Kate Middleton: The Next Queen of England | Absolute History

[Music] this is the story of how an ordinary young woman from an ordinary family became destined to be the future Queen of England [Music] it seems like a fresh chapter at the beginning of something quite new what you see is pretty much what you get William Kate have brought a real relevance to the monarchy the Royals never really lost popularity because the monarchy is uniquely trusted it is above politics she's possibly one of the most scrutinized Royals ever and one of the things that the young Royals have done very successfully is to renew the royal brand abroad most of the nation has fallen in love with Kate [Music] we are seeing a queen in Waiting well in in terms of the duchess of cambridge and what you see is pretty much what you get I've met Kate now on quite a few occasions which is very kind she's very thoughtful and she's very easy to get along with I think she's been very well brought up she comes from a lovely family she's got two feet firmly on the ground and the people who know her well are very loyal to her and they you know they love her he once since will and Kate marrying it seems like a fresh chapter the beginning of something quite new and if you go back to when the present Queen married Prince Phillip in 1947 that at that time was thought to be a new beginning and then later on people said what happens when they get old will get bored with we don't want them anymore and particularly with the present Queen who's now the law of Israel history [Music] on the contrary as the rain has gone on the affection in which she's held gets deeper and not less this suggests monarchy has very deep roots and these periodic refreshments of young blood do it nothing but good but it still goes on just to say I think William and Kate have brought a real relevance to the monarchy they're young they're very good-looking Kate certainly injected quite a lot of glamour but more importantly perhaps they're working on subjects that are very relevant to the younger generation at the moment so in their charity work they're focusing on things like mental health wildlife conservation and even things like cyberbullying which is the real modern-day issue the former Kate Middleton has done a remarkable job in being the wife of William in almost every circumstance that she finds herself in she acts with a churning combination of good nature and a proper sense of the dignity of the occasion at some date in the future Prince William will become king Kait by his side will be Queen consort well there are two roles to a future Queen one is to produce heirs which he has done and one is to learn how to one day become Queen and that is very much what we are seeing we are seeing a queen in Waiting and we are seeing the Duchess take on more duties more royal engagements more of a public profile than ever before or she's taking on more patronage she's taking on patronage is from the Queen and from the Duke of Edinburgh now this is all very deliberate very much a part of the palace machine bringing her from the from the shadows of an MA in to the forefront into the spotlight because they're very clever they realized the power of Kate they realized the potential of William and Kate is this young glamorous dynamic duo who actually do have the ability to reshape and project the monarchy into the future if you had asked me in the 1990s what I saw the future for the royal family as being I would then have shared the pessimism about its longevity not because the opinion polls suggested that was right because one of the things that people always misunderstand is even though there was the annus horribilis even though there was that huge controversy around that the collapse of the the Charles and Diana marriage and that and in fact also other royal marriages in spite of all of that the Royals never really lost popularity individual members did but the family didn't the Queen didn't in any real way there was always there's never been really more than 25 percent Republican sentiment in this country however I would at that point of thought that the way in which the modern world was developing mitigated against a monarchy continuing well into the 21st century because we seem to be entering a society that was more egalitarian and had more faith in the transformational effects of politics and was somehow kind of moving into a joyous modernity and in fact we've gone totally the other way and people have lost faith in politics so profoundly but that is actually in a strange way showed up and made much more important the position of the royal obviously whether you're a Republican or a royalist your viewers going to differ but when you see how the nation came together to celebrate the Queen's 90th birthday there was no doubt in my mind that the United Kingdom loves its Queen there will always be people who say it's a waste of money well you know they cost us less than a pound a year in terms of upkeep and I think they're worth every penny and William and Kate's very much are the future of the monarchy I think monarchy is now more relevant in the early 21st century than it has been for many years and I think the answer is because the monarchy is uniquely trusted it is above politics and at a time when a public trust and respect for not just our politicians but many of the forces in society which hitherto had bound us together is beginning to break down the monarchy is the one common point above a politics above suspicion so I think as long as the monarchy can keep a the sense of it being a family and a wholesome institution in place the country is going to want to not just at a superficial level but at a very profound emotional level bond into the monarchy as the representation