♪♪ -The Tower of London... Hampton Court... and Kensington Palace.

These three royal palaces tell the story of almost a thousand years of British monarchy, from William the Conqueror to Princess Diana.

They're the jewels in the crown of Britain's heritage, and every year, millions flock to visit them... [ Indistinct conversations ] [ Bells tolling ] ...except in 2020, when the global pandemic meant their doors were shut and their treasures locked away.

Good morning!

-Good morning, Lucy!

-[ Laughs ] But my job is chief curator at historical palaces, which means I've got the keys!

♪♪ In this program, I'll take you on a very special tour of these deserted palaces.

It's ever so creepy here at night.

I'll discover how they've evolved from high-security fortress to pleasure palace... Oh, goody!

It's my wine.

...royal residence to family home.

[ Clicks teeth ] And I'll show them off at their most spectacular...

Isn't that stunning?

...and their most surprising.

This is like opening the world's best birthday present.

-This is genuinely exciting.

♪♪ -So come with me behind the scenes to reveal the secrets of Britain's royal residences!

♪♪ ♪♪ -The Tower of London is Britain's oldest royal palace.

♪♪ It's also a fortress, a prison... and one of the properties that I'm lucky enough to help look after.

♪♪ Normally, they'd be literally thousands of visitors all rushing in here, so to be all alone feels strange and really quite eerie.

But the upside is it's a privilege to have this place to myself.

And it also gives me the opportunity to take you right into the heart of the fortress.

♪♪ At the castle's very center stands its oldest building, the White Tower.

Begun in the 1070s, its walls bear witness to nearly a thousand years of history.

It was built to be an impenetrable stronghold surrounded by a ring of fortifications.

♪♪ Even when it's closed to visitors, the tower is still home to its permanent residents -- the ravens... and the Yeomen Warders, or Beefeaters.

[ Man whistling ] Tonight, Shady Lane is on dinner duty.

-Right.

This is Poppy.

With the red band.

Here you go.

-Ooh!

-There you go.

George.

[ Whistling ] George.

-[ Gasps ] -[ Laughs ] ♪♪ -He's buried it.

Is that for later?

A little snack?

-Certainly is, yeah.

They -- I think they prefer their -- A little on the turn, they prefer their meat, and that's why they'll bury it and they'll come back later on.

-So what's the secret whistle that tells them to come in?

-It's really simple.

-[ Whistles ] -[ Imitates whistle ] -There you go.

You got it.

-They're coming!

-[ Laughs ] -No one knows exactly how long they've been here.

Perhaps they first came to feast on the corpses of traitors.

But it's been at least 400 years.

When Sir Walter Raleigh the Elizabethan adventurer was in prison -- just there, actually -- he wrote a letter to a friend saying, "I hope the Ravens don't eat me up."

After all, they feed on all things.

-Here you go.

Good boy.

-Shh.

Don't tell the Beefeaters, but it's clear who's really in charge at the Tower of London.

[ Crow cawing ] Good night, ladies.

Good night, gentlemen.

Enjoy your mice.

See you in the morning.

Take care of the kingdom overnight.

♪♪ [ Crow caws ] [ Bell tolling ] ♪♪ It's claimed that if the ravens ever leave the tower, then the kingdom and the tower itself will fall.

It's ever so creepy here at night.

♪♪ The legend of the ravens is said to date back at least as far as the 17th century, when this turret at the White Tower had a rather unusual purpose.

♪♪ 300 years ago, you might have come across John Flamsteed bringing his telescopes up these stairs.

He'd been given permission by King Charles II to use this turret as his observatory.

He'd just been made Astronomer Royal.

And the White Tower was a great choice for an observatory because it was still then one of the very tallest buildings in London.

♪♪ Here, Flamsteed set to work on an all-important mission -- using the positions of the moon and stars to calculate longitude.

Solving this mystery was the key to accurate navigation at sea.

There was just the one problem.

