In all our anticipation of The Crown’s Kate Middleton, we did not expect that she would have a scene-stealing family member. (And if we had, we would have bet on Pippa.) But in the season six episodes “Alma Mater” and “Hope Street,” the Crown creator Peter Morgan brings our focus to Kate’s mother, Carole, the stewardess turned entrepreneur who set her sights on William Wales as a love match for her eldest daughter.

Portrayed by Tony-nominated actor Eve Best (Nurse Jackie, House of the Dragon), Carole pushes Prince William as a love interest for her daughter (Meg Bellamy) in a storyline vaguely reminiscent of the recent Mohamed Al Fayed arc, which involved the billionaire steering his son Dodi into a  romance with Princess Diana. Unlike Al Fayed, though, the character of Carole has a gentler touch as a self-appointed matchmaker, offering Kate words of empowerment (“Never think there’s anything in this world you’re not good enough for”), strategy (“Does he know you’re back on the market? Find a way of letting him know”), and styling tips for seduction (“You want to show off those legs”).

The depiction suggests, in the most elegantly-acted way possible, that Carole masterminded her daughter’s romantic relationship with Prince William.  

“I thought you’d thank me,” The Crown’s Carole shrugs after Kate accuses her of meddling. In the show’s reimagining, Kate calls Carole out for trying to puppeteer her into a relationship with the royal. Then she rattles off a list of Carole’s biggest prince-bagging plays:

“I was all set to go to Edinburgh University straight out of school with all of my friends. Then you suggested I change it to St. Andrews after a gap year. With none of my friends. That was no coincidence…. Was it a coincidence you encouraged me to sign up for the art school in Florence where William was expected to go? And then to the expedition in Chile as well. Where he went…. Once you had the idea fixed in your head, you never stopped.”

Is it possibly true that Kate—a future queen who fashions herself a strong, sporty female—really rerouted her life to pursue a prince? The Crown’s head of research, Annie Sulzberger, says her team asked the same question.

“It was hard,” Sulzberger says. “My team is entirely women. We didn’t want the research to add up to, ‘Wow. She really did leave Edinburgh and go on a gap year and reapply to St. Andrew’s because of this new student [William] who was matriculating that year. We tried our darnedest to find other things that would’ve impacted her decision-making.”

What her team found, though, is that Edinburgh seemed to be the better school for Kate and a more logical choice for every reason. 

“Edinburgh had the better art history program,” Sulzberger tells us. “Edinburgh was a better school. All of her friends were going to Edinburgh. She had never talked about doing a deferment—a year off. So it was a little disheartening, actually, to come to the conclusion that a lot of the media had come to, which, in this case, we felt was accurate.”

Vanity Fair’s Katie Nicholl previously reported the same thing in her book Kate: The Future Queen. “It was a bold move and very risky, and rather out of character for Kate,” Nicholl writes. “There was no guarantee that she would get a place in the history of art program at St. Andrews, which was oversubscribed now that William had confirmed his place.” Author and former Vanity Fair editor in chief Tina Brown adds in The Palace Papers, “It was not Kate’s style to blow off something she had worked so hard to achieve, then blithely take a gap year and reapply to somewhere the exact opposite in ambiance. Carole was the chancer in the family, not Kate.”

Brown gives Carole ample credit for coaxing Kate’s royal marriage in The Palace Papers, writing, “It is unlikely Kate would be where she is today without her mother’s canny help in negotiating a royal romance.” Brown explains:

“Carole…is acknowledged by all as the dynamo in the family. She is the daughter of a sales assistant and a builder-decorator who met Michael [Middleton] when he worked as a member of the ground staff at British European Airways and she was an air stewardess. She married up, and was a hard worker…. Her origins are scrappy working-class, a family of strivers…. [Carole] inherited her drive from her socially ambitious mother, Dorothy “Dot” Goldsmith, aka “The Duchess,” who, according to a snarky relative, “wanted to be the top brick in the chimney.”…

Carole Middleton is usually characterized as a cross between Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet and the sitcom social climber Hyacinth Bucket, who answers the phone, “The Bouquet residence.” Neither model is right. Carole has considerable strategic flair. Whenever Kate was bloodied in the ring [during her courtship with William], she retreated to [the family home in] Bucklebury, where Coach Carole would dress her wounds, advise her on moves, and urge her to keep her eyes on the prize. Carole’s fingerprints are all over Kate’s first move on the royal chessboard. 

