-Britain’s royal palaces.

Historic.

-This, a twin-towered Italianate vision by the sea.

-Extravagant.

-It just shouts power and richness.

-And jam-packed with secrets.

Their floating palace was the only palace that didn’t leak.

-In this series, we gain privileged access inside palace walls... -I’m heading for one of the most unexpectedly spectacular and costly parts of the palace -- the roof.

-...and uncover the hidden treasures within.

-It wasn’t until the fire that these beautiful paintings were rediscovered.

-We unearth the palace’s dark, secret histories... -Kew Palace had been a secret place of torture.

-...and we reveal the truth behind their most dramatic moments.

-Charles and Camilla probably just had their head in their hands and thought, "What else could go wrong?"

-This was the closest that Hitler got to actually killing the British royal family.

-I sat bolt upright in bed saying, "What fire at Buckingham Palace?"

-The tears almost flowed.

-Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

-This is the all-new "Secrets of the Royal Palaces."

This time, behind the scenes at a Buckingham Palace party that almost went up in flames.

-Apparently, it’s treasonable.

We’d have all been taken to the Tower.

-We discover that at Hampton Court Palace, the walls literally have ears... -There’s a network of spies.

It spreads paranoia.

-...the diamond ring that started a palace love story... -There is a secret to this ring.

It was a private message from Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth.

-...and at Sandringham, a secret some call murder.

-How shocking is that, that the British king was killed in his own bed in secret in his own palace?

-But first, to royal HQ -- Buckingham Palace, the backdrop to the greatest royal celebrations.

Though back in 2002, as the Queen’s reign lurched into its 50th year, there was a distinct lack of party spirit at the palace.

-I remember a "Guardian" headline -- "Apathy threatens Queen’s Jubilee."

And it was how the Palace should respond to that.

-Royal popularity was low in the late '90s and the early noughties.

-The monarchy had gone through those troubled times in the '90s with the Windsor fire, the break up of the marriages, the tragic death of Princess Diana.

So this is all overshadowing the build up to this enormous event.

-The monarchy wanted to win back public affection with the Golden Jubilee, so the Queen and her team cooked up a plan.

-She wanted to be seen to be inviting the country into her home.

That was the idea that just emerged around two concerts, a classical concert and a pop concert, to symbolize the success of British music over the Elizabethan age.

-It was unusual because it was a public concert, invited, but a public concert in the garden at Buckingham Palace.

-The crowd needed a boost, but staging a pop concert was miles outside the royal comfort zone.

-Royal courtiers aren’t known for organizing pop concerts, but they were involved in this one, and of course, it was an epic location.

But what was going to go wrong?

-I don’t know what music they’d been listening to in the decades leading up to it, but they assembled a great roster of A-list talents.

-From earlier in the reign, you’ve got Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney.

-Elton John, Queen, Status Quo, and Mis-teeq, Blue.

-Shirley Bassey, Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys.

You’ve got all the greats of pop music, including Ozzy Osbourne.

When she got to Ozzy Osbourne’s name, allegedly, she said, "Well, that’s alright.

As long as he doesn’t bite the head off a bat."

-Rounding off the whole event, a more traditional royal finale.

-Fireworks and jubilees go back a long, long way.

So, there had to be fireworks at this, of course, iconic location, and it had to be on the roof.

-This presented a once-in-a-lifetime challenge for the fireworks team.

-Launching fireworks from the palace roof -- a bit of a different kettle of fish.

Buckingham Palace is such a picture postcard perfect view for everybody.

It was very scary, to be quite honest.

We were sworn to secrecy.

We’ve been inspected by security, and the bomb squad and the sniffer dogs have all been round the vehicles.

And hands up -- we’re trying to move two and a half tons of fireworks into a royal palace.

-By the eve of the concert, Keith’s team had lugged their fireworks onto the palace roof and primed the charges.

What could possibly go wrong?

[ Sirens wailing ] -I had a phone call asking me about the fire at Buckingham Palace, and I sat bolt upright in bed saying, "What fire at Buckingham Palace?"

-This was hugely, hugely dangerous because many of the fireworks by that point had been laid.

Everything could have just literally gone up.

-Later, we’ll discover whether the party went off with the intended bang.

[ Fireworks popping ] Today, Buckingham Palace is indelibly linked with our longest serving sovereign and a reign characterized by selfless duty.

