The extent to which Carole Middleton — mother of the Princess of Wales — actually played a role in the early success of her eldest daughter Kate's relationship with Prince William has long been the subject of intrigue and speculation. Some say her daughter never would have met the prince without her supposedly masterminding the whole thing as a 'pushy' social climber; others say she was simply a hard-working and ambitious middle class mum who simply wanted to empower her daughter to believe she can achieve anything.
Which side of the fence The Crown creator Peter Morgan sits on is hardly a difficult one to guess. In his latest season of hit royal series, Carole, 68 — played by House of the Dragon actress Eve Best and the character who arguably takes centre stage — is seen advising Kate what to wear to that now-notorious university fashion show that William is set to attend.
"Heels not flats, you still want to show off those legs," she instructs her daughter over the phone. "It’s our duty to make use of the assets God has given us... Does he know you’re back on the market? Maybe find a way of letting him know."
The casting on The Crown is so spectacular, I knew Eve Best was Carole Middleton the *second* she appeared on screen. They do such a good job of invoking the character even without a painfully accurate aesthetic recreation. pic.twitter.com/k0yEr3tocp
— Rita (@ritalara) December 15, 2023
Kate smiles and tells her mother she's "worse than Mrs. Bennet" in Morgan's portrayal – a nod to the scheming mother-of-daughters character in Pride and Prejudice and a spelling-out of Morgan's attitude towards Carole's role in the makings of the now-great royal romance between Wills and Kate. Scenes show the stewardess-turned-businesswoman pushing Kate through the crowd to meet William during a public appearance, and tuning into the radio as he announces his decision to attend St Andrew's university after a gap year. She is later seen being yelled at by her daughter for being too pushy, as well as spilling details of her meet-cute with her own husband, Kate's father Michael.
"When I first met your father he was way out of my reach, I was just a lowly stewardess. Trolley dolly," she tells her daughter. "I felt like the luckiest woman in the world … Then I realised that maybe it was the other way around, that he’d been lucky to have me. Never underestimate yourself. Never think there’s anything in this world you’re not good enough for."
Kensington Palace has declined to comment on the portrayal but this particular scene certainly speaks to a belief many critics have long held of Carole: that her background as a working-class stewardess and her propelling into the upper echelons of the British upper-middle-class through her husband Michael offers a clear explanation for her desire to propel her eldest daughter even further, into the role of future Queen of England. "Canny", "desperate", "pushy" and "meddling" are just some of the terms used to describe Carole's character over the years since her daughter married the future King.
But how accurate are those descriptions, really? What is her background, exactly? And how much of The Crown's portrayal is to be believed?
The stewardess who married an aristocrat
Carole's upbringing was not a likely one for the mother of a future Queen. She grew up in a council flat in Southall in the London borough of Ealing and had a modest childhood, attending state schools while her father Ron worked as a painter and decorator and her mother Dorothy had a part-time job in retail.
After school, she initially had plans to teach, but ended up studying retail via a John Lewis scheme. She went onto work as a secretary for the company Prudential Insurance before joining British Airways as a flight attendant at the age of 21. According to insiders, Kate was later teased about her mother's background as cabin crew when she was at university. "When all of them used to go out to the night clubs I think some of his friends used to make the joke ‘doors to manual’ when she walked through the door, which was a reference to her mother because she used to be an air hostess,” Lucie Cave, editor of Heat magazine, once said in a documentary.
It was during this job that Carole met her now-husband Michael, a Clifton College-educated British Airways flight dispatcher who was six years her senior and who the tabloids learnt many years later was from the prominent upper-middle-class Lupton family from Yorkshire, with aristocratic roots. His great-grandfather, Francis Martineau Lupton, was a wealthy mill owner from a family steeped in politics in England and said to have been looked upon favourably by both Henry VII and Henry VIII. Michael was said to be "rather shy" when he and Carole met, but very handsome, she has since said.
The couple married in Buckinghamshire in 1980, when she was in her mid-twenties (their son James' future wife Alizee Thevenet went onto wear Carole's wedding gown at their wedding in 2021). They moved to a Victorian house in Bradfield Southend in Berkshire and went on to have three children: Catherine (Kate, Philippa (Pippa) and James.
