William and Not-So-Innocent Kate

I'm down with the lurg at the moment, but I can just about bring myself to comment briefly on the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton. He gave her Princess Diana's engagement ring. Bad move, and perhaps it would have seemed churlish to Kate to have said, "Very sweet of you, but no thanks, I'd like my own engagement ring. I don't want there to be 3 people in this marriage." (As Diana said about her marriage.)

As his Mum died while he was still young, no doubt William is seeking a mother figure, and that's OK because people bring all sorts of stuff to their marriages. Kate has Moon in Cancer so will be able to supply that need. What she doesn't need is to be carrying, through the ring, everything Diana stood for.

It is traditional to use the grandmother's, not the mother's, engagement ring, and you can see the sense in that, because it gives a sense of family and continuity in a much less loaded way.

Here's some of what I wrote 3 years ago when William and Kate had just split up (for 3 months, as it turned out):

People in the UK are divided about the monarchy, but perhaps less than they think they are, because the attachment to it runs deep. I’m in favour of the monarchy, not because I ‘believe’ in it, but because I think it takes some of the weight of projection off the Prime Minister. It seems to be part of human nature that we collectively assign semi-divine qualities to certain people and then worship them – and celebrities catch a lot of this, which many of them are only too happy to do – so the more we can take this off our political leaders so that they can get on with the job of running the country, the better. Though the USA broke with Britain and its monarchy 234 years ago, some of its roots are still here, and we can see that in the ongoing level of interest in Princess Diana – and even in ‘Fergie’, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, who managed to get her own TV show in the USA.

Prince William is 24 years old and currently in the army, with which the Royal family has strong links. Before that he was at university for 4 years, where in 2003 he began a relationship with Kate Middleton, that lasted until a few weeks ago. It seems to have been him that ended the relationship. She was always portrayed as this straightforward middle-class girl who just happened to have met up with William at university, and for the last year or two the media had been endlessly predicting an engagement.

About a month ago I read a magazine article about her background. It wasn’t a critical article, but I found it revealing. Her family are well-off and live in Berkshire, near London. They have a mail order business. It turns out that her younger sister has been going out with a ‘wealthy aristocrat’ and shares a flat with a son of the Duke of Northumberland and a son of the Duke of Roxburghe. The Middleton family are also applying to have a coat of arms. In this light, Kate’s involvement with Prince William doesn’t look so innocent. Nor does her decision to attend far off St Andrew’s University, which no one from England usually attends, but where Prince William just happened to be going. Her previous relationship also just happened to end at a point where William was single, and it was probably a case of “He chased her until she caught him.”

Not that any of this was probably very conscious in her, young as she was. Kate Middleton was born on 9 January 1982 (no birth time), and what stands out very strongly in the chart is Sun in Capricorn square to Saturn-Pluto and quite possibly making a t-square to Moon in Cancer. This woman thinks hierarchically through and through, a high social position is very important to her. And important to her family. She didn’t want to marry William, she wanted to marry a Prince, and she thought she’d landed one. Not that she would have seen it like that. She was also no doubt doing exactly what her family wanted and expected her to do, without anything needing to be said.

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Since university she seems to have fiddled around in London, having recently taken up a pseudo-job through family connections, but in reality waiting for her real goal to unfold: marriage to the Prince. Kate's chart also suggests the possibility of real achievement, rather than the mere pursuit of status, so you never know, this knock-back might change something for her.

Now 3 years later it turns out that they are engaged, I don't think that the power-seeking and status-seeking that is so clear in the chart will serve her well in the long term. It didn't serve Fergie well (Prince Andrew's ex), but she seems to have learnt something from it. The Royal Family is a particular tribe that, for better or for worse, is comfortable with what it is, and would not respond well to those who are there for 'aspirational' reasons. All the same, Kate will not yield now she is in there, and her chart suggests she will be the most powerful member of the Royal Family once she is Queen.

The word 'aspirational' has become a bit of a ghastly euphemism. By the way, the Navajo word for ambition means 'crazy about being rich.'