The ravens kept leaving their droppings on Flamsteed's telescope.

So he went to Charles II, and he said, "Will you please banish these wretched ravens out of the Tower of London?"

The King said, "I cannot do that, because if the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the kingdom will fall."

Instead, Charles II built Flamsteed a lovely new observatory down the river at Greenwich.

♪♪ That link between the strength of this castle and the strength of the nation stretches back 10 centuries to when the White Tower was built.

♪♪ In 1066, William the Conqueror and his Norman army invaded England.

[ Soldiers shouting ] After defeating the English army and killing the Anglo-Saxon king, William was crowned in his place.

He knew that Norman rule who could only be imposed by brute force.

Within a few years, he'd begun work on the Tower of London.

It would leave his new subjects in no doubt about who was in charge.

Some historians used to see England before the Normans as primitive, backward, stuck in the Dark Ages.

It's a bit more complicated than that.

But it is true that when the White Tower went up in the 11th century, it wasn't just a formidable building -- it was also a shockingly modern one.

No one in England had ever seen anything like it before.

♪♪ In an age of timber and thatched buildings, Londoners must have been shocked and awed by these monumental stone walls -- 90 feet tall... and 15 feet thick at their base.

♪♪ But the White Tower was more than just a statement of the Normans' military might.

♪♪ It was also a showcase, for the beauty and sophistication of their architecture and art.

♪♪ This chapel is my favorite place in the whole of the Tower of London.

♪♪ The chapel is one of the country's earliest Norman churches, and it was probably built for the use of the royal family.

What I really love is the simplicity of the carvings on the columns.

It's almost minimalism.

And I also like the contrast between the formidable fortress outside and the serenity in here.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The White Tower was designed to impress and inspire.

But it also had to meet more practical needs.

I do love the chapel, but I also love what's tucked away in this corner.

This was a very innovative piece of design, one of the first of its type in the country.

It's one of the six White Tower garderobes, or toilets!

♪♪ Very simple in design but very clever.

You keep the White Tower clean because the poo goes down the hole.

[ Slide whistle!

Ding! ]

But there's a problem -- no drainpipes.

Which meant that all the waste came running down the beautiful white walls of the White Tower, not the sort of elegant and sophisticated impression the Normans wanted to make.

♪♪ The builders of the White Tower, though, had thought about this, and they have placed the toilets on the back side of the building, not the side overlooking the river or the side that faces the city of London.

This meant that the conquered Londoners would not be able to see the dirty little secrets of their new Normal rulers.

♪♪ Besides being a palace and a fortress, the tower's mighty walls meant it soon became the most notorious prison in the land.

Over nine centuries, everyone was held here, from Gunpowder Plotter Guy Fawkes to Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.

But the tower's first prisoner was a Norman bishop, Ranulf Flambard.

Flambard was described as eloquent, intelligent, and handsome.

Medieval bishops were some of the most powerful people in England, and Flambard wormed his way into the position of top adviser to King William II.

But he does sound like a nasty piece of work.

He abused his position.

It's said that he skinned the rich and ground down the poor!

♪♪ When a new king came to the throne in 1100, Flambard was stripped of his position and led in chains to the tower.

Now, you might think that being kept prisoner in the Tower of London must have been a dreadful experience, but not necessarily so.

This wasn't an ordinary prison for criminals.

It was a prison for important enemies of the state.

You could expect to be looked after rather well.

This medieval chronicle tells us that Flambard, for example, "fed sumptuously" when he was in here, and every day he was given a "splendid table" -- that's a feast - for himself and his keepers.

Hm!

♪♪ And on the Feast of Candlemas, 1101, he arranged a special delivery to his cell.

Oh, goody!

It's my wine.

♪♪ [ Straining ] ♪♪ Flambard invited his guards to join him for a particularly good dinner.

He got them so drunk that they all passed out, and then he put his plan into action.

Because what was inside the barrel wasn't, in fact, wine.

