Secrets Of The Royal Palaces Ep 2 - Riddles of Balmoral Castle - Royal Documentary

britain's royal palaces majestic it's absolutely dripping in history luxurious the white drawing room at buckingham palace is like a scene from a disney film and packed to the rafters with incredible secrets secrets that the royal family would much prefer not to be made public from royal courtships to royal births to royal marriages and scandals the palaces have played host to all of that this series goes behind palace walls the royal palaces represent the monarchy and have incredible history we'll learn how these iconic creations were built 16th century kings built with brick in a way that we wouldn't recognize today this is george iv leaving his mark on the center of london uncover the spectacular palace art housed within the royal collection is vast and i mean vast it has more than a million objects spread across all of the royal palaces just imagine what has been collected over centuries so this collection is unlike any other collection in the world discover their gruesome stories it's an amazing insight into the royals history but also our common history frankly you're gonna cut the head off a king it's got to be done in a palace and relive the recent events that shaped the modern royal family the whole case was an absolute fiasco and a huge embarrassment the queen was particularly aggrieved that harry had done it in the way that he had this is the secrets of the royal palaces this time a conversation between the queen and diana's butler is kept secret landing him in the old bay i just felt as if i betrayed the princess's legacy when all i'd ever wanted to do was protect her we explore the royals hidden getaway the vast estate of balmoral they can walk for four or five hours and not come across a living soul we discovered that henry viii's great lost palace was a stadium for violence what he does when he restores whitehall palace is he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfighting pit and we reveal the secret story behind one of the most iconic statues in the country to their astonishment they found out that it was actually one of queen victoria's own daughters and royal protocol is tested with president trump's state visit to windsor castle there was a lot of nervousness about how trump would behave all eyes were on him [Music] the royal palaces are stuffed at the brim with priceless objects and paintings every wall corner and staircase of the palaces is lined with sensational pieces of art including hundreds of portraits throughout history portraits have normally been for the purposes of state or for propaganda they are kind of weapons if you like in the countless paintings in her rain often multiple times a year [Music] she has a room in buckingham palace the yellow drawing room that is specifically set up for artists and i suspect that she takes the view that sitting for a portrait painter is an occupational hazard many of these portraits are displayed across the royal palaces for all to admire but sometimes an artist delivers the unexpected ladies and gentlemen i give you lucy and freud lucien freud was one of the most successful popular figurative artists of the 20th century he was particularly well known for his really searingly truthful images of people [Music] some nudes which are very uncompromising quite gritty not particularly pretty so eyebrows were raised when the queen agreed to be his subject it's quite a brave decision of the queen freud offered to paint the queen for free and after years of secret negotiations the queen accepted he kept insisting that the queen would need to come to his studio and he was asking for at least 72 sittings the queen of course is a phenomenally busy woman she doesn't normally give more than a handful of sittings to any one portrait painter eventually they compromised freud would come to the queen painting her in the royal collections paint conservation studio in saint james's palace where she would sit for 20 sessions fewer than the original 72 sittings requested when he realized he would have much less time because he just immediately shrunk the size of the canvas it's a really small almost postcard size painting of the queen you'd see this cropped version of the queen's head and shoulders with just that edge of the crown coming over her head she could almost be one of us [Music] the finished piece a small headshot just nine and a half inches by six inches caused quite a stir when the public got its first glimpse in december 2001 it was definitely a marmite moment people loved it people who hated it and nobody was in between you had some newspapers saying it was deep and exploratory and then you had others saying it was an absolute travesty how could this thing be let out in public he's not exactly a flattering portrait painter but there was a secret reason the portrait didn't look quite right freud's painting hadn't gone to plan freud actually slightly mucked it up he decided that he wanted to add the diamond diadem on the queen's head but he didn't have room on the canvas so what he had to do was actually add a layer of canvas at the top it's quite funny that after all those years of planning he actually had to slightly bodge the job in the end what the queen thought back of art but he gave it to her and i think it's one of the most valuable things in her