(narrator) At the heart of the British establishment are the royal palaces.

Imposing... (Dr. Ramirez) They encapsulate the very finest architecture, art, design.

(narrator) Lavish... (Professor Whitelock) It was deliberately grand, this most ostentatious statement of absolute power.

(narrator) ...and brimming with hidden gems.

(Lisa) You always feel like there's something new to discover.

(narrator) They're the backdrop to every royal event.

(Susie) Every celebration, birth, death, crisis for a thousand years.

(narrator) In this all new Secrets of the Royal Palaces, we gain exclusive access to these illustrious buildings and uncover their private parts... (Dr. Foyle) The regal bog, that would be used by Queen Victoria herself.

(narrator) ...reveal the extraordinary royal art hidden within... (Dr. Ramirez) The Queen's stamp collection is worth 100 million pounds.

Not a bad return on loads of pictures of yourself really, is it?

(narrator) ...dig up the royal palaces' dark history... (Professor Williams) George builds secret tunnels so no one could ever see him.

(narrator) ...and share fresh revelations about the royal dramas that are gripping the nation.

(Colin) Not a soul got anywhere near that island.

I loved it a bit.

(narrator) This is the Secrets of the Royal Palaces.

(dramatic music) (peppy music) In this episode, the secret plans of a royal king to destroy Hampton Court Palace.

(Dr. Foyle) This plan shows that they're saving Henry VIII's Great Hall.

For the rest of the palace, forget it, they can level the lot.

(narrator) We uncover the secret symbols hidden in Prince Philip's funeral and why whistles were played.

(Victoria) He sacrificed his very promising naval career in order to support the Queen.

(narrator) And we reveal how a queen was butchered alive at the hands of her doctors and left to die at St. James's.

(Professor Williams) Part of her bowel was poking out of her stomach.

They had to put it back in again.

Instead, the decision was made to chop bits off.

♪ (narrator) Britain's royal palaces, magnificent, sensational, extraordinary.

They are the envy of the world.

But of all the royal residences, Windsor Castle is the palace closest to the Queen's heart.

(whimsical music) (Richard) Windsor Castle is really the home of the royal family.

It's been a lived-in castle for a thousand years.

(wondrous music) (narrator) It's also the place where most members of the royal family are laid to rest in the catacombs under St. George's Chapel.

The most recent royal to be buried there was Prince Philip in April 2021 in the middle of the COVID pandemic.

But it's little known that his funeral ceremony at Windsor was packed with secrets and hidden symbolism planned by the Prince himself.

(Wesley) I think he'd relish the planning of it just as his uncle Mountbatten spent decades planning his funeral.

This was a very, very personal order of service, and it was planned to show different elements of his personality.

(narrator) Royal coffins are usually carried on a gun carriage, but Philip's coffin arrived in an odd-looking Land Rover, a nod to Prince Philip's passion for British engineering.

(Victoria) It was most involved in helping to customize the Land Rover that his coffin traveled on.

(Daisy) He chose the particular shade of green that it was painted.

He designed it so that his coffin would slide onto the back of it.

So there were lots and lots of personal touches.

(narrator) His funeral procession also featured another strange vehicle: An empty riding carriage.

The carriage contained just a driving cap, a whip, and a Tupperware box of sugar lumps, a reference to his favorite sport that he had helped to popularize: Carriage driving.

(Victoria) It was never really a big part of his public life.

It was a private interest, but I think just how important that was to him really came to the fore during the funeral.

This was also a passion he shared with friends and family.

(intense music) (narrator) Then there was the giant flag that coated his coffin with a complex pattern of hidden messages.

(Daisy) So his standard, his personal flag reflecting all elements of his life.

His Greek heritage, his Danish heritage, Mountbatten family, which of course was so important to him, and finally Edinburgh, as the Duke of Edinburgh, all reflected in that standard, and elements that he was clearly proud of.

(narrator) But there were more than visual symbols on display.

His arrival in the chapel was accompanied by a series of strange sounds.

(whistling) Bosun's whistles to honor his record as a naval veteran.

These bosun's whistles were used on ships, on the sea, when the noise of the sea was so loud you couldn't hear a verbal command, but you could hear a whistle, and then different whistles meant different things.

