Prince William, the heir to the British throne, returned to the public stage on Wednesday, trying to project a steely sense of normality, three days after it was announced that his father, King Charles III, had been stricken with cancer.
But as William held an honors ceremony at Windsor Castle and attended a charity fundraiser in London, a shadow of uncertainty hung over the 41-year-old prince. No one, apart from Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, has faced a more prolonged disruption than the king’s cancer diagnosis from his eldest son.
The advocacy, family life and privacy zone William has carved out is very different from that of his father when he served as Prince of Wales. Whether William will be able to maintain these qualities while supporting his father during his treatment is uncertain at best.
“William was less inclined to the day-to-day business of the monarchy than his father, instead focusing on bigger, more glamorous engagements,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian. “But now it’s expected to complement many of these more mundane public outings.”
It’s not just about managing a calendar: William’s professional focus, staff members say, has been to throw his energy into some high-impact social issues — most recently, climate change and homelessness — where he thinks he can make a difference. tangible difference.
The scope of William’s ambition is evident in an impending upheaval in his office at Kensington Palace. He and his wife, Catherine, are expected to appoint a chief executive for the first time. By using a corporate title rather than the traditional title of private secretary, a person with knowledge of the office, he said, is calculated to attract candidates with business credentials and reinforce the professional nature of the office.
Among the prince’s marquee projects is a five-year program seeking to end homelessness in six British towns and cities. While Charles had a similar attachment to pet subjects like organic farming and architecture, he pursued them more on an ad hoc basis. Much of his time, as for other royals of his generation, was consumed by ribbon-cutting and other ceremonial duties.
Now, some of that burden will fall on his son.
“William was trying to explore the limits of what he could do as heir that he couldn’t do as king,” said Peter Hunt, the BBC’s former royal correspondent. “The tension is how to continue his own activities while supporting the monarch. William will feel this at an earlier stage than his father.”
A spokesman for William, Lee Thompson, said Kensington Palace was in discussions with Buckingham Palace about how to fulfill the king’s public engagements (William’s events on Wednesday were on his calendar before the revelation of his father’s illness ).
Meanwhile, Mr Thompson said, William continues to drop off and pick up his children from their school in Berkshire, west of London. This is another break from the royal family’s more distant parenting style in previous generations.
It’s a ritual William and Catherine usually share, but which he took on as a single parent when she was unexpectedly hospitalized last month (he had suspended his public duties until Wednesday to care for her).
The zeal with which William has thrown a cloak of privacy around his family has been dramatized by his wife’s medical treatment. Kensington Palace offered little information about her condition, other than that she was undergoing abdominal surgery. There were no pictures of the couple’s children – George, Charlotte and Louis – visiting their mother in hospital. Nor were there any images of her returning home nearly two weeks later.
The contrast with Charles was striking. Buckingham Palace has revealed that he will undergo surgery for an enlarged prostate. Camilla was pictured visiting her husband and the pair left the hospital together, waving to the cameras as they made their way to their car.
Some of these differences can be explained by history. While Charles has taken his share of the British tabloid press, he has continued to work with these papers in an essentially transactional relationship.
William, however, still bears the scars of relentless coverage of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, which ended with her death in a Paris car accident in 1997, pursued by the paparazzi. In 2021, the prince bitterly criticized the BBC for a sensational interview aired with Diana in 1995 in which she discussed the marital infidelities of her ex-husband Charles.
The BBC apologized for the report after an external investigation concluded that its correspondent, Martin Bashir, had used fraudulent methods to obtain the interview and BBC management had covered it up.
“It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failings contributed significantly to the fear, paranoia and isolation I remember from those final years with her,” William said in a video statement.
The prince’s younger brother Harry claimed William was not above dishing dirt on family members to the tabloids. William has also not hesitated to use lawyers to go after the press, winning a “huge sum of money” in 2020 from Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group to settle claims that his journalists had hacked his mobile phone, according to a legal filing filed by Harry.
Not surprisingly, William’s emotional scars extend to his brother. The two broke up when Harry and his wife, Meghan, moved to California in 2020 and there are no signs of a rapprochement. Harry flew to London this week to visit his father, but the brothers did not meet, according to a person familiar with their schedules.
As the ranks of royals have thinned, William’s family has come to the fore at events such as Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and Charles’ coronation. This has inevitably caught the camera’s bright light. The couple’s 5-year-old son, Prince Louis, has become a latter-day version of a young Harry, squirming and making faces at formal occasions.
A charming picture for the papers, sure, but also a reminder that William and Catherine still have a young family.
Charles had to wait decades to become king. If his health fails, his eldest son may face the opposite problem, entering a job before he has had a chance to explore his social and philanthropic ambitions, and exposing his children – especially his eldest son and heir, George – to unwanted attention.
“This is going to be a very big issue for him,” Mr Hunt said. “George is only 10. You can imagine William saying to himself, ‘How can I create a buffer for him?’