collection [Music] the queen doesn't actually own the priceless art and artifacts that are given to her as sovereign she holds them in trust for her successes and the nation and the same is true of her palaces windsor castle buckingham palace james's palace hollyrood house they are all owned by the country the state the only two royal residences that the queen actually owns a beautiful sandringham estate in norfolk and balmoral in scotland for nearly 170 years balmoral has been the royal family's secret retreat in the scottish highlands balmoral is very scottish it's set in the most beautiful countryside in the highlands of scotland the royal family's annual summer holiday here is a time for them to embrace all things scottish [Music] so you're quite often going to be walking up with the signs of bagpipes being a scot that's something i would i wouldn't mind that's on a paper wake me up in 1842 queen victoria and her husband prince albert fell in love with scotland [Music] she was infused by the romance of scotland she loved it and so did prince albert it reminded him of his native germany the great mountains of bavaria which of course were dotted with romantic castles [Music] victoria and albert decided to invest in a scottish castle of their own and bought one without ever having seen it a painting was enough to make them part with thirty thousand pounds around four million pounds in today's money the ball moral in the kangals queen victoria said it was a perfect place to escape from the sadness of the world at that time wars were raging across europe they'd found the perfect location but there was one small issue with the castle itself when they got to visit in 1848 victoria said well yeah it's lovely but it's a bit small so they moved into the existing castle and started building a bigger one a hundred yards away when it was finished it had 70 rooms including a huge ballroom [Music] its seven story tower parks back to medieval defensive tower houses while its pepper pot turrets are reminiscent of french shadow but victoria and albert's fantasy scottish castle is not to everyone's taste balmoral is a really ugly building i mean phenomenal it is a country house with an over scale tower looks like a win a grand landscape in addition to the castle there are 150 other buildings dotted throughout the state including farms cottages and a distillery [Music] but hidden away in a remote part of the estate lies a particularly important building this is glaz old shield on the shores of lokmik nestled beneath the mountain this remote spot is perhaps the most beautiful place on the estate and this lodge reveals the untold story of balmoral and victoria and alberts lost love coming up on secrets of the royal palaces the kensington palace butler fighting for his life i had no backup no defense i was heading straight to prison and the secrets of the witches of hollywood they find what they say is the devil's mark on her genitals they said yep it's true i was the devil's witch each royal palace is as unique as look who lived there george iv buckingham palace was designed as a showpiece which would dominate london while william iii's kensington palace was built outside of london as he suffered from asthma and wanted to avoid the pollution but none of the palaces are as closely associated with a particular monarch as queen victoria's balmoral castle balmoral the royal scottish retreat it's not just a house it's a 50 000 acre estate that's almost twice the size of the city of manchester [Music] balmoral is hundreds of acres of nothingness with nobody they can walk for four or five hours and not come across a living soul [Music] queen victoria and prince albert bought the estate as their ultimate secret love nest a place where they could get away from the court and be together what they were buying into at balboa it was a way of life it was an escape from royal duty and ceremonial and stuffy staterooms and interfering prime ministers this was their path it was where they could indulge in their hobbies here albert would stalk deer and victoria would paint but all that came to an end in 1861 with albert's premature death [Music] victoria was devastated she retreated from the world and found solace at balmoral and here on the shores of lochmic she built what she called her widow's house where she could mourn in peace it was an additional place where she associated to it it became hers her widow's cottage and it just shows the depth i think of her despair and her need to escape and it was at burma that she found a place to do that victoria spent her first night in the lodge in october 1868 and recorded her sorrow and loneliness in her diary missing her dearest albert with whom she had been so happy at balmoral [Music] in recent years this lodge has been a favorite spot for royal picnics and sometimes they open it to non-royals one of its outbuildings is a body a resting place for hikers so it's the only royal residence where you can drop into sleep for the night for free [Music] another hidden building on the estate about a mile from the main castle is particularly special to our current queen every year she starts her summer holiday with a stay at the seven bedroom craigowen lodge so since the house is open to the public for much of june and july often the queen will arrive in scotland before the big house balmoral's open so she stays