(narrator) As the pallbearers prepare to carry the coffin into the chapel, they whistled the "side," used to welcome senior officers aboard, followed by the "carry on," the call for crew to resume duties.

This attention to naval procedure indicates that the Prince's naval service in World War II remained of central importance to him.

(Victoria) It did really hit home.

It really underlined this active service that he had seen.

He sacrificed his very promising naval career in order to support the Queen when she became Queen.

(narrator) Philip's symbols were everywhere, but they were not the only secret messages on display.

Of course all eyes were straining on that day to see the beautiful bouquet of flowers, the wreath that the Queen had put on her husband's coffin, and there was a note, it certainly looked like it was handwritten.

We think it said, "From Lilibet," which of course was the nickname that Prince Philip always referred to his wife as, but certainly a very private and poignant moment.

(pleasant music) (narrator) With these hidden symbols, Prince Philip left a colorful and characteristic stamp on his own final state occasion.

(Daisy) It was public, and yet very private with all these little notes to his own interests and his own hobbies and so on.

(Victoria) You actually got more insight into who he was as a person and what mattered to him.

(Wesley) Like him or not, Prince Philip was an incorrigible, hard-working person that we all thought we knew, and this was an appropriate send-off for him.

I think it was an incredibly powerful event.

♪ (whimsical music) (narrator) Our current Queen considers Windsor her home, but the royal palaces have changing roles and purposes.

♪ Each one is a symbol of the power and personality of the monarch who favors it.

♪ (Dr. Dunlop) They're the interplay between art and ego, money and man.

(narrator) Nowhere is this truer than at Hampton Court Palace.

Built over 500 years ago in the reign of Henry VIII, this red-brick palace has over 1,300 rooms and is spread over six acres.

(Dr. Dunlop) Imagine Hampton Court as this spider's web with loads of different lairs and antechambers, and at the center of it all a Great Hall.

It was an epic structure to accommodate an epic vision.

(narrator) But the truth is, for its original owner, its beauty brought nothing but grief, because in the reign of King Henry owning a palace this stunning could be damaging to your health.

The visionary who began transforming a modest country house into a vast and sumptuous palace was one of England's first self-made millionaires: Henry's right-hand man, Cardinal Wolsey.

Wolsey was the brains to Henry VIII's stash, and both men, as a result of their partnership, ended up immensely wealthy.

The relationship between the King and Cardinal Wolsey was a kind of Tudor bromance.

(narrator) In fact, Wolsey was a commoner elevated by a king who was suspicious of the aristocracy.

(Dr. Owens) He didn't trust his nobles, so instead he promoted a commoner, someone who was extremely intelligent, sly, as essentially his deputy.

(narrator) In 1515, Wolsey decided his new wealth and power meant he deserved his own great pad.

But unlike the conservative English nobility, the well-read commoner was open to new ideas from abroad.

(lively music) England, it's got to be said at this time, is something of a cultural backwater.

(narrator) At that time the new art and architecture of the Renaissance was taking Italy by storm.

(Dr. Dunlop) Europe, you know, this is the great era of Renaissance art from Michelangelo's Italy, you know, the Sistine Chapel, what's going on on the continent.

(narrator) Inspired by the Italians, Wolsey built his palace around three courts, or courtyards, two of which remain today.

But until recently it was not realized just how much the Renaissance influenced the design.

By piecing together the original palace footprint, architect royal historian Jonathan Foyle has uncovered its hidden design secrets.

(Dr. Foyle) I've got a ground plan of the palace and ground plans can tell you a huge amount.

The outside of the base court is a perfect square, but drawing a circle around that square lays out all of the parts of the kitchens and the service to the Great Hall, the middle of clerk court.

So this use of compasses to create an external shape to discipline your building is part of a new departure.

Architecturally, Hampton Court is super important, and what Wolsey did here is followed in Italian rulebook and created a palace which has really no parallel in England.

(narrator) When it was completed, Wolsey's Hampton Court was said to be so pleasing to the eye it outshone any of Henry's royal palaces, but its very brilliance was a mistake Wolsey would live to regret.

(Dr. Dunlop) If you build a palace that outguns the King's abodes, it's hardly tactful, is it really?