It was a rope that he was now going to use to escape.

[ Hisses ] ♪♪ Now, this wasn't the most swashbuckling of escapes.

Flambard did go down his rope with his bishop's crozier in his hand.

[Chuckles] But silly guy forgot his gloves, and his hands got all rubbed raw.

Ouch!

[Inhales sharply] ♪♪ [ Boing! ]

Ooh!

Ahh!

And when he got to the bottom, the bishop realized that his rope was too short.

That medieval chronicler tells us that the portly bishop lay bruised on the ground, groaning piteously.

But the main thing was that he was out, and his accomplices took him away by boat.

So Bishop Flambard was the first prisoner at the Tower of London, and he was also the first to prove that the security at the mighty fortress wasn't always quite what it should have been.

♪♪ Over the years, thousands of prisoners have been held here, but just 40 have escaped these walls.

♪♪ ♪♪ More than 400 years after it was built, the tower remains the centerpiece for some of the most important moments in royal history.

In 1509, King Henry VIII followed royal tradition by staying at the tower before his coronation.

And in spring 1533, his second wife, Anne Boleyn, also came to the tower before being crowned queen.

On the 29th of May, 1533, Anne traveled up the river from Greenwich by barge, and she landed right here at these steps, and her arrival was greeted by the firing of a thousand cannon.

[ Cannon fires ] ♪♪ Anne entered the tower through the special royal entrance.

♪♪ Then, as now, it was out of bounds to ordinary mortals.

♪♪ Next, she came through these gates.

The wood's been tested, and we know that they're very same ones that she passed through nearly 500 years ago.

Then she was welcomed to the tower by her husband, Henry, and it's said that he cupped and stroked her pregnant belly.

[ Choir singing ] ♪♪ All this pomp and ceremony was part of Henry's bid to legitimize Anne as England's rightful queen and to establish her unborn child as his rightful successor, his longed-for son and heir.

Henry had had the tower done up for Anne's coronation, adding those pepperpot domes onto the turrets of the White Tower.

Now, with all of this fanfare and all of this fuss being made about her arrival, for Anne, this must have been a real moment of triumph.

But less than three years later, Anne's triumph would turn to disaster.

In May 1536, she returned to the tower.

She entered by the same royal gate, but what had been her palace was now her prison.

After Anne failed to bear Henry a son, he was desperate to end their marriage.

He had her arrested and charged with adultery, incest, and high treason.

The constable at the tower, Sir William Kingston, reported everything Anne said and did to Henry's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

The day after Anne arrived at the tower, Kingston wrote a letter to Cromwell describing her strange and hysterical behavior.

One minute, he said, she was weeping, the next, she'd fallen into what he described as a fit of great laughing.

Anne was tried and found guilty.

Her sentence was death.

This is Kingston's last letter about Anne, written on the very day that she was to die.

He reports that she'd said she'd heard that the executioner was very good and that, in any case, she had just a little neck.

And then she put her hand about it, laughing heartily.

[ Shudders ] Then he finishes -- and this is the really macabre bit -- that, "This lady has much joy and pleasure in death."

♪♪ ♪♪ Anne may have resigned herself to her fate, but she still chose the clothes in which she was to die with great care.

They spoke of her innocence.

On her gown, she wore the ermine, which was a marker of her royal status.

And her skirt was crimson, the color of martyrdom.

[ Bell tolling ] On the 19th of May, 1536, a temporary scaffold was erected close to the White Tower for Anne's execution.

Anne made a final speech from this scaffold, and in it she expressed her loyalty to her husband.

She said that, towards her, the king had ever been a good, a gentle, a sovereign lord.

An expert French executioner had been brought in for Anne, and instead of the usual acts, he sliced off her head with a single blow of his sword.

In her last days, the tower became Anne's entire world -- her prison, her place of execution... and then her final resting place.

♪♪ She was buried in the tower's second church, the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula.

Anne was laid to rest, not in a proper coffin, but just in an old chest that had contained arrows.

