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LONDON — With royal fanfare tweeted instantly around the world, Buckingham Palace on Monday announced the birth of a boy to Prince William and his wife, the former Kate Middleton, placing a framed proclamation on an easel at the palace gates.
LONDON — The news, when it finally came, was hardly a surprise. But after the days of fruitless speculation, of webcams showing live scenes of inactivity, of bystanders photographing one another and of wilting reporters straining for new ways to say nothing was happening, the arrival of the newest royal heir on Monday afternoon turned out to be as much a relief as a joy.
“Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4:24 today,” the statement proclaimed, more than four hours after the birth. “Her royal highness and the child are both doing well.”
The baby, a boy who weighed in at 8 pounds, 6 ounces, will not be king for some time: he has to wait in the long line behind his great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth; his grandfather Prince Charles; and his father, Prince William. Nor are British monarchs as important in the wider scheme of things as they were in, say, the 16th century.
A palace statement said the child weighed eight pounds six ounces and that William had been present. Mother and baby would remain in the hospital overnight.
But the birth of the as-yet-unnamed (at least as far as we know) royal son of William and his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, gave Britain a chance to celebrate itself by connecting its past to its present, something it is especially good at.
No name was immediately announced. The child is third in line to the throne. His birth gives the royal family three generations of heirs to the throne for the first time since Queen Victoria’s rule.
It also gave the wider world a chance to demonstrate once again that there is something about royal occasions that can apparently turn republicans into monarchists, however briefly, even in countries that renounced their own monarchies long ago.
The announcement came more than 12 hours after Buckingham Palace said Monday morning that the 31-year-old duchess had gone to St. Mary’s Hospital in London in the early stages of labor. Then not another word emerged from royal officials, beyond the bland assurance from palace officials that matters were “progressing normally.”
Failing that, it gave people here something to focus on that did not have to do with the bad political situation, the bad economy or the bad weather.
Hundreds of reporters and photographers gathered by the hospital in Paddington, a district on the edge of central London, wilting in a heat wave. They were joined through the day by excited well-wishers from Britain and beyond, some pledging to stay until the birth was announced.
Like a bride wearing something old and something new, Buckingham Palace announced the birth in a way that reflected both traditional pomp and modern circumstance. Yes, a piece of paper signed by the royal doctors and announcing that Kate “was safely delivered” of a boy was driven from the hospital to Buckingham Palace, where it was solemnly placed on an ornate, gold-trimmed easel to impress tourists.
Queen Elizabeth offered a faint signal that an early development might be at hand when she left her preferred quarters at Windsor Castle and drove the 20 miles to Buckingham Palace. That put her in position to be on hand, her royal standard fluttering, when the birth was announced.
But the palace first announced the birth the modern way, via a news release that meant the information flashed around the world before the piece of paper even made it into the car. The palace did not explain why it had reneged on its plan to make both statements simultaneously, but one possibility is that it wanted to forestall potential tabloid efforts to follow the car in a dangerous fashion while trying to photograph the contents of the paper.
A large crowd gathered there, periodically breaking into cheers and straining to get a view of the framed official announcement by the gates.
Following ancient custom, political leaders in Britain hastened to join the happy bandwagon by expressing their pleasure. Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Twitter that he was “delighted” and that Kate and William would be “wonderful parents.”
Jenny Self, a media planner for a broadcaster, said she felt compelled to be at the palace for the announcement. “I missed the royal wedding and the Olympics so I wanted to be here,” she said. “It is something to be proud of.”
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said that “this is wonderful news that will make the whole country smile.” And across the Atlantic, President Obama referred to the “special relationship” enjoyed by Britain and the United States — always a way to warm British hearts — and declared that he and his wife, Michelle, wished William and Kate “all the happiness and blessings parenthood brings.”
She said she was happy the baby was a boy. “But it would have been nicer if it was a girl — more historical,” she added, referring to the recent change to Britain’s laws to allow a first-born girl to inherit the throne.
Members of the royal family said they, too, were thrilled, led by Prince William, who said, “We could not be happier.”
Michael Frederick, who described himself as a freelancer in public relations, pushed his way back out of the crowd after getting a glimpse, saying: “It was like going through labor. I hope she realizes what I have been through.”
The story began Monday morning when people woke up to the news that the Duchess of Cambridge, formerly known as Kate Middleton, was in the early stages of labor and that she had been admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where Prince William was born 31 years ago.
“I’m so happy,” he said. “It’s an example of what brings the community together in London, and it has also made the whole world focus on this amazing city and its people.”
For most of the day, that was all the news there was. Hundreds of people gathered at the hospital to find out what was going on, but nothing was going on, at least as far as anyone told them. No one emerged to reveal whether Kate had an epidural, for instance, or whether she swore at William when he told her how to breathe — these are the Windsors, not the Kardashians — and the crowd had to wait in ignorance.
The statement from the palace said that members of the immediate family, including Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, as well as William’s father, Prince Charles, and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, “have been informed and are delighted with the news.”
It was the hottest day in seven years. Téba Diatta, a British-Senegalese Kate-and-William fan wrapped in a long, homemade Union Jack skirt, had made a cake to commemorate the occasion, but by the afternoon the icing had cracked and the writing had become partly illegible. “It used to say, ‘Come on Kate, we can’t wait, give us something to celebrate,’ ” Ms. Diatta said sadly.
Prince Charles issued a statement saying that he was “enormously proud and happy to be a grandfather for the first time and we are eagerly looking forward to seeing the baby in the near future.”
Meanwhile, another equally in-the-dark crowd had gathered at Buckingham Palace, many people pressed right up against the gates, as if they were prisoners trying to break out of their non-royal lives. Some were Britons who had come especially for the occasion; some were tourists who claimed they just happened to be there; others for some reason turned up in elaborate costumes.