(Tony) And when you've got a king as paranoid as Henry VIII, that's not a good idea.

Henry was a classic paranoid dictator.

(narrator) Soon after, when Wolsey fails to get the King a divorce, the bromance collapses.

The paranoid dictator turns vengefully on his deputy and Wolsey is desperate.

(Dr. Owens) Wolsey gives Henry Hampton Court as a kind of peace offering.

In much the same way you might bribe a mafia don who you think you've fallen out with because you're terrified of losing your life.

(narrator) The bribe did not save the cardinal.

Wolsey was banished to York and later arrested for treason.

He died on his way to London to stand trial.

(Tony) With Wolsey's downfall, Henry effectively damns his memory, and he does what many dictators have done in history and that's basically chiseled out his name.

So all over Hampton Court Palace all indication that the palace was once owned by Wolsey disappears.

(narrator) So next time you visit, spare a thought for the cultured cardinal whose vision created the first small outpost of the Renaissance in England.

(peppy music) Coming up: We reveal a secret meeting where the Queen saved a palace and made a fortune... (Edwina) Think it must've dawned on HM, who's an extremely shrewd investor, that, "We're on to a good thing here."

(narrator) ...and how Queen Anne's palace became a place of secrets and lies.

(Professor Williams) All kinds of rumors were put about saying the Queen was having a sexual affair with first Sarah and then Abigail.

♪ (narrator) The royal palaces are glorious symbols of our nation's past, present, and future.

(Daisy) Palaces are monuments of previous monarchs, and that's what's quite fun when you look through the palaces because they represent different eras, different generations, different monarchs, different styles of architecture.

(narrator) But they are more than just a bricks-and-mortar link to this country's history.

They are a hotbed of passion and intrigue, and none more so than Kensington Palace, backdrop to one of the most infamous royal sagas of secret love, blackmail, and scurrilous innuendo, at the 18th century court of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne.

(mysterious music) ♪ (dramatic music) (Professor Williams) Queen Anne was shy, self-conscious about her looks, desperate to have a child, so she suffered a lot of sadness.

Sarah Churchill was the woman with everything.

She had wit, beauty, money.

She was an incredibly powerful, charismatic figure.

She and Anne had been friends since childhood.

(peppy music) When Anne becomes Queen, Sarah gained money, power, status, and she and her husband were named Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.

Sarah believed that Anne was so in love with her that Sarah could do pretty much whatever she liked, but that wasn't true.

(pensive music) In 1704, Sarah helped place her cousin, Abigail Masham, as bedchamber woman to the Queen.

Sarah thinks that Abigail is very humble, rather lowly.

She thinks nothing's going to happen, she thinks it'll create more loyalty for her.

But instead, Abigail really sees an opening here, she sees what Sarah's done, and what she starts to do is really get the Queen to be dependent on her.

Abigail performed intimate duties for the Queen, and increasingly the Queen starts to say, "I prefer Abigail."

Sarah feels her power slipping away.

She and her husband try to scheme to get Abigail out of the court, they fail.

Then they spread scurrilous rumors that the Queen's having a sexual affair with Abigail.

The Queen is so hurt by Sarah's lies she dismisses Sarah from court and Sarah loses all her privileges and the money tree is cut off.

Sarah is devastated, she's furious, but Anne will not have her back, and really now is all about Abigail and Abigail remains her favorite, gains all of Sarah's positions, until Anne dies in 1714.

All kinds of rumors were put about saying the Queen was having a sexual affair with first Sarah and then with Abigail.

This was the ultimate royal love triangle.

We will never know the truth, we can speculate, but what it definitely shows are two women who saw really that they could exploit and use the Queen for their own power and their own privilege.

♪ (narrator) Britain's royal palaces are as ancient as they are majestic, and they also play home to our royal family.

(Dr. Dunlop) It's what gives our palaces the X factor.

It's why they're one of the biggest tourist attractions -in the world.

-But neither the monarchy nor their palaces are indestructible, and in the early 1990s, it would take a top secret royal meeting to save both a palace and arguably the monarchy itself.

(contemplative music) On the 20th of November 1992, the Queen suffered a terrible blow when Windsor Castle went up in smoke.

♪ (Julie) The Queen loves Windsor, I mean, that is her primary residence.

