Since meeting as students, Prince William and Princess Kate’s love story has been followed across the globe. The pair first became friends when they were undergraduates at the University of St. Andrews before things became romantic.
They dated for many years before they finally took the plunge and announced their engagement in 2010, and married in a lavish fairytale ceremony at Westminster Abbey the following year.
Millions of people watched the royal wedding, which marked Kate officially joining the Royal Family, but only a few years before the couple’s happily ever after moment, they had actually split up for a brief period in 2007 – and Prince William was reportedly left pretty “lonely” during their two month break.
The revelation that William didn’t take the break up with his longtime girlfriend well came in a new documentary for Channel Five, which explores Kate’s life story, from a relatively normal middle-class upbringing in Berkshire all the way to becoming one of the most famous women in the world, and future Queen. Royal experts came together to track her journey in the show, and they claimed that Kate and William had pretty different reactions to their split.
Kate, according to expert Dickie Arbiter, took the adversity in her stride and made sure to carry on with business as usual, keeping up with her social life and even going on a couple of dates. “She wasn’t going to let that little blip interfere with her life, she was going to carry on and hang on to her anger,” Arbiter, who used to be a press secretary for the royals explained. “She went out on dates and she went to parties.” The expert noted that this was in his view Kate displaying she would remain “as stoic as ever” even in the midst of her heartbreak.
William on the other hand found himself pretty down in the dumps without Kate, a former member of the royal household revealed. Grant Harrold, who worked as a butler for the royals for many years, said: “He was quite sad at that time and a bit lonely”.
The former butler for King Charles added: “Everybody loved Kate being around. It was always fun and jokey. We used to sit with William and Kate in the kitchen and it was always really good fun hanging out with them – suddenly all that changed.”
Within just two months, the pair resolved their differences and got back together, and within three years made their bond permanent by deciding to get married. William proposed to Kate during a romantic getaway to Kenya.
They kept their big news under wraps at first, before announcing the news publicly three weeks later and taking part in a sit-down interview with Tom Bradby. In the chat, William revealed they had been discussing getting married for a long time “so it wasn’t a massively big surprise”, but Kate admitted that the proposal had still been “very romantic”.
William popped the question using his mother’s, the late Princess Diana’s, engagement ring, reportedly valued at nearly £50,000. “I had been carrying it around with me in my rucksack for about three weeks before that and I literally would not let it go, everywhere I went I was keeping hold of it because I knew this thing, if it disappeared I would be in a lot of trouble and because I’d planned it, it went fine. You hear a lot of horror stories about proposing and things going horribly wrong – it went really, really well and I was really pleased she said yes,” William said.
Kate said that her mum Carole Middleton was absolutely thrilled with the news. “I think as any mother would be she was absolutely over the moon,” she revealed. “We had quite an awkward situation because I knew and I knew that William had asked my father but I didn’t know if my mother knew. So I came back from Scotland and my mother didn’t make it clear to me whether she knew or not so both of us were there sort of looking at each other and feeling quite awkward about it. But it was amazing to tell and obviously she was very happy for us.”
