‘The Crown’: The True College Romances of Kate and William | Vanity Fair

By Julie Miller

Prince William comes of age in The Crown’s final episodes, making him the target of screaming women, more press, and his first romantic storyline. In “Alma Mater,” the seventh episode of season six, creator Peter Morgan reimagines William’s 2001 enrollment at St. Andrews, and the women who flooded the small coastal Scottish town because of it. In real life, the school saw a 44% uptick in applications—including paperwork from one candidate who reportedly spiked her own university plans upon hearing William’s: Kate Middleton.

But before William falls for Kate on the series, The Crown pairs the freshman prince with a pigtailed aristocrat and aspiring actor named Lola Airdale-Cavendish-Kincaid. (“From a family so posh they had to name it thrice,” a character tells Kate.) Though William dated plenty of titled women in real life—“His social circle was replete with the same old stuffy titles from the Highgrove set whose parents had bored Diana,” wrote former Vanity Fair editor in chief Tina Brown in The Palace Papers—Lola Airdale-Cavendish-Kincaid is a fictional creation.

Before William got to college, he was linked to Davina Duckworth-Chad, whose mother is second cousins with Princess Diana; Rose Farquhar, a childhood friend of William’s and the only one of the prince’s exes to have appeared on The Voice; Arabella Musgrave, whose father managed the Cirencester Park Polo Club; and Jecca Craig, whom William met during his gap year while staying at her family’s 55,000-acre African game preserve. At St. Andrews, he “fleetingly” dated a blonde beauty named Olivia Hunt before embarking on a relationship with a fellow student named Carley Massy-Birch.

Like the fictional Crown girlfriend, Massy-Birch was an aspiring actress who briefly went out with the prince at St. Andrews during his freshman year. In real life, the two dated for about seven weeks. On The Crown, William and Lola date long enough for her to erupt in jealousy when she spots William and Kate together at the library.

After the relationship ended, Massy-Birch opened up about the romance to VF royal correspondent Katie Nicholl: “William was in the year below, and we just happened to meet through the general St. Andrews mêlée. It’s such a small place that it was impossible not to bump into William…. It was very much a university thing, just a regular university romance.” In a feature for this very magazine, Nicholl continued:

Carley was also a country girl, which appealed to William—he had been brought up in the Gloucestershire countryside. “I’m a real country bumpkin,” Carley told me. “I think that was why we had a connection.”…They discussed plays and literature, and Carley told William all about her home life in Devon. Other evenings they would enjoy pints of cider at the Castle pub, on North Street, and play board games or enjoy dinner parties with their friends…. Although Kate had been voted the prettiest girl at St. Salvator’s, Carley’s derrière was voted the best at St. Andrews.

“We would joke that Carley’s bottom had been sculpted by the gods,” recalled one of her friends. “William was very taken with her, which was completely understandable. Unlike the hordes of made-up, pashmina-clad undergraduates who devoted their time to stalking William, Carley was happy to stay in and cook for him, and their romance was so beneath the radar it was reported only years after they had both graduated.