![]() Andrews, her past has been ogled and evaluated by anyone with a curiosity for who might capture the future King’s heart, and the list isn’t short. That is a great American phrase to describe what I think will prove to be a long and successful royal career for the Princess of Wales.From the second that Kate was first linked with William that fateful night at St. In short, it matters far more where she’s going than where she’s come from. Since 2011, discussions of ‘the first middle-class queen since Anne Boleyn’ have died down, leading to the rather refreshing view that the Princess, and her actions, are viewed as more important. In itself, nothing about the Princess, but rather about Britain’s evolving perception of class, as well as the differences in views on either side of the North Atlantic. That perhaps is what the idea of Catherine Middleton as middle class shows us most clearly. In Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III, Catherine’s origins are reworked to suggest a gutsy and determined social climber, something which interestingly saw the play described as an attack on the Princess by certain sections of the British press and viewed by many American reviewers as a point in the character’s favour. That she was born into a family of hardworking entrepreneurs and then married a man who will one day be the custodian of a legacy that can be traced back to the saints and warriors of the Dark Ages are two remarkable facts in a graceful and, by all accounts of those who know her, profoundly kind, young woman’s life.īut she was not, to quote one piece from 2007, a ‘middle-class rose’. There is no point in pretending that the Princess of Wales is not liked and respected by the vast majority of her husband’s future subjects. Kate Middleton What matters more is where she's going (Both were daughters of earls, but let’s not get too bogged down in details.) Catherine could carry the torch of long-term dignity and spousal support that the country associated with the Queen Mother but also the unstuffy charisma and charitable good deeds of the tragic Diana. Far from damaging her prospects or her popularity, as it might have done half a century earlier, the Princess of Wales' ancestry was initially used to cultivate a vague sense of continuity with her immediate predecessors as consorts, hugely popular figures like Princess Diana or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, both native-born ‘commoners’. Snobbery like that was either disbelieved or sharply criticised. That particular piece of spite was widely dismissed as nonsense in Britain, wholly out of keeping with the Queen’s world view, but it gained some traction in talk-shows abroad. ![]() ![]() Later, rumours emerged that the Queen resented ‘the déclassé’ Carole Middleton’s presence in Prince George’s nursery. There was even a story, almost certainly an absurd fantasy, that the Queen’s eldest daughter Princess Anne was refusing to curtsey to Catherine after the marriage because she refused to accept that someone born into the middle-classes should be curtseyed to by the Princess Royal. There were mocking captions on photographs of her mother Carole chewing gum there were critiques on the Middleton family’s grasp of etiquette. Initially, some British publications began to do the same thing with Miss Middleton. Historians have not traditionally been kind on the subject of Anne Boleyn’s origins, using them to suggest that Anne was a girl who climbed like ivy, an ambitious adventuress who gambled in a game she had no business playing and paid the ultimate price for daring to transcend the pre-ordained limitations of her background. In 2010, the comparisons to Anne Boleyn were an ominous indicator of where the story might go. ![]()
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