And her burial place wasn't marked, perhaps so that it wouldn't become a place of pilgrimage for people who felt she'd been unjustly killed.

♪♪ 300 years later, the Victorians did finally create a memorial to Anne on the place where we think that her body must be.

But...it's a fairly modest tribute to this queen who looms so large in English history.

♪♪ But in some ways, the tower itself is Anne's memorial.

It was her palace and then her prison, the place that saw the very beginning of her reign and its very end.

♪♪ Over four centuries after the Normans built the Tower of London, King Henry VIII's reign would witness the birth of a new kind of royal palace.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hampton Court, 12 miles southwest of London, was Henry's favorite home.

Like the tower, it proclaims the monarch's might and magnificence, but unlike the tower, it wasn't an impenetrable fortress.

♪♪ Hampton Court's been my office for 15 years now, but I still get a thrill every single time I come here, especially when I get to use the front door.

[ Door creaks ] ♪♪ Hampton Court didn't start life as a royal residence, but when Henry VIII moved in in 1528, he set about transforming it into a palace fit for a king.

♪♪ I'm climbing up to the big, spooky attic.

Visitors don't normally get to see it, but I think it's one of the most atmospheric parts of the palace.

There's some Tudor plumbing.

There's some Georgian woodwork.

And look -- we've got a profusion of antlers!

♪♪ We may have to climb through a window now, but I promise you that the view is worth it.

♪♪ Isn't that stunning?

♪♪ The king was a man of huge appetites, and when he began renovating the palace, one of his most pressing concerns was keeping his vast court well-fed.

Just look at this forest of Tudor chimneys.

This whole area is the kitchens.

When Henry was in residence, he had up to 800 servants with him, all of them expecting dinner.

There's a Tudor record that says that these kitchens in one single day required 80 sheep, a dozen fat cows, 18 little calves, and that's not to mention the poultry, the game, the deer, the boars, and the rabbits on top of that.

This was catering on a gargantuan scale.

Henry's improvements didn't end with the kitchens, and for much of his reign, Hampton Court was a building site.

The king treated it as a fabulous stage set that he changed the scenery as often as he changed his wives.

When Henry took over the palace, he was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Catherine of Aragon was known for wearing the gable hood with its pointed gable like the gable of a house, and her personal badge was the pomegranate.

♪♪ And here is one of Catherine's personal pomegranates carved into the stone archway.

It's one of the few traces of Henry's first wife to survive at Hampton Court.

Now, the tragic irony is that Catherine's pomegranate was the ancient symbol of fertility -- all these little seeds inside it.

But it was her infertility, in the sense that she wasn't able to bear Henry the son he wanted, that in 1533 meant that he divorced her.

After that, like Catherine herself, the gable hoods and the pomegranates were banished from court.

♪♪ In 1533, Henry married his second wife, the doomed Anne Boleyn, in the same year he started work on Hampton Court's spectacular great hall.

Now, Anne Boleyn, by contrast, she wore the glamorous French hood.

Ooh.

It's quite sexy.

It shows a bit more hair.

And her badge was the aggressive falcon.

[ Growls ] ♪♪ Now, there was once a time when if you'd have come into this room, you would have found Anne's falcons and the letter "A" and "H" for Henry intertwined all over the place.

But when Henry and Anne's relationship soured, he had all of these symbols taken down.

Up here in the paneling, you'll see some strangely blank areas.

The workmen who had to do this job of removing Anne's symbols had to do it so quickly under such pressure that the accounts tell us they were eligible to claim overtime.

And they did it in such a rush that they made mistakes.

If you look at the palace really well, you can find an "A" and an "H" for Anne and Henry that they missed.

Henry wasted no time.

He got engaged to wife number three, Jane Seymour, the day after Anne's execution.

♪♪ Now, Queen Jane wanted to make a complete break with the past, and one of the ways that she did this was to reject the French hood of Anne Boleyn and to go back to the gable hood of Catherine of Aragon.

