Eleanor Herman is the author of Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and Off With Her Head: 3,000 Years of Demonizing Women in Power.
Kate, Princess of Wales, departs Westminster Abbey after the coronation ceremony in London, May 6, 2023.Alessandra Tarantino/The Associated Press
The story of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and her abdominal surgery has been a total mess – and an entirely modern one. After all, kings and queens of centuries past traditionally had the luxury of remaining majestically mute about their unsavoury medical conditions.
Consider for a moment – and let’s make it a very brief moment – Louis XIV’s 1686 surgery to repair an anal fistula, or Henry VIII’s malodorous abscess that began leaking pus in 1536. And let us not forget Queen Caroline of Anspach, wife of George II, who died in 1737 after her intestine poked out of her navel and then exploded. The only positive aspect of these events is that no one assumed the palace would comment.
These days, palace press offices are expected to issue statements on the physical conditions and potential concerns of kings and queens, princes and princesses. No longer considered semi-divine creatures, royals have effectively become overpaid public servants to us, living lavishly on the taxpayer dime – and so we want to know why they’re not showing up for work, their right to privacy be damned.
Today’s British palace spokespeople, then, face the daunting task of relaying something true while stating almost nothing at all. And so, on Jan. 17, Kensington Palace announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had been hospitalized for a “planned abdominal surgery” and that she was “unlikely to be returning to royal duties until after Easter.”
A timeline of Catherine, Princess of Wales’s abdominal surgery and recovery
In this way, it is clear that today’s Buckingham Palace PR team is familiar with the traditional playbook. In 1951, Buckingham Palace announced that King George VI had undergone surgery to repair “structural abnormalities” in his lung, which was technically true, given that a lung that had been eaten up by cancer has many abnormalities. The public was shocked when the king died five months later at the age of 56. Cancer was not mentioned in his death announcement, which indicated he had passed away peacefully in his sleep (from abnormalities, one assumed, though later the palace said he had died from a “coronary thrombosis.”)
Elizabeth II, too, relied on carefully constructed two-word obfuscations concerning her health. In her last years, the palace reported that she suffered from “mobility issues,” and her 2022 death certificate stated that she had died of “old age,” though author Gyles Brandreth wrote that the queen had been suffering from bone cancer.
Charles III, somewhat more forthcoming about his health, also revealed on Jan. 17 (through the palace) that he would be undergoing a “corrective procedure” for an enlarged prostate, which occurred the following week. On Feb. 5, he was the first British monarch to disclose that he was being treated for cancer, though what kind of cancer, its severity, his treatment, his prognosis – all that, he has kept to himself.
Faced with a serious medical diagnosis, many people retreat into a cocoon of privacy to deal with the physical and emotional ramifications. Perhaps this inclination is even greater among those who face a daily international barrage of press and social-media commentary on everything they say, do, eat and wear.
But what has roiled people about Catherine – surely you’ve seen the furious theorizing on social media – is not that she has kept the details of her illness private; that’s only in keeping with centuries of royal tradition, after all. It’s that, for more than two months, she practically disappeared from the planet. On Jan. 29, King Charles was seen leaving the hospital with his wife, waving gamely, and getting into his car. The palace announced that Catherine, too, had been released from the hospital that day, though a black van with no windows must have spirited her away in the wee hours, as no one saw her leave.
The King has been seen attending church and has released photos of himself cheerfully greeting ambassadors and reading “get well” letters from the public. Yet for weeks, not a word was heard from the palace about Catherine, other than an insipid Jan. 29 statement about “progress,” which was alarmingly similar to reports issued after George VI’s surgery, and we all know what happened to him.
Inevitably, the Princess’s disappearance has fuelled a belief in a vast “Katespiracy.” She is recuperating from an eating disorder, some suggest, or perhaps a Brazilian butt lift. Maybe complications from surgery landed her in an induced coma. Others are resolute in their thinking that she’s getting divorced because her husband has been having an affair with Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, and that in a fit of pique, Catherine is refusing to do anything the palace wants her to do.