at craig lodge and i don't know she's i don't imagine she's doing the cooking or anything but she and they're able to be there as an ordinary married couple without the grandeur i think the queen sees the grandeur in these amazing houses as sort of part of the job but the queen like anybody else can only be in one room at a time so one room at a small house is probably rather a nice change for a person who can never go on a normal holiday like the rest of us balmoral is incredibly important in the summer as her retreat and her place to explore the highlands belmont has been the royal family's secret escape for generations hidden away in the vastness of the scottish highlands but not all scottish palaces have such sedate and serene history scotland's james vi who became james the first of england after the union of the scottish and english crowns used the other scottish palace hollyrood house as a court he made himself judge jury and executioner in the trial of agnes sampson james vi is convinced that witches are out to get him and it all really starts with bad storms his wife and she's coming over from denmark to marry him and he decides that the bad storms on the way are caused by witches who are trying to kill the future queen so james called for one woman agnes sampson to be brought to hollywood house and she's questioned and in front of the king she refuses to say she's a witch she says she's innocent so she's taken to the hollywood cells it's got these four teeth two go into one cheek and the other two go into the tongue it's really torture and still she's not saying anything she's not giving up and then they decide to look for the devil's mark and what they mean by witch mark is what we see as a mole even a freckle i mean they're that desperate sometimes even a freckle will do so finally they find what they say is the devil's mark on her genitals on her privileges as they put it so that is really the moment when agnes crumbles she said yep it's true i was the devil's witch so agnes poor woman is burnt at the stake and james he is convinced that witchcraft exists he writes a witch hunting guide demonology a book that you can use for hunting down witches and we think about 4 000 people are burned and killed as witches in scotland and all of this hysteria all these deaths they all began with james's trial of agnes sampson at hollywood house [Music] throughout history the royal palaces have played the part of the ultimate backdrop to some of the greatest affairs of state and political intrigue the country has ever seen they've seen death they've seen murder they've seen marriage look at them that's called a microphone there's absolutely nothing that hasn't happened in these palaces but what really gets the public interested are the secrets behind the drama [Music] june 1998 kensington palace ten months after princess diana's death her former butler paul barrel is spotted by the police duty police officer at kensington palace noticed paul burrell uh pulling up about 3 30 in the morning loading up his car with a couple of evening dresses and a wooden box three years later the police launched an investigation into the suspected sail of princess diana's personal possessions in america [Music] it led police to borrow's cheshire home where he was then living with his wife and two sons and a dawn raid when the police came to my family home that day the bottom of my wall fell out i felt completely helpless and hopeless police spent 12 hours searching his house and found hundreds of diana's possessions didn't take very long to find about 2 000 different items one officer went up into the loft and said it's wall-to-wall royal dresses and stuff up here the police's view was that this man was helping himself and stealing diana's possessions barrow had worked for the queen for 10 years [Music] he was then i was invited into her world i became part of her world i became closer and closer as the years went by diana felt that she could trust him she confided in him and as he later revealed she did ask him to provide some very intimate services including smuggling boyfriends into kensington palace late at night it all came to a boiling point when the couple decided to lead separate lives and separate charles said to diana you can have anything you want what do you want do you want the furniture do you want the silver you name it make a list so she made a list and on top of that list she put my name and when charles saw it he said you can't have paul paul came from my mama and i need him for the future what charles princess diana said you said i could have anything i wanted and i'm taking paul with me to london [Music] she believed that paul burrell was one of the few people in the world that she could trust implicitly to do what she wanted and to be her man if you will [Music] after princess diana's tragic death in 1997 barrel was heavily involved in sorting her belongings at kensington palace it was an arduous task but i found it quite cathartic really to be in her world to still be in control to still be taking care of the things that she loved most but paul felt members of diana's family were deliberately destroying her legacy getting rid of material they didn't want the public to discover he could see her mother and sister tearing up letters and removing things and he felt that there were things in that palace which should