of what it means to be British as flooded to God [Laughter] well I think the Cates family background has been very helpful to the image of the monarchy and to William and Kate there's that happy family that you know everybody getting along well being supported that fellow which the fact that she's young and she's known only the years of peace and relative prosperity might suggest that you know she hasn't got that kind of experience of life but then if you look at her family you will see that it's really much more interesting and reflects such a huge variety of English history her grandfather is an RAF pilot the world helped to nudge the wings of the bee ones when they came over London away from away from London grandmother was Bletchley with her twin sister and received the news of the Japanese surrender and you can trace all the way back there the idea that to be middle-classes to come from nowhere they come from a great number of different parts of English history and so you know she she is not she is not from nowhere you can trace her way all the way back her ancestry back to Harry Hotspur who died in the Wars of the Roses so this is this is a family like many families who have deep roots in the nation's history and the fact that she's young is nothing but a good thing well let's also remember that catherine's great-great-grandfather was a miner a coal miner in County Durham in fact he worked in the mine beneath Queen Elizabeth the Queen mother's estate in County Durham it's all a romantic connection you guys you said if I was freezing wind is basically somebody think that they only lost one one scene of the first expedition he was in the crow's nest who fell for it [Music] well William guards the privacy of his family I think more highly than anything else in his life and it doesn't take a psychologist to work out why you only need to look at Williams own background his relationship with his mother what happened to his mother and the untimely death preceding that the breakdown of the world his marriage everything played out in the media pored over in the press and he hated it and you can completely understand why all he wants is a quiet family life out of the spotlight [Music] [Applause] [Music] I think the pet palace take a great deal of care of William and Kate and I don't think they make them do too much take them away from their children too much I think that they have are really you know modern sympathetic fuel but I think he really understands that there's a huge public interest in their lives and affection towards them as a result of that and and that the media is necessary certainly when it comes to conveying messages I think he totally understands that it's a vital tool for him the Kensington Palace has you know warned against the use of paparazzi photographs and of the children in particular or where they're still being taken quite frequently there aren't any UK publications who will use them and I think that's probably helped a great deal to to reassure him instead we have William and Kate choosing when they want to issue photographs of the children they have taken George on a public engagement in the UK for the first time he went to the war military air tatting with his parents and I think that's something we don't increasingly so I think it's very much a case of him wanting to protect them while at very young and just do things in a way [Music] one of the very first things I noticed about Kate was the way in which she is not like the mother-in-law she never met and I think that will actually help her a lot both in in her sort of non rollers as Queen in waiting and and eventually as queen she is extraordinarily self possessed somebody who's very comfortable in who she is and very self-assured which just with that level of attention she gets is incredibly important so I think that self possession that self confidence that sense of who she is will be extraordinarily useful when I first visited the hospice in Milton I had a preconceived ideas what to expect far from being a clinical depressing place for Sick Children it was a home most importantly it was a family home a happy place of stability support and care it was a place of fun I see Kate's confidence increasing as she gains an experience over the years she's going to be speaking more in public she'll in a difficult situation because I think she's not always able to be completely spontaneous in front of the cameras and you have to remember that she's possibly one of the most scrutinized roles ever and because of the rise of smartphones and social media any tiny slip-up or mistake she might make could go viral within seconds and she must be really conscious of that which which must be a challenge but when you see her interacting and engaging with people at the close you know you will you really get a sense of warmth and of genuine interest she's someone who does a lot of research she reads up on everything to do with the charity she's visiting and I think to the people she's engaging with that must really come across well kate has shown herself to be a wonderful addition to the royal family in a more egalitarian society Kate has the natural connection with ordinary people that may well prove to be both the salvation and preservation of the monarchy I think the times we see Kate really relaxing are quite often in the most informal moments when she's getting involved in some kind of sporting activity particularly when she's competing with William that something when she's interacting with small children and youth getting his fantastic fun facial expressions she looks to be really enjoying herself I think that's when you can really imagine what she's like behind closed doors [Music] the idea that Kate will drift away from