The family moved to Jordan in 1984 for Michael's work before returning to Berkshire two years later. Carole set up her own party supplies business, Party Pieces, the following year after reportedly struggling to find paper plates for Kate's fifth birthday party. "I do love a good party," she said in her first ever newspaper interview. "I'm definitely a night owl and a real chatterbox."
She began the company by selling party supplies and decorations by mail order, with Michael quitting his job at British Airways to join her as a business partner in 1989. "Mike and I often talked about work in the evenings or on holiday, but we enjoyed it. I never really felt I was a working mother although I was — and the children didn't either. They grew up with it," she once told The Telegraph.
Insiders say 'the Mids', as they were nicknamed, were renowned for doing everything to the very highest of standards. "There was always something slightly galling about having your children at school with the Middletons," a fellow parent once told Tatler. Every pristine item of clothing would have a beautifully sewn-in name tape, for instance. It was unthinkable that they would end up resorting to marker pen on labels like the rest of us.
"There were huge picnics on sports days, the smartest tennis rackets — that kind of thing. It made the rest of us all feel rather hopeless... Ultimately, Carole has played a blinder as a mother. Not only are all of her children unfairly good-looking, they are also famously charming. Always the first to write a thank-you letter, they dance all night and are still the first up in the morning, plumping cushions and washing up."
The couple bought Oak Acre, a Grade II-listed Tudor-style manor house called Bucklebury Manor in Berkshire in 1995, when Kate was 13, and Party Pieces went onto employ 30 members of staff, including all three children at one point.
In 2002, the couple bought a £780,000 flat in Chelsea flat for Pippa and Kate to live in after university and their business was worth £30 million by 2011, but ended up falling into administration after the pandemic. They sold it to Teddy Tastic Bear Company Limited for an undisclosed amount in May this year, with reports stating that the business owed £2.6 million to various suppliers.
From the upper-middle-class to the royal inner circle
The Middletons were hardly a publicly-known family when Kate started university in St Andrews. They were millionaires thanks to the family business and the children had been educated at top schools, Kate studying at the all-girls boarding school Downe House in Berkshire before leaving mid-term because she was "badly bullied", according to a friend. She moved to the prestigious boarding school Marlborough College for the rest of secondary school, and reportedly had a poster of Prince William on the wall in her dorm. She has denied this, saying it was actually a poster of the Levi jeans guy.
The Middleton family were fiercely private – a quality William is said to have been particularly attracted to in Kate and her parents in those early days of courtship. “We are very amused at the thought of being in-laws to Prince William, but I don’t think that is going to happen,” Michael told reporters amid rumours that Kate and William were quietly dating at St Andrew’s.
It later emerged that the couple had indeed been dating and that Carole had supposedly been the puppeteer, triggering a series of classist attacks against the family - particularly Carole - in the press. “She is pushy, rather twee, and incredibly middle-class. She uses words such as pleased to meet you, toilet, and pardon,” an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2007, criticising her for chewing gum at Prince Wililam’s passing-out parade from Sandhurst.
Another piece in the Daily Mail published after the couple had briefly split that same year asked if Kate's mum had been "too pushy for the royals". “Mrs Middleton has acquired a reputation for being pushy and it has been suggested she manoeuvred her daughter into William’s orbit and then tried to engineer a match," it read. "According to Clarence House sources, her overweening ambitions for her daughter grated on Prince William's friends and courtiers, especially since the former air stewardess's aspirations clashed with her own humble origins.”
Details about Carole's younger brother Gary Goldsmith, 58 — a tattooed, multi-millionaire recruitment consultant who used to live in Ibiza, has been married four times and has a daughter, Tallulah, with his second wife — have also been dredged up by the press in the years since his niece started getting serious with Prince William.
The then-56-year-old, who now lives in London and is estimated to be worth £30 million, has been accused of being the 'black sheep' of the family and embarrassing Kate on several occasions, most prominently in 2017 when he was living in an Ibizan villa nicknamed 'Maison de Bang Bang' and was arrested and later charged with assault by beating following an argument with his current wife Julie-Ann — six years after appearing as one of the guests at Kate and Wills' royal wedding.