Other palaces bear the imprint of rather more controversial monarchs.

Take Hampton Court Palace, the most celebrated palace of Henry VIII, infamous for death and divorce.

But the king did have a more constructive side to his nature.

-Henry VIII is renowned as one of the great royal palace builders.

He acquired new-built, developed, extended residences across the country.

When he came to the throne in 1509, he inherited about 20 properties from his father, Henry VII.

When he died 38 years later, he had amassed close to 70 properties.

-This palace-building frenzy was kick-started by his famous mid-reign crisis.

-By the time we hit 1528, 1529, he’s been married to Catherine of Aragon for 20 years, and they only have one child to show for it -- a girl, Princess Mary.

So he’s facing this real dilemma in terms of his legacy.

-He wants to get rid of his long-standing wife, Catherine of Aragon.

He wants a new wife, Anne Boleyn.

He wants to live in a new way.

He wants more sumptuousness, and nothing is going to stand in his way.

Even his old friend and advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, who is unable to meet the king’s demands, also has to go.

-Henry seized Wolsey’s Hampton Court home for himself, seeing it as the perfect royal doer-upper.

-Henry VII’s builders, took over Hampton Court and embarked on a program of massive expansion that would last for over a decade.

There was the practical stuff to consider -- new offices, lodgings for the royal courtiers, but also beautiful new privy gardens and suites of accommodation for not only Henry VIII, but also his mistress, Anne Boleyn, who was not yet queen.

There’s no lodgings, though, for the old queen, Catherine of Aragon.

This was all about Henry’s future.

-And Henry’s future would include a vast entourage.

All needed accommodation at Hampton Court.

-This might include members of his family, senior nobles, certainly his Privy Council, servants and pages, knights and yeomen, and everyone required to support all of that.

-Henry’s huge household was a projection of his power, and they would come together daily in one all-important room.

-This fabulous space, the great hall, was at the heart of Henry VII’s building works.

We know from records that in summer 1535, there were 70 stonemasons and 81 bricklayers.

There were 45 carpenters and 21 joiners, plus 208 laborers, all working away to complete this grand vision at the heart of the palace.

♪♪ Henry VIII was in love with the idea of the chivalrous monarch, and the space that Henry created was the kind of place that kings of antiquity might have held banquets and great feasts, and on occasion, great feasts were held here.

But the reality is, for most of the time, it acted as a royal staff canteen.

-The king insisted that his entire household eat together, a command motivated not by love, but by fear.

-A culture had developed where people would slip away to have dinner by themselves in some dark corner, the Tudor equivalent of the TV dinner.

But Henry insisted that his courtiers came to the hall to dine, that they were under the king’s watch, and they understood their place in the pecking order.

-Henry was wary of intrigue and plotting.

He’d executed adversaries and advisers alike.

Now, he saw enemies everywhere.

-Wolsey’s destroyed.

Moore and Cromwell are executed.

We know about the sorry saga of Henry VII’s wives.

Are you telling me he’s not a paranoid man?

-Information is power, and this is a time when information really travels by whispers.

-There were always plots.

There were always conspiracies.

Maybe some of them were imagined by Henry, but some of them were very real.

-He started to make some very real enemies, and we see him exerting his control.

-So Henry made sure there were eyes and ears everywhere.

-If you look up into the fabulous carved roof, you’ll see small characters called eavesdroppers.

Now, they're carved as if they were in contemporary dress.

They look for all the world like the courtiers that would have been arrayed underneath them, but they’re looking down upon them.

They remind you that there’s a network of spies.

You’re not sure who it is that you’re talking to, whether you should confide your plot against the king.

It spreads paranoia.

It works for Henry VIII, because the eyes and the ears of the king are on you at all times.

-Coming up, we discover how Henry feeds the enormous household he watches over... -The mind actually boggles.

It’s like it's a mini industry.

It’s like a sort of factory.

[ Fireworks crackling ] -...there’s an explosive miscalculation at Buckingham Palace... -A huge cloud of smoke then envelops the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

They’re sort of like doing this and coughing, kind of stepping back.

-...and Charles II's palace mistress holds nothing back.

-"I’m still dominant.

Look at my lacy knickers."

