
Secrets of the Royal Palaces
Royal Duty
Season 5 Episode 504 | 43m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Includes the controversy around Russian spy Anthony Blunt’s stay at the Palace in the '80s and more.
Includes the controversy around Russian spy Anthony Blunt’s long stay at the Palace in the '80s, the revelation that Blunt had performed a secret mission retrieving incriminating evidence linking Queen Elizabeth’s family with the Nazis, the tumultuous history of the Scottish Crown Jewels, and Diana’s ascent to fashion icon status with her “Black Sheep” jumper.
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Secrets of the Royal Palaces is presented by your local public television station.
Distributed nationally by American Public Television
Secrets of the Royal Palaces
Royal Duty
Season 5 Episode 504 | 43m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Includes the controversy around Russian spy Anthony Blunt’s long stay at the Palace in the '80s, the revelation that Blunt had performed a secret mission retrieving incriminating evidence linking Queen Elizabeth’s family with the Nazis, the tumultuous history of the Scottish Crown Jewels, and Diana’s ascent to fashion icon status with her “Black Sheep” jumper.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship-Britain's royal palaces are family homes like no other.
Historic.
-These buildings speak to our extraordinary royal past.
-Secure.
-Palaces are fortresses.
They're super safe.
You're protected.
-And deeply secretive.
-It is the poshest, most regal gated community in the world.
-In this new series, we sneak inside more of Britain's extraordinary royal homes to eavesdrop on palace secrets.
-Suddenly now, to hear it in full verse from the Princess of Wales was quite extraordinary.
-Uncover mysterious treasures.
-They were shrouded in secrecy, both outside the walls of the palace and even inside.
-Reveal hidden royal residences the public know nothing about.
-It is absolutely not for public access, and therefore we only get a glimpse of it.
-And unearth the stories of the most dramatic palace moments.
-He said if you see this, I will be dead.
I'm going to kill the Queen.
-These are the extraordinary and brand new "Secrets of the Royal Palaces."
This time, we uncover secret stories of palace duty as the Queen makes her final appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony.
-She always put duty above personal pain, above family, above personal sacrifice.
-We expose Buckingham Palace's cover up of a Russian spy.
-I think people underestimate just how effective he was as a Soviet asset and he gave nothing away.
-Reveal the designer dress that outshone a glittering palace.
-It was a very subtle but a very powerful secret message that she was respecting the culture of Malaysia.
-Discover how not to look after the crown jewels.
-Believe it or not, the door was bricked up and this incredible symbol of Scottish monarchy was simply completely forgotten about.
-And at Windsor, did this humble item of knitwear have a hidden meaning?
-Lots of people thought Diana was making a statement.
She kind of was the black sheep of the royal family.
-But first to Buckingham Palace and the world famous balcony, which has been center stage for major royal occasions for well over a century.
-As they appear on the balcony at Buckingham.
-One of the most memorable and poignant was the final day of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations in July 2022.
-The noise level, the cheering, the shouting, the clapping and the three cheers for ma'am.
Hip hip hooray!
I mean, I'm getting spine tingles, actually, even now, thinking about it.
-Little did her adoring public know, but the Queen appearing on that day very nearly didn't happen.
-In the last year of the Queen's life, she literally took her engagements day by day.
-By July, the health of the 96-year-old queen was failing fast, and there was a question mark over how many of the Jubilee events she'd managed to attend.
On the first day of the celebrations, she watched the trooping of the color, but it clearly took its toll.
-Trooping had been quite difficult and she stayed in the palace for some hours after trooping, which surprised me on the day.
-The Queen was absent from the celebrations for the next two days.
And by the fourth and final day, the decision had been made that she would stay at Windsor and not travel to the palace.
-There was a profound underlying condition which was well advanced by then, and it was extremely difficult for her to make it.
-The crowd didn't know any of this.
They didn't know that she was ill, and they didn't know she was suffering in pain.
And they didn't understand why the Queen wasn't there.
-It was only when Charles rang up from the royal box and said, mummy, there's vast numbers of people here.
There's a wonderful atmosphere.
Is there any chance that you could make it?
-She felt it was her duty to come to London to acknowledge the crowds.
But it wasn't just about duty.
I think it was about Charles wanting the Queen to see how much she was loved, to see how much she was appreciated.
So she agreed.
-The Queen's change of heart sparked a massive operation to get her from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace, without anyone realizing just how frail she'd become.
