As far back as their early days of courtship, Prince William fell in love with not just Kate Middleton, but her entire family. The Middletons—parents Michael and Carole, and Kate’s younger siblings Pippa and James—likely represented to William the “normal” (whatever normal is, anyway) family that he never had: Upper middle class, tight-knit, and relatively drama free. William, who not only grew up royal but also in the tumult of his parents’ fractured relationship, probably found the Middletons to be a breath of fresh air.
And, as The Daily Express reports, William sees the Middletons as a huge source of stability for him, and always has. Speaking in the Amazon Prime documentary William and Kate: Into the Future, Andrew Morton (famously a biographer of William’s mother, the late Princess Diana) spoke of how the Prince of Wales “yearned” for the stability the Middletons offered after his own parents divorced when he was 14.
“For a kid from a broken home which is, after all, what William is, he has always yearned towards the stable and towards the steady,” Morton said. “It’s not just Kate he’s in love with—it’s the family.”
In the same documentary, royal author and journalist Richard Kay spoke of how William wanted to avoid the mistakes of his parents in his own marriage: “Everything about William you can trace back to what happened to his parents,” he said. “He lived through the bitter breakup of their marriage. He knows that what happened to them destroyed their marriage and he is very careful not to make the same mistakes.”
Like he is now, Michael and Carole are the parents of three children, and “we’ve seen over the past few years that he gets on really well with them,” Rachael Andrews said of Kate’s parents. “He admires the way that Carole and Michael brought up Catherine, Pippa, and James and that seems to be reflected in the way William is a down-to-earth father now. He, of course, lost Diana when he was very young and probably looks up to Carole because he’s lacked a mother figure for so much of his life. With Carole and Michael, he’s got people to confide in who are removed from the monarchy.”
Now that the Wales family of five—William, Kate, and their children Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis—live in Windsor, they are just a short drive from Bucklebury, where the elder Middletons reside. And Carole in particular has been generating news lately over the collapse of her longstanding business, Party Pieces, which she founded in 1987. The company’s crippling debt of over 2.5 million pounds has made Carole “understandably upset and deeply disappointed in this situation,” one of her close friends told The Daily Mail’s Richard Eden. “Over the past five months she really has done her best to find a buyer, who not only would take the business forward, but would also honor any outstanding debts. Carole believes in accountability and accepts she had been a little naïve to step back and trust someone else to run the business she had spent decades nurturing and it’s been desperately sad to see the company sold off in this way.”
