Now, safe in the sanctuary of their Norfolk home, Catherine, William and the children can look forward to a peaceful period of rest and recovery.
The storm of publicity has passed and now, as a family, they will take some time to focus on Catherine’s recovery.
Just as important as the princess’s physical improvement is William’s constant presence at her side, a vital contribution on her path back to full health.
How reassuring and how different from the story of another Princess of Wales and another life-threatening illness.
A portrait of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII
The Prince of Wales and his bride, Princess Alexandra of Denmark, just after their wedding, posing with Queen Victoria.
The Prince of Wales in his uniform as a colonel of the 10th Hussars.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 1841 – 1910, seen here as a student at Oxford
Prince Bertie – the future King Edward VII – and his wife Alexandra suffered a similar shock when the princess suddenly fell ill when she was about to give birth to their third child and was diagnosed with rheumatic fever.
Within hours his condition had worsened to a crisis.
Unlike Prince William, Prince Bertie paid little attention to his wife’s despair. Returning home from a trip to Russia, he discovered her in pain and feverish, but that didn’t stop her from going to a race and a couple of dinners in Windsor.
Alexandra stayed at Marlborough House, near Buckingham Palace, and as her situation worsened, an urgent telegram was sent to Windsor calling Bertie back to London.
He did not answer. Two more telegrams were sent, increasingly urgent, but he still took his time returning to the capital; At that point it was clear that the princess was very seriously ill, potentially at a clinical stage of death.
“He had terrible pains in his leg and hip, and remained for days in the most pitiable state,” wrote biographer Christopher Hibbert.
‘The Prince of Wales was not worried (although) his wife could not eat because her mouth was very swollen and she could not sleep without heavy doses of drugs.
“She turned imploringly for comfort to (her lady-in-waiting) Lady Macclesfield, who cried to see her crying so piteously in terrible pain.”
However, the prince downplayed all this and treated his wife’s complaint as nothing more than a shudder.
“Most nights he would go out and if he sat with her he would get bored and restless,” Hibbert continued.
‘Irritated by Lady Macclesfield’s anxiety, Bertie left the house for a club. Even when he told his wife that he would be back at a certain time, he was always late.’
The princess, refusing to take her sleeping pill until he came to say goodnight, sometimes had to wait until three in the morning for the prince to return home.
Alexandra’s illness lasted for months but the prince’s negligent attitude did not improve.
He went out most nights in the company of women (the “notorious” palace courtier Sir William Knollys called them) and no one could stop him.
Eventually word spread and people began gossiping about Bertie’s abandonment of his wife and his inappropriate behavior: he was publicly seen “snoozing with Lady Filmer” and ostentatiously taking young actresses to dinner before sleeping with them.
In fact, his notoriously rampant promiscuity may have been the cause of his wife’s tragic illness in the first place.
Eminent rheumatologist Dr. Robert Pinals argued in a 2016 academic journal that the princess’s condition deteriorated dangerously because doctors were wrong: Alexandra was not suffering from rheumatic fever but “gonococcal arthritis (a sexually transmitted disease)” and that the infection It was transmitted to her. by her husband.’
It took almost six months for the princess to recover enough to greet her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, from a wheelchair. The matriarch later wrote that Alexandra “looked lovely” that day, but altered.
His youthful optimism had taken a severe blow and his leg was so stiff that he would walk the rest of his life with a pronounced limp.
Such is the fashion that some high-born ladies found the ‘flabby Alexandra’ so attractive that they adopted it themselves.
His mild deafness now deteriorated into something much worse, and as the years went by it would become more and more profound until his entire social life had to be rebuilt because of it.
As time went on, she drifted away from life at court: “her deafness became progressively worse due to her illness and sometimes made her seem more stupid and less interesting than she really was,” Hibbert wrote, “especially when trying to hide it a continuous flow of conversations that did not allow comments or responses.
After the onset of middle age, the royal couple, now King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, spent more and more time apart.
The king’s mistress, Alice Keppel, great-great-grandmother of Queen Camilla, largely took her place, being labeled by courtiers as “The Favourite”.
Alexandra as Princess of Wales, seated, with her daughters Victoria, Maude and Louise
An engraving of the young Prince of Wales in uniform, first published in 1859.
King Edward VII photographed in full coronation robes, after being crowned on 9 August 1902.
Alexandra’s friend, the Countess of Antrim, opined that if Alexandra had loved her husband as much as he loved her, he would have been more faithful.
But with his illness, the marriage had taken a turn and there was no turning back.
When the wandering Eduardo died in 1910, Alexandra had the last word: “Now at least I know where he is.”
The same will never be said of the devout Catherine and William.