-It was a military operation because she didn't want anyone to see her in a wheelchair, not even really members of her own staff.
-She wanted us to see her as the Queen.
-So the helicopter landed as close to the sovereign entrance at Windsor Castle as they could possibly get.
She was wheeled to the to the helicopter, lift it in.
The chopper flew to London.
The first inkling was when the Royal Standard was raised on the flagpole at Buckingham Palace.
Suddenly the flag went up.
The crowd started cheering.
[ Cheering ] -Just after 5 p.m., the crowds finally got what they'd been waiting for.
-When the Queen stepped out on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, looking absolutely resplendent in that green outfit.
The crowd goes absolutely wild.
-Queen Elizabeth had been appearing on that balcony since the late 1920s as the king's granddaughter.
Little did we know this was the last time we were ever to see her on that famous balcony a huge moment.
-The pinnacle of the Platinum Jubilee was seeing the Queen on that balcony, and you could see the emotion written all over her face.
I think she was so very, very glad that she managed to see her people, if you will, one last time.
-The Queen's presence on the balcony was to be her last major appearance in front of the nation.
-She always put duty above personal pain, above family, above personal sacrifice.
Duty always comes first.
-Although Buckingham Palace is the go-to showpiece palace for the royals, it's another palace just down the mall where much of the real work goes on.
-So many of us think Buckingham Palace is the HQ, the most famous address in Britain where the royals live and work from, when actually there is another palace that's been doing that job for far longer than Buckingham Palace and that is Saint James's Palace.
-This isn't any ordinary office.
This is a Tudor palace dating back to King Henry the Eighth, and it's still the ceremonial center of the royal family.
-But it doesn't have everything.
I mean, there are no gardens in which to relax.
There's no great deal of privacy there.
You're in the middle of a palace, which is where the court resides.
So it really is very much a place of business.
-Business, like Saint James's, is the perfect London base for the hardest working member of the royal family, Princess Anne.
-In 2022, she did 214 events in her capacity as a working royal.
Charles, meanwhile, did 181.
She smashed him out of the park that year and if you go back in time, she's smashing him out of the park in quite a few other years as well.
-But the Princess Royal doesn't spend her whole life living above the office.
The place where she properly kicks back and relaxes is a secluded spot nestled in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside.
Gatcombe Park her real and very secret home.
-To my mind, Gatcombe Park is the most beautiful royal residence and it's because it is a magnificently composed, symmetrical limestone late Georgian house on a tumble of the Cotswold hills, with woods behind it and its proportions are really exquisite.
-It has that beautiful look of a mansion set in the countryside.
And there are about nine bedrooms in the property in total.
So we're not talking about Versailles.
We are talking about a classic English country gentleman's residence.
-Every part of it is so seamlessly, proportionally related to the next.
It just sits there like a jewel box.
It's just marvelous.
-Princess Anne moved to the Gatcombe estate after a fairytale wedding to captain Mark Phillips back in the '70s.
-The marriage was really the royal event of the 1970s, and so it's not surprising that the late Queen Elizabeth gave to her daughter this really impressive estate at a value of something like half to three quarters of £1 million, which in today's money would be about £6 million.
-Most royal residences are owned by The Crown, but Gatcombe Park is different because it began life as a private house and it was bought as a private house.
-Because Gatcombe was an outright gift, Anne couldn't rely on money from the Crown Estate to keep it afloat.
Instead, she had to find ways to make her home self-sustaining.
-Land is a great asset to have.
If you look after it properly and Anne is very good at husbandry, she has been an effective farm manager.
Estate manager.
-In 1978, the princess made the shrewd move of buying the neighboring property, the equally secluded Aston Farm, expanding Gatcombe grounds to around 730 acres gave her yet more scope to make it pay for itself.
But in 1992, everything Anne had worked so hard for at Gatcombe was suddenly in danger of being lost.
Later, we'll reveal what happened to Gatcombe when Anne's marriage hit stormy waters.
-Divorce?
Never been mentioned by anybody.
-And we'll uncover the Soviet spy at the palace who kept his job despite being outed.
-How do you feel about being called a traitor now?
-I can't deny it.
-For centuries, the royal family's palaces have been decorated with priceless works of art.
-The Royal Collection is the greatest sort of semi-private collection in the world.
-There are about 7,000 paintings.
There are 30,000 watercolors and drawings, 500,000 prints.
It's almost impossible to put a price on the Royal Collection.