her family into an exclusively royal life seems to me to misunderstand what's happened what's happened is a permanent removal of the old barriers and a few like a domestication of the of the idea of royalty and that she will be able to bask happily amongst family for the rest of her days and so to that extent we have moved into a much less magical era of monarchy one in which they seem to be much more people like us leaving leading lives like us they of course they don't need lies exactly like us I think far from this being as something which will weaken the hold of a monarchy upon the public imagination I should have thought it would would strengthen it yeah I think very much there is a feeling in the palace that they want to learn from the mistakes of the past and they didn't want a royal bride who felt isolated and lonely in cut off from her family and miserable because that has happened before and they didn't want a repeat of Diana so I definitely think courtiers were were determined that that Kate should marry into the family feeling as comfortable as possible and I just think William wasn't going to take any chances and he adores the Middletons he has a very close relationship with Michael and with Carol so he also didn't want them to be sidelined as soon as Kate married into the family I don't I don't think there'd be any need for her to distance herself from her family they're obviously very important to both William and Kate and they've really been accepted into the Royal fold if you like we've seen the Queen driving Carol Middleton around at Balmoral pointing out sites to her they're obviously very comfortable in each other's company the family have also enjoyed you know lunch at Sandringham and they've stayed at Prince Charles's Burke Hall home they're very much welcomed into the phone I don't see any reason why that would change in future I think that William found the home life of the Middletons tremendously reassuring and appealing and I think that's an atmosphere he wanted to reproduce in his own home and I think that's been very important to him in previous generations that imperious tug of the court would have ensured that the the incoming princess would have been swept up into the into the court with all its protocol and formality and this clearly hasn't happened in this case and obviously the fact that the middle Middleton's are clearly a happy family unit has has a lot to do with it I think again that's that is a sign of general change because I think in previous generations the the new princess would have been pulled into the court much more and indeed that happened vice-versa with with Prince Phillip who found it felt that he was becoming a mere appendage but he of course had no home at all and you have to remember that he came from a home which was broken in the most spectacular way that his his mother became a a nun and his father were became a playboy in the Riviera and he had no family at all this couldn't be a greater contrast between that and and and and Kate Middleton's upbringing [Music] kate has provided William with a stable family life one that he himself never had and one that he values enormous ly much as he loved his mother Diana and much as he still loves his father Prince Charles William never knew the simple pleasures of a warm settled and happy family life I think that Kate's influence on William has been very very important I think that he was quite seriously affected by the bad relationship of his parents and I think that Kate has strengthened him Harriet goes bounces along anyway but I think William was more sensitive and more effective by say the suffering of his mother and I think that Kate is provided and necessary like stability for him when I was growing up I was very lucky my family was the most important thing to me they provided me with somewhere safe to grow and learn and I know I was fortunate not to have been confronted by saris adversity at a young age for some children maybe there are some here today I knew that life can sometimes feel difficult and full of challenges I think that every child should have people around them to show them love and to show them kindness and nudge them as they grow don't be under the illusion that she's a Wallflower because she's not she's very strong she's very confident and I think she has a real clarity of vision and I think William depends on that hugely so she has brought a huge amount to Williams life she is filled Williams life with love and happiness and security and she's given him the family life through her own family just regular things that he never got to enjoy but he is enjoying now and I think she's made him incredibly happy William and Kate's marriage is very much a love match and I think they seem incredibly happy together you can see a huge amount of affection between them on engagements you know that there's often a norm around one another looks that they share and I hope that's going to last I think they certainly you know got a fantastic example in the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and I think because William experienced his parents difficult marriage he's very keen to not repeat that scenario and I don't think that it will ever happen kate is hugely boosted the popularity of the monarchy I think people find it very appealing that she's someone from an ordinary background who has joined the ranks if you like and it's perhaps able to to bring her experience of other so-called normal life to the royal family and it's something I think that particularly William really appreciates he's always said that he wants to give their children as normal and upbringing as possible the Windsors are among other things a brand and brands need renewal and one of the things that the