-In 2002, the Queen planned the ultimate party in the grounds of Buckingham Palace to celebrate her golden Jubilee and reconnect with the public.

[ Siren wailing ] But when a fire swept through the palace on the eve of the big day, the festivities looked doomed.

It was a heart-stopping moment for the Queen’s press secretary.

-I was extremely alarmed, and I wondered whether it could jeopardize the pop concert that night.

20 fire engines and over 100 firefighters fought to control the blaze just meters from tons of explosives.

-Suddenly having a fire so close really, really did bring home the risk.

-Thankfully, after several hours, they managed to subdue the flames before they could spread to the rooftop fireworks.

The pyrotechnic spectacular was back on track.

All that remained was to pick which flag to fly.

-I was suddenly aware, as I was standing, that there was someone standing beside me, and it was the Queen, you know, and she was looking, and I said, "Ma’am, we’re just trying to work out what size standard we should put up."

I said, "I think a big one."

She said, "Yes, I think a big one too.

Why not?"

And then she said, "Would it be significant, do you think, if it burnt?"

I said, "Yes, ma’am.

End of the dynasty, I think."

And she laughed.

-The Queen’s preference for a 38-foot rooftop flag had the pyro boys scrambling.

-We do some quick measurements and work out that if the flag is flying and there’s a breeze which takes the flag up to its full, full potential, it is going to be flying over the fireworks as we fire them.

We were absolutely paranoid about burning the standard, that apparently it’s treasonable if you burn a flag.

We’d have all been taken to the tower.

-After some head scratching, a secret low-tech solution was found, invisible to the watching millions.

-Well, in the end, it’s amazing what a little bit of rope can do.

-But we had a man with a black string on the corner of the standard, so when the fireworks went off, he pulled it.

He was sitting at the bottom of the flagpole.

He pulled it in gently so no one could see that it was being pulled in.

-By early evening, a throng of thousands had passed security, eager for the show to begin.

-When you arrived, you also got given a rather nice little picnic hamper, and you went off and had a sort of picnic in the grounds of the palace.

So, one minute there’s this rather Edwardian scene of people sort of sitting on the lawns, having their coronation chicken and a cup of tea, and then suddenly, they’re sort of down in the mosh pit waiting for Ozzy Osbourne.

It was wonderfully unpredictable.

-By around 7:00, it was full up, and then at the pivotal moment, Brian May on the roof, and the whole thing started.

-For over three hours, the best of British pop rocked the palace, all building up to the grand firework finale lit by the Queen herself.

[ Cheers and applause ] -I think anybody would be concerned if we said we were going to put two and a half tons of fireworks onto the roof of your house, and I think Her Majesty was even more concerned when she found out that we’d prepared a giant rocket, that she was actually going to light and fire at her own house.

[ Cheers and applause ] -A huge cloud of smoke then envelops the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

They're sort of, like, doing this and coughing, kind of stepping back.

[ Cheers and applause ] -And there was the Queen and Prince Philip silhouetted against the smoke, and they turned around and they looked at me and they went, "Huh?"

You know, "What’s going on?"

I said, "I haven't the faintest idea.

All I know is there’s a lot of fireworks going on."

-Blame for the royal indignity was hotly debated.

-The night before, we’d done a rehearsal, and it worked perfectly.

Then, come the night, someone did something to the box that the rocket was coming out of.

-We’d had a failure with the test rocket, and Sir Michael Parker was very unhappy, to say the least, and that’s when we added more firepower to the rocket.

We had underestimated the volume of smoke that came out of it.

So, Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh unfortunately were engulfed in quite a lot of smoke.

-But when the smoke cleared, the show blew everyone away.

-When Buckingham Palace lit up with all these fireworks, it was an absolutely amazing spectacle and it just lit up Buckingham Palace for miles around.

-Of course there were problems and mistakes and muddles, but I think that that concert was an unqualified success.

-The party forged a new connection between palace and people.

-There was a fear that people might not turn up, but my goodness, they turned up in the millions.

-When the fireworks went off at the end of that evening, I mean, you really did have a sense of, "Okay, the crown is back."

-If Buckingham Palace is the royals' front of house, then Sandringham is very much backstage.

Hidden from public view, anything could be going on.

But few would guess that might include the deliberate killing of a king.

♪♪ -On the 15th of January, 1936, King George V complained of a cold and took to his bed in his royal palace of Sandringham.