be preserved for william and harry a missy schenkid would sit on the city in the princess's sitting room and constantly shred the princess's correspondence she really did destroy part of the princess's world harold started secretly protecting her possessions and removing them from kensington palace and it was these items the police found in his home three years later the 43 year old former royal servant left a london police station this evening to return to his home in chester having been formally charged with stealing 342 items of personal property the police believe they had enough evidence to take barrel to court with the apparent approval of prince charles the police told the prince of wales they had photographic evidence of me wearing diana's clothes [Music] of course none of it was true none of it was true it never happened the stage was right paul barrow has denied three charges of theft and intimate details about the royal family could be exposed it's impossible for anybody to have witnessed what happened so because of that i had no backup no defense none whatsoever i was heading straight to prison coming up the queen reveals a secret conversation that will change the outcome of the barrel case never before had a monarch intervened in a criminal court case and henry viii sees a palace as the backdrop for extreme sports when he restores whitehall palace he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfight behind the pump and glamour of the british royal runner very rarely do any of these room staff make it into the headlines but in october 2002 all that changed with the trial of princess diana's former butler paul burrow burrell was accused of stealing possessions worth millions from diana's kensington palace home the police wanted my head on a spike they wanted me in prison because then i would never ever have been believed again his defense statement barrow mentioned a conversation he had had with the queen after diana's death [Music] we were standing in her sitting room just the two of us and we had a very open frank discussion i told her everything that happened and i said i've taken it upon myself to keep things the princess had given to me for safekeeping and i've protected them and she understood that but due to an age-old palace protocol barrel was duty-bound to keep the details of this conversation secret paul burrell couldn't say to his lawyers look uh i told the queen i'd taken all of this he was just prevented from doing so many people will not be aware of the protocol that when you have a private audience with the sovereign you're not supposed to repeat what has passed between you it is entirely confidential and the confidence belongs to the sovereign so it is up to the sovereign whether she reveals what you spoke about or doesn't i'm not going to tell them how close i was to her majesty i'm not going to tell them that's going to be my privilege but i would have to pay the cost and the price i would pay would be prison coming each day to the old bailey is a journey called bottle is getting used to after 11 days of the trial barrel was thrown a lifeline from an unexpected source the queen had only realized paul burrell was on trial when she drove past the old bailey on her way to a church service for the barley bombing and noticed all the crowds outside and the queen then at that point her memory is jogged and she realizes that she has the vital piece of information that burrell had in fact told her that he was doing that he was taking things for safekeeping and the queen in reply said oh hang on paul told me he was looking after these things for safekeeping we'd better let them know the queen's recollection undermined the prosecution she knew barrow was taking diana's possessions out of kensington palace this wasn't a palace theft and the trial collapsed permanently deprived the royal princes of their mother's goods nearly that he'd taken them into custody so that they could have them when they grew to be 18. so there was no theft i'm expecting to make a statement on behalf of paul i couldn't believe i was free to walk from the old bailey instead of into a prison cell barrel was jubilant claiming that the queen had come through for him never before had a monarch intervened in a criminal court case and she'd saved me [Music] she saved me from what i thought was my fate but i think she saved me because she knew me because i was her boy for 11 years and she saw me grow and saw me marry and have two children and i think she was i think she cared i do i think she cared she cared about me and what would happen to my family one of the most high profile court cases was now over the kensington palace butler was free henry viii great lost royal residence whitehall palace stood in the heart of the british establishment before it was destroyed by fire in 1698 this palace was built for excitement it was a pleasure palace thanks largely to the cockpit a court henry viii whitehall palace it wasn't what we'd imagine to be a palace there were four tennis courts and tilt yard for doing jousting henry viii was a great sportsman and when he was outside london in hampton court or windsor he went out hunting and when he was in london the sport he did was watching animals beat each other up to death [ __ ] bears and dogs actually cockfighting had really been wearing down in its popularity henry comes to