And her badge was the phoenix, the symbol of rebirth.

You can see the phoenix in here still very prominently visible on the ceiling.

And the reason it's still up there, the reason it survived, is that although Jane was only wife number three of six, she was the one Henry always said that he loved the most.

♪♪ The palace's grand state rooms paint a magnificent picture of the Tudor court, but for Henry and Jane's full story, we need to explore a part of the palace that's off the beaten track.

Come this way.

♪♪ I really love the name of these stairs.

This is called the Silver Stick Staircase.

It goes to a room that's off limits to visitors.

♪♪ If I show you what's in here, you'll understand why it's not on display.

It's just a room that we use for staff training sessions.

But 483 years ago, this was Jane Seymour's bedroom.

And before that, it was Anne Boleyn's.

And before that, it was Catherine of Aragon's.

It's extraordinary to think that all three of them slept here.

♪♪ On the 12th of October, 1537, it was in this room that Jane Seymour finally gave birth to a son, the heir that Henry had been craving for nearly 30 years.

This was a moment of rejoicing and relief for Henry, and I'm sure for Jane, too.

She'd done her job.

But here's the poignant thing.

Just two weeks after the birth of her son, Jane fell sick, and it was also in this room that she died.

Centuries on, the memory of this joyful birth and tragic death still lingers.

It's said that Jane's ghost haunts this staircase and that each night she comes down these steps and walks towards the nursery of the son she scarcely knew.

When it comes to ghosts, I must admit, I'm not a believer, but I do think that the ghost of Jane Seymour has an interesting story.

Sightings of Jane, and the other spooks at Hampton Court, really took off in the 19th century when the palace had become a visitor attraction.

You could even buy a postcard like this one showing Jane's ghost... [Chuckles] ...looking almost as convincing as I am at this moment.

And, as it says here, "As seen nightly."

The cynical might say that the ghosts of the palace had been invented in order to be a draw for tourists.

[ Woman screams ] ♪♪ At first glance, Hampton Court looks like a perfectly preserved vision of the Tudor past.

♪♪ But look again, and it's really two palaces in one.

150 years after Hampton Court was home to Henry VIII, half of the old Tudor palace was completely rebuilt.

Come this way... and we can travel in time from the 16th-century world of the Tudors over there to the late-17th-century world of the Stuarts over here.

♪♪ ♪♪ When building works began here in 1689, ambitions couldn't have been higher.

♪♪ This side of Hampton Court was redesigned in the latest baroque style, taking inspiration from the order and symmetry of classical architecture.

Stuart monarchs William and Mary wanted their new palace to rival King Louis XIV's spectacular Versailles.

But this impression of "Versailles on Thames" is only skin-deep.

William and Mary wanted to rebuild the whole palace in that glittering white Portland stone, but they couldn't afford it.

♪♪ Now, tucked away here is something that William and Mary didn't want you to notice, This should be lovely white Portland stone.

But instead it's -- Look.

It's yellow.

This is Oxfordshire stone.

A lot cheaper, but it doesn't match.

And this -- this is terrible stone here!

It's all crumbly!

This is Reigate stone, reused from the old Tudor palace.

This is corner cutting.

And there's a reason for this.

Unlike Louis XIV in France, William and Mary weren't absolute monarchs.

They only reigned with the consent of parliament, which meant that, unlike Louis, they didn't have a bottomless royal budget.

♪♪ So much for these fancy facades.

To me, the nooks and crannies hidden behind them are just as fascinating.

If you want to explore the seamier side of life here 300 years ago, then I think we need to explore the little passageways of Hampton Court.

♪♪ Look at these funny little railings in the corner.

What could they be for?

[ Chuckles ] Well, a "court" is a large body of men.

There aren't too many proper toilets.

And these railings have been put here to stop the courtiers from taking a leak in the corner.

Obviously, it's not 100% effective, but it does give you a bit less privacy than would be ideal.

