Shortly after midnight, a black car pulls away from a royal residence.
Online, that’s all it took.
Within hours, social media was buzzing with a new claim: a supposed “royal driver” had “leaked” that Prince William’s late-night journey “wasn’t to see Kate” but to visit someone else. No photos, no official record, just a breadcrumb in a sea of royal gossip – and yet it snapped perfectly into a story the internet had already half-written: William, Rose Hanbury, and a marriage under pressure.
The alleged driver has never been named. No reputable British outlet has published a verified account of that ride. But the rumor landed on a landscape already primed by years of unproven affair allegations involving William and Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, which first surfaced in 2019 and have lingered ever since.
So what is real, what’s pure fan fiction, and why are people so eager to believe the worst?
The Phantom “Royal Driver” Leak: All Suspense, Zero Receipts
Let’s start with the hard truth: there is no confirmed, on-the-record “royal driver” confession in any reputable news outlet. The story exists in fragments – anonymous posts, second-hand “I heard from someone who knows someone” gossip, and Reddit threads where users connect dots that may not belong in the same picture.
What does exist is:
A long-running rumour that William had an affair with Rose Hanbury, a former close friend and neighbour of William and Kate in Norfolk.
Tabloid stories and social-media posts claiming William was “too close” to Rose during the period Kate was pregnant with Prince Louis.
A renewed wave of speculation in 2024, when Kate disappeared from public view after major abdominal surgery and later revealed a cancer diagnosis, creating a vacuum that conspiracy theories rushed to fill.
Into that swirl, the idea of a midnight car ride – driver plus unnamed destination – slotted in like the missing scene from a soap opera. Fans didn’t need timestamps; they already had a script in their heads.
The palace’s response? Silence. No commentary on a driver, no line-by-line rebuttal of affairs. Kensington Palace typically refuses to engage with personal-life rumours unless they cross very serious lines – and that silence is exactly what keeps the gossip machine humming.
Rose Hanbury Enters the Chat: Aristocrat, Neighbor… or Internet’s Favorite “Other Woman”?
To understand why one vague late-night trip could explode online, you have to look at who the internet believes might be waiting at the other end: Rose Hanbury.
Rose is not some random stranger. She’s an aristocrat, married to the Marquess of Cholmondeley, and for years she and her husband moved in the same Norfolk social circle as the Waleses.
She attended William and Kate’s wedding; their country homes are within easy reach; their children are similar ages.
That proximity is what made the 2019 rumours so potent. When a U.S. tabloid floated the idea that William had an affair with Rose, British newspapers largely backed off, but social media never did.
Fast-forward to 2024–25 and the stakes rise:
Online “Katespiracy”: Kate’s lengthy recovery from surgery and cancer treatment led to a frenzy of “Where is Kate?” threads, fan theories and wild speculations about her marriage.
Late-night posts: Users dug up old photos of William and Rose at parties, then layered on anonymous claims of “secret meetings” and “late drives.”
Reddit temperature check: in multiple royal-watch subreddits, users casually refer to the alleged affair as if it were fact, despite the lack of hard evidence.
But here’s the key detail that often gets buried in the drama: Rose Hanbury has denied the affair allegations through her lawyers, calling the rumours “completely false,” and reputable outlets like Business Insider and Town & Country have made that denial clear. Kensington Palace declined to comment.
In other words: the internet has a villain for its story – but the villain is officially saying, “This plotline never happened.
Cancer, Vanishing Princess and Online Meltdowns: How Kate’s Hardest Year Supercharged the Affair Narrative
If the affair rumours were the dry tinder, Kate’s health crisis was the match.
In January 2024, the palace announced that Kate had undergone planned abdominal surgery and would be absent from public duties for months.In March, she revealed that tests after the surgery had discovered cancer and that she was undergoing preventative chemotherapy.
The official story was consistent: major surgery, cancer, chemotherapy, privacy for the children. But online, every gap in the public timeline was treated as a clue:
“If William is at an engagement alone, who is he seeing afterwards?”
