March 2025 marks the one-year anniversary of “Kate-Gate,” the social media-fueled frenzy that enveloped Catherine, the Princess of Wales, following her poorly timed dalliance with Photoshop amid a much larger personal crisis. For weeks prior, royal watchers, celebrity gossips, and other observers had whispered about the January 2024 announcement that the princess would be pausing her public engagements while recovering from abdominal surgery. A convergence of ‘suspicious’ events, most notably Prince William’s absence at a memorial service for his godfather, stoked fears that something was amiss. Social media sleuths, gossip blogs, and the British tabloids began speculating about the nature of the princess’s illness and offered alternative explanations for her withdrawal from public life; these ranged from the straightforward – the princess was sicker than Kensington Palace let on – to the more extreme – Kate was divorcing Will because he had cheated on her – to the ridiculous – the princess was recovering from a Brazilian butt lift.
Though some explanations veered into conspiracy theory territory, most were relatively tame, if undeniably rude in their disregard of the princess’s request for privacy. Journalist Linda Holmes describes such rumours as “recreational conjecture” rather than conspiracy theories, arguing that “they are flights of fancy done for entertainment and social interaction.” Whereas conspiracy theories have a more ominous association, recreational conjecture, for Holmes, is a relatively harmless exercise in collective imagination. “It is impossible to stop recreational conjecture in its tracks,” she writes. “It is possible, however, not to spur it on.”
This is not what happened. Departing from the royal family’s unofficial motto of “never complain, never explain,” the Princess took matters into her own hands, perhaps prompted by her husband or the Kensington Palace PR team. On March 10, Mother’s Day in the UK, she posted to Instagram a photo of herself with her three children and a message thanking her followers for their support. But by this point even the more casual observer had started to treat Palace communications with a heightened degree of skepticism. What followed was a global exercise in forensic photo analysis, as Internet sleuths identified multiple instances of editing/tampering, and a subsequent “kill notification” from the Associated Press, which removed the photo from its outlets and raised serious concerns about the trustworthiness of Kensington Palace.
Though the princess quickly admitted to and apologized for her Photoshop gaff (the apology alone was unprecedented), the conspiracy theorizing reached new levels of intensity – leaping from social media to late night television and journalistic magazines. Images proliferated across the mediascape from one form to another, prompted by increasingly urgent questions: What was happening to the princess? Who were the royals trying to deceive? Photos of the princess in the back of a car or a video of her strolling with Prince William through a farmer’s market in Windsor were treated as yet further deception, provoking further rounds of debate and amateur diagnostics claiming evidence of body doubles and photo manipulation. It wasn’t until the Princess finally posted a video in which she disclosed her cancer diagnosis that the rumour mill finally slowed, and gossips everywhere hung their heads in shame.
I’ll admit it: I was one of those gossips. Though I didn’t participate in the proliferation of social media images and break-down analyses, I did consume them rather eagerly. Yet my interest in the swirling media storm around the Princess of Wales was also academic. As I followed the story with a mix of curiosity, concern, and something that can only be described as schadenfreude (like many Canadians, I have a complicated relationship with the British royals), I was reminded of the eighteenth-century satirical prints I had pored over a month before at the Library of Congress. I noticed curious similarities in the oppositional performances that surrounded Princess Catherine and those that had surrounded Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, in the 1760s. By “oppositional performance,” I refer to performances (theatrical and otherwise) that question or challenge the authority of the reigning monarch and/or other royals or leading government officials. In the 1760s, Princess Augusta became the main character in an aggressive print and performance campaign designed to stoke conspiracy theories about her influence over her son, the newly crowned George III, and the nature of her relationship with the king’s former tutor and close confidante, John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute (see figs. 2-4).