-These days, much of these incredible artworks are on display at key royal palaces.
But the public getting access to the Royal Collection is a relatively new idea.
-There was a huge exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1946.
-Many distinguished visitors attended Private View Day at the Royal Academy for this summer's exhibition.
-It was the first time the public were going to be able to see a lot of the greatest masterpieces in the Royal Collection.
-The man who finally persuaded the royals to open the collection to public view was the newly appointed surveyor of the King's Pictures, an ambitious art expert by the name of Anthony Blunt.
-Blunt was an extremely well-respected art historian.
He was widely published, wrote some incredibly important books, but he was also very well-travelled.
And also he has aristocratic connections because he is the third cousin of Queen Elizabeth, the future Queen mother.
-With the right royal connection and impeccable manners, Blunt was the perfect man for the job, but he also had other, more clandestine talents.
-Blunt had been both a soldier during the war and a spy in MI5.
He was recruited in 1940.
He was fluent in English, in French and German, so he was exactly the sort of person they were looking for.
-Blunt's royal employers were quick to recognize his expertise in espionage.
Within months of him joining the palace staff, he was sent on a top secret mission for the King.
-After the war ended in 1945, there were lots of artifacts and royal treasures that were secreted in Germany, and King George VI was very anxious that they should be brought back.
-Blunt was sent to a castle just outside Frankfurt called Friedrichshof.
It had been built by Queen Victoria's oldest daughter, and there were supposed to be an enormous cache of letters between her and her mother, in which a lot of the time she'd been rather rude about the Germans.
-The King was worried that if these were ever published, they'd be embarrassing for the family.
-Blunt was able, using his considerable charm, to convince the granddaughter of Queen Victoria to hand over the correspondence that they wanted.
But he also came away with a 12th century illuminated manuscript and a diamond crown that had belonged to Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George the Third.
In total, he returned home with 4,000 letters and some very expensive royal items.
-This trusted palace insider made several more clandestine trips to Germany for the royal family, and many believe he had another, even more sensitive mission to complete.
-It is also possible that he was sent to see whether they could find any letters that might incriminate Edward the Eighth, the Duke of Windsor, in having slightly closer relations with the Nazis than he was supposed to have had.
-With his secret mission a success, Blunt had cemented his position as a trusted Palace employee.
But what the royal family didn't know was that their reliable art advisor was living a treacherous double life.
-He was at the center of Britain's biggest security scandal of the century.
-We'll reveal later how the Queen dealt with the problem of Anthony Blunt, the spy in the palace.
The Royal collection also includes those most priceless artifacts, the crown jewels, now closely guarded in the Tower of London.
But these world famous sparklers aren't our oldest crown jewels.
That honor goes to another set of treasures that are held in Scotland.
-The Honours of Scotland are the oldest royal regalia in use in the British Isles.
They have been involved in every coronation of a Scottish monarch since the 16th century.
And yet we hear so little about them.
-Also known as the Crown jewels of Scotland, the Honours consist of three priceless pieces a crown, a scepter, and a sword.
-The Honours as coronation regalia were first used at the coronation of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1543.
So really they became very quickly emblems of Scotland and Scottish monarchy.
-But the treasure's prestige was almost their downfall.
In 1650, having melted down the original English Crown Jewels, Oliver Cromwell marched north.
His mission to destroy the Scottish Honours and prevent them being used to crown King Charles the Second.
-Cromwell was too late to stop Charles being crowned, but the Honours couldn't be taken to their home in Edinburgh Castle as Cromwell had taken the castle.
-Instead they were ferreted away to Dunnottar Castle.
Cromwell sent a garrison of 70 men to repeatedly assault and try and take the castle.
-Dunnottar Castle held out for eight months, but when it looked like the siege was going to be broken, a plot was hatched to smuggle the Honours to safety.
-When they realized that the castle was about to about to fall, the crown, the sword, and the scepter were lowered out of a window to a waiting woman there, on the pretense of gathering seaweed.
-She took the Honours of Scotland to a nearby church, where they were buried in the ground, and they remained there until 1660, when the monarchy was restored.
-The Honours were back in use, but only for another 50 years.
-With the Act of Union and the dissolution of the Scottish Parliament, the Honours of Scotland were no longer needed, so they were locked up in a chest in the Crown Room at Edinburgh Castle and believe it or not, the door was bricked up and this incredible symbol of Scottish monarchy was simply completely forgotten about.