Now, when you come to Hampton Court today, everything is clean and lovely.

And I have to admit, it's a sanitized version of a dirty, smelly past.

♪♪ And the traces of this underbelly of court life are absolutely everywhere... if you know where to look.

Now, this is the palace's dedicated chocolate kitchen, hot chocolate being the breakfast drink of choice in the Stuart period.

Queen Anne couldn't get enough of it.

But what I really want to show you is in here.

It's a piece of late-17th-century graffiti scribbled up onto the walls.

It's a picture of a naked lady.

You can see her head at the top in profile.

Then we come down to her bosoms that, rather strangely, are placed one on top of the other.

Then we have her naked legs, but she's wearing a rather beautifully drawn pair of shoes.

I think we're getting an insight here into the life of a bored page boy waiting here to pick up his master's hot-chocolate order and filling in the time by scribbling on the walls.

I'm not sure he was entirely familiar with the female anatomy, but from the way he's done the shoes so well, I suspect that he may have been a foot fetishist.

♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ Although the realities of palace life could be decidedly down-at-heel, Britain's 18th-century kings and queens hit upon a new way of keeping up appearances.

♪♪ It's brilliant in here.

These are the storerooms of the royal ceremonial dress collection.

These clothes belonged to kings and queens and courtiers going back over 500 years.

My colleague, Eleri Lynn, is helping me unpack one of our star pieces.

This has to be my favorite thing in the whole of the dress collection.

-Yeah, it's pretty stunning.

-This dress is over 250 years old.

-What's really striking about this particular piece is that it still shines and sparkles.

Most silver this old would have oxidized and been gray and dull.

What you have here is beautiful French silk that has actually been woven with real silver bullion on the loom, so the fact this is still shining is very, very rare.

-You get the sense that this is supposed to be viewed by candlelight.

-Absolutely.

-Glinting.

-Yeah.

-Shall we lift?

-Lift.

-The dress belonged to Lady Rockingham, wife of an 18th-century prime minister.

-It's exceptionally well-preserved, even down to this lovely bit of silk lining here, which has been added to the back of the train to absorb the dirt and the dust from the palace floors.

-Well, we can still see some Georgian muck that's become attached to it.

I love that.

-Absolutely.

It's the real deal.

-And this is the skirt.

It's a whopper!

Would you say that was six feet across?

-Easily.

It's basically worn as a big rectangle.

-And what can you actually do in a dress like this, apart from standing around looking good?

Because you can't bend over, you can't get through a doorway, you certainly can't run to catch a bus.

-This dress is not a dress for practicality, is it?

But you had to wear a dress like this to court.

You weren't allowed into the palaces to meet the king or queen unless you were wearing a dress like this.

So this basically is court uniform during the 18th century.

-How much money would a dress like this have cost, do you think?

-This dress would have cost as much as a very substantial house.

We know that a lot of even members of the nobility were mortgaging their properties and mortgaging their land just to afford a court uniform, but it's an investment because you're hoping that what you're wearing is going to grab the attention of the king or queen.

And if they come over and talk to you and compliment you on your clothes, that way, you might be able to get a promotion or position at court.

The obvious equivalent for me is the red carpet at an awards ceremony like the Oscars.

It's all about being seen.

-I think of this dress as being like the missing link.

If you go into the palace, it's very splendid, but it's kind of empty.

And the reason is that it should have been packed full of ladies wearing dresses like this, loads of them!

While court dresses were becoming ever more enormous, when it came to their palaces, the monarchy was downsizing.

♪♪ Kensington Palace became a royal residence in 1689.

It's now in the heart of the city, just down the road from the Albert Hall.

But back then, the asthmatic King William III chose it as a healthy retreat from the polluted air of London.

♪♪ Now, as suburban villas go, this is obviously pretty nice, but you've got to admit it's a bit of a step down from Hampton Court.

Compared to its predecessors, Kensington Palace is positively homey.