Five days later, at 9:30 p.m., Dr. Dawson issued a bulletin to the public, saying "The king’s life is moving peacefully to its close."

100 miles away at Buckingham Palace, well-wishers gathered to read the bulletins of the king’s health.

At five minutes to midnight, the king died, and the cause of death was confirmed by Dr. Dawson as bronchitis, but this wasn’t the whole truth.

When Dr. Dawson died nine years later, he went to the grave with a dark secret.

Dr. Dawson’s diary was discovered in 1986, and in it, he lays out what happened on that fateful night.

[ Bird cawing ] Dawson had dispatched him.

Dawson had killed him.

At 11:00 p.m., the king is still drifting in and out of consciousness.

It’s not looking likely he’s going to die any time soon.

More likely in the early hours of the next morning.

"Fine," you might think.

But no, not fine.

It’s really thought that royal deaths should be announced in the morning newspapers, in the "Times", and that’s a problem.

The "Times" is waiting.

They’re waiting to go to press.

If the king dies after midnight, the news of his death will have to be announced by the evening papers.

Dr. Dawson takes matters into his own hands and bumps off the king with a combination of morphine and cocaine injected into his jugular vein, but he hadn’t asked the king.

He hadn’t said to the king, "If it’s going on for a bit, can I just bump you off with morphine and heroin?"

No.

How shocking is that, that the British king was killed in his own bed, in secret, in his own palace?

-Sandringham was built as a weekend retreat, a place for entertaining in private.

But monarchs need a site for more conspicuous consumption, too.

For Henry VIII, that place was Hampton Court, a byword for entertaining in style.

-Hampton Court is the Tudor palace par excellence.

It doesn’t come much better than this.

It’s visually stunning.

It really is a palace built by a Renaissance man, and it just shouts power and richness.

-It was the height of comfort, which is what you want if you want to impress.

-So keen was Henry to impress, he once spent a year’s tax celebrating Christmas.

-Henry loves to spend money.

He likes grandeur.

He likes opulence.

He likes basically to large it -- big palaces, big banquets, and even his own physical stature.

-You’ve got a very, very large king.

He’s got a very, very large ego.

Henry’s vast gut never goes empty, and those of his important courtiers, of course.

-Hampton Court became the entertainment capital of England, and the task of supplying it would have challenged a modern-day cruise ship.

-Henry needed an entire administration to oversee all of the food which arrived for the palace, and it came in industrial quantities -- meat, vegetables, wine, beer, grain.

The carts made their way through into this courtyard and offloaded the supplies into strategically positioned kitchen offices.

-Mountains of food and an army of cooks could quickly degenerate into chaos.

It took a Herculean effort to keep order, and facilities had to be purpose-built.

-The mind actually boggles.

It’s like it's a mini industry.

It’s like a sort of factory.

You’ve got to have cold houses, you’ve got to have cellars.

Let’s go through those larders.

You’ve got to have a wet one, a dry one, a flesh one.

I know.

That’s disgusting.

You’ve got to have a bakehouse, you’re going to have a pastry house, you’re going to have a boiling house.

-Here, game and fowl were first parboiled, to reduce cooking time on the spit.

-What Henry needed to efficiently feed the hundreds of people that surrounded him every day was an industrialized food production process, where each unit relates to the next in sequence.

These great kitchens are 40 feet high, and they contain six hearths, to have that number of carcasses of meat being spit roasted at once, and there were two kitchens -- the lower kitchens and the upper kitchens.

The one person who did not eat from these kitchens was the king himself.

He needed greater security and higher quality, and he had his own hand chosen cook.

-Coming up, at Kensington Palace, the door slams on MPs investigating secret financial arrangements... -We weren’t allowed to look at all the property.

Princess Michael refused us entry.

-...while at Hampton Court Palace, another door opens, revealing the opulence of a king... -I’m heading for one of the most spectacular and costly parts of the palace.

-...and we uncover the Buckingham Palace strong room where the queen kept her most personal treasures.

-Bracelets, earrings, tiaras, necklaces.

So many jewels lined up in this amazing showroom.

-Public fascination with the royals means we take any chance we can to peek over palace walls.

-Monarchy has been equated with celebrity.

It’s been equated with Hollywood, glamor, soap opera, too.

