At just 42 years old, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, has been diagnosed with cancer. After a fortnight in the hospital and three months of medical leave from her royal duties, the most popular member of the United Kingdom’s royal family revealed she is undergoing chemotherapy. The cancer was discovered in tests stemming from her January abdominal surgery.
Underneath her typically shining mane of chestnut hair, Catherine was thin, pale, and fighting back tears as she made the announcement.
“As you can imagine, this has taken time,” the princess said in a message broadcast around the world. “It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment. But most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them and to reassure them that I am going to be OK.”
One can easily deduce that Catherine, as any cancer patient would, wished she could be doing anything else in the world than giving an international broadcast about her health. But savage spectators, speculating sexists, and bullies pretending to enact revenge on behalf of Catherine’s brother- and sister-in-law would not let Catherine rest.
Despite Kensington Palace outlining a reasonably fixed and limited timeline from the start — the princess would return to public life around Easter, it said — a coordinated disinformation campaign, cheered on by the Russians, decided to torment Catherine and her family. The conjecture ranged from the comical (the preternaturally elegant princess was getting a Kardashian-style Brazilian butt lift) to the cruel. The Prince of Wales was accused not just of violently beating his wife but also of killing her. Catherine was accused of anorexia, bulimia, and suicidality. Did she get a hysterectomy, or did she get a colostomy bag? In other words, what was operated on? The royal womb or the royal colon?
Of course, Catherine had a very good reason to take her first and only medical leave in 14 years of public service: She wanted to reassure her children that she wouldn’t die.
Despite Catherine’s storied commitment to her job, she has no constitutional role. Unlike her father-in-law, King Charles III, who had a moral and arguably legal obligation to continue to answer to the public, Catherine wanted 12 weeks of privacy. And many of you could not give her that.
More than a decade ago, the late and great Hilary Mantel wrote of the inanity of royal commentary about the princess during her pregnancy with Prince Louis, when she had played a spot of field hockey while visiting her old school.
“BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken,” Mantel wrote. In the obsession over the princess’s body, Catherine was rendered no different than the beheaded Anne Boleyn or Jane Seymour or any other royal wife. Just as the commentariat skewered the common, unnoble, and middle-class Catherine as Waity Katie, the girlfriend who must have spun some devious tricks to nab a future king, royal watchers have done for a millennium.
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“No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young,” Mantel reflected of Henry VIII’s third wife, a commoner just like Catherine. “The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme’: which was to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.”
Perhaps the media can now stop deciding if she is too thin or too puffy, too put together or too run down, too secret or too desperate for public approval. Even a royal lady, even the royal chalice of the future kings of Britain, deserves a bit of humanity. Even Catherine deserves all of our prayers, if not an apology.