I hoped that this weekend would be full of fresh tea about Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge and the Marchioness of Cholmondeley. It didn’t really happen – Prince William must have done a lot of work behind the scenes to get British media outlets to shut down the speculation. To recap, for a few weeks there was some low-key speculation that Kate and the Marchioness (Rose Hanbury) were beefing about something and no one really knew what. When the Sun published a piece last weekend about Kate and Rose being “rural rivals,” the speculation grew. So much so that William ran to Richard Kay at the Daily Mail to shut it down and throw the Sussexes under the bus. A day later, a well-connected British food writer tweeted-and-deleted a confirmation that William and Rose had an affair.

Since then, there hasn’t been much. Tom Sykes at the Daily Beast wrote this odd piece about how Kate has managed to stay unknownable and mysterious and how this whole scandal is her first-ever juicy, shady storyline, because I guess some people will really buy that. Then last night, journalist/commentator Nicole Cliffe did a Twitter thread of speculation/editorializing on what she believes is really going down. Click below to read the full thread:

Would it be helpful for me to explain the current Royal scandal w a great deal of personal editorializing?

— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) March 30, 2019

I’ll summarize: Cliffe believes that Rose and William did have an affair and that Rose did gossip about it to other Turnip Toffs, because even though discretion is absolutely the rule with these people, sometimes rules are broken (it would explain the low-key feeling that the story had been widely rumored in aristo circles for a while too). Cliffe believes that Kate really was trying to phase out Rose because Kate learned of the affair. Cliffe then speculates that the affair was perhaps at the heart of the whole Sussex-Cambridge beef to begin with, that Harry and Meghan knew of William’s affair and that Harry and William fell out because of the affair, etc. It’s not a perfect theory, as I don’t believe Harry would really feel that strongly about William’s infidelities, but I definitely think that Cliffe makes some good points. And hey, at this point, she’s one of the few journalists actually voicing these theories.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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