-Which helps explain why thousands of visitors flock to Kensington Palace every year, and for a few pounds, glimpse how the royals once lived.

However, most of the palace remains strictly off-limits, as this is still a royal home.

-Kensington Palace contains dozens of apartments.

I’m not talking about your standard one bed with kitchenette and mezzanine bedroom.

The size of a house with beautiful furniture, right in the heart of London.

-Princess Margaret memorably lived in apartment 1A, Kensington Palace, which sounds like a sort of, you know, basement studio.

But when we talk about state apartments, we mean enormous grade I listed state properties.

-Kensington Palace is crown property, but it’s maintained by public funds, and this uneasy alliance would trigger a showdown between palace and Parliament.

-In 2002, we became aware that there’s a substantial number of people.

living in Kensington Palace, at either no rent whatsoever or very, very reduced rents.

-Well, through history, members of the royal family have lived in royal premises which are loaned to them by the monarch of the day.

-Now, of course, in return for this grace-and-favor house, that family is meant to work for their residence.

-These palatial grace-and-favor homes had a very generous landlord -- the queen.

Rental arrangements were on a strictly need-to-know basis, the emphasis on us not needing to know, until one group of MPs put them under the microscope.

-Well, the Public Accounts Committee had been concerned for some time with the efficacy of spending on the royals.

We wanted to check that there was value for money, that there wasn’t wastage, that there was no extravagance.

-One royal couple in particular caught the eye of the MPs.

-We were particularly concerned to discover that Prince and Princess Michael of Kent had -- as well as a house in the country of their own, they had a five-bedroom apartment in Kensington Palace and seemed to do no royal duties.

Now, that just seemed to be outrageous.

-It was said that they were paying £69 a week, I think, which was for the gas and the electricity.

-Now, anyone who’s tried to get on the property ladder in central London knows that you can’t get anything for £70 a week.

-Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent, perfectly nice members of the royal family, but they didn’t always have the best gift for publicity.

-They were known to be extravagant.

They were known to be quite grasping.

In fact, Princess Michael of Kent acquired the nickname of Princess Pushy.

-So, a group of MPs decided to visit the palace to investigate exactly how the Kents were living.

-It was a long struggle before we got to visit Kensington Palace.

-At the palace, revolutionaries made their declaration at the gates, after they’d stood aside to let a champagne delivery in.

-Prince and Princess Michael of Kent undertake no public duties whatsoever, yet live in a royal palace at a peppercorn rent.

We weren’t allowed to look at all the property.

Princess Michael refused us entry.

-They didn’t get to see the private areas of the apartments, the five sitting rooms, the multiple bedrooms, the kitchen and so on.

-For the newspapers, this royal scandal was a gift from heaven.

-The press had a total field day when it was revealed quite what a bargain the Kents were getting.

It was "Push off, Princess Pushy."

-It was said that it was the most fantastic system of housing benefit, and that you could live in a palace for less than some people were paying for council accommodation in the same borough.

-Parliamentary pressure and the glare of publicity meant things had to change.

-What the public and the parliamentarians were demanding was that the Kents started paying the going rate for the apartment in Kensington Palace.

The going rate was decided to be about 10,000 pounds a month.

-Substantially more than the agreed £69 a week.

-Prince and Princess Michael of Kent just simply, flatly refused to pay any rent at all.

-Now, of course, all this very adverse publicity for the Kents put the Queen in a very difficult position because she had given them this grace-and-favor massive apartment as a wedding gift.

I think on the one hand, she had the Kent saying to her, "You can’t take back a gift.

We’ve relied on this free accommodation."

On the other hand, she knew that the country was thoroughly fed up and disapproving.

-It was hard to see a way out of this right royal mess, but the queen came up trumps.

She honored the gift but made sure the public didn’t foot the bill.

-And the solution the Queen came up with was that she would step in.

She would be their guarantor.

She would pay their bills, but not forever -- for, as it turned out, seven years.

-I think it shows that the queen is looking after her family, but I think that, as always has happened in the queen’s reign, when there’s public pressure on an issue, there’s a response to public pressure.

-The queen had to change the way that the royal family behaved, so that it was more in line with modern Britain.

-From a city pad for minor royals to the grandest palace of Henry VIII, built from what was the Tudors' grandest building material -- brick.

