Think #kategate rumours are shocking? The past is worse than the imagined future

This past week, social media has been a wild west of rumours about Kate Middleton, whose absence from public life since surgery in January has raised all manner of speculation. Whatever the truth, it can’t be more bizarre than the past scandals of England’s (and, therefore, Australia’s) royals.

The original picture-editing scandal

Not amateur photographer Kate playing with Photoshop, but a true professional at work. Way back in 1539, leading portraitist Hans Holbein lands the gig of readying Anne of Cleves for 16th-century Tinder-for-Royals. Hans does the job a bit too well. Looking for wife number four, Henry VIII swipes right.

Then comes date night. The touch-up is exposed! “There is nothing fair about her,” complains the already obese 48-year-old Henry. Lucky Anne. She gets paid off with a divorce and a castle of her own. Her successor, Catherine Howard, ends up on the chopping block.

The Stuarts: Too many lovers, not enough heirs

The 17th century of more or less politically acceptable Scottish Stuart kings (James, Charles, Charles, James) slowly ran out of puff due to their apparent preferences for male friendship (streaming to you soon), mistresses as baby-mothers and Catholicism. Did the second James try to rescue the line by smuggling an outsider Catholic child into the royal success, as the political chant as nursery rhyme, “Rock-a-Bye Baby”, suggests? (Couldn’t happen now, could it?)

It’s with the collapse of the Stuarts that the Cholmondeleys first became chummy with the royals, fleet-footedly swapping sides to rise from obscure Irish peers to English barons, then earls in a generation, and lofty Marquesses one hundred years later.

The Four Georges — and a lost Fred

The 18th century brought the German Hanovers — and the foundations of modern gossip in the early London papers, captured by the godfather of celebrity journalism (and coiner of its descript “Vanity Fair”) William Makepeace Thackeray in The Four Georges.

The first George, he tells us, left his wife imprisoned for adultery in Germany, bringing instead his two mistresses (cruelly dubbed at a glance by London gossips as the Elephant and the Maypole). Royal decree made them the more stately Duchess of Kendal and Countess of Darlington.

The second George flips the practice: leaves his oh-too-religious wife in England for his mistresses out of journalistic sight in Hanover. He continued, too, the all-too-common tension between long-sitting monarchs and their over-thrusting heirs. Bad luck for his Prince of Wales, Frederick. He’s the last (*cough, so far) not to reach the throne, dying before his father.

“What had he done,” Thackeray leaves us to ponder, “that he was so loathed by George II and never mentioned by [his son] George III?” He responds with a doggerel from the time: “Fred… was alive, and is dead / There’s no more to be said.”

Princes: Dregs of their dull race

“An old, mad, blind and dying king”. That’s Shelley’s England in 1819 — and, by extension, the colony of New South Wales — with a dying George III, and the royal future laying with his five princes (“dregs … mud from a muddy spring” spits Shelley).

Trust a journalist: in her Queen Victoria biography, Julia Baird brings her news eye to the story, for example, describing Prince Ernest (who got the consolation prize of Hanover where the “no stinky girls allowed” Salic law applied) as “the subject of great fear and gossip due to his scarred face and reams of unproved rumours that he had bedded his sister, sexually harassed nuns and murdered a valet”. He sounds nice.

But the real problem, as Golda Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte tells it in Netflix’s latest Bridgerton spin-off, was too many bastards, not enough eligible heirs. The most fecund was the future William IV, with 10 children with his unrecognised wife. But none of the children with his official wife, Adelaide (yes, South Australia’s Adelaide) survived infancy. Oh, well. At least he got to be king long enough to make his eldest bastard an earl in 1831.

In real life, as in the Netflix show, the death of the only legitimate grand-child (also Charlotte) in 1817, sparked a breeding race among the princes. Too late. After two of the aging princes became kings as George IV and William IV (with a too-early death depriving us, again, of a King Fred, in between), it was left to women to clean up, with Victoria, daughter of the fourth prince, ending up on the throne.

The coming of libel — and an establishment media

With the new queen, the political class had enough of the rising power of a scandalous Grub Street. They codified the old common law of libel, which, matched with a yearning for emerging press barons to become, well, real barons, kept a lid on reporting the scandals of the aristocracy.

Stick and carrot. The affairs of Victoria’s Prince of Wales — the later Edward VII — were largely unreported. It’s a forgivingly small world in the English ruling class: his long-time mistress, Alice Keppel, is the great-grandmother of Queen Camilla.

Edward’s son, George V, was less lucky. Belgian-born Edward Mylius reported in a Paris-based newspaper The Liberator, that the now-king — married to his acceptably aristocratic cousin, Mary of Teck — had, while still a spare to his elder brother, been earlier married in Malta with children, threatening the accepted line of succession. Unlucky Mylius, too. Although the report was published in France, he was prosecuted for criminal libel in England and jailed for a year. (Watch out Stephen Colbert!)

And with that, reporting of royal scandals largely evaporated for over half a century — gently sliding past the unserious threat of Edward VIII marrying a divorcee (and the more serious threat of his taste for Nazis). It was smoothed out too, by the apparent normalcy of the personal lives of George VI and his daughter Elizabeth II.

Now, with social media and smartphones following on from paparazzi and celebrity tabloids media, social and legal restraints have equally lost their hold. Looks like the old firm that is the royal family are falling back on the weakest of tools — high walls and deep image manipulation.