♪♪ The palace really came into its own in the Georgian era, beginning in 1714.

Parliament was so desperate to avoid having a Catholic on the throne that they imported protestant King George I and his readymade royal family all the way from Germany.

The new king was in a unique situation.

He was royal by invitation, not by right, and that meant he could be sacked.

When George I arrived in Britain, he quickly realized that his new courtiers didn't like him.

It is true that he was quite boring company and his English wasn't great, but it's also true that the courtiers were outrageously xenophobic.

So he decided to win them over by showing them a good time.

To that end, he rebuilt Kensington Palace into a sort of stage set for a whole succession of cool gatherings.

He turned this place into... a party palace.

♪♪ There was no guest list at court.

In theory, it was open to all, but in practice, getting in wasn't so straightforward.

Now, to make it to the top of this staircase and into the king's presence with a bit of an ordeal.

These courtiers are all painted up here to remind you that at court you will be watched and you will be judged to see if you belong or not.

And, ultimately, those Beefeaters up there, just like the ones at the Tower of London, they're armed, and they will be deciding whether you're going in or whether you're going home.

But there were some well-established techniques for wheedling your way in.

One, clothes are all-important, and if you don't have the right look, then you should borrow some better clothes from a friend.

Two, bribery.

Once, a young law student tried to get in and failed.

He went off to the coffee shop for half an hour.

He came back, and this time he gave the footman a shilling, and it worked!

In like a rocket.

Three, what you do is wait until you see a posh person coming.

Ooh.

Here comes one now.

And then you get in behind them and you pretend to be their servant.

You might call it slipstreaming.

After all that, if you did make it into the king's presence, you might then have wondered whether it had been worth the effort.

If you look beyond the extravagant court outfits and the elaborate court rituals, though, you do get the sense that this place no longer really mattered.

Royal palaces had once been the most important buildings in the land, but now the big debates, the big decisions were all happening out there in the city, in the press, in parliament.

♪♪ By 1830, the Georgian age was drawing to its close, and Britain's next monarch would inaugurate an entirely new era.

♪♪ Now I'm taking you to a really exciting room in the palace, where an event of monumental historical significance took place.

Come with me.

♪♪ It was in this room on a cold autumn day in 2002 that I came for my job interview to become chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, but perhaps the room is better known to history for what happened here on a spring day in 1819.

A baby girl was born.

The future Queen Victoria!

[ Music box playing ] ♪♪ The young Victoria led a sheltered life at Kensington.

From the age of 5, her closest companion and dearest friend was her German governess, Baroness Lehzen.

This is a scrapbook, or an album, that Lehzen herself has compiled, full of little mementos of her former pupil.

It's such a lovely thing, and it's a new addition to our collection, so it's a treat to have a good look at it.

On this page, Lehzen's stuck in snippets of the princess' hair.

Here's one labeled "Princess Victoria's hair as a baby."

Here she's growing up and going through her education, with a sample of her handwriting.

It's heartbreakingly neat.

And this page, this is really gorgeous.

It's a fragment of Victoria's wedding dress -- a white wedding dress -- because Victoria started off this great fashion that still continues for brides to be dressed all in white.

Now, the really lovely thing about this little book is that Lehzen has clearly made it with love.

And she thought of her pupil as a kind of surrogate daughter.

And when they were in private, Victoria herself would call her governess "Mother."

But Victoria's relationship with her real mother, the Duchess of Kent, was more troubled, and Victoria despised her mother's closest adviser, Sir John Conroy, who strictly controlled every aspect of her upbringing.

♪♪ This is the young Victoria's traveling bed.

It comes apart so it could go with her from place to place.

And she needed a bed like this because her mother and Conroy decided that she should get out of the palace.

They sent her on tour to go to meet her future subjects face-to-face.

♪♪ The idea that a royal would venture out beyond the palace gates to meet ordinary people was a revolutionary one.

Victoria really hated these tours.