-Hampton Court is the greatest surviving example of Henry VII’s work.

This sprawling red brick complex represents an investment of about £62,000 in his money, tens of millions today.

-And Henry’s building at Hampton Court, like everything he did, was taken to extremes of scale.

-One of the things that happens to Henry at this time is that he gets the building bug big time, and he’s getting directly involved in the process.

He’s poring over the plans, he’s directing people, he’s deciding the grand way that he wants to live from now on.

-Between 1529 and '39, about 16 million bricks were made on site.

Another 10 million were brought in by barge and cart.

But to see what these bricks were really capable of for Henry, I need to get away from the public courtyard and into a place you don’t normally see.

I’m heading for one of the most unexpectedly spectacular and costly parts of the palace.

I’m not talking about rooms full of tapestries.

I’m talking about the roof.

-Here, where few ventured, Henry turned the functional into the fantastic.

-Each one of these chimneys is different to the next.

There are 241 of them, and they excel in their quality and variety.

Now, it must be said not a single one remains intact from Henry VII’s period, but they have been faithfully duplicated, with bricks cleverly made into molds, so that you can create these geometric designs.

One like a net, another one with zigzags, another like a set of knotted ropes.

They have all the festival atmosphere of a maypole.

They don’t have to be like that, but this is expenditure.

It’s showing off for its own sake.

-No expense or effort was spared.

Only excellence would do.

-If you want a fabulous roofscape, why stop at the heart of the palace?

Because these aren’t the main apartments.

These are the kitchens and boiling places and storage rooms.

If Henry VII says, "I want four acres of fabulousness," who’s going to say no?

-Historically, a king’s word was gospel, but in the 17th century, in the Palace of Whitehall, Charles II found he had someone who answered back.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Palaces are places where kings consort with their mistresses.

Sometimes, they hide away in secret, but not always.

On the 21st of May, 1662, the diarist Samuel Pepys sees, hanging up in the grounds of Whitehall Palace for all to see, a pair of glamorous, lacy underwear.

These knickers belong to Charles II’s very intimidating, powerful mistress, Barbara Castlemaine, the Duchess of Cleveland.

And what the Duchess is doing is she is protesting, because on that day, Charles is marrying his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and Barbara Castlemaine, the mistress, is saying, "I’m still dominant.

Look at my lacy knickers."

But she was also very hated, and as lady-in-waiting to the queen she hated, she made Catherine of Braganza's life a complete and utter misery.

Barbara Castlemaine was dangerous, beautiful, intelligent, and she dominated the king.

Charles II is so obsessed by his fiery mistress that he gives her a house in the grounds of Whitehall Palace.

She took lover after lover, including one who, when she heard he’d been boasting about their antics, she had him castrated.

She spent half a million on gambling and jewels, raided the exchequer.

Diarist John Evelyn called her the curse of the nation.

She’d had five children by Charles II, and then the sixth child Charles was convinced wasn’t his because they hadn’t slept together in months.

Barbara was furious.

She threatened to dash the child’s brains out if Charles didn’t acknowledge the child, and Charles did.

He begged for forgiveness on bended knee.

Barbara had her victory, but really, after that, it was a decline.

Charles grew weary of her, her dominant nature, and also the fact that she had so many other lovers.

It was okay for him to have other lovers, but her, it was a complete disaster.

She was seen less and less at court.

Charles preferred the attentions of other, more gentle mistresses.

It was time for the uncrowned queen to end her dominance and other mistresses to move into the palace.

-Coming up, the diamond ring that started a palace love story... -There is a secret to this ring.

It was a private message from Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth.

-...and at St James’s Palace, the painful secret behind its most glamorous balls.

-Better that the blood gush from your head than take out your hairpin.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Buckingham Palace contains over 800,000 square feet of floor space, divided into 775 rooms, more than enough space to hide a few secret treasures.

-The royal palaces are teeming with secret passageways and hidden chambers, and there’s one that’s particularly exciting 40 feet beneath Buckingham Palace.

-Below Buckingham Palace, there are the hidden jewelry vaults in which the queen kept her extensive collection of bracelets, earrings, tiaras, necklaces.

So many jewels lined up in this amazing showroom.

-But the Queen was very generous with her jewels.

-She invited Meghan to come into the vault at Buckingham Palace and select the tiara that she wore at her wedding.