-Unbelievably, the jewels lay undisturbed for just over a century until they were they were rediscovered in 1818.
Since then, they have reclaimed their royal role.
-When Queen Elizabeth the Second died in Scotland, she was laid to rest in Saint Giles Cathedral and the crown was placed on her coffin.
-And of course, Charles the Third was crowned using them at his Scottish ceremony.
-Now, after numerous close calls and almost 500 years of adventure, Britain's oldest crown jewels are firmly part of the regalia of the British monarchy.
Turbulent histories are part and parcel of royal life, and even the most steady of the senior royals and her palace have been hit with unexpected change, [ Man speaks indistinctly ] -Divorce?
Never been mentioned by anybody.
-Princess Anne did go on to divorce captain Mark Phillips following allegations he'd fathered a love child.
But who would get to keep the pair's secluded Gatcombe Park estate?
-In 1992, Princess Anne divorces her then husband Mark Phillips.
But it was a divorce done in a very Princess Anne kind of way.
-There wasn't any acrimony or histrionics.
-She kept Gatcombe and Mark Phillips, moved into Aston Farm on the estate, and they carried on, bringing up their children in as stable an environment as possible.
-In 1997, Mark Phillips moved his second wife into Aston Farm, but family upheavals appear to have had no effect on his children's love of the place.
-Princess Anne's children seem to have been drawn back to Gatcombe, as if it almost had a magnetic pull on them.
-The children grew up there, Zara and Peter.
They then fled the nest, but since then they obviously miss home because they both come back to live with their mother.
-And when dad Mark got divorced again and moved out, it opened up an opportunity for Zara and her new husband, Mike Tindall, to move into the family farm.
-Aston Farm was quite an old-fashioned farmhouse and they did quite extensive renovations.
They modernized it extensively, you know, they put in high ceilings, they made it much more their own.
Lots of natural light.
And of course, they added stables for Zara as well.
-It's more than happy families.
It's an industry.
It's particularly looking in the equine direction, both of them really mad keen horsewomen and very talented horsewomen.
So I think it's a win-win.
-Princess Anne has not only carefully managed Gatcombe Park to be a self-sufficient and happy family home, she secured it for her heirs for years to come.
-It's about responsibility, it's about care.
And Gatcombe plays that game of stewardship beautifully.
-Still to come, we reveal what happened when the palace's top art advisor was accused of spying.
-He just denied, denied, denied.
-Was Princess Diana's Windsor jumper sending a secret sign?
-Was she telling us a message about herself?
Was she the black sheep of the family?
-And the palace that had the most bizarre excuse for treason.
-My cat forced me to say I was the king.
-Britain's royal palaces have hidden many secrets over the centuries, but few are more shocking than that of the surveyor of the Queen's pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt, who betrayed the palace for 27 years.
-Anthony Blunt was a double agent for Russia, which is absolutely astonishing.
-Long before his association with the royal family, blunt was one of five Cambridge students recruited to spy for the Russians.
-The Cambridge Five were all establishment figures, and for this reason they were ideal to the KGB, to the Soviet Union.
-When two members of his spy ring were exposed in 1951, the spotlight fell on blunt.
-Blunt is called in for questioning some 11 times over the next 13 years.
And he's interrogated about his known relationship with these people.
-I think really they didn't have any evidence and he just denied, denied, denied.
-He was a very level headed, cool, calm, collected person.
-I think people underestimate just how effective he was as a Soviet asset and he gave nothing away.
-Blunt successfully kept up his bluff for 13 years until another spy across the Atlantic started talking.
-Blunt's cover is blown when an American journalist, Michael Straight, confesses to the CIA that he's been a Soviet spy for many years, and it turns out that his recruiter was none other than Anthony Blunt.
-The Palace's top art man was finally proven to be a spy.
So what would the Queen do about the traitor in her palace?
Amazingly, absolutely nothing.
-The Queen was told not long after Blunt made his first confession in 1964, and MI5 advised the royal household not to sack him.
They said that any sudden moves might alert the Soviets that something weird was going on, and they didn't want them to know that Blunt might have been exposed.
-What the intelligence services said to Blunt was, look, give us the full confession.
Come clean and we will give you eternal immunity from prosecution.
-The Queen is head of the establishment.
So if her government has done a deal, which was what had happened in 1964 with Blunt, she's part of the deal, as it were.
-Astonishingly, this known spy remained pally with some royals.
