CATHERINE, PRINCESS OF WALES has announced that she is suffering from cancer. The Duchess, who had major abdominal surgery in January, said in a video statement released on March 22nd that her condition had initially been thought to be non-cancerous; but that later tests found cancer had been present. She is now in the early stages of a course of preventative chemotherapy. She described the diagnosis as “a huge shock”.

The question is not what this must mean for the princess. It requires little imagination to know what a mother with three young children must be feeling to be diagnosed with cancer at the age of 42. In her statement the princess said that she and her husband William, the Prince of Wales, had been doing all they could to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis, and to “reassure them that I am going to be OK”.

The bigger question is what, if anything, this means for the royals. As heir, Prince (now King) Charles had long said he wanted a slimmed-down monarchy. Few would have imagined its working ranks would have shrunk quite so swiftly or under quite such grim circumstances as they have in recent years. A family that for decades had seemed improbably hearty has suddenly started to seem rather less so.

The death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in 2021 was followed by that of the queen in 2022. King Charles was diagnosed with (a still undisclosed) cancer in February; now the Princess of Wales has been too. Prince William will naturally have to take time out to look after her and his family. Prince Andrew, King Charles’s brother, was stripped of his royal patronages and military titles in 2022 over a sexual-assault case (which he settled out of court); Prince Harry stopped being a working royal in 2020. In four short years “the firm” has lost a queen and a duke to death, and at the present moment is lacking three princes and a princess to illness, folly and feuding.

Once, such thinning of the royal ranks would not have mattered much. For centuries, Britain merely had kings and queens: the success or failure of the royal rulers rested on one head alone, that of the monarch. But since the time of Queen Victoria, Britain has not had merely a monarch but a royal family. And the job of the royal family was to put on a good show.

Visibility was the point of the royals: “I must be seen to be believed”, Queen Elizabeth II used to say, setting out in rainbow-bright colours on royal tours. Many of the headlines that the other royals produced—from divorces to tampons to toe-sucking—also had to be seen to be believed. The royals all realised that they were there to put on a show and, on the whole, they obliged with tragicomedy. Britain, and the world, enjoyed the performance.

In the twenty-first century, the comedy has rather faded; the audience has not. In the months since the news of the princess’s operation was released, conspiracy theories—ranging from the idea that Kate was suffering from bulimia to speculation that she was in fact dead—have flourished. A photograph released for mother’s day was widely scrutinised, and pilloried for being manipulated. It has been reported that staff at the hospital where she was being treated tried to gain access to her records.

However, the royals’ appetite for being watched has, quite reasonably, diminished. “We hope that you will understand that, as a family, we now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment,” Kate said in her statement. Though many onlookers may feel chastened, it is hard to imagine Britain—or the world—giving it to her. ■