On Monday afternoon, the Zapruder film of the Kate Middleton mystery analysis manifested on TMZ. It showed the Princess of Wales walking with her husband out of a Windsor farm shop, and while she didn’t look exactly glamorous — donning leggings and athleisure wear — she didn’t look, you know, dead, which seemed to put an end one of the more wackadoo theories on the internet: that the woman had expired, and that the royal family had spent several months cribbing from “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

“Well, that’s that,” I thought, and then within five minutes I heard from a friend — a sober, reasonable friend (who, before last month probably could not have even picked the princess from a lineup) who said: “It’s a body double, right? She doesn’t usually walk that way.”

Once more, unto the breach:

Back in January, the royal family announced that the princess had checked into a hospital for “planned abdominal surgery,” and that she would be stepping back from public duties until around Easter. All was quiet for several weeks, until royal watchers started to think it was odd that she hadn’t been spotted at all. (No wave from a balcony? No “thanks for your well-wishes” prerecorded video?) Conspiracies were only stoked when she was spotted: A family photo the couple posted to Instagram was republished by news outlets and then immediately retracted when it was discovered the image had been badly and hilariously photoshopped, with a chunk missing from Princess Charlotte’s sleeve.

Kate later copped to doing the photo edits herself and, if you wanted to, you could think of perfectly reasonable explanations. Maybe this was the only way she could show all three of her kids smiling in the same shot, or maybe she felt her own appearance needed some touching up because she was, in fact, recovering from abdominal surgery. Oh, well. Too late. By that point the whole Kate Middleton mystery had become, as Helen Lewis wrote in the Atlantic, “QAnon for wine moms.”

Why have so many people fallen into such a toilet bowl of speculation? More to the point: Why didn’t the royal family immediately pour in some Drano and flush the system clean? How have the Windsors, whose entire job is really optics, managed to be so terrible at optics?

There is an argument to be made that the royal family, despite their centuries of practice, has no idea how to be famous. At least … not modernly famous.

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, fame was a different thing. Heads of state were expected to have private lives. The lung cancer that took Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was so closely guarded that his death shocked the nation, which hadn’t even realized he was very sick. And then the queen reigned for 70 years, and the social mores surrounding her changed but the social mores applied to her — the ones about her own health privacy — did not. A posthumous biography, set to be published next month, reports that Elizabeth, too, had been battling cancer, myeloma, for years before her death, and nobody knew. She had managed to carry a 1950s protocol for fame all the way into the 2020s.

But by the time she died, we were living a tin-foil-hat, anti-vax, lizard-people, flaming-dumpster world, very different from 1952, and the royal family is still operating as if they live in a world in which the public will believe them when they couch something medical as routine or planned.

Kate’s surgery announcement was made the same day that the palace announced King Charles III would be seeking treatment for an enlarged prostate. The news about Charles later turned into an announcement that the king would be seeking treatment for cancer. But not prostate cancer, an unspecified cancer. We still do not know what kind of cancer. We do know that the palace is discussing whether modifications might need to be made for his birthday parade in June, whether he’ll leave Buckingham in a carriage instead of on a horse.

You can guess what the public is making of all of this.

The question of whether Charles’s health, or Kate’s health, is any of our business is almost beside the point. So is the question of what’s “really” going on with the family, if, indeed anything is “really” going on with the family (Cholmondeley? Gloucester? Ostomy? IYKYK.) Those horses have left the barn, no matter if the king is on the saddle or trailing in a carriage.

What the debacle has revealed, on a grander scale, is that the royal family has lost control of the narrative and they do not know how to get it back. Theirs is an ancient brand built on mystery rather than disclosure, sympathy rather than empathy, being among the people but not regular folks.

You could picture a different course the Princess of Wales might have taken at the beginning of this. One in which she disclosed her surgery ahead of time, laid out what it was and how she felt about it. You could picture her social media posts after, with pictures of hospital Jell-O, and personal captions about how humbling it felt to be physically compromised after a lifetime of good health. Maybe a statement acknowledging that she knows people are wondering about her, but she feels and looks like trash right now and there’s no way she’s stepping out in a bathrobe, guys.

It would have been the common thing to do. But it would not have been the royal thing to do. It might remove the mystery of where she had been, but it would also remove the mystique of the monarchy. And that is what the current state of affairs has revealed: The royals can’t continue to behave like royals if they want to be trusted.

But once they start behaving like commoners, what’s the point of them anyway?

In what was either a wild coincidence or truly expert trolling, the past few weeks also saw some minor movement from the California wing of the royals, Harry and Meghan, who in 2020 wisely sawed off their own branch of the family tree and brought it to Montecito. After years of social media silence, the Duchess of Sussex quietly relaunched an Instagram presence for “American Riviera Orchard,” featuring a creamy gold insignia on a linen background.

The accompanying website is still empty — you can “join the waitlist” — but sleuths who scoured pending U.S. trademark applications learned that American Riviera Orchard was a home goods company that would feature things like stationery, candle holders and yoga mats.

Mark my words, we’re getting Gwyneth Paltrow meets Stonewall Kitchen; we’re getting preserves and chutneys and Meghan’s favorite gardening pants, and more than you wanted to know about what herbal remedies Harry likes to turn to when he has a cold. It will be lovely, and mockable, and sincere — and also entirely staged.

Because Harry and Meghan know how to be famous. They hated being royal, but fame they can do. They will launch a lifestyle brand, and Kate will launch a thousand conspiracies, grainy videos, yoga pants, until she finally returns to her normal public schedule and her own lifestyle — the royal brand — the one people aren’t sure they still need to buy.