"We come from really humble stock," he told ITV for a royal wedding documentary in 2021. "My father was a painter and decorator, mum was an accounts clerk and their eldest granddaughter was at Westminster Abbey about to marry the future king of this country."
A social climbing 'modern-day Mrs Bennet' — or just an ambitious middle class mum?
A dynamo. A chancer. A working-class girl who married up and inherited her drive from her socially ambitious mother.
These are just some of the terms used to describe Carole Middleton over the years. But how much truth there is to these pushy-mum, social-climber accusations against Carole in the tabloids depends who you ask.
Tina Brown, author and former editor of Vanity Fair, calls her a "dynamo" and a "chancer" who inherited her drive to boost her family's social status. "Carole was the chancer in the family, not Kate," she wrote in her 2022 book The Palace Papers. “It is unlikely Kate would be where she is today without her mother’s canny help in negotiating a royal romance.
“Carole… is acknowledged by all as the dynamo in the family. She is the daughter of a sales assistant and a builder-decorator who met Michael [Middleton] when he worked as a member of the ground staff at British European Airways and she was an air stewardess. She married up, and was a hard worker…. Her origins are scrappy working-class, a family of strivers…. [Carole] inherited her drive from her socially ambitious mother, Dorothy 'Dot' Goldsmith, aka 'The Duchess,' who, according to a snarky relative, 'wanted to be the top brick in the chimney'."
Royal author Omid Scobie echoes most of Brown's depiction, saying Carole made "calculated moves to place her daughter at the centre of William's world". "As two caring parents who worked hard, made their mint, and climbed the social ladder (no small feat in a country still obsessed with class), the Middletons — mostly Carole — saw that the pretty and grounded Kate was ready to carry the family name further to the top," he writes in his latest book, Endgame.
"So, they began orchestrating her life, ensuring she was at the right places at the right time and spoke the right way. Kensington Palace has never denied that Kate had several rounds of elocution lessons as she became more serious with William... The Middleton strategy involved more than just aristocratic affectation — Carole calculatingly placed Kate right at the centre of young Prince William’s world."
According to Scobie, this meant dissuading her daughter not to attend the University of Edinburgh, where she'd been planning on studying and where her younger sister Pippa later went onto study English and was known for mixing with a well-heeled social set.
"When Carole learned that Prince William was slated to attend the University of St Andrews, she encouraged her daughter to turn down a spot at her dream school, the University of Edinburgh, take a gap year to study abroad in Florence, and enrol at St Andrews the following year," he writes. "Carole set things up, and Kate took it the rest of the way."
Scobie writes that William later took to the Middleton family life in rural Berkshire. "William took to the cosy Middleton enclave in a village where time seemed to stand still. The echoing bells of the sixteenth-century parish, the clink of glasses and last call in the traditional Bladebone Inn, and the low lights and trailing chimney smoke from thatched-roof houses all proved irresistible for a young man used to gated entries, long corridors, and private secretaries."
Al Fayed 2.0 but with a gentler touch
Some commentators have been quick to draw parallels between Carole's storyline in The Crown and that of Mohamed Al Fayed, in which the former Harrods owner seemingly pushed his son Dodi towards a relationship with Princess Diana. “You don’t know him. What if William isn’t right for me? What about what I want?” a young adult Kate sobs to Carole in The Crown. “Once you had the idea fixed in your head you never stopped."
But most agree that Carole had a gentler touch than Mohamed Al Fayed in terms of her matchmaking. In The Crown, she is fictionally portrayed as offering Kate words of empowerment (“never think there’s anything in this world you’re not good enough for”), strategy (“does he know you’re back on the market? Find a way of letting him know”), and styling (“you want to show off those legs”).
She is also said to have shown more strategic "flair" than Al Fayed, who is portrayed in The Crown as phoning staff on the yachts his son and Diana were holidaying on to see if they were sleeping in the same room. "Whenever Kate was bloodied in the ring [during her courtship with William], she retreated to [the family home in] Bucklebury, where Coach Carole would dress her wounds, advise her on moves, and urge her to keep her eyes on the prize," says Annie Sulzberger, head of research for The Crown. "Carole’s fingerprints are all over Kate’s first move on the royal chessboard."
