Rose Hanbury Would Like to Be Excluded From This Narrative

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 19, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 19, 2024 |

The Kate Middleton conspiracies have only gotten more feverish since I last wrote about them only a few days ago. Such is the inevitable result of a fevered online discourse combined with a secretive organization failing at basic PR. While Kate was seen out and about in a fuzzy video sent to TMZ yesterday, it’s done nothing to quash the mutated tinhat creature that has sprung up from the well-manicured lawns of Kensington Palace. Sure, some people are having fun in an obviously ludicrous manner with this story, but it’s also been extremely weird to see various websites, commentators, and seemingly sensible people fall into a rabbit hole of QAnon-esque rhetoric that is one step away from saying that Kate is a lizard person.

The drama also led to renewed interest in Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chumley’ and yes, this still irritates me.) She’s an aristocratic lady and apparent friend of William and Kate, and for several years now, she’s been the focus of a rumour that she was in the midst of an affair with Willy. We wrote about those rumours when they first set Twitter ablaze back in 2019, and they’ve only heated up as people seek even more evidently ludicrous explanations for why a woman who underwent major surgery would not be in the public eye right now.

Well, Hanbury has finally gotten sick of the gossip and released a terse statement via her lawyers to Business Insider: ‘The rumours are completely false.’

These rumours have been around for a while, but then Stephen Colbert talked about them on his show and suddenly the American press went into overdrive. The British press mostly avoided it for various reasons relating to their relationship with the royals and also the toughness of libel laws, but the internet follows no such doctrine. I imagine if I were in her position I would want to say something too. Because, as I said before, there is no hard evidence that an affair has taken place, and any publication claiming otherwise is lying.

Of course, it won’t quash any of the hysteria. If she were shagging Wills, she wouldn’t tell the press anyway. How gauche. But as with all conspiracies, the more someone tries to refute it, the more those oppositions become ‘evidence’, regardless of what is said or shown. We’re already seeing a lot of websites of varying levels of integrity roll around in the mud of misogyny and moon logic of this story for clicks and to further their own ideas about Kate (again, being a sexist weirdo towards someone is not an act of anti-monarchism, it’s just lazy bigotry. Try harder.)

To add more fuel to the fire, Getty Images, one of the big photo agencies, flagged an image shared by the royal family as ‘digitally enhanced at source.’ The August 2022 image of the late Queen with several of her grandkids and great-grandkids was called out for its various discrepancies, which suggested that some of the kids may have been added to the picture after it was taken.

If anything tangible has come out of this entire story, it’s the realization that the royals will never again be taken at face value by major journalistic agencies. After the Associated Press issued a kill notice on Kate’s doctored Mother’s Day image, it brought a level of scrutiny to their output that they’d previously never faced. That will do more damage to them in the long-term than a bunch of bored Tweeters with corkboards and red string.

Of course, there’s also another way to ensure that nobody faces this kind of unfair scrutiny and conspiracism: Abolish the monarchy!