Lady Rose Hanbury: Kate Princess of Wales' party-loving close friend with a Saltburn-style upbringing

Behind every good royal, there is a party-loving aristocrat with personal connections as sprawling as their country estate. For the Princess of Wales, that aristocrat has long been known to be Lady Rose Hanbury, former model and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. It might all sound very unlike Kate, but she and Hanbury have never been that similar. As royal expert Ingrid Seward once put it when speaking to The Sun, "They were not childhood friends. They are from very different backgrounds. Rose is an aristocrat in her own right and something of a free spirit.”.

Free spirit indeed. Hanbury started dating her current husband, David Cholmondeley, in 2003, when he was 45 and she was just 22 years old. She once got Tony Blair into hot water after she was photographed next to him wearing a bikini, and her upbringing was definitely more on the wild side of liberal. Here’s everything you need to know about Kate’s look-alike best friend, Lady Rose Hanbury. Born on 15 March 1984 to Timothy Hanbury and Emma Longman, Sarah Rose Hanbury entered the world as the Hanbury’s second daughter. She was preceded by her elder sister, Marina, who was born two years before, and later followed by a younger brother, David Mark James Hanbury, born two years afterwards.

The Hanburys were both designers, though in very different fields: she in fashion and interiors, he in building websites. Longman’s fashion brand Marosa was once so successful it was worn by the likes of Sienna Miller and Kate Moss, until it eventually closed down in 2019. And while Eton-educated Hanbury may have built his career on the internet, he is also descended from brewery wealth, as part of the Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co brewing family.

The family had links to the royals long before Lady Rose Hanbury met William and Kate, too. Rose’s maternal grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Lambart, was one of Queen Elizabeth’s bridesmaids at her wedding to Prince Philip. In his youth, Timothy ‘Tim’ Hanbury himself was known to be a party boy, said to have tales of wild nights at Annabel’s in Mayfair, so he and Emma raised their brood with a similarly care-free attitude. According to socialite Violet Naylor-Leyland’s book, Rare Birds True Style, the Hanbury kids had their family home, Holfield Grange in Coggeshall, Essex, “transformed” for wild parties. As reported by the Mail, Rose told the author, "Mum turned the basement into a nightclub for us, painting the whole place herself and hanging Moroccan lanterns and suzanis from the walls [...] It felt a bit like an opium den.".

Hanbury boarded at the prestigious Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, where annual tuition fees are around £38,000 for boarders. After leaving Stowe, she undertook an Open University degree and found work as a model. Hanbury was reportedly signed to Sarah Doukas’ cult modelling agency Storm aged 23. The likes of Kate Moss, Carla Bruni and Monica Bellucci have all been on Storm’s books. Doukas is responsible for discovering Moss, along with Cara Delevingne, Behati Prinsloo, and Anya Taylor-Joy.

Much of Hanbury’s 20s were like that of any other aristocrat or socialite. She lived a life of launch parties and charity dinners. She made headlines in 2005 after she and her sister Marina were pictured wearing bikinis and standing next to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the grounds of infamous “aristocratic playground” that is Villa Cetinale, in Tuscany. The 17th-century Baroque villa has seen royals dine in its gardens, French models sunbathe topless by its pools, and even played host for the season three finale of hit HBO show, Succession.

Around this time in her life, Rose was said to have met a man at a party in Villa Cetinale who was twice her age — one David George Philip Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley. At this point he was better known as David Rocksavage, a “promising” filmmaker in his 40s who was said to be friends with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. Hanbury and Rocksavage officially started dating in 2006, when she was 22 and he was 45.

It wasn’t just Rose that had a penchant for older men, either. Rose’s sister Marina later courted the former defence minister and Earl of Durham, Edward ‘Ned’ Lambton, who is 22 years her senior and also happens to own Villa Cetinale. It will surprise many that Rose was once rumoured to be engaged to Ned Lambton’s son, Fred!. It’s clear Rose Hanbury and David Cholmondeley couldn’t wait to tie the knot, as they announced their engagement just a matter of days before a wedding at Chelsea registry office in June 2009.

And what a relief for the couple’s friends and family, who didn’t think the Marquess was “the marrying kind.” “Until Rose came into his life, friends had almost given up hope of the peer finding the right girl,” the Daily Mail reported at the time. Meanwhile, Hanbury was working as a political assistant to then-Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove at the time, but had to give up her role because she was pregnant with twins, with an expected due date of January 2010.