Sulzberger agrees with Scobie that there is some truth to Carole's role as Cupid in her daughter's royal romance, but “we wanted to present [Carole as] more of a maternal figure wanting the best for her daughter — someone who has actually worked very hard to gain her position in society in the upper middle class. It has been her work and ideas and ventures that have gotten them there, not the father’s. That was something we wanted to hold on to."
For Sulzberger and her colleagues on The Crown, it was less "You’ve got to go bag the Prince of Wales, the future king" and more "If my daughter enters this world, I have the confidence that she will end up in this social circle that will set her up for the rest of her life. And I am ambitious for her.’”
There is, however, a hint of truth in the "pushy mum", social climbing stereotypes, says royal expert Dr Tessa Dunlop. "We will never know exactly what role Carole Middleton played, but we can confirm that she successfully pulled the Middleton family up by the financial boots straps. Kate enjoyed all the trappings of an upper-class life: including a stint at Marlborough College where she honed the perfect accomplishments and friendships for a future princess.
"When it comes to bagging a royal, money talks. Whether deliberately or accidentally, perhaps Carole Middleton played Cupid after all."
Close with Wills, pals with the late Queen and a hands-on 'Granny'
Whatever her involvement in Kate and William's initial get-together, Carole took keenly to her later role as mother of a princess. She is said to have struck up a close friendship with the late Queen, photographed riding in the front seat of the monarch's Range Rover in September 2016 on the Balmoral estate in Scotland - much to the surprise of many royal watchers.
"Because of the circumstances of William’s childhood, the Queen has made a big effort to include the Middletons much more than she would have done otherwise,” royal expert Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said at the time. “She is recognising they have a big role in the lives of her family — and she is happy with that.”
Robert Lacey, a royal expert who has worked as a consultant to the The Crown, said the Queen always appreciated Carole Middleton's perspective. “In the past, (young Princess) Elizabeth had a Scottish nanny who was the daughter of a railway signalman and actually slept in her bedroom until she was a teenager. She would teach her the habit of unwrapping your presents carefully and then ironing (the wrapping paper) and putting it back in a drawer so you could use it again," he told People. “That sort of contact with ordinary life came through the servants in that generation — and now it’s coming through Carole."
The couple still reside at Bucklebury Manor in Berkshire, where they've lived since 2012, and are said to be hands-on grandparents to George, Charlotte and Louis, who reportedly call Carole 'Granny'. "I want to run down the hills, climb the trees and go through the tunnel at the playground," she told Good Housekeeping in 2021. "As long as I am able to, that's what I'll be doing. I cook with them, I muck around dancing, we go on bike rides."
Some commentators have praised Carole Middleton and her family for giving Prince William the normality his mother Diana wanted for him. And he has gushed about this fondness for his in-laws himself. "Some people are quite happy they haven’t seen their in-laws for a year. I love my in-laws," he said during a public appearance in 2021."The funny thing is when I spoke to my family, I found it so good to catch up, but then you haven’t anything to catch up on because no one had done anything."
Carole and Michael have also attended many high-profile public occasions over the years since their daughter married Prince William, including King Charles' coronation in May, where they were seated in the seventh row, just behind the royals themselves and next to several world leaders - a fact that Daily Mail editor Richard Kay called a "visible picture of dizzying social mobility" and a "very clear sign about the future direction of the monarchy".
"Charles may be on the throne but by including William's in-laws and in such a conspicuous position in the Abbey, there was a tacit acknowledgement of the role the Middletons are undoubtedly going to play," he wrote at the time. "So while this was his father's day, it was also the beginning of a new royal order and the extension of what was once referred to by courtiers as 'The Middleton Rules'."
What they make of their portrayal in The Crown - or indeed whether they've watched it at all — is unknown, but if the descriptions of Carole as a private, caring, hard-working grandmother are to be believed, one can probably take a guess.
