Diksha Sundriyal
The royal romance of Prince William and Kate Middleton becomes the center of attention in the second half of the final season of Netflix’s ‘The Crown.’ The show doesn’t explore the entire length of their relationship to date but rather constrains itself to the early years of William and Kate’s friendship and their burgeoning romance. While all of this takes place after the death of Princess Diana, there is one scene that shows Diana and Kate in the same frame. Does this mean that they met each other in real life?
Diana and Kate’s Meeting in The Crown is Fictional
In the Netflix series, Diana and Kate come face to face on the street where the princess and her son, William, are shown selling copies of ‘The Big Issue’ and Kate buys one. Following this, Diana asks the girl her name and tells William to thank Kate for being generous. In this brief moment, Kate and William catch each other’s eye, but they don’t see each other again until years later, which is when their real story begins.
In real life, Diana and William never sold ‘The Big Issue’ together on the streets. Both of them have been connected with the magazine and the cause of homelessness. William has sold the magazine’s issues, but that was after the death of his mother. While the princess didn’t sell the copies herself, she did support the magazine by buying it regularly. According to a vendor, she would go to Beauchamp Place to buy it. The mother-son duo never sold the zine together, but they did visit a homeless shelter together when William was just 11.
Considering all this, it’s clear that the scene in the show is made up by the writers, though they did use real-life tidbits to craft the scene and make it memorable for the audience. So, in the show, Kate gets to meet her future mother-in-law, but just like the scene, the meeting never happened in real life. The now-Princess of Wales has mentioned several times that she never got to meet Princess Diana, but she would have loved to.
Both William and Kate have wished that Diana got to meet her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren and believe that she would have been a great grandmother. Kate has called Diana “an inspirational woman to look up to,” while William expressed his sadness over the fact that his mother would never get to know his family, and neither will they know her.
While Kate might not have gotten to meet Princess Diana, she has been connected to the late Princess in several ways. For one, Kate now holds the same title that Diana did when she married then-Prince Charles. Kate has also inherited several of Diana’s jewelry and has worn it over the years. When William proposed to Kate, he did it with the same sapphire ring Charles used to ask for Diana’s hand in marriage. Kate has been seen wearing the ring on several occasions.
Kate has also been seen wearing several other of Diana’s favorite jewels like the Diamond and South Sea Pearl Earrings, the Double-Drop Sapphire and Diamond Earrings, the Four-String Pearl Choker, the Three Stand Pearl Bracelet, and the Collingwood Pearl Earrings, along with the Lover’s Knot tiara that was given to Diana as a wedding gift by her mother-in-law. The tiara was returned after Charles and Diana’s divorce.
While the first meeting between William and Kate might not have happened in the presence of Princess Diana, it did, reportedly happen while she was alive. According to Tina Brown’s words in ‘The Palace Papers,’ Kate and William crossed paths when he was 9. He’d come to play a hockey match, and Kate got a glimpse of him. It was also claimed that in her teen years, Kate was completely smitten with William and his photos on her walls. While the prince has jokingly called it true, Kate has denied these allegations and said that she had the Levi guys on her wall, not her future husband.
Considering all this, it looks like ‘The Crown’ wanted to create a special moment for Diana, William, and Kate by putting them in the same spot and making their wish come true, in a way. So, the writers took separate anecdotes and morphed them into one scene that would not only serve as a meet-cute for William and Kate but also as the meeting between Diana and Kate, which never happened.
Read More: Did William and Kate Live Together Before Marriage?
