The morning after Catherine, the Princess of Wales, otherwise known as Kate Middleton, announced that she had cancer, the weather in London was bright and clear. After weeks of gray and rain, it felt like spring in the capital. (Later, it hailed.) It was as if the raging fever of speculation about the senior royal’s health since her disappearance from the public eye in January—some of it genuine, much of it gleeful and unhinged—had finally broken. At 6 P.M. last Friday, just as many were heading to the pub, Kensington Palace released a short video on X, formerly Twitter, in which Catherine sits alone on a bench surrounded by grass and daffodils, and calmly explains that she is undergoing treatment for cancer.
“It has been an incredibly tough couple of months for our entire family,” Catherine says in the video. She’s wearing a striped sweater and jeans, and her hair is, as usual, immaculate. She looks a little tired. “In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London, and at the time it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous,” she says. “The surgery was successful—however, tests after the operation found cancer had been present.” Her medical team has recommended a course of “preventative chemotherapy,” and she is now in the “early stages” of that treatment. Here she pauses and presses her hands together, as if gathering strength. The news came as a “huge shock.” She and Prince William have been “doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family.” “As you can imagine, this has taken time,” she continues. “It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment. But, most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that’s appropriate for them and to reassure them that I’m going to be O.K.”
The announcement followed a busy month of news, and non-news, about the Princess. The royal’s last official engagement was at Christmastime, when she waved to crowds while on the way to church with her family in Sandringham. On that occasion, she wore a long blue coat and looked the picture of health. Then, on January 17th, the palace revealed that she had been admitted to the hospital for an unspecified “abdominal surgery” and that she likely would not be appearing in public again until at least Easter. As the weeks ticked by, people on the Internet grew restless. “Where’s Kate?” became a weird parlor game and a goad to conspiracy theorists. Was the Princess in hiding because of a bad haircut? A breakdown? An affair?
Finally, on Mother’s Day in the U.K., the palace released a photograph, credited to William, of Catherine and the couple’s three children. Posted on Kensington Palace’s X account, the image is startlingly lovely. All three kids are smiling toward the camera (no small feat), and Catherine seems to exude happiness. Soon, however, discrepancies emerged. There was something odd about the zipper on the Princess’s jacket, and a strange blurriness around Charlotte’s sleeve. On TikTok, a user pointed out the similarities between the outfits in the photo and the clothing that the royals had worn at an earlier event. Not long after the image was posted, news agencies—including the A.P. and Reuters—issued kill notices for it, citing manipulation. Cue hysteria.
The people online who had claimed something was off felt vindicated. The people who had dismissed the people online claiming something was off had to admit: something was off. The revelation that the photo had been altered—and the further revelation that the palace would not be releasing the unedited photo—inflamed the situation to the point that a rare apology was issued, on March 11th. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” a post on the palace’s X account read. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” It was signed “C,” for Catherine.
Last week, interest in the Princess’s case showed no signs of letting up. On Monday, TMZ and the Sun released a grainy video of William (baseball cap) and Catherine (leggings, sneakers) carrying shopping bags at a farm stand in Windsor. Online, some people immediately questioned the video’s legitimacy, claiming, based on scant evidence, that the woman was a body double or a hired actor. This launched a series of memes in which commoners resembling Kate get called up to play the royal. “White women with brown hair all over london on their way to audition for the role of blurry Kate Middleton of the week,” one user wrote, above a video of a chaotic pileup at the bottom of an escalator. Then, on Tuesday, news broke that the Information Commissioner’s Office, a privacy watchdog, had opened an investigation into the hospital where Catherine had her surgery in January, over a potential data breach. At least one member of the staff allegedly tried to access the Princess’s medical records. (The hospital’s C.E.O. said, in a statement, “We take enormous pride in the outstanding care and discretion we aim to deliver for all our patients that put their trust in us every day. We have systems in place to monitor management of patient information and, in the case of any breach, all appropriate investigatory, regulatory and disciplinary steps will be taken.”)
The Princess’s cancer announcement fell over the chatter of the past few weeks like a bucket of cold water. A roving game of finger-pointing followed. (No one wants to be accused of making jokes about someone with cancer.) On the “News Agents” podcast, the British journalist Jon Sopel called the video “a message to the amateur sleuths, to the conspiracy theorists, to the conjecture merchants, and to the fantasists, to shut up and let her get better and let her heal.” The British tabloids adopted a positive, can-do attitude, with a Sun headline reading, “Kate, You Are Not Alone.” Online, lots of people felt bad. The actor Blake Lively apologized; earlier this month, she had posted an obviously manipulated photo of herself with a weirdly elongated thumb, as a spoof of Catherine’s Mother’s Day image. On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the host expressed remorse for pulling out a tea trolley to “spill the tea” about Kate on an earlier episode.
Others were less contrite, blaming the palace for a shoddy communications strategy and a lack of transparency. Some columnists, including Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, bristled at the suggestion that the public should feel any shame “when the royal family’s Nixonian PR strategies all but begged them to speculate.” The finger-waggers “ignored the reality that what most everyday people were saying on the internet—that Kate must be more seriously ill than the bland and occasionally misleading statements from Kensington Palace—proved to be the truth,” he wrote. Paddy Harverson, a previous adviser to Kate and William, told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that both social media and the mainstream media were in a “sort of permanent doom loop” around the royals. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” he said.
With the video, Kensington Palace clearly hopes to put an end to the rumors. The journalist Elizabeth Holmes, who writes the substack “So Many Thoughts” and has published a book on royal style, told me, “It’s not the royal videos we’re used to seeing, where, you know, the late Queen, or now the King, is seated at a desk, where it looks grand and gold.” She noted that the palace had brought in a third party—BBC Studios—for the filming, and that the video is one continuous shot and doesn’t appear to be edited. “All of these things point to this video being the result of the last several weeks.” Catherine’s choice of outfit was also telling. “We have seen her in jeans and a striped sweater countless times before,” she said. “It was a way of looking very recognizable, and very relatable, and very down-to-earth.” She went on, “It wasn’t Catherine the glittering princess that we’ve seen at the coronation or any number of stately occasions. This was a mother of three, sitting there, essentially pleading for space and privacy while she recovers and goes through treatment.”