In conversation with VF, Sulzberger says that she and The Crown’s team were careful about depicting the power dynamic between Carole and Kate.

“We didn’t believe Kate was simply a kind of gold-digging student at 18 years old,” says Sulzberger. “[We were] making sure there’s some of [Kate’s] agency [to the decisions]. You get the sense that she understands what her mother is doing and somewhat agrees with it, but still believes there needs to be a backing-off. It was really interesting character-research work to go through to get the Middleton [characters] to the place where we believed our version of them on the show.”

Sulzberger says the series was also careful to give Carole dimension as a self-made woman whose success moved her and her children up the social ladder; it was Carole and Michael’s Party Pieces business that allowed them to send their three children to the elite Marlborough College. While boarding there, Kate befriended women who moved in William’s social circles, including Emilia d’Erlanger (now a godmother to Prince George) and Alice St. John Webster. (Nicholl writes in Kate: The Future Queen that Middleton was planning on enrolling at Edinburgh with these women until her “dramatic and sudden change of heart.”)

Says Sulzberger, “We wanted to present [Carole as] more of a maternal figure wanting the best for her daughter—someone who has actually worked very hard to gain her position in society in the upper middle class. It has been her work and ideas and ventures that have gotten them there, not the father’s. That was something we wanted to hold on to. For her, what did this opportunity [of Kate going to St. Andrews] present? For us, it was not necessarily, ‘You’ve got to go bag the Prince of Wales, the future king.’ It was more, ‘If my daughter enters this world, I have the confidence that she will end up in this social circle that will set her up for the rest of her life. And I am ambitious for her.’”

As The Crown shows, the real Kate and William ended up in the same dorm building, St. Salvator’s, during their freshman year. While there, Kate quickly got William’s attention. Per Nicholl, in Kate: The Future Queen:

Tanned from a recent holiday in Barbados with her parents, fit from her regular early morning run or swim, and dressed in her comfortable Hennes jeans, fitted sweater, and signature cowboy boots, she radiated an outer freshness and an inner confidence.

It took William a couple of weeks to summon up the courage to ask Kate to join him and his friends for breakfast. He immediately remembered her, and they quickly discovered they had plenty in common besides their mutual friends. They were both health conscious, always opting for a breakfast of muesli and fruit over the cooked option; they discussed sports and skiing trips; they compared notes on their gap year experiences.…

She was a diligent student and often took notes for William when he was unable to attend lectures, going over them later in the comfort of the common room, as the autumnal evenings gathered in around them. It soon became clear to others that they enjoyed a special connection. 

William and Kate both spoke about this period of freshman-year friendship during their post-engagement interview. “We ended up being friends for a while and that just sort of was a good foundation,” William said. Kate added, self-deprecatingly, “I actually think I went bright red when I met you and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy…. But we did become very close friends from quite early.”

It is widely believed that a 2002 charity fashion show at the end of William and Kate’s freshman year, recreated in The Crown’s “Hope Street” episode, was the turning point in their relationship. Prince William reportedly paid $275 to sit in the front row at the event, directly in front of the catwalk Kate infamously walked while wearing only a sheer skirt refashioned as a dress.  

From the Archive: Wills and the Real Girl

The piece’s designer, Charlotte Todd, didn’t choose Middleton to wear the dress; in fact, she says, she has no idea how Kate came to wear it on the runway. “I don’t know if Kate chose to wear this dress or if someone put her in the dress,” Todd told CNN when the dress was auctioned in 2011. Referring to its sheerness, she added, “I don’t know if it was her intention to be there in her underwear in front of the prince.”

But in The Crown’s retelling of the fashion show, Kate’s wardrobe decision is less of a mystery. We find her backstage, rifling through a rack of clothing less than a minute after a scene in which Carole tells her, by phone, “Heels, not flats…. It’s our duty to make use of the assets God has given us.” 

“Honestly,” Kate teases her mother at another point in the episode, “you’re worse than Mrs. Bennett.”