Heir Apparent

Why William and Kate's firstborn, due in mid-July, is already a figure of global influence

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Patrick van Katwijk / DPA / Corbis

Catherine, pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, names a Princess Cruises ship 'Royal Princess' at Ocean Terminal, Southampton Docks, Hampshire, Britain, June 13, 2013.

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Hard information is as closely guarded as the crown jewels, but here are a few genuine diamonds, which have been confirmed by royal officials: William aims to be at Kate's side when she gives birth under the supervision of obstetrician Marcus Setchell. William has applied to take paternity leave from his work as a search-and-rescue pilot for the Royal Air Force. The family will continue to live in temporary quarters in Kensington Palace, Diana's former home, until building work is completed on a larger apartment in the same complex. The Cambridges did recruit a housekeeper earlier this year--further fueling speculation that a nanny will prove surplus to their requirements. The successful candidate is widely reported to be an Italian and a dab hand at pasta. On that, as most everything else, officials, like the duchess herself, are keeping mum.

Bringing Up Baby

It has rarely, if ever, been easy being a royal child, in spite of the privilege each one enjoys from birth. Marion Crawford, a Scottish governess who from 1936 to 1948 looked after the current Queen and her younger sister Princess Margaret, published an account of her struggle to banish "the miasma of unreality" from their lives and enable meaningful connections with ordinary folk, who remained, for the most part, faces staring through the railings at the Princesses as they played in the garden. "A glass curtain seems to come down between you and the outer world, between the hard realities of life and those who dwell in a court, and however hard a struggle is made to avoid it, escape is not entirely possible," wrote Crawford.

The royal upbringing, especially for boys, has at times seemed almost gratuitously isolating. As a toddler, Charles was left in England as his newly crowned mother and his father embarked on a tour of the British Commonwealth. At 8, he was sent away to his first boarding school, and at 13 consigned to the untender care of another, Scotland's Gordonstoun, where boys submitted to a spartan regimen of long cross-country runs and cold baths, and bullying was frequent.

Diana is widely credited with injecting emotion into the palace and parenting her two sons in a more nurturing way than most previous royal mothers, but her emotions sometimes got the better of her judgment. Suffering from bulimia, unhappy in her marriage, she described to her biographer Andrew Morton her relationship with her sons in a way that suggests they may have absorbed some problematic messages from her along with intense maternal love. "I hug my children to death," she told Morton. "I get into bed with them at night, hug them and say, 'Who loves them most in the whole world?' And they always say, 'Mummy.'"

By royal standards, Charles and Diana were hands-on parents, taking baby William on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, though, as Diana later told Morton, "we didn't see much of him but at least we were under the same sky." The decision to do so drew comment from the British press as a break from protocol, yet it chimed with the spirit of an era when the clock-watching disciplinarian approach of child-care guru Truby King had given way to the child-centered philosophies of Benjamin Spock, Donald Winnicott and Penelope Leach.

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