the throne and [ __ ] are back and what he does when he restores whitehall palace is he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfighting pit the large building surrounded by seating so that when those two [ __ ] go and fight it out everyone can watch them and cheer them on and tudors loved it it was not a time for happy lives for animals you know what stands on the place of henry viii's cockfighting pit that is now 10 downing street the prime minister's residence where those big puffed up [ __ ] fight it out that power and glory behind closed doors whereas henry viii's whitehall palace was built in the centre of london british establishment balmoral was built as far away from it as possible for queen victoria and prince albert it was their secret local culture and incorporated it into their castle balmoral is quintessentially scottish and quite deliberately it was seen very much as an opportunity to make the british monarch seen as more scottish rather than simply an english monarch victoria and albert immersed themselves in the highland life especially when it came to their decor balmoral is entirely clad in tartan that was always the intention the carpets were tartan the seat covers were tartan the curtains were tightened no doubt they wore titan in the servant's quarters on the floor was tartan linoleum and if you looked at the walls loads of stags heads and antlers and deer skins on the floor as you come in through the main entrance it was a theme park of scottishness victoria and albert's obsession with tartan was actually a secret political ploy to win back the support of the scots in the middle of the 18th century victoria's great great grandfather george ii had invoked the massacre of glenn coe tartan was banned any affiliation with scots or stewards against the english kingship was treasonous so for victoria to start to to rebind the links with the people of scotland went down really well a century and a half later have our modern royals torn out the tartan few had seen inside this private home until 2013 when new zealand's prime minister john key broke protocol and shared a photo of the queen's private living room and what you see there is a glimpse of an interior which undoubtedly familiar to victoria and albert i mean their own portraits victoria and albert still either side of the fireplace that they commissioned and saw built there are still time carpets wall to wall there some of their furniture still survives in situ it's simply been comfortably updated through time and i rather like that [Music] while in balmoral you can walk for miles without bumping into another living soil in london's kensington palace you can't turn a corner without bumping into a royal in fact it houses more royals than any other residents including the future king and queen and watching over this palace is britain's second longest reigning monarch victoria this marble monarch greets over half a million palace visitors every year but the creation of this statue is one of the palace's greatest secrets completed in 1893 to commemorate her golden jubilee a few years earlier the young slender figure is not the victoria we think of today the image most of us have of queen victoria is when she's old when she was a widow she was dressed in black and she looked pretty commissioning the statue the powers that be decided on an open competition allowing anyone to enter a design various people sent him sketches one came in anonymously and it was decided by the commission unanimously that that was the sculpture they were going to go for little did they know this was no ordinary submission to everyone's surprise the winner was actually a female sculptor which in itself was pretty amazing but then to their astonishment they found out that it was actually one of queen victoria's own daughters princess louise the sixth child of victoria and albert princess louise was something of a rebel princess princess louise was probably the least conventional of victoria's children she rode bicycles she smoked cigarettes she had numerous affairs she believed strongly in women's rights and suffrage she also was very artistic she wanted from a young age to go into what at this point was a male-dominated world of art and sculpture unsurprisingly there were lots of subjects louise and her mother did not see eye to eye on including her sculpting victoria very much disapproved of her daughter's interest in sculpture she thought it was a masculine art form and really unseemly for a princess but the rebellious princess stuck to her guns after much pushing and cajoling she persuaded her mother to let her go to the national art training school now the royal college of art and that made her the very first princess ever to go to a public education institution at first louise had not entered the competition for the commission fearing it would be inappropriate but now that she had won it the stakes were even higher not only did she have to satisfy the organizers and the general public she also had to please her disapproving mother the queen everyone would have had an opinion about the sculpture and lots of people would have been waiting for louise to fail particularly feeling that a woman's sculpture wasn't appropriate and a member of the royal family [Music] coming up what would the forbidden queen victoria make up her daughter's artwork you get a sense