The day Kate Middleton announced that he has cancer

Seven centuries of misfortunes and a title that nobody really wants: is Princess Kate the last one to challenge a black destiny? An exclusive extract from the new book by Antonio Caprarica, Kate and the curse of the Wales, now in the bookstore with Sperling & Kupfer.

At a certain point in the life of every human being comes a date destined to score forever a before and after. It is the “particular day” that each of us crosses in a decisive appointment with fate.
It can be a happy date, as a love meeting that gives happiness to the course of an existence. It may be a dramatic date, which instead marks a challenge between life and death, a moment in which everything is at stake and the result is in the hands of the case, genetics or providence.

When it happens, if you are lucky enough to survive, not only that day will remember forever but will become the secret pillar of the years to come, the memory to be drawn to confirm the strength in itself in the hardest evidence. If this applies to all mortals, for public figures the passage represents more a moment of truth. Since each challenge for them is played under the eyes of the world, the way in which they respond records their character, their moral timing, the ability to give the judgment of contemporaries the outlines of a personality with exemplary in the judgment.

For Catherine, Princess of Wales, that date is March 22, 2024: the day of the announcement of cancer. The pale and composed image of the woman who pronounced fatal words from the TV screens, without ever giving in to emotion – if not the voice just crossed in a couple of moments – generated an authentic wave of shock.
And not only in the faithful monarchical England but in the entire planet. It was an event of media magnitude comparable to that of much larger collective tragedies. In a mysterious and inexplicable way, the shadow of the fearsome illness that stretched, without making any distinction of rank or status, on that young mother produced an echo of profound emotional participation in the heart of billions of spectators around the world.

Not even the throne is immune to evil.

Today, just over a year since that March 22, the permanent miracle that is contemporary medicine has returned a princess of Wales again, fascinating and smiling again: to its family, to the country that awaits it queen, to the crazy planetary of admirers and disparagings.
The January 14, 2025she herself announced in a social message, signed with the usual “C”, to be “in remission from cancer” and to “remain concentrated on the second half”.

Business as Usualwould the British say? Not exactly. Remission means that the tumor has disappeared after treatment, but does not yet represent definitive healing. Also, in theAnnus horribilis of the Windsor, the entire world of the woman who was Kate Middleton is earthquake. On the level of feelings, of the image, of politics.

Nothing in the usual images of the Windsor walk towards the church of St Mary Magdalene in Sandingham, on the morning of December 25, 2023he let the dramatic news of the days that would follow.
For Charles III it was the second Christmas by King but the first after the incoronation of May 6, and would also be the first to be passed with The “extended family”.

At the four Windsor brothers with children and grandchildren (exceptionally readmitted even the reprobate Andrea, and even the divorced wife Sarah Ferguson) would have added themselves – absolute novelty – also the children of Queen Camilla, Tom and Laura Parker Bowles. Viva Elisabetta, for them the royal residence in Norfolk was rigorously off limits. The queen had had to send down – for a state of state more than for maternal love – the second wife of the heir but certainly did not extend her forced generosity to the rest of the family. Camilla had had to make a reason and every holy Christmas, just consumed the ritual Christmas Pudding at the end of the real lunch, ran to reach children and grandchildren in his buen retiro of Ray Mill, in Wiltshire.

But with mom on the throne, everything had changed and the Parker Bowles had also earned the entrance ticket to Sandringham’s Christmas. Tom, forty -nine years old, and Laura, forty -five, carried the teenage children behind, two he and three, as well as a nice load of embarrassment. Their relationships with the boys of Carlo had never been too hot, given the complicated family situation, and it cannot be said that even after the wedding of the parents in 2005 William had too much sympathy for them, particularly for Tom, due to his youthful drug problems and beyond.

The truth is that the prince (and even more his brother Harry, but he still stands away) did not forgive him above all that he was the son of the woman who had caused the unhappiness of the mother Diana. It also has to do with a certain dose of jealousy. Carlo, always so busy to pay attention to his two heirs, seemed to be very helpful and protective towards the son of the lover, so much so that he deserved his public declarations of affection and gratitude at the time of the succession to the throne.

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Published courtesy of Mondadori Libri spa for the Sperling & Kupfer brand
(c) 2025 Mondadori Libri spa, Milan