Kate Middleton was 'very badly bullied' in her school days

Prince Williams bride-to-be was reduced to an "emotional wreck" by school bullies who picked on her for being too "perfect".

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 pounds-a-year Downe House girls' boarding school.

Middleton 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 Middleton.

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

"She hated it, absolutely hated it," the Daily Express quoted her friend Jessica Hay as saying.

"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," Hay added.

"She had run into a pack of bullies who reduced her to an emotional wreck," said Smith.

"Until then, she had been at mixed schools and had no experience of how bitchy girls could be," he added.

Middleton's childhood misery emerged after she nominated the charity Beatbullying as one of 26 organisations for wedding guests to donate to rather than give her and fiance William wedding presents.