A message on Twitter was the first of a series of carefully scripted disclosures that culminated in the announcement of an event that appeared to be drawing unparalleled media coverage, even in the annals of Britain’s headline-making royal family. Live-streaming cameras have been trained on the hospital, and even on the easel where the announcement of the birth was formally posted.
Some couples seemed to be in slight discord over the cosmic importance of the event.
“Her royal highness the Duchess of Cambridge has been admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London, in the early stages of labour,” said a message from Clarence House, the official residence of the duchess and her husband, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge.
“We’re going to wait here until the baby’s born,” announced Denise Cave, a 49-year-old Canadian.
The duchess had traveled by car to the hospital from another royal residence, Kensington Palace, a second message said. Reporters outside the hospital said the couple had slipped in through a side entrance, largely unobserved by the waiting press corps.
“We are?” said her husband, Wayne, 51, who did not share his wife’s unalloyed excitement. He thought of an alternative plan, whereby Ms. Cave could remain where she was to wait out the labor, while he went to “grab a beer and watch it on TV.”
The couple met in the early 2000s, when both were students at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and their relationship, which was later hailed as a fairy tale union, proceeded sporadically for several years until their wedding in April 2011.
The news was released to huge cheers, and then an air of anticlimax. The reporters who had obsessively speculated for days about when the baby would be born enjoyed a moment of emotional satisfaction, and then switched to their next obsessive speculation: what the baby will be named.
In some ways, the phantom of William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, has hovered over the couple, and he has frequently made it clear that he wants to protect his wife from the intense media scrutiny associated with his mother. Her own fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles in 1981 soured, and the protracted breakdown of their marriage included toe-curling acknowledgments of infidelity by both. They divorced in 1996.
The BBC reported that it took Prince William’s parents, Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, a week to name their firstborn son, so who knows when this next bit of news will come. The palace said it would happen “in due course.”
The princess was killed in a Paris car crash in August 1997 as her driver tried to outrun a pack of paparazzi trying to snap pictures of her and her lover, Dodi Fayed, the son of an Egyptian billionaire who owned the London department store Harrods.
As night fell at the palace, the crowds realized that nothing else was going to happen — Queen Elizabeth, for instance, was not going to ruin generations of tradition and suddenly come out to answer their questions — and began to dissipate. They said it had been an arduous experience.
Prince William and his younger brother, Prince Harry, were teenagers at the time, and images of the two walking, eyes downcast, behind the caisson that carried their mother to her funeral in Westminster Abbey marked an emotional low point for the nation. Prince William, quiet and intensely private, has said in interviews in recent years that he was determined to make sure that his family was never subjected to the media’s cruel buffeting.
“It was like going through labor,” said Michael Frederick, who works in public relations, speaking of the wait, and the heat, and the crowds, and the excitement, and finally of Kate. “I hope she realizes what I have been through.”
Intrusive and highly competitive coverage of royal events was common for decades. But the newspapers have been chastened by public opprobrium resulting from a phone-hacking scandal that led to broad scrutiny by Parliament, the public and the police of the way the media operate. And an agreement bolstering the royal couple’s privacy was secured in discussions between royal officials and editors of Britain’s municipal newspapers.
Reporting
was contributed by John F. Burns, Stephen Castle, Julia Werdigier and Katrin Bennhold.
For weeks, photographers and camera crews had camped out with stepladders and other equipment outside St. Mary’s, where William, now a Royal Air Force search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, was himself born in June 1982. His brother, Harry, was born there in 1984.
The period preceding the birth, however, was marked by a display of restraint among the tabloids, with no sign of photographs of the royal couple from clandestine stakeouts.
For the last few months, the tabloids restricted themselves mainly to photographs of the duchess with her growing “bump” that were taken on official occasions, and articles about the mellowing impact that her family was having on the often-stuffy protocols of the royal family. The Middletons have no royal blood, but rather a lineage of merchants, miners and laborers in Britain’s industrial northeast.
The young couple’s success in protecting their privacy lasted through the final hours of the duchess’s pregnancy, when they arrived unobtrusively at a back door of the hospital wing not long past dawn, seen by only two of the dozens of photographers who had staked out the wing for much of the past month.
The baby is expected to be known formally as the Prince of Cambridge. In the line of succession, he will be third after Prince Charles, 64, and William, 31. Prince Harry will be fourth.
The birth gave the House of Windsor, the reigning family in a line that stretches back more than 1,000 years, a sense of enhanced stability — much sought after by Queen Elizabeth, whose 61 years on the throne, second in length only to Queen Victoria, have included tumultuous periods of scandal and grief.
The excitement over the birth has been depicted as offering a likely counterpoint to Britain’s economic austerity, buoying a public mood that has been elevated by a series of sporting successes in cricket, rugby and cycling after London hosted the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. An unusual heat wave, meanwhile, has brought picnickers and strollers out in droves across the land in parks, on beaches and at heaths and wilderness areas.
Sarah Lyall, Julia Werdigier, Stephen Castle and Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 22, 2013
Correction: July 22, 2013
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the picture’s location and date. The picture, of Princess Kate, was taken at an official visit to Hope House addiction center in February, not outside St. Mary’s Hospital on Monday. An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name Queen Elizabeth’s preferred residence and its location. It is Windsor Castle, not Windsor Palace, and it is just outside London, not in the city.
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the picture’s location and date. The picture, of the Duchess of Cambridge, was taken at an official visit to Hope House addiction center in February, not outside St. Mary’s Hospital on Monday. An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of Queen Elizabeth’s preferred residence and its location. It is Windsor Castle, not Windsor Palace, and it is just outside London, not in the city. An earlier version of this correction incorrectly referred to the Duchess of Cambridge as Princess Kate.