young Royals have done very successfully is to renew the royal brand abroad if you look at the kinds of crowds that their trips attract it is extraordinary the young girls can do that in a way that the older ones cannot I include in that Prince Harry I I travelled to the US with David Cameron in 2013 and I was in New York with David Cameron when we met up with Prince Harry and there was this extraordinary scene somewhere in the middle of Manhattan where Prince Harry sort of suddenly came around the corner and I'm standing there with the prime minute then Prime Minister of the UK and there was a screeching like we'd get with a Beatles concert in the 1960s [Applause] and the thing about that is that sort of Rockstar appeal that the younger ones have it's incredibly detached from who they are as people but it is also incredibly potent and you see it in the level of coverage they get not just the crowds they attract but but the amount of column inches so yes clearly that has an impact on the brand and in the sense that the brand is most closely identified with in Britain [Music] [Applause] well when she is query she was going to be queen of a very modern world and I think it's going to help her hugely that she hasn't come from blue blooded aristocracy and and a background perhaps that people cannot relate to you she comes from a very hard-working family who have you know climbed up the excellence of society from in a working-class to the very top and she hasn't got about her station she's she is very approachable that air of normality and ordinariness that you see in her I think is is what makes her real to people she's very solid she's very consistent she's incredibly loyal which is incredibly discreet all of these things that we've seen over the years she's been an amazing companion and girlfriend and now wife to William they are a partnership she also has an innate understanding of what she's married into and that sense of duty but I suspect that those 10 years of dating Prince William were probably enough to make her realize exactly what life was going to consist of she had time to know whether or not she was cut out for it but woody was very lucky that she did have those characteristics which not everyone does 8 has a natural sympathy and connection with the public it is unusual for someone so young to possess so many qualities that combine charm with graciousness I just wanted to say how delighted I am to be here this evening to celebrate the fantastic work the gallery's achievements are exceptional they hold the most extensive collection of portraits in the world and their unique brilliant exhibition never felt she's she's the sort of girl who will walk into a room and light that room up not in the same way that Diana did Diana was a head turner she was you know she was the glamour girl she dazzled in diamonds Katy's more understated but there is a warmth about her and something incredibly appealing and all of those are going to be things that stand her and I think in very good stead for her future role Kate might not have the blue blood of the aristocratic monarchy but she has every bit in her character and behavior the virtues of monarchy all around the world at its very best and I'm sure that William married her not thinking whether she was a royal family member or not but because he fell in love with and who complained in most of the nation has fallen in love with Kate [Music] I don't think that there's anything at this stage that I could teach Kate about being a member of the royal family because she clearly took to it very quickly but she also had this very interesting period in her relationship with the prince where they split up and then got back together again which was very clearly a testing period a proofing period something where she'd already been through the baptism of fire in terms of what it meant for destroying any chance of a private life she would ever have and she went into it in that sense with her eyes open the one thing I suppose she may not have known and will now know very well is just how peculiar royal life is it is the strangest place that I have ever spent time as in the palaces just that sense of never ever really being alone and the the palaces are sort of strange old buildings that are all about actually being built for show for people to look inwards and so they're really not about comfort they're really not about family life so by now she knows that by now she knows the peculiarities of the etiquette they wrote the young Royals have dispensed with some of it in a way that Prince Charles for example has not he still insists that not only that his staff called him Sir and curtsy or bow but actually many of his friends do I think that what Williams saw in Kate was a woman who would never leave him and that she had that sense of faithfulness to him which would ensure all their lives and given his own experience of his parents turbulent marriage I think something deep inside him was calling him and saying I didn't want that for my marriage I want to be with somebody who I can be together with when I'm 90 I think the world has changed a great deal in the last century I think since World War two particularly the private sectors and the palace they have a big sense of pee on our dais which they certainly didn't I remember the green she had a press secretary who said to a group of American journalists I'm not what you journalists would call a public relations man that was the press secretary speaking so there was that mentality very sort of built-in mentality at the palace not necessary by the Queen herself but that has changed a great deal particularly after the annus horribilis when Diana died I think that gave the system a big shock and I think that it shook