So to see your--her primary home go up in smoke and flames must have been heart-wrenching.

(narrator) Although the fire was brought under control, priceless treasures were destroyed, and because both the building and its contents were so valuable, they were uninsurable.

Rebuilding would cost a fortune.

♪ (Victoria) The repairs for the castle were going to cost a considerable amount, reports suggested, you know, up to 60 million pounds potentially.

(narrator) The prospect of this enormous bill being borne by the taxpayer caused a popular revolt.

It was a bit of a shock when it was announced that the public would be paying for it.

We will be footing this.

That did not go down very well.

(Edwina) The divorces were happening, there was a lot of bad publicity going on with the royal family.

We were coming out of a horrible recession, so a lot of unemployment, lots of people short of money, and then there's the Queen expecting us to dip into our pockets.

(narrator) The monarchy was in crisis.

Both their finances and their very legitimacy may never have recovered.

But behind the scenes the Queen would act, convening a top secret meeting of senior royals to plan a way forward, and out of it would come an extraordinary plan devised by the Queen herself to save the castle.

She would open Buckingham Palace to the public, eight pounds a ticket to raise money for the repairs.

It was a royal game-changer.

(intense music) But would it work?

(peppy music) Found all over the country, the royal palaces of Britain come in all shapes and sizes.

Britain's palaces are like the royal family themselves.

They're each unique, they each have an individual style.

(narrator) But few are as odd as Hampton Court.

Hampton Court looks like two palaces in one.

Hampton Court's strange, it's a bit schizophrenic.

(narrator) The secret truth is that Hampton Court owes its appearance to a rollicking royal rivalry that got really out of hand.

(regal music) When Dutch King William III took over the English throne, he favored Hampton Court over all the other English palaces.

(Dr. Foyle) William III didn't care much for the palaces of London.

He suffered from asthma, they didn't suit his lungs frankly, but he also enjoyed the space and the landscape that surrounded Hampton Court because it reminded him of the Dutch palaces that he knew from his origins.

(narrator) But the palace was also attractive for another reason.

It was where William wanted to poke his finger in the eye of his big royal rival: King Louis XIV of France.

(Dr. Dunlop) The rivalry between Louis and William was baked in.

Louis XIV thought he was the most important monarch in Europe and arguably the world, styling himself "The Sun King," by which he meant, "Everything revolves around me."

(narrator) Louis had just trumped William by unveiling his new mega-palace: Versailles.

(triumphant music) (Dr. Owens) Other monarchs of Europe saw what Louis XIV had achieved with Versailles, just that side of Paris, and they were awestruck.

There was nothing like it anywhere else, and they were all extremely jealous.

But I mean, they are quite annoying, the French, aren't they, when it comes to architecture.

They just did it way better than us.

It was like eye candy, and I think William wants a bit of that.

He thinks, "I can do this better than that, (self censor), French king."

(narrator) Hampton Court was the perfect location for an English mega-palace.

(Dr. Foyle) What William III could do here is not only rebuild a palace, uh, with a kind of similar air of magnificence, but surround it with gardens and statuary and fountains that made a political point.

This was one-upmanship.

Hampton Court was to be Versailles on Thames.

(narrator) William hired top English architect Christopher Wren, and within a few years Wren had torn down and rebuilt the south and eastern facades in the same Baroque style as Versailles.

The way that the windows march along the facade in a kind of regular way, all this is part of Baroque architecture, where you have the money and you have the organization to create something which is beautifully proportioned, but also a real imposition, something which speaks of power.

This is his response to Versailles.

(narrator) And in the gardens William couldn't resist another dig at Louis.

(birds chirping) ♪ The statue represents Apollo, who Louis XIV reckoned that he was incarnate.

(contemplative music) It shows Apollo, but does it show him in glory?

No, it doesn't.

It shows an Apollo looking north to William III's palace.

He's covering his eyes, he's saying, "All right, it's a fair cup.

I've been outshone."

(narrator) But a secret sect of rarely seen plans reveal that William and Wren weren't finished with their renovations.

(Dr. Foyle) This is a ground plan of the palace that William and Mary wanted to be built.

It's from Christopher Wren's office.