-We do know that the Queen mother did go on seeing him, because she had known a lot of people in the 1930s who had been very sympathetic to left wing politics because of what was happening in Europe.
And she felt that he was one of those people and that he'd made a tremendous mistake.
-Anthony Blunt continued working with the Palaces Royal Collection until his retirement in 1972, but seven years later, the treachery that had been covered up by MI5 came back to haunt him.
-Margaret Thatcher knew about the immunity from prosecution and she thought that it was absolutely disgraceful.
-She felt that it sort of reeked of the sort of old boy network that she was incredibly against.
-From the dispatch box, Thatcher exposed Blunt to the nation as a traitor.
-I thought it right to confirm that Professor Blunt had indeed been a Soviet agent, and to give the House the salient facts.
-When Blunt was exposed, there was a massive media furore.
-Blunt was besieged by the press for months and months.
He lost most of his academic titles and he was stripped of his knighthood by the Queen.
-Blunt lived in disgrace for another four years before dying of a heart attack in 1983.
His work opening up the palace's private art collection to the public, forever overshadowed by his secret double life.
-How do you feel about being called a traitor now?
-I can't deny it.
-Anthony Blunt may have lost his reputation at the palace, but in Edward II's time he would have lost a lot more than that.
-At Beaumont Palace in Oxford, the great palace which was the birthplace of Richard the Lionheart and of King John, a man turns up, John Powderham from Exeter, and he says I am the real king.
We were switched at birth, and I am the true Edward the second.
And no one knows quite what to think.
John is tall.
He's good looking.
He looks like he could be the king.
He's missing an ear, but he says, oh, well, that's because a pig bit it off while I was playing with him.
John is taken to Northampton and he actually goes into the presence of the King, Edward II.
Edward says, welcome my brother, sarcastically.
Edward the Second has John put on trial for treason.
And when John realizes that he's going to be found guilty, he comes up with a fairly clever defense.
He says, actually, the devil made me do it.
And the devil made me do it in the shape of my cat.
My cat forced me to say I was the king.
It didn't work.
John was found guilty of treason and he was hanged.
And some say the cat was hanged too.
-From black cats to black sheep, and the rediscovery of a forgotten palace treasure in the most unlikely of places.
-I just noticed this old wine box sitting in the corner of our very dusty attic, and there was a red sheep jumper inside out just rolled up.
I thought, this is the Diana jumper.
And suddenly a possibly really important piece of clothing.
-Knitwear designers Joanne and Sally created this jumper for Diana 42 years ago, shortly after her engagement to Prince Charles.
She first wore it at a Windsor Castle polo match and it caused a sensation.
-Everyone, every young woman, wanted a copy of the jumper that the girl who was going to marry Prince Charles was wearing.
-We realized that when Diana, we saw Diana wearing the jumper, we knew we had something really special.
-Sales rocketed.
David Bowie, Andy Warhol, and even the Victoria and Albert Museum bought a copy for their collection.
Diana was beginning to be seen as a style icon.
-The thing about Princess Diana is that it didn't matter if she was doing day dressing or evening dressing, or anything in between.
Everything that she wore immediately became iconic.
-Although she was rather careless with the jumper that started it all.
-A parcel arrived from Buckingham Palace in the post, with the jumper in it and the letter saying could we please replace it because she loved it so much?
Or mend it for her?
But it was really quite damaged.
So we decided to replace it.
-The replacement first saw the light in 1983, worn by a very different seeming Diana.
-When she wore it in 1983, she wore it with a lot more style white jeans, a big white collar and big sunglasses.
She looked much more in control.
-Despite being married for only two years, Diana and Charles's relationship was already under strain, and some wondered if there was a secret message in Diana's knitwear.
-Upon seeing that jumper, lots of people thought Diana was making a statement for not being one of them.
She never really felt like one of them.
-Was she telling us a message about herself?
Was she the black sheep of the family?
-What the press didn't notice at the time was that actually the second outing, the jumper was different.
The sheep was slightly different.
Sheep is in a different row.
The rows are going the different directions.
And we of course knew it was a different jumper, but nobody spotted it.
-By that point, the original jumper was already forgotten about in an attic in Brighton, where it remained for 40 years.
Then Joanna and Sally rediscovered their Diana relic and in August 2023, put it up for auction at Sotheby's in New York.
As soon as the auction opened, a bidding war broke out.
44 frantic bids in 15 minutes pushed the price sky high.
