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Prince William and Kate Middleton weren’t always the picture of royal propriety.
Sure, now they’re ye olde married couple—celebrating their eighth wedding anniversary Monday, in fact—who are expected to be elegant, magnanimous and practically perfect in every way as the future king and queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. They have three children, all of whose names they had to inform Queen Elizabeth II of before they could be announced to the public. Kate can almost never take her coat off and probably sleeps in a hat. William, who used to get less grief from the press expressly because he was the future king, while Prince Harry was painted as a right hellion, now gets publicly shamed if he goes skiing on the wrong day.
But not all that long ago, Kate was the college lass catching a 19-year-old William’s eye when she flashed her undies in a see-through black lace dress at a student fashion show.
“Kate’s hot!” was William’s storied reaction, whispered to his best friend Fergus Boyd.
Kate was the daughter of a couple of commoner millionaires, Carole and Michael Middleton, whose fortune came from the online party-planning business, Party Pieces, that they started in 1987. She had two younger siblings, sister Pippa and brother James, and the family lived in the Berkshire village of Bucklebury.
She was an athlete, like William. A worldly art appreciator, like William. And, starting their second year at University of St. Andrews, they were both residents of the same flat on one of the nicest streets in the neighborhood, which they shared with Fergus Boyd and another friend, Olivia Bleasdale.
But they were just a few mates rooming together, as far as the official word went at the time.
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Pals included Holly Branson, daughter of billionaire business mogul Richard Branson, and Violet von Westenholz, who down the road would set Harry up on a date with Meghan Markle. One of the lucky yacht passengers, Emilia d’Elanger, was also his guest at a royal shooting party, but Emilia was also spotted watching polo with Harry.
All just mates…mainly.
The summer after finishing at Eton he’s said to have gotten close to childhood friend Rose Farquhar.
“William and Rose had a summer romance and she still refers to him as her first true love,” a friend from their “Glosse Posse”—the fellow privileged young people who constituted William and Harry’s inner circle from time spent at their dad’s estate, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire—recalled to Katie Nicholl for her 2011 book The Making of a Royal Romance. “It was a long, hot summer and William spent a lot of time at Highgrove and Rose was always around…That summer they realized that they both actually rather liked each other and it was William who made the first move.
“It was a very sweet and innocent love affair and Rose still laughs about the time they got caught by a farmer in a field. They are still good friends and speak all the time.”
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“I like to keep my private life private,” an 18-year-old William said on the occasion of his milestone birthday in June 2000; he didn’t sit down for a formal interview but agreed to answer questions from a select group of media.
Asked how he did manage to have a private life amid all the attention he got, particularly from young ladies, he offered, “In my own way. Trying to explain might be counterproductive.”
William took off for Santiago, Chile, where he chose to spend part of his gap year, on Oct.1, 2000; Kate, too, took a gap year to travel, and also touched down in Chile at one point.
Will and Kate met in the dorm at St. Andrews during their first year. Kate had been crowned the prettiest girl in their residence hall. William eventually invited her to join his regular breakfast table and they became fast friends, bonding over their shared interests in sports and ski trips and art history. They went for morning swims and took strolls through town, and Kate got along with William’s pack of friends. She was an obliging ear when he struggled with art history and decided to switch his concentration to geography.
But still…just mates.
The prince, who was rather interested in acting, started dating a creative writing student named Carly Massy-Birch, whom he met in drama club.
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But, keeping in line with his pattern of having friends and then all of a sudden realizing one day that they had grown into swans, it was the fashion show, in March 2002, that made William see Kate as more than just a friend.
Kate had been dating fourth-year student Rupert Finch, but Will swooped right in at the after-party.
“It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate,” a friend who witnessed the moment (which included an awkward attempt at a kiss that visibly startled Kate) recalled to Nicholl. “He actually told her that she was a knockout that night, which caused her to blush.”
But Kate, not wanting to buckle just because the prince was all of a sudden interested, “played it cool,” the friend added. “She didn’t want to give off the wrong impression or make it too easy for Will.”
She also didn’t immediately break it off with Finch, but by the end of their first year at St. Andrews, Kate and William were obviously into each other. And then they decided to live together—with other people, but still an unprecedented arrangement for a member of the royal family.
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According to the 2003 biography William, friends were saying Will and Kate were not romantically linked. Just mates. And William himself declared during an interview coinciding with his 21st birthday that year that he was single.
“If I fancy a girl and she fancies me back, which is rare, I ask her out,” he explained. “But at the same time I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation, because a lot of people don’t understand what comes with knowing me, for one—and secondly, if they were my girlfriend, the excitement it would probably cause.”
But they were taking their chances.
Per Nicholl, a 2002 game of “I’ve Never” turned awkward when William, Kate and Carly Massy-Birch—who ended up living across the road from them—all ended up at a dinner party and Carly offered, “I’ve never dated two people in this room,” knowing that Will was by then dating Kate and, if he was being truthful, would have to take a shot—signaling that he had dated two people in the room.
Kate, already not a big fan, was done with Carly after that.
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