Things got much worse on Mar. 10 – Mother’s Day in Britain – when Kensington Palace released a clearly doctored photograph of Kate with her three children, as if attempting to reassure the public she was alive and well. The photo had quite the opposite effect. Princess Charlotte’s arms seem to jut out at unnatural angles; all the kids’ hands look strange; little Prince Louis appears to be missing part of a finger. (Centuries ago, we could have chalked this up to royal inbreeding, but not with these kids.) Perhaps oddest of all was that Kate wasn’t wearing her wedding ring in the photo. Was it because she was mad at William, Prince of Wales, or because it wasn’t even her hand to begin with?
The Kate photo chaos is a portent of things to come in this disinformation age
Global news agencies retracted the image; the global news director of Agence France-Presse said that it no longer trusts Kensington Palace as a source. Though Catherine apologized on X for the botched job, the palace refused to release the unedited photo, unleashing rumours that there had never been one.
Since then, Catherine has been photographed on two occasions in a car (though social media speculated it was a body double) and was seen looking fit with William at a market earlier this week. But with Easter less than two weeks away, the palace has not stated when the Princess will resume royal engagements. It is safe to say something is wrong with the popular, hard-working woman who cheerfully posed in heels for press photos with her little bundles of joy only hours after she’d given birth. Whether the problem is physical, psychological, marital or some combination, we cannot know.
But here’s another moment for tradition to rear its ugly head: It’s likely that the international uproar over her disappearance is fuelled, at least in part, by gendered tropes – specifically, an archetype of a damsel in distress, the innocent victim of an evil palace. Think Diana in the tunnel, killed with paparazzi in pursuit (and, conspiracists mused, by royal order). Think Iphigenia, a princess set to marry Prince Achilles, who instead allowed her to be sacrificed on the altar so Greek men could wage war on Troy.
In this scenario, Beauty doesn’t marry the Beast to discover he’s really a prince; Beauty marries the prince and finds he’s a Beast. She’s in a dungeon. She’s locked in a tower. She must be rescued. And there is more than a hint of schadenfreude involved. She has the palaces, the tiaras, the fame we want – and just look how miserable she is.
If the disappearing royal were a 42-year-old man instead of Kate, would the interest be as frenetic? Would we assume he had an eating disorder, had undergone plastic surgery, had been betrayed by his wife or was too emotional to do his job? Or would we conclude he was taking a break from work, drinking heavily on a fishing trip or cavorting with beautiful women?
Whatever the case, the palace must do more to quell Kate-Gate – perhaps something outside of the playbook. Even Louis XIV, who considered himself only a tad below God, realized when the privacy jig was up. In 1670, his sister-in-law, Henriette, duchesse d’Orléans, died after nine hours of abdominal agony at just 26, and many at court believed the English princess had been poisoned by her husband Philippe, the king’s flamboyantly gay brother, for convincing Louis to exile Philippe’s waspish male lover. Louis knew that when word of Henriette’s death reached her devoted brother, Charles II, in London, there would be talk of war between the two nations.
So the day after Henriette died, the French king held a public autopsy, which drew hundreds of spectators, including many Englishmen and the English ambassador. Seventeen French physicians and two English ones were encouraged to inspect each organ, hold them up, and poke them – and concluded that Henriette’s death was the result of an inflamed intestinal tract. (More recently, medical professionals have determined she died of a ruptured gastric ulcer, but the physicians weren’t too far off the mark.)
Catherine is, of course, entitled to privacy about her health. But the bizarre disappearance of the future queen of England has damaged the Crown’s reputation. To borrow a page from the palace press office: The monarchy’s credibility is in desperate need of a corrective procedure to repair structural abnormalities. It’s unfortunate, but maybe a poke and prod is what is needed.