The more hidden side of Prince William, who turns 40

The prince Williamborn on 21 June 1982, blows out 40 candles. And he’s so popular that we think we know everything about him. Yet many anecdotes about his life are little known. And they tell the prince better than many novels. For example he only had seven years when he told Mom Diana that he wanted to become a policeman, so that he could be her bodyguard. Harry, who was five, replied: “You can’t: you have to be king“.

As is well known, mum Diana’s bond with her children has always been very strong. While Carlo has always been portrayed as an icy dad. Today the heir to the throne and the eldest son are very close, but this has not always been the case. Carlo’s troubled marriage to Lady D could not help but leave traces on his children. Especially since Diana often cried in front of the older one, always on her side. Once, when she was just eight, it was William who passed the kleenexes to her mother who – locked in the bathroom in Highrove after an argument with her husband – she never stopped sobbing.

It is logical that William, for years, has not been able to understand that father, from him judged too cold and distant. Yet the Mirror, on the occasion of the prince’s first forty years, he fished out a letter written by Charles after his birth which tells of a father who is anything but cold: “The arrival of our son was a surprising experience and meant more to me than I could ever have imagined “, Carlo wrote in the letter addressed to a cousin, Countess Patricia Mountbatten. “I am so grateful that I was at Diana’s bedside the whole time, because I deeply shared her birth process and then I was rewarded by the appearance of the little creature that belonged to us“.

William’s birth moved the more sentimental side of Charles, it seems. The same cannot be said of Elizabeth II. William was the first British prince born outside a royal palace. His mother Diana gave birth to him at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. The regina she saw him only a few days after birth. And even on that occasion he unsheathed his proverbial sense of humor. At the first meeting with William, as the British edition of Marie Claire, the queen came up with very different words from those one would expect from a new grandmother: “Thank goodness he doesn’t have his father’s ears! »Exclaimed The Queen, alluding to the famous protruding ears of Charles, which have always yielded teasing and merciless jokes to the prince.

40 years have passed since then. And William celebrates them at a time when his popularity – also thanks to “Harry’s betrayal»- is skyrocketing. After Elizabeth II many Brits would like him on the throne of England (in place of his father Charles). Why William and his wife Kate Middleton they form the “perfect reigning couple”, as royal experts explain. The reasons are many: the Cambridge are spending themselves for humanitarian causes; “They are capable of mixing tradition and modernity”; they always show nice and easygoing. And they know how to learn from their mistakes. For example after the recent tour to the Caribbeana means flop marked by protests linked to colonialism, they understood that it is time to modernize the royal protocol: “They want people you just call by namenot with their titles “revealed the Daily Mailand they intend to “abolish bows”, the quintessential symbol of formality.

Today, at 40, William is a much-loved future king. But most of all he is a father. According to a source in the Palace, the prince and his wife planned their royal career, from the very beginning of their marriage, precisely in order to “leave room for the role of parents”. Because for him and for Kate the little ones George, Charlotte And Louis they come first of all, even before the Crown.

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• William, smiles and tenderness: the unpublished photo with the children for Father’s Day
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• William and mourning the end of the relationship with Harry