When Bute became Britain’s first Scottish-born Prime Minister in 1762, the anti-Augusta campaign intensified. Publishers, artists, playwrights, journalists, and politicians swapped strategies for attacking the princess and her rumored lover; their strategies included reducing the princess and earl to emblems (a petticoat and boot, respectively), which could be remixed and repeatedly ad nauseum across satirical prints; characterizing the princess and earl as street performers in theatrical settings that foregrounded their proclivity for lying and deception; and deploying theatrical techniques, most notably the spectacular visual effects of transparencies, to ‘reveal’ the princess’s secret intentions.
These mid-eighteenth century prints also bear many of the hallmarks of twenty-first century memes in their use of emblems that could be quickly and easily reproduced by anonymous creators. Underlying the anger at Augusta and Bute were deep anxieties about the future of Britain and its Empire, including treaty negotiations for the end of the Seven Years’ War and concern that Bute’s policies were advancing his Scottish friends and associates at the expense of the English. Politicians like John Wilkes positioned themselves as friends to Liberty and as enemies to the corruption that Augusta and Bute exemplified.
I recognized the toxic brew of anger, misogyny, and mistrust that bubbled beneath the surface of the anti-Augusta campaign because it was not dissimilar from the mix of emotions evoked by “Kate-Gate.” In my article for Theatre Journal, “Princess Conspiracies: On Secrecy, Transparency, and Repertoires of Oppositional Performance," I pair the stories of the two Princesses of Wales to identify similarities in the repertoires of oppositional performance that raised doubts about their motives and truth-telling capabilities. I call attention to the way both princesses deploy/ed “soft power” tactics, playing into tropes of maternal femininity to assert influence, and examine what happened when these tactics were exposed as yet another form of performance during periods of heightened political anxiety.
Indeed, while I find Holmes’s definition of “recreational conjecture” useful for thinking about what distinguishes certain forms of gossip from more malicious conspiracy theorizing, I’m not convinced that all who participated in “Kate-Gate” were motivated by a desire for “entertainment and social interaction.” The nastiness of the rumors, the eagerness with which so many people joined in, and the willingness to believe the royals capable of lying and deception speak to a larger crisis of faith in the British monarchy as an institution. By 2024, this mistrust had been brewing for years. For many people throughout the world, especially those in Commonwealth countries – i.e. former colonies that maintain a formal tie to the United Kingdom - the British royals represent an antiquated institution. Recall the protests and calls for reparations that greeted Prince William and Princess Catherine on their visit to the Caribbean in 2022. Photographs of the royal couple participating in a military parade fully dressed in white and another of Kate shaking the hands of children separated by a wire fence alerted viewers to the ongoing deployment of soft power tactics to legitimize Britain’s history of colonial violence, slavery, and oppression. So, too, the 2023 publication of Prince Harry’s Spare, delivered juicy access to palace intrigue and the machinations of the royal PR teams, offering evidence of corruption within. Thus, while some people may have viewed the circulation of “Kate-Gate” social media memes and related rumours as a form of entertainment, for others the opportunity to poke fun at the princess and engage in deep analysis of her Photoshop fail was no laughing matter. The detailed image “breakdowns” and joking monologues that played out over TikTok and late-night television tapped into much older modes of “oppositional performance,” further eroding trust in the British monarchy.
In the end the only act capable of interrupting the “Kate-Gate” narrative was a rare performance of vulnerability by the princess herself. In disclosing the terrible truth of her cancer diagnosis, the princess cast herself – and thus the royal family – in a new light, directing attention away from difficult questions about the monarchy towards a personal crisis that was all too familiar to millions around the world. In that moment, Princess Catherine became an everywoman. Her pain was our pain. This was soft power at work, and more than that, it was a stirring performance of a woman rewriting her own story. Whether she continues to assert such power in the face of ongoing scrutiny remains to be seen; for now, though, the Princess of Wales seems to have regained the upper hand.
Works Cited
Holmes, Linda. “What the royal family doesn’t understand about PR in 2024,” NPR.org, March 12, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238045755/kate-middleton-photo