Kate Middleton’s blue-and-white Veronica Beard dress isn’t the only thing in her new video that paid homage to her royal life. According to People, the clip, which included Middleton sharing that she’d completed her preventative chemotherapy, also had an homage to the late Queen Elizabeth. The outlet notes that in one montage, Middleton can be seen driving a Land Rover—and the video was filmed “in strikingly similar footage” to a clip showing the queen doing the same thing in the 1992 documentary Elizabeth R: A Year in the Life of the Queen.
In Middleton’s video, she’s shown via an over-the-shoulder shot driving near Amner Hall, the royal residence in Norfolk that she shares with Prince William. Queen Elizabeth was shown in a similar manner driving near Sandringham.
Middleton’s news came on Monday, September 9, just a day after the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s passing. Insiders note that all the clues point to the fact that everything was carefully planned. After all, royal biographers have stated that the queen was one of the Middleton’s role models. Author Sally Bedell Smith told People that Kate had “learned” a lot from the monarch “by observing” her.
“She knows what resonates. She will have absorbed a lot from this queen,” she said, adding that Kate would also come to embody the queen’s unofficial motto: “Never complain, never explain.”
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Fellow royal author Robert Jobson added that Middleton and the queen spent a lot of time together and that part of why she and William chose to live at Adelaide Cottage was to be closer to the monarch in the later part of her life.
“Catherine understood that for William, as a future king, it was important for him to be geographically closer to the late Queen in her final months, when he was required to support both her and his father. It made a real difference,” Jobson wrote in his biography, Catherine, Princess of Wales. “They were in regular contact, seeing each other in person and speaking on the phone several times a week, bringing them even closer.”