of the pressure coming from all directions and president trump refuses to follow the rule book while visiting buckingham palace trump being trump lands his chopper in the middle of the buckingham palace lawns this houses more royals than any other residents you've got um princess eugenie and her husband jack brooks back there of course you've got the cambridges the department 1a and the gloucesters i mean the royals are very much packed in to kensington palace and they're all watched over by the young queen victoria thanks to a controversial statue designed by her daughter princess louise the rebellious sixth child of queen victoria had secretly entered and then won a competition to create a sculpture of her mother at kensington palace now she had to deliver louise herself lived in kensington palace and that's where she'd set up her studio it of course was the palace in which queen victoria had been born so you get a sense of the pressure coming from all directions the statue had been commissioned to mark victoria's golden jubilee louise had to go through source material in order to reconstruct what queen victoria would have looked like at her coronation this was a task of epic proportions and the princess rose to the occasion like any other wealthy artist at the time louise had studio assistants to help her but she made the maquettes the small scale mock-ups this would have gone to a professional carver who then would have translated it into that wonderful carrara marble [Music] although the statue had been commissioned for the 1887 jubilee it was not completed until 1893 on the anniversary of her coronation victoria herself unveiled the statue but would she like it she said it gives me admirably designed and executed by my daughter the rebel princess had pulled it off the queen loved the statue princess louise carved several other puppet statues but her best known is the one she made to stand here guarding her mother's childhood home [Music] in her 65 year reign queen elizabeth has hosted 113 state visits a heady mix of kings queens prime ministers and presidents have passed through the palace's gilded gates but only one has ever gone over them june 2019 the ballroom buckingham palace georgian tableware is laid for a very special state banquet the state visit is very much about putting on the the best of british it's a chance for us to show off and say this is what we're all about and the queen personally will inspect the table so there's pressure for the butlers feeling the heat on this official visit will be american president donald trump americans love the royal family even if you're the president of the united states it's a big deal to come and meet the queen you know you couldn't get two more opposite people in one room together than president trump and queen elizabeth the palace was on high alert for any potential banana skins which wasn't surprising considering what had happened the first time president trump met the queen at windsor castle if you look back at the g20 2018 visit you know he did have that huge faux pas trump walks in front of her everybody's cringing this queen is divorced by his gargantuan size and suddenly appears from behind him as absolute shocker and his lack of etiquette isn't the only baggage trump brings with him no room is full of mirrors if you look at the two state visits between obama and trump it's almost night and day you know when obama arrived he obviously took a car to buckingham palace and the streets were lined with people cheering him on and it completely opposite when when trump arrived the streets were aligned mostly with people protesting his visit [Applause] [Music] to avoid the anti-trump protesters the president decided on an entrance nobody else had done before he was the very first president to fly in on a helicopter for a state visit trump being trump flies over the protesters lands in the middle of the buckingham palace lawns all the journalists including myself were stationed on the law mergers from the helicopter he thought he was going to meet the queen but it was charles and camilla who were the first to meet him only then did trump get to join her majesty inspect the guard from a safe distance [Music] i think he probably surprised many people in in that he was quite quiet and subdued it's almost like you're visiting your granny and you remember when you used to go and visit your granny you wear your best clothes you would mind your p's and q's you wouldn't make any mistakes president trump knew he needed to be on the very best behavior you have to remember this queen has been through everything she's seen it all this is just another another president [Music] next time at windsor castle the world's oldest working kitchen rises from the ashes the archaeologists revealed something quite extraordinary that this was original to edward the third building we explore the mysterious balmoral pyramid it is really not what you would expect to see in the middle of the scottish highlands and diana's statue fails to materialize at kensington palace is this further evidence of fractious relationship between the two of them [Music] you

Channel: UK Documentary

Views: 53,942

Keywords: Queen, PrinceCharles, PrincessDiana, PrinceWilliam, Kate, PrinceHarry, MeghanMarkle

Id: DbgC3YFqyls

Length: 39min 3sec (2343 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021