them into a more modern approach [Music] I think the life and death of Princess Anna is is simply a tragedy whose seeds were laid seeds were sown even before she meant met Prince Charles I think she she had a she had a very bad start in life and things went badly wrong and went badly wrong in the most public way imaginable and the the funeral of Diana was one of the most heartbreaking events in in in British life in in the whole of the last century and everyone felt this and I think although it she's now not spoken of nearly so much I think it was quite a trauma whose effect is still being filled William Kate I think have inherited an interest a passion from Charles of being extraordinarily interested in the least well-off the least financially prosperous but also those who are suffering and it clearly touches the hearts of both William and Kate this is utterly genuine and they want to use the authority of their offices their status to see if they can touch the lives of those who are mentally suffering and try to bring them some lights and release some joy into their troubled lives it should not be seduced subject in the year 2016 their heads together campaign is all about getting people talking about the hard times that many of us will face and have faced in our lives [Music] [Music] [Music] I think it's really quite a brave move these are the subjects that traditionally have been fairly tubu they're talking about really difficult things such as suicide and addiction bullying and I think it's really being very important to bring it out to the fore and get people talking about it and you can see you can see the genuine concern we had a an incident recently where Prince William comforted a young man who had lost his mother recently and obviously you could see that his empathy is genuine he's been through the same thing but that's incredibly powerful thing to be able to do to go and bring their own experience and share it with others and and let them know that it is okay to talk about these things it seems to me an enormous challenge for all of the young royals but in particular for William and Kate to find a way to do the empathy thing to do what they they you know seen as being their core role in terms of performing a charitable role and maintaining something that they are clearly setting out to do which is redefining how much of themselves they make public they are trying to and I'm by the way very sympathetic to them on this they are trying to carve out a space for themselves to have a private family life they are also I think very interestingly positioning themselves for the age that they are in the era in which they are in the public eye which is of course a social media set rated Instagram selfie era where they are in some way going very much against the tide on that trying to reclaim something for themselves now I think that is potentially quite a clever thing to do in the long run in the short term it is inciting the ire of the press so they're getting a more negative press as a result because the press feel shut out and you see some quite silly and nasty reporting as a result but there is also the danger that they just end up looking like they're not doing very much which of course is the big criticism there's absolutely it has been the case that William and Kate have been given some breathing space and some time out to enjoy being married to have children and I think that does come down from experience I mean Charles and Diana was thrown into the thrust of royal life you know weeks after their wedding they were touring around the world Diana became an international celebrity overnight totally eclipsed Charles no one wants to see history repeating itself in that respect and so what you have seen is a far more controlled release of William and Kate into the public domain it hasn't just been an explosion you know after the Royal Wedding they went to Canada and then things settle down so there are tours and there are engagements all over the world the visits of Kate and Prince William have led to a renewed enthusiasm for the Royal presence abroad heads of state are pleased to welcome the royal couple everywhere and audiences are clearly charmed by Kate [Music] the busy foreign tour program of William and Kate I think became even more important after Britain decided in the referendum vote to leave the European Union and what better emblem rather than the prime minister of the day that come and go prime ministers who pitch up but a little known by the public in these far-off lands but the images of Kate and William are known every bit across the world so they have an extraordinarily valuable role to play in ensuring that the future of Britain in the uncertain world into which we're going to be going will be as as good as strong and as high as possible and William and Kate are already traveling a great deal throughout the world they're visiting many of the realms and countries that they're going to be visiting for decades to come and their visits are enormously popular but Kate in particular seems to really captured the international imagination she has fans all over the world and that's going to stand her in great stead in years to come and she's going to be able to grow this you know soft diplomatic power which would be perfect for her role as Queen one of the things that has been very interesting for me because I covered the Royals for such a long time you know I first started covering the Royals in the I guess early 90s and covered them you know right the way through to now so I have seen the evolution of royal press management and I have seen in it it become much more sophisticated much more aware of the issues but they even so cannot even begin to keep up with what's going on in the