London - The arrival of his daughter could not have gone more smoothly.
But for Prince William there remains a troubling problem: how to balance family life with royal duty. Now that he has two children, his dilemma has suddenly become even trickier.
One of the main reasons why he admires his ‘Granny’ the Queen so much is the calm way in which she assumed the throne while a young mother of two small children.
“He sees what she did as an astonishing sacrifice,” says one of his oldest friends. “He’s learned from it.”
Though he has not actually said so, William has made it plain that, while he remains two steps from the throne, his family life is not negotiable. This explains the plans for his family to live away from the London goldfish bowl.
The Queen’s own experience has been a key factor in this. Now 89, she was just 25 - with Prince Charles, three, and Anne, 18 months - when her father George VI died from lung cancer in 1952. It meant that as monarch she had to spend long periods away from her small children.
It took Charles, now 66, well into his middle years before he finally realised she wasn’t the distant mother he talked of to his official biographer: she simply had to put her duty first.
So, how is William likely to handle the change that comes with his second child? Despite what is expected of a royal Prince who will one day be king, his first instinct will be to hunker down domestically more than he already has and take on even fewer formal duties.
A full and happy family life - at least, as most of us know it - was the missing vital ingredient throughout most of William’s impressionable years. As a child, he knew of the rows between his warring parents, only to lose his mother when he was 15.
He turns 33 next month and the stability of his family life and its core, story-book ingredients, right down to Lupo the cocker spaniel, are vitally important to him.
To this end, he has succeeded in keeping his family as far removed as possible from the exposure and strictures of royal life.
Friends believe that the circumstances of his mother’s death nearly 18 years ago lie at the heart of his resolve never to allow his official duties to overwhelm his family nor to allow the outside world to pry too intimately into it.
As newlyweds, he and Kate lived in a whitewashed cottage in Anglesey while he worked as an RAF search and rescue pilot. Now, with George and their new daughter, they will be bedding down in Norfolk, where he is a civilian air ambulance pilot.
Admittedly, Anmer Hall on the Queen’s Sandringham estate is rather grand, but it is also remote and significantly far from prying tourists’ eyes and paparazzi cameras. The heir-in-line to the throne is becoming, in effect, a rural royal.
It means they are certain to spend more time in Norfolk in the coming years than at Kensington Palace, where £4-million of taxpayers’ money was spent refurbishing the late Princess Margaret’s 22-room Apartment 1A specially for them.
The work included a new roof, an overhaul of the plumbing and electrics and two new kitchens: one an extravagant £170 000 affair for entertaining and a second kitchen for intimate family suppers.
Meanwhile, judging by the way Prince George has been shielded from the limelight - he’s rarely been seen by the British public between his birth in July 2013 and being taken to see his baby sister on Saturday - William will be keen to make sure that his daughter is similarly protected.
It may frustrate the public and the media keen to record every step his two children make, but William is more determined than ever to tilt the work-life balance in favour of his young family.
He has even managed to arrange an immediate six-week spell of unpaid paternity leave.
The Queen has come to understand and respect William’s conviction that the happiness of his young family should not have to take second place to his royal responsibilities.
She and William enjoy a close relationship, forged over Sunday tea at Windsor Castle when he was a schoolboy at nearby Eton, and similar to the closeness that Prince Charles had with his grandmother, the QueenMother.
The full and happy family life that William wants is likely to follow the style introduced to him and Harry by their mother.
When the world was mourning Princess Diana 18 years ago, he was mourning a mother who had given him and his brother the chance to behave like “normal children” - whooshing down the water slides at Thorpe Park, wearing casual clothes.
“Remember,” she would tell her sons, “not everyone drives a Range Rover,” making sure they realised what the ups and downs of life were like in the wider world outside Palace walls.
Inevitably, this brings us to another pivotal maternal figure: Kate’s mother, Carole Middleton, who will be moving into Anmer Hall with them.
Some of William’s friends have been privately joking about the “dangers” of having his mother-in-law living with them, on the grounds that Mrs Middleton, 60, and her daughter will form an axis that keeps him henpecked and at bay.
The reality is that this happy, warm, middle-class informality is exactly what William craves. True, the new baby’s arrival will take up a considerable amount of Kate’s attention - attention that William, being a Windsor male, might expect himself.
It should be said that theirs is not a marriage without disagreements - “How dull that would be,” declares one of their married friends.
William is used to getting his own way, and the more malleable Kate is content to go along with him, though some question whether she will continue to be so pliant with her mother on hand.
Yet the fact is that it was William, not Kate, who invited Carole to join their household as a semi-permanent fixture alongside the nanny while the new baby is small - fulfilling a similar role to the one she has played since George was born.
One family friend, who has known William since birth and “understands William’s thinking perfectly”, says: “It’s all about the layers of family life and the closeness that he found when he started seeing Kate.
“All the Middletons seemed to be involved with what everyone else was doing, and Carole was always in the middle of it. William really likes that. And it’s Carole, not Camilla, who has come to replace the mother figure he lost.”
At Anmer Hall, William is also keen to recreate some of the informal weekends he used to enjoy as a boy with his mother and Prince Harry at the sprawling home of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, on Ham Common, near Richmond. These idyllic weekends were in stark contrast to domestic life at Kensington Palace and Highgrove, where the atmosphere was all too often tense and stressful.
Lady Annabel, now 80, the widow of tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, was a motherly figure to Diana when she was at her most troubled, a close friend to whom she unburdened herself. In fact, she hosted the 40th birthday party for Camilla Parker Bowles’s younger sister, Annabel Elliot, at which Diana famously confronted her rival over her affair with Prince Charles.
“Annabel’s weekends were so relaxed and chaotic, with family of all ages dropping in,” recalls William’s friend. “Lunch was eaten so fast that Diana started to time them and there was always lots of laughter. William loved it. He still remembers them. It’s what he’d love to create at Anmer.
“And making sure his children’s grandmother - and grandfather, for that matter - are regular fixtures in his home is all part of his need to recreate what he found at Annabel’s.” That means Michael and Carole Middleton, of course, not Charles and Camilla.
This brings us to another pressing problem for William: how to make sure the new baby’s other grandfather, Prince Charles, sees more of her than he has of George.
Charles, who has seen surprisingly little of Prince George, is said to worry about what those around him refer to as the ‘Middletonisation’ of William, something he feels there is little he can do to change.
William and Kate have spent endless days, and even foreign holidays, with Carole and Michael, but precious little time with Charles and Camilla.
It cannot help that Kate has nowhere near the same close relationship with Camilla that William has with Carole.
Charles’s disappointment is understandable.
“He hoped to develop a real relationship with George, not only as his grandfather, but as one future king to another,” says one of his circle. “Thus far it hasn’t happened. Still, there’s time, there’s time.”
So, can things change now that he has two grandchildren?
Most friends of the Royal Family know that it all depends on Prince William - a very independent royal in his own right.
- Daily Mail