-Among her trove of sparkling treasures, there was one piece she never lent out, a piece that accompanied her everywhere and was forged from love.

-When Prince Philip wanted to propose to Princess Elizabeth, he was in the Navy.

He wasn’t going to be able to afford the kind of ring the future monarch was expected to have.

So, he went to his mother, Princess Alice, who loaned him a tiara that she had herself had been given for her wedding.

He took the diamonds, and then he had them reorganized in this beautiful engagement ring.

-And it’s very much in the royal tradition in a way, because it was exactly what Prince Albert did with Queen Victoria with many of her jewels.

So, obviously, there was a bit of a royal tradition of the men of the family being involved in designing these special pieces of jewelry.

-The result was stunning.

-The Queen’s engagement ring -- it was beautiful.

It’s made of platinum.

At the very center is a three-carat diamond, and either side are five smaller-cut diamonds.

Together, the whole piece is worth about £200,000.

-With ring in hand, Philip chose the princess’s favorite royal palace to propose.

-In the summer of 1946, He was invited to stay at the Balmoral estate, and it was next to a much-loved loch of water that he proposed to her.

The queen said that there were white, fluffy clouds in the sky, and she could hear the call of a curlew.

There was another reason why he would have chosen to propose at the Balmoral estate.

It’s very remote, so the things that take place there can be kept a little bit under wraps.

Elizabeth must have just wanted to scream from the rooftops that she was engaged to the man that she loved, but her father, George VI, thought that she was just too young to rush into something of that magnitude.

So, he made sure that she took six months to really think over whether she wanted to, in fact, marry Prince Philip.

-But every time the couple was seen together, whispers and rumors followed.

-The palace did everything to quash these rumors.

They even issued a statement flatly denying it.

-At last, the heir to the throne was allowed to declare her love for the dashing prince, a sparkling moment in the gloom of postwar Britain.

-In July 1947, Elizabeth and Philip formally announced their engagement.

Finally, she could show off that massive sparkler of an engagement ring.

-But one part of the ring remains a secret to this day.

-There is a secret to this ring.

There is a little inscription on the inside.

No one knows what it says.

It was a private message from Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth.

They were the only two people who knew what it says.

-The royal palaces have long been the setting for love stories, romances started at historic royal speed-dating events -- debutante balls.

But behind the frocks and finery was a painful secret.

♪♪ -The royal palaces are as much places of pleasure as places of work, and there’s nothing more fun than a royal ball, except, that is, if you happen to be a Georgian debutante.

A debutante is a girl of about 18, aristocratic family.

She’s coming out at society, making her debut, and the whole point is she finds a good husband.

They knew that all their chances for a marriage was resting on this one night, and woe betide anyone who felt faint or sick or overwhelmed.

In 1718, St James’s Palace ballroom, King George III held the first of a debutante ball called Queen Charlotte’s Ball, after his wife.

Nothing could be more glamorous, you’d think.

It was terrifying.

The lady-in-waiting to the queen, Fanny Burney, also the novelist, she wrote this incredible account that said, "You must stay still the whole time."

You had to stand up for hours, perfectly erect, waiting for your name to be called.

Very heavy gown, corset so tight you could barely breathe, carrying a heavy train, and no sign of faintness, no sign of shakiness.

That would show no strength of character.

If you want to cough, it is better to choke than cough.

If you want to sneeze, better burst a blood vessel.

And if one of your hairpins came loose and it was poking into your head, better let the blood gush from your head than take out your hairpin.

Better bite off a piece of your cheek in pain than take out a hairpin.

Essentially, it is better to die on the spot than it is express any physical discomfort.

Husband hunting was brutal.

It was tough.

The Royal Ball might be something we’d all dream of going to, but in fact, for the Georgian debutante, the Royal Ball was a palace of horrors.

-Next time, the monarch who never cried sheds a tear in front of the nation... -It was very shocking for the British public to see the Queen being emotional.

It’s something we’d never seen before.

-...we visit the most important palace of all, where no sovereign ever sleeps... -Up until the 19th century, it had a preeminent position.

What you get then going down the decades is increased levels of mumbling and grumbling that this isn’t a place fit for a king.

-...and what happened at Kate and the queen’s first meeting?

-If the queen didn’t like her, She could veto any future potential marriage.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