.
Dickie Arbiter says Catherine is the product of great familial stability and harmony, and as an adult woman, this capacity for resilience has held her in good stead through this most difficult of times: “Remember too, Catherine is a graduate, educated … She was engaged in her late 20s, unlike Diana, who by her own admission said she was an ‘airhead’ and came out of school with a couple of GCSEs and was engaged at 19.”
“Prince William said that this has been the worst year for him,” Hugo Vickers adds, ” … and when you think about it, that’s a very strong statement from someone whose mother was killed when he was so young.”
Yet Princess Catherine has emerged from this year of challenges appearing wiser, more assured and much more like a queen in waiting.
Catherine Mayer believes that the Princess of Wales’ illness and withdrawal last year may, in retrospect, lead to a new and more nuanced understanding of her significance within the British monarchy.
“Her enforced absence has rammed home just how much of a star turn she is for the Royal Family,” Catherine Mayer tells The Weekly. “Past criticism of their family-first policy can now be set aside because it is obvious that her presence is not all about quantity, but about the excitement she generates … None of the men have it anymore. It is the glamorous women who generate huge interest. Of course, that says a lot about our culture, but it is a very real phenomenon, and Catherine’s absence showed her enormous significance to the institution and more widely in public culture.”
This feature originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest magazine at your local newsagents or SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue!
