The Year the Royals Narrative Went Off the Rails

Queen Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis arrived in 1992, a year of relentless disappointment and disaster. First, her favorite child (Prince Andrew) separated from his wife in the wake of a toe-sucking tabloid scandal; then her second child, Princess Anne, filed for divorce; next came Andrew Morton’s covertly authorized biography of Princess Diana, with all its unflattering anecdotes about Prince Charles, and that couple’s separation; and finally, to top it all off, a fire torched Windsor Castle. 1992, as she put it at the time, was not a year on which she “would look back with undiluted pleasure.”

In 2024, King Charles can probably relate. For the royal family, the past 12 months have dealt blow after blow, a steady stream of bad news the palace has struggled to contain. The king’s own annus horribilis, in which the royal narrative went utterly off the rails.

The year opened with dual hospitalizations: In January, Charles sought treatment for a prostate ailment, while Kate Middleton — now Princess Catherine — underwent abdominal surgery. In early February, Buckingham Palace announced that Charles had an unspecified form of cancer, an attempt to “prevent speculation” that raised more questions than it answered. Chemotherapy meant Charles would have to scale back his public duties for several months, a problem for a monarch who — as his late mother once put it — “must be seen to be believed.” Indeed, the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes reports that Charles undertook his recent trip to Australia mainly to prove to the world that “he isn’t dying,” which is probably not the tone he had hoped to set in the early years of his reign.

But at least he attempted a degree of transparency. When it came to Kate’s health, the decision-makers at Kensington Palace opted to keep things quiet, disclosing in January that the princess had returned from the hospital and would be recovering at home, in private, until Easter. The public would receive updates only when “there is significant new information to share,” the official message read.

That should have been a clue that something was seriously wrong. The palace prefers to keep royal health issues secret, and their issuing any kind of warning about Kate’s absence made their statement read more like a plea: Look, you’re not going to see Kate for a while, so don’t freak out, okay?

But freaking out is exactly what people did, and in spectacular fashion. Within a few weeks, the conspiracy theories were everywhere: Kate was hiding at home after a botched Brazilian butt lift. Kate did a Gone Girl over Prince William’s alleged affair with the Marchioness of Cholmondeley. Kate was in a medically induced coma, or Kate had been offed by her stepmother-in-law. Social-media users the world over were losing their minds, and every effort by the palace to assure the public Kate was alive — if not quite well — worked like water on a grease fire. The paparazzi pics of Kate riding shotgun in her mother’s SUV triggered allegations that the firm had brought in a body double. Skepticism ran so high that when TMZ published iPhone photos of Will and Kate at a Windsor farmer’s market, the outlet went so far as to run the metadata, too.

The frenzy hit its peak when Kensington Palace released a family photo for Mother’s Day claiming it had been taken by Prince WIlliam in 2024. Soon after the photo went online, news organizations and photo agencies began removing it from circulation on grounds that it had been manipulated to an unpublishable degree. There were too many misalignments, too many weird angles to trust the picture’s integrity, an explanation that spurred TikTok sleuths to get out their magnifying glasses. From the outfits to the haircuts to the children’s teeth, every detail of the photograph came under microscopic inspection, repurposed as evidence that something macabre was afoot at Kensington Palace. What were the royals trying to hide?

In an effort to calm everyone down, Kate — or someone pretending to be Kate; really, who could know? — tweeted an explanation that only made things worse. The princess had merely been playing around with photo editing, the tweet claimed, fueling speculation that Kate had been repurposed as a straw man in the cover-up of something more sinister. In the end, Kate silenced the noise by announcing that she was undergoing treatment for cancer, you assholes, and had hoped for peace and quiet while she and William figured out how to “explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them.”

The future queen delivered the news in a video: Seated on a park bench, her speech was stoic and measured, even though collective madness had basically strong-armed her into sharing a difficult and deeply personal piece of news before she was ready. That subtext triggered an immediate tone shift; an outpouring of sympathy and goodwill where suspicion and fantasies had ruled for weeks. This period of contrition lasted about as long as Kate’s chemo: Shortly after Kate announced in September that she was “cancer free,” a member of the royal rota reported that Kate maybe never have had cancer in the first place, a claim that kick-started the conspiracy cycle all over again.

While Kategate was in full swing, the princess’s estranged sister-in-law, Meghan Markle, returned to Instagram to share some personal news of her own. Meghan was starting a lifestyle company called American Riviera Orchard, and she was starting it with jam (the king’s thing first, by the way). Despite shipping strawberry preserves to a handful of her fellow celebs, Meghan hasn’t yet done much with the ARO domain, save for a creating a chaotic distraction from whatever was happening across the pond. What might have been more frustrating for her in-laws, however, was the couple’s conspicuously royal rebrand. In February, Meghan and Harry debuted a new website, which looked like a revival of Sussex Royal, the platform the queen obligated them to retire when they resigned as senior members of the family. At that time, Prince Harry purportedly wanted to be called Harry, “just” Harry, but now he and Meghan are back to Duke and Duchess. Despite having agreed not to position themselves as Crown surrogates, 2024 also saw H&M relaunch royal tours, reportedly leaving Charles apoplectic in the process.

As it turns out, there doesn’t seem to be much the king can do to rein in rogue family members. He has not, for example, managed to oust his younger brother Prince Andrew from the Royal Lodge, a defeat that “comprehensively humiliated” Charles, at least according to the Daily Beast. As a top boss, Charles appears less than effective at holding everyone together, much less in line.

Which isn’t entirely his fault: The king’s diagnosis has revealed fragility at the heart of the Firm, where a skeleton crew of senior royals has been working double-time to keep the lights on. The general stress of the year has taken its toll on the king’s deputies. Princess Anne, the hardest-working royal of all in terms of official appearances, was sidelined over the summer with a mystery concussion, having been kicked in the head by a horse (we think). Queen Camilla is only just getting back on her feet after a chest infection left her bedridden for weeks — a direct result of her “exhausting” “hamster wheel” of a job, her friends believe. As William has noted, it has been an absolutely “brutal” year for the entire family. Maybe you can empathize?