development of the press and the development of the world at the same time in the early days and why they got so blindsided by having Princess Diana they're actually working against them and doing her own having her own direct line to the press but in their era that was the end-of-the-year of deference where you know you could say to an editor don't run this and then editor would not run it you could put out statements and say we will not answer any more questions on this and that would be the end of the story the that is so far gone that was the Royals themselves helped to blow that out of the water that collapsed the royal marriage and so now you have them operating in this take-no-prisoners environment where even if the royal press managers can stop the mainstream media from reporting things that they don't want or can encourage them to report things that they do want they have no control control over the wider online world and that is HUGE and it and it also presents very new and big challenges for the Royals [Music] [Music] there's a strange belief that the young have no interest in ceremonial or in the past and I've lost count of the times in which people have said oh let's stop doing this commemoration Remembrance Day or whatever it is because it won't appeal to the young and the same is true of the monarchy that this is an institution whose roots liar too far in the past to interest the young but every time every generation proves us to be wrong and that the crowds at Remembrance Day and at royal events remain as large as ever and as filled with the young as ever because the idea that the young have no sense of the past is is one of the greatest of all modern illusions the current position of the monarchy in Britain was pretty much defined by queen elizabeth ii and by her father george the 6th as the focal point for the nation not just at times of crisis and war but at times of reflection but even in a day-to-day way there's a sense in the british public that they have an almost religious reference for the monarchy in a way that they would never have for the political masters well I think the royal family is in a very unique position in that you know the Queen is is on the throne because it was her god-given right but I think that that is now seen is quite an antiquated concept I think certainly if we're looking into the future towards King William and Queen Catherine it's not going to be seen as a god-given right they're going to need to justify being there they are going to need to be a king and queen of the people figureheads representives for the UK hard-working members of the royal family and actually one has to respect the queen hugely for that because I don't think she takes her position for granted at all it's the image that is being cultivated of William and Kate now it's going to be very important several years down the line because all of this will reflect our opinions of them as a future king and queen my prediction I'm happy to make a prediction is that you will see the royal family continuing that the royal family slimming down and slimming down and paying more and more attention to looking like value for money and what sort of Queen will Kate be will her easygoing manner be an enormous change to the style of the British monarchy the memory of Princess Diana shines down as an alternative way of being royal that tragically was never to find full expression well Kate to be very different as Queen to what Diana might had been and how different a court will Kate preside over with King William to that of the court of the present Queen Kate has that rare ability possessed by very few people of being able to talk to speak to relate to those of utterly different ages backgrounds ethnicities it's a magical talent that is infinitely precious really and you either habit I think in life or you don't most people don't hate us it's impossible to tell what sort of Queen she'd be like we can only observe what we see and read but she seems to be a rather modest cautious sort of person who's unlikely to endanger the monarchy and I should have thought she would be a kind of reassuring presence but who knows what what the future will bring oh I think I think Kate will make a dignified Queen it's very hard to imagine her sort of emerging in in a sort of social activist role like her father-in-law or anything like that I think you know in terms of what people expect of the Queen as the current Queen has defined it she'll be quite close to that same model I think Kate's gonna make a fantastic Queen I think she is hugely interested in the causes that she supports and I can imagine her giving that level of commitment to the role in future she's got great diplomatic power she's hugely admired across the world well when Kate does become queen she will have had decades of experience within the royal family so the fact that she wasn't born blue-blooded will not matter at all in fact it will be that that stands her in the best possible stage she will have the advantages of both worlds that experience of royalty and having been born an ordinary girl from the Home Counties it's a perfect combination [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: timeline, kate middleton, kate middleton best looks, kate middleton and prince william, kate, catherine middleton, prince harry and meghan markle, prince george and princess charlotte, kate middleton 2020, kate middleton interview, absolute history, queen kate, queen kate middleton, the queen of england, queen elizabeth ii, queen elizabeth, prince harry, royal family, duchess of cambridge, prince william, princess diana, prince charles, royal children

Id: mXUnUvUDqiY

Length: 51min 25sec (3085 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019