With an anonymous bidder eventually bagging Diana's most famous woolly for the incredible sum of just over £900,000.
The Forgotten Jumper, with the secret message becoming the most expensive piece of Diana's clothing ever to be sold.
-It is a lovely jumper and it would have been successful anyway.
We had no idea we'd still be talking about 40 years later.
It's so true.
-Coming up, we reveal the palace that was a baptism of fire for a royal newbie.
-Kate was nervous.
She was nervous about the speech.
She was nervous about how she would stand, what to do with her hands.
-And in the shadow of Westminster Palace, a portent of doom for the King.
-The king said later it seemed a strange thing to happen.
I wondered whether it was a bad omen.
-Palace life and royal duty can be a shock to the system if you're not born into it.
In 2012, Kate was still finding her feet in her new role as Duchess of Cambridge when she was given another Palace challenge, a major international tour.
-Foreign trips for members of the royal family are not a laugh.
From the outside, it might seem that there's just one big holiday.
It really isn't.
The diary is absolutely packed.
There's so many different events, so I think it's fair to say there's certainly not for the faint hearted.
-For a newbie keen to not put a foot wrong, Kate's tour of the palaces and people of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific was fraught with pitfalls.
-So the nine-day tour in 2012 was to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
That point, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were being punted up to be senior royals.
-The Malaysian leg of the tour was particularly intimidating, with a brand-new palace four times the size of Buckingham Palace to contend with.
-This new palace is extraordinary in scale.
It has around 250 acres of grounds, 22 golden domes on the palace itself.
-It's very much designed in Malaysian architectural style.
It's very opulent.
It's very luxurious.
It's very beautiful.
It's dripping in gold.
It's not subtle.
-But Kate wasn't just here to admire the palace.
She needed to make her first international speech with the world's press watching.
-At this point, around 2012, the royal family is really keen to push Kate forward.
So this is quite an important speech in terms of her journey and becoming much more public facing.
-And beforehand, Kate was nervous.
She was nervous about the speech.
She was nervous about the attendance.
She was nervous about how she would stand, what to do with her hands.
-Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Your Royal Highness, for your kind words and very warm welcome.
William and I are hugely excited to be in Malaysia.
-Kate's two-minute speech at a hospice for terminally ill children charmed the press and public.
-And all the very best to this exciting new initiative.
Thank you.
-Yes, she was nervous, but she got the job done and it was certainly very well received all across the across the board, and afterwards she said she was so glad that it was over.
-Having overcome her nerves with her first major speech, Kate could finally relax back at the palace and reveal a surprise of her own.
-There was one thing that everybody was looking out for at the banquet is what would Kate wear?
So for the dress, Kate went to Alexander McQueen, who'd made her wedding dress the year before.
So he created this ivory gown that had this secret message in it.
And that was the gold embroidery of the hibiscus.
And the hibiscus is the national flower of Malaysia.
-So it was a very subtle but a very powerful secret message that she was respecting the culture of Malaysia.
-Absolutely hit the nail on the head, but it was still demure, but still so very Kate.
-The Duchess had cemented her position as a senior royal, capable of coping with anything thrown at her.
-I think it's fair to say that this whole tour, the nine-day tour of the Asia and Pacific, that region, it was a complete success.
Kate nailed it.
I think we can definitely say that was one of the most successful royal tours that there ever was.
-Kate may have only married into royalty, but history has shown us that being born into it is still no indicator of success.
-January 1936, King George the Fifth is dead and his coffin is possessing through the streets of London to the Palace of Westminster.
Behind the coffin is walking Edward the Eighth, the new king.
On top of the coffin is the Imperial State Crown, with the resplendent Maltese cross on the top containing Edward's sapphire.
But no one knew that a screw on the Imperial State Crown holding the Maltese cross was loose.
And as the gun carriage bearing the coffin of the King went over the London streets, it vibrated and the Maltese cross fell off.
The king saw a flash of light dancing along the pavement, and he thought for a moment to pick it up, but as he said, a sense of dignity restrained me.
Luckily, an officer picked it up and held it in his hands until the coffin reached the Palace of Westminster, and then it was hastily put back on again.
The king said later it seemed a strange thing to happen, and although not superstitious, I wondered whether it was a bad omen.
Well, it was a bad omen because less than a year after George V's funeral, the King Edward the Eighth, had abdicated to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson, and he'd never see the crown ever again.
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