Marlborough College in Wiltshire provided an escape from the bullies for the teenage Kate Middleton

Only now have the full details come to light of the torment the future Queen suffered as a 13-year-old pupil at £28,875-a-year Downe House girls’ boarding school.

Kate quit after just two terms in spring 1996, shortly after her 14th birthday, and moved to Marlborough College in Wiltshire.

The nightmare she suffered at the hands of a gang of teenage girls at Downe House school in Cold Ash, near Thatcham, Berkshire, has been chronicled in a new biography of Kate.

Author Sean Smith has used testimony from contemporaries from her school days.

Her friend Jessica Hay said: “She hated it, absolutely hated it.

“The girls there were horrible. They used to put faeces in her bed and she was very, very badly bullied.

“She was picked on because she was perfect, well turned out and a lovely person. She was not the type of person to stick up for herself. They saw something that they could pick on – and gangs of girls can be very nasty.”