And on this side is where clerk court is and that was where base court was to be demolished.

And then north of the hall were the kitchens and the yards out that way.

So all this area was to be swept away.

This plan shows that they're saving Henry VIII's Great Hall.

The rest of the palace, forget it, they can level the lot because it's just kitchen buildings, it's storage, it's old-fashioned, pull it down.

They want something neater, newer, and grander, something which isn't ashamed to stand on a European stage.

(narrator) If the plan of William and Wren had been followed, Tudor Hampton Court as we know it would be gone.

So why is it still here today?

♪ (whimsical music) ♪ One palace that has withstood the test of time is Windsor Castle.

Built over 1,000 years ago, it is considered by many to be one of the most sumptuous and recognizable buildings in the world.

♪ And it's also the perfect place for a photo from royal weddings to royal holiday stamps, summits to state occasions.

A palatial palace environment is all-important.

The palaces are really the backdrop to British history.

(narrator) And Windsor Castle was the location for one of the most significant portraits Queen Victoria ever sat for, an image that has since become famous.

But few now know the real reason for its existence and the sad details it contains.

On the 16th of November 1861, Queen Victoria posed for the esteemed photographer Charles Clifford.

(Susanna) The picture was taken in the Orangery at the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, which is an incredibly beautiful space filled with tropical plants and so on.

(narrator) The portrait of Victoria taken at Windsor Castle was indeed impressive.

A more regal look compared to previous photographs.

(Susanna) So what we see in this portrait is Queen Victoria in a dark-colored evening dress with a sash, wearing the diadem and jewels.

She's seen at a full length portrait and sort of turned kind of three quarters towards the camera.

She's presented in this image as a strong and incredibly powerful figure.

(narrator) The portrait was commissioned by Victoria's fellow monarch, Queen Isabella of Spain.

(Susanna) Queen Isabella sent her photographer, Charles Clifford, with a portrait of herself as a gift to Queen Victoria, and asked Clifford to take a portrait of Victoria to send back.

So it's a kind of exchange of portraits.

(narrator) But Isabella had not commissioned Victoria's portrait to hang on her wall.

Instead, it was intended as a carte-de-visite, a collector's hobby that Isabella was obsessed by.

It was a huge craze in the 1860s, the collecting these tiny portrait photographs.

And it became essentially a form of top trump swap, or a Pokémon card, that you would swap these, you would put them into albums and you would collect these cards.

(Susanna) Not just portraits of your own friends and your own family members, but also portraits of celebrities and of course royalty.

(Dr. Pritchard) Clifford took the photograph back to Isabella and that was put into her own album, a carte-de-visite.

(narrator) Isabella was now the proud owner of the European top trump Victoria, and she was not the only recipient.

The image would've been produced in the tens if not hundreds of thousands for collectors and individuals who would buy these carte-de-visites and paste them into albums at home.

(narrator) But there is another little-known secret about this photograph.

Although the photo was taken in black and white, Victoria originally sat for it in a colorful dress.

Probably a dark blue or purple evening gown.

(contemplative music) (narrator) And that's the key to this photograph.

Exactly four weeks later her beloved husband Prince Albert died of typhoid.

This has become a hugely significant portrait of Queen Victoria because immediately upon the death of Albert, she wore mourning dress, that's black clothing for the rest of her life, and she goes into hiding at her palaces at Windsor, Balmoral, and Osborne House.

(narrator) This photo would be the last time we saw her in anything but black.

Overnight, a collectible trinket became a poignant symbol of Victoria's life and her reign.

(Dr. Pritchard) In a way it humanizes Victoria.

This incredibly powerful photograph, but it's been powerful because we've got the context, we know what happened next.

♪ (narrator) Coming up: We discover that the reason for the palace's survival is visible in Wren's stonework.

(Dr. Foyle) The reason is because any stone brought from Dorset down the English Channel would now be traveling through a warzone.

(narrator) And we reveal the surgical disaster that led to the demise of a queen at St. James's Palace.

They kept on chopping and chopping and chopping to try and get themselves out of the hole, but there was nothing they could do.

(regal music) ♪ (narrator) The nation's love affair with Britain's palaces is shared by our longest serving monarch.

♪ The Queen herself has six official residences, including her private estate of Sandringham, the beautiful and secluded Balmoral, and her favorite, Windsor Castle.

♪ (Emily) It really does feel like you're in the monarch's home, much more so than Buckingham Palace, which is monarchy HQ.

Windsor Castle is the home.

♪ (narrator) But when in 1992 fire consumed a large section of Windsor Castle, the resulting repair bill ran into the millions.

An economic succession and successive royal scandals had left the public unwilling to foot the bill.

So unknown to the public, the Queen took drastic action.

Just five days after the fire, she convened a top secret meeting of the most senior royals: Herself, Prince Philip, and their adult children, plus three trusted private secretaries.

They come up with quite a pretty genius plan: Open up Buckingham Palace to the public.

What's extraordinary about this genius plan is that it was thought of by the Queen herself.

Even if her courtiers had thought of this as a way to raise money, I don't think they would've ever approached her on this.

(narrator) On the 7th of August 1993, the doors of the palace opened to the public for the very first time.

I was one of the first in the queue.

Going into Buckingham Palace when the doors opened and the flunkies invite you in, you're stepping over a genuine threshold, but into a world that we can only imagine.

You're not getting to see, you know, the Queen's private quarters of course.

They are very much off limits.

You're seeing the official staterooms that they used for entertaining.

(Edwina) But actually to go round the staterooms into the throne room, actually to look longingly at the throne and think, "Is anybody looking around?

Can I go and sit on it?"

(narrator) In some ways the reality was a bit of a shock.

(quirky music) (Victoria) It is very grand, but it is also a very old building, and you very much do get that sense when you're inside.

I was expecting huge rooms, very impressive, intending to show power and glory and all the rest of it, and there was a lot of red and a lot of gold, but it was all tarnished and dusty, and it was clear there weren't enough staff around to keep it in pristine order.

(narrator) But despite its scruffy appearance, the public flooded in.

Buckingham Palace is considered the most iconic royal palace across the globe.

"Sign me up," is what people are thinking.

These tickets sold out years in advance.

(narrator) The original plan was to open for only a limited time, but the extraordinary demand made the royals reconsider.

And the tickets went shooop, hotcakes.

What the Queen's realized is, "This is an absolute gold mine."

Think it must've dawned on HM, who's an extremely shrewd investor, that, "We're on to a good thing here, and actually if we keep doing it, we could get rid of those cobwebs.

We could change those drapes.

We might have real gold leaf up there again as Victoria and Albert did."

And I've been there, to the royal palaces since, they look an awful lot smarter.

They're cleaner, the toilets are modernized.

Much better.

Turns out to have been a genius stroke to say that Buckingham Palace was to open.

The disaster of the Windsor Castle fire, not only was it brilliantly reconstructed under budget and ahead of time, but the public ended up not paying, and something else happened which was a terrific moment of openness.

Buckingham Palace being somewhere that anybody could visit.

(narrator) In a real sense, the monarchy was reborn from the ashes.

(Edwina) We feel much closer to the Queen now.

We feel still in awe of the whole institution of monarchy, but I think the Queen has shown that you can change, and that as you get older, you can get more innovative and probably richer.

(peppy music) (narrator) At one time or another, most royal palaces have had a makeover.

(Susie) Almost no royal palace is as it was originally built.

Every monarch who comes in has changed it, renovated it, thrown an extension on the side.

(narrator) But few have been left with such an extraordinary, schizophrenic appearance as Hampton Court.

As part of his renovations, King William III had wanted to level the old Tudor side of the palace, but something made him stop.

The reason is written into the stonework on the southern facade.

(Dr. Foyle) The stonework of the southfront holds the secret.

If you look at the color of the stone, you can see it's whitestone on that pavilion end.

That's Portland stone from Dorset, brought to London by Christopher Wren along the English Channel.

And then you get Oxfordshire stone, the yellowstone, so you start to get this variation.

It's all a very jolly kind of design.

You can see Portland stone back in the middle, but then when you get round to the west pavilion where it should be white again and balance out the whitestone in the east, it's yellow.

The reason is because any stone brought from Dorset down the English Channel would now be traveling through a warzone, because England was at war.

(intense music) (narrator) The rivalry between Louis and William had gone from bricks and mortar to muskets and cannons in a war that would last nine long years.

William was really keen to prosecute this war against Louis to put him back in his box, but it came at a cost.

The Nine Years' War essentially ruined William III's project.

He hadn't the money to spend on doing Hampton Court up as he'd originally desired.

(narrator) The plans for Versailles on Thames were shelved indefinitely, but the Tudor courts were saved, and Hampton Court remained as it is to this day, a unique blend, part English Tudor, part European Baroque.

(Dr. Foyle) So often war is a great destroyer of buildings, they're the first thing to go, the symbols of people and what their nation is and what they stand for.

In this case, it was the ambition of William and Mary that was the great threat to this palace, and ironically it was war that stopped them in their tracks.

War saved this place.

(wondrous music) (quirky music) (narrator) The grandeur of royal palaces is not restricted to the buildings.

Royal parks and gardens also play their part in creating the sense of regal prestige.

One of the first green-fingered royals was King George II's wife, Princess Caroline of Ansbach.

From her home in St. James's Palace in the 1730s, she masterminded the beautification of nearby Hyde Park, and the creation of the much-loved Serpentine waterway.

But all Caroline's abilities could not save her when the doctors called.

♪ (mysterious music) ♪ (Professor Williams) What happened was on the 10th of November 1737, she began to feel a great pain at her royal reception.

All the doctors came to see her, they all checked on her, they all looked at her, and in the end they realized that what she had was what we call a hernia now, probably an aftereffect of childbirth.

Easily treatable, very common.

What they had to do was-- part of her bowel was poking out of her stomach.

They had to push it back in again.

Instead, the decision was made to chop bits off.

Caroline underwent daily surgery at the hands of Dr. Ranby in her bedchamber.

He was cutting her, chopping her every day, and, this is the worst thing, there was no pain relief, there was no opium, there was no alcohol.

She was fully conscious through all this chopping and cutting of her bowel.

And Dr. Ranby was directed by his colleague, the aged Dr. Bussier, who by this point was 90, so the 90 year old was telling Dr. Ranby where to cut.

It seems to me that they realized they made a mistake by the first chopping and they kept on chopping and chopping and chopping to try and get themselves out of the hole, but there was nothing they could do.

After 11 days of nonstop surgery, Caroline's bowel burst.

The doctors realized they'd pretty much killed her.

There was nothing they could do and she was left to bleed painfully to death.

Three days later she died at St. James's Palace, just 54, with her husband, the King, holding her hand.

The tragic irony was that Caroline was the Queen.

She was so powerful, she was so wealthy, so she was surrounded by these doctors.

Had she been too poor to see a doctor, she would probably have survived.

(solemn music) (narrator) Coming up: The tale of the Windsor's forgotten African prince.

(Professor Williams) He died at the age of 18 of pleurisy, but I would also argue of a broken heart.

(narrator) And a priceless palace royal clock with a curious history.

(Dr. Ramirez) These objects simply shouldn't be together.

It really is just a bizarre ensemble.

(pensive music) (narrator) People travel from all over the world to visit Britain's magnificent royal palaces.

Windsor Castle alone gets more than 1.5 million visitors a year.

But in the 19th century, one visitor was there very much against his will and his bones still rest in the grounds of Windsor Castle today.

This is the tragic tale of Prince Alemayehu of Ethiopia.

(mysterious music) ♪ (regal music) ♪ (Professor Williams) In the 1860s, the King of Ethiopia, Prince Alemayehu's father, he was threatened on all sides by uprisings.

He begged the British Empire for help.

The British Empire completely ignored him.

And finally, exasperated by being ignored, the King took hostage some British people who were in Ethiopia, and at this the British Empire saw red.

They sent in thousands of soldiers who were determined to seek revenge, and met by this huge army, the King committed suicide, the soldiers looted the castle, they took all the Ethiopian treasures.

The British took the Empress and the Crown Prince back to England.

His mother died on the journey and Prince Alemayehu was adopted off into a military family, Captain Speedy, who was kind to him, but then just a few years later he was sent off to another family.

And what you see with Prince Alemayehu is he was really treated like a public possession.

He was paraded around.

