‘Hospice’: Panic over single terrifying Charles word on royal website

Seven simple letters have appeared on the royal family’s official website that could set off serious shockwaves.

They say in the event of any emergency you should yell “fire” – the single word that will instinctively propel people into action, if not sheer panic and a mad dash for the exits. Sometimes one word can be all it takes.

Take what was going on with the royal family’s website ever so briefly on Thursday, with the first heading on the site simply reading, in lower case, “hospice”.

Well, bugger me.

Clearly this was some sort of error, with things changed back to normal before anyone had really noticed (aside from the eagle-eyed Gertrude Daly of Gerts Royals who spotted the mistake).

One possible explanation for the shocking word’s appearance being simply that the site was being updated to include Queen Camilla’s Tuesday visit to a hospice in Swindon. Sometimes, most of the times, a cigar is just a cigar. A very explicable, entirely understandable, simple human error of a cigar.

Now 12 months on, we remain in the dark and practically, nothing has changed: His Majesty has weekly treatment, where and what and for how much longer, nobody knows.

But what his diagnosis has done is to bring into painfully sharp focus just how close Prince William and Kate, The Prince and Princess of Wales are to the throne.

This time in 2022, the duo were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, removed by two steps from those big gold chairs and having to sit through the parading pageantry and play-acting of the opening of parliament.

William and Kate were the royal family’s big ticket items, their only real remaining marquee young names, what with Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex having slipped the royal harness to canter off into the sunset. But still, there was distance.

It appears to have been an unfortunate error. Picture: X

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Them as King and Queen seemed such a far-off, future prospect. That whole coronation malarkey? Oh, ages away. Courchevel skiing mini break? Don’t mind if I do.

However, in a horrible bit of symmetry, Monday marks one year since King Charles entered hospital for treatment for an enlarged prostate, a procedure that 25,000 British men undergo annually, during which his doctors discovered he has cancer. (Buckingham Palace has never revealed what sort of cancer he has).

But then Queen Elizabeth died in September 2022 and the new King Charles III immediately elevated the couple to the Wales titles. (It was not automatic – he was nine years old before Her late Majesty conferred the title to him, information he reportedly found out about on the news while at boarding school. How’s that for a stellar bit of parenting?)

Most of us assumed Charles would reign well into his 90s, like his parents. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

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And even though, with Her late Majesty’s death, William and Kate were only technically one ladder rung closer to the top, still, their crown years seemed so very distant, an inevitability like the advent of flying cars and Elon Musk’s Oval Office run. It will happen, but not for yonks. After all, those Windsor genes are fashioned from pure Sheffield steel, hardier than nearly all known earth elements and Katie Price’s rhino-like hide. It would be decades before anything changed, right?

On February 5 last year, with the Palace’s announcement, we learned how wrong we all were.

With the King’s diagnosis, the question of how long he might get to do the ruling thing suddenly rushed into view, an acute, painful and sudden mass awareness of his mortality.

Oh, the King is human after all. Oh. Oh.

There is knowing something will happen and fully metabolising and knowing.

With the next beat came the implications of that discovery – that for William and Kate, becoming King and Queen was no longer simply some remote, purely intellectual potentiality, but something that was all too real.

Let me stress at this point that what little we know of King Charles’ condition, it is a “very encouraging status quo”, as a Palace source told Page Six earlier this month. The 76-year-old’s health is being “managed” and “moving in a positive direction”.

The King’s diagnosis reminded us he was human after all. Picture: Jane Barlow/WPA Pool/Getty Images

There are clear, positive signs too. It now seems more and more likely that in the next few months he and Queen Camilla will be off on a State visit to Italy to do some professional gelato-sampling. Belissima!

Still, there is no ignoring the reality; that His Majesty is flesh and blood. That the timetable that everyone had assumed, that Charles would rule into his late 90s like his parents, was suddenly called into painful doubt.

“He looks quite knackered up close and red around the eyes and thinner,” a royal insider who has seen Charles told Page Six this month.

“Especially for someone who normally looks so vigorous, but I suppose it’s only to be expected after 10 months of cancer treatment.”

The past year has been an “awakening” for William, the Telegraph reported late last year, with him having (like all of us) “once expected to have decades ahead of him as the Prince of Wales”.

In December, respected biographer Sally Bedell Smith told People that, due to Charles’ cancer, “[William] and Kate have been preparing for their future roles sooner than they would have expected”.

“There’s a sense of calm before the storm,” an insider told the magazine.

“They are next in line for the biggest job of their lives.”

Kate and William are now preparing for the biggest roles of their lives. Picture: Will Warr/Prince and Princess of Wales/Instagram

Last year, The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes reported that while Charles is “doing fantastically well”, “secret plans” for his death were already being made. According Sykes, the monarch’s February 5 announcement of his diagnosis “fired the starting pistol on what courtiers euphemistically term the ‘change of reign’ … The planning and positioning for the reign of King William V, necessarily and behind the scenes, began — and it will be very hard to put that genie back in the bottle”.

Call it, as one close royal source previously told People’s longtime royal editor Simon Perry, “an institutional preparedness”.

Still William, veteran royal biographer Hugo Vickers told Page Six, “must be under tremendous stress — not only is his father ill, but the Prince of Wales, throughout history, doesn’t know what morning he will wake up and find himself King”.

Hopefully not for a very, very long time yet. And I’m sure I’ve read about the health benefits of gelato, right?

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles