When it comes to encapsulating this past year for the Royal Family, you might reach for adjectives like “shocking,” “unprecedented” or even just plain “weird,” to sum up the utter strangeness of a year that’s felt, at times, like a fever dream scripted by a group of soap opera writers locked in a room until they can up with the twist to end all twists.
Or, you could go with something that speaks to the real human toll behind the headline-making drama, like Prince William recently did, leaning into the visceral awfulness of it all with “brutal,” “dreadful,” and “the hardest year in my life.” King Charles, for his part, began his Christmas Day speech with a meditation on suffering — mental and physical, personal and geopolitical — that underscored the Nativity story’s message of “calling us to bring light where there is darkness.” His daughter-in-law, Kate Middleton, just a few weeks earlier, dedicated her annual carol service to “the importance of love and empathy,” penning a letter that exhorted us all to “shine for each other. Because in times of joy and sadness, we are all each other’s light.”
Sadness, suffering, a plea for kindness: It’s hardly the vocabulary choice of a family who’s had a banner year. In fact, it’s been the sort of wild, bewildering, gasp-worthy year in the House of Windsor that, were it still in production, would probably take “The Crown” about three seasons to cover. And that’s assuming they don’t do entire episodes around, say, the backstory behind Prince Harry popping up at the Grey Cup, or Prince William and his two eldest taking selfies with Taylor Swift backstage at her Eras Tour concert in London.
And while there are at least a handful of PhD theses to be written on the events of March alone, we’ve whittled down the five royal moments from 2024 that defined a year royal watchers won’t soon forget — and, which, we think, will shape the future of this monarchy in a profound way.
1. Kate Middleton and King Charles dropped health bombshells on the same day
On Jan. 17, Kensington Palace announced that the Princess of Wales had had “abdominal surgery” the previous day, and that while it was “successful,” she’d been in hospital for about two weeks and then out of commission until Easter. The ink was hardly dry on this shocking news when Buckingham Palace quickly followed with health news of its own: The King would go into hospital for a “corrective procedure” to treat a “benign prostate condition.” In the understatement of the century, the BBC called this double royal health drop “unusual.” If only they’d known the gravity that was to come …
2. The internet went looking for “missing” Kate Middleton
In hindsight, it was the perfect toxic brew in which conspiracies theories grow: The world’s most famous woman, suddenly struck down by a mystery condition, utterly absent from public view for months. Sensible considerations like, say, her team being quite clear that she would be away from public duties for a while, and she’s a human being entitled to deal with whatever she’s dealing with in her own time and way did not stand a chance against the tsunami of viral speculation that kept the rumour mill whirring for the first three months of the year. The Kate Middleton Is Missing phenomenon fed on the darkest, cruelest impulses of the internet’s imagination — it’s a very dark place when a theory that the royals had multiple clones of Kate waiting in the wings for just such a moment isn’t the worst thing you might stumble across — and generated a stream of unsubstantiated rumours that were the stuff of a libel lawyer’s dream.
The worst (and most long-lasting) part of it all? This moment of collective madness seems to have fundamentally shifted something in how the Royal Family is viewed, kicking the last brick out of whatever edifice of Ye Olde deference and intrinsic trust they may have had, particularly with Millenials and Gen Z. Case in point? While it broke the fever dream of speculation, the news that Kate was, in fact, being treated for cancer, has not entirely put an end to the speculation about what is “really” going on.
3. Kate admitted to altering an official portrait as news agencies pulled the image
And while the propensity of algorithms to reward sensational content and human appetite for juicy gossip played a role in the Where Is Kate debacle, you also can’t dismiss the fact that the royals played a part in exacerbating the situation. Case in point: The Mother’s Day photo circus. On its surface, this was a classic, benign royal image: Kate Middleton, seemingly recovering well after her surgery, surrounded by her three children, the picture taken by her husband. Dig a little into the Photoshop layers, however, and it was dry tinder to fuel the already blazing speculation that the Royal Family was concealing something from the public.
Released in what seems like an attempt to allay our fears, this picture was quickly torn apart by internet sleuths — Charlotte’s disappearing sleeve, Louis’s missing finger, weird lines on George’s sweater, Kate’s zipper to nowhere — and quickly led to multiple news organizations pulling the image because it appeared to have been “manipulated.” Within 24 hours, Kate seemingly fessed up on social media, writing: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
4. Meghan Markle teased a product line that, almost a year later, has yet to actually launch
As business moves go, it’s a bit of a headscratcher: Tease a new venture by soft-launching on Instagram — complete with videos that seem to hint at much more to come — build the hype further by seeding product with influencers who give it rave reviews and then … nothing. For months.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happened with Meghan Markle’s lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard. In March, it was “announced” via a chopped-up series of images on Instagram that, put together, makeup the brand’s name and logo embroidered on linen. Shortly thereafter, we got a few Stories — a glimpse of a kitchen, the garden of a sumptuous house, a woman in a gown — set to “I Wish You Love.” News that Meghan Markle was launching a brand hardly needed further buzz, but they seemed keen to generate it even further when, a few months later, she sent out what seemed to be samples of the first product they were launching — jam — to some famous pals, like Chrissy Teigen and Abigail Spencer.
And while we’ve had some related news since, including word of a lifestyle show Meghan is making for Netflix, and possible difficulties around trademarking the brand name, that’s it — so far — for American Riviera Orchard, a full nine months after it was soft-but-actually-not-launched.
5. Prince Andrew is embroiled in a spy scandal
Given his previous track record, you wouldn’t be that clairvoyant if you’d predicted that Prince Andrew might cause a bit of bother for his brother in any given calendar year. What you might not have had on your bingo card, however, is that Prince Andrew’s latest scandal would involve an alleged Chinese spy. But here we are, with Andrew essentially disinvited from Royal Christmas after it emerged that the U.K.’s national security court had banned an alleged spy from China who had “developed an unusual degree of trust” with the Duke of York, and, in fact, allegedly planned to “leverage” the influence of his alleged close confidant. The alleged spy in question had been banned from the United Kingdom while Andrew, for all intents and purposes, appears equally banished from his brother’s court, too.