(contemplative music) The Prince was in this impossible position because on one side he was expected to perform the role of the perfect English gentleman, and on the other side he was expected to be the African symbol, the African Prince, so it was very difficult for him to be both of these things at the same time.

And on one hand they were erasing his past, and on the other hand asking him to be Ethiopia to show that Britain was so benevolent and kind and had "rescued him."

So Prince Alemayehu was sold to the British public as a rescue, as being saved, as yet another Black person rescued by White people and giving him "a better life."

Instead, he lived a life of misery, of neglect, of being used as a spectacle in England, and finally died at the age of 18 of pleurisy, but I would also argue of a broken heart.

Queen Victoria said how sad it was that he died alone and friendless.

And that's quite an irony considering it was Britain who took him from Ethiopia and then condemned him for life of misery in Britain itself, passing him between schools and families, saying he was an honored guest, but really treating him like a prisoner of war.

And he's buried at Windsor, which seems so wrong.

Why weren't his remains sent back to Ethiopia so he could be finally at home in the place of his birth?

(somber music) (peppy music) (narrator) Britain's royal palaces are loved for their imposing architecture, but they are also cherished for the beautiful objects that fill their interiors.

(Jacky) The royal collection is one of the largest, the greatest, the most important art collections anywhere in the world.

It's worth countless billions of pounds.

♪ (narrator) Buckingham Palace houses its fair share of royal treasures, but few are as odd as an ornament that graced the mantelpiece in the palace's Chinese Drawing Room for over 150 years: The curious Kylin Clock.

(tranquil music) (Jacky) At first sight it looks like it's a classic Chinese piece.

So you got these two wonderful turquoise lions.

You've got foliage reminiscent of Chinese symbols, like the lotus and the sunflower.

But actually when you start to look more closely, you realize that all is not exactly as it seems.

(narrator) To start with, it's not just Chinese.

(Dr. Ramirez) When you look at the top, there's another little figure.

This is also porcelain, but it's Japanese.

It's the Japanese god of luck.

(narrator) And it gets more confusing.

Although the sculptures come from Asia, the clock was made in France.

(Jacky) The clock mechanism itself is entirely French, as is the case, and also the gilt bronze base.

(Dr. Ramirez) These objects simply shouldn't be together.

You've got these figurines from China, you've got something from Japan, you've got a clock element from France.

It really is just a bizarre ensemble.

(narrator) The clock's creation can be traced back to the royal family's own bizarre ensemble: George IV.

(quirky music) The wayward playboy prince commissioned it in the 1820s as decoration for the exotic pavilion he was building in Brighton.

(Jacky) George IV had incredibly wide, eclectic tastes, and this piece was perfect for his pleasure palace at Brighton, which was itself this incredible fusion of Asian and European styles.

It is so prince regent.

I'm not entirely convinced he successfully made a beautiful object, but it really does give us an insight into the sort of person he was.

(narrator) But when his straitlaced niece Queen Victoria came to the throne, she was not amused by his exotic pleasure palace and quickly got rid of it.

In the winter of 1847, the Queen totally stripped Brighton Pavilion of everything, so paintings, furniture, decorative arts.

The Kylin Clock itself gets taken away and shipped off to Buckingham Palace.

(narrator) Which is why the peculiar Kylin Clock ended up ensconced in London, separated for 170 years from its outlandish pavilion home.

But just recently they've been reunited.

(Dr. Ramirez) In 2019, the Kylin Clock did come home to Brighton.

While Buckingham Palace was being renovated, the Queen loaned it back.

It's back in this ornate, chinoiserie-inspired interior for which it was originally intended.

So it's just fantastic that people have had the chance to see it back in its pride of place.

It's had a chance to come home after nearly 170 years.

(wondrous music) (narrator) Next time on Secrets of the Royal Palaces: We uncover the inside story of the hours after Diana's death.

(Colin) Just for that millisecond we thought she was alive.

(narrator) We reveal how even royal palaces couldn't protect a prince's private life.

(Bidisha) Scotland Yard told the royals, "This is serious and it is illegal."

(narrator) And we find out who captured one of the most intimate portraits of the Queen at Windsor.

(Dr. Dunlop) She likes her sense of humor.

There is a fondness there.

(regal music) ♪ (bright music)