She was put under the scrutiny of so many people looking at her, judging her.

But these tours established an important principle which stands to this very day, that royals belonged not so much in their palaces, but out there in the public eye.

♪♪ On the 18th of May, 1836, the 16-year-old Victoria was beginning to plan a life for herself beyond the palace.

♪♪ And she was also awaiting the arrival of some of her German relatives.

Victoria first set eyes on her cousin Albert on this staircase.

♪♪ Victoria recorded this first meeting with Albert in her journal, and she says that he is "extremely handsome."

♪♪ "His hair," she says, "is about the same color as mine."

Hm.

Hmm.

Funny, that.

"His eyes are blue.

He has a beautiful nose."

Oh, yes.

And a nice mouth with "fine teeth."

Oh, yes!

Tasty.

But I'm afraid all he had to say about her was that she was very amiable.

Huh.

[ Taps book ] [ "Wedding March" plays ] [ Door slams ] Of course, Albert was eventually won over, and they married in 1814.

♪♪ When she ascended the throne, Victoria left Kensington Palace, and for over a century, it became a bit of a backwater.

At the beginning of the Windsor era, it was lived in mostly by minor royals.

But when Princess Diana moved in in the 1980s, the eyes of the world were back on the palace.

♪♪ As Diana discovered, life as a modern royal meant a life lived in public.

And to face her public, Diana assembled one of the world's most famous wardrobes.

♪♪ This is like opening the world's best birthday present.

-This is genuinely exciting.

This is the first time that I've seen it since we acquired it.

-It's lovely!

-It is.

This is one of my very favorite dresses, actually, and so I'm absolutely thrilled to have it in the collection.

It was designed by the London-based designer Victor Edelstein for Princess Diana in 1985.

And she wore it to the White House, and there, very famously, she danced with John Travolta, which is why this dress gets its nickname, "The Travolta Dress."

-What I love about that picture of Diana and John Travolta dancing together is that in the background you can see Ronald and Nancy Reagan being starstruck!

[ Laughs ] -Yeah.

Absolutely.

I think that -- I think the whole crowd was, and I think -- To be honest, I think the world was starstruck, because it made headlines across the globe.

-How does this dress work?

What makes it look so good?

-Part of what made this dress look good was the fact that Princess Diana wore it.

But this is a very beautifully constructed dress.

So, it's in a midnight-blue velvet.

Very artfully ruched all the way down the bodice to the thigh.

But the real magic of those photos is that that skirt is so full that it twirled up around her.

If she had been wearing any other dress, those photos wouldn't have been nearly as iconic.

And it's that incredible meeting of Hollywood and royalty coming together that just sort of captured everyone's imagination.

-What do you think this dress says about Diana's growing fashion confidence?

-In the early '80s, Diana was still wearing lots of very new, romantic styles.

So lots of frills.

Lots of puffy sleeves.

But in 1985, there's a shift, and you find her moving towards designers and towards designs that are very sleek and very timeless.

And that's the style she stuck with then for the rest of her life, those very kind of sleek column dresses.

And it shows a woman, I guess, finding her own style, but also a style that worked on an international stage.

-She sort of becomes herself.

It seems like the job of being royal has turned into establishing what you might call... a personal visual brand.

And you can see the Queen does that.

She kind of always dresses the same and always looks very recognizable and good.

And you can see Diana reaching that moment in this dress.

-I think so.

Certainly in terms of her fashion story, this is -- this is the beginning.

-It's peak Diana!

-[ Laughs ] It is.

♪♪ -On the 31st of August, 1997, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris.

She was just 36 years old.

♪♪ In the days after her death, hundreds of thousands of mourners left an extraordinary carpet of flowers in front of the gates of Kensington Palace.

This public outpouring of grief for Diana was a watershed moment in our relationship with the royals.

To the millions of people who mourned her as the people's princess, she wasn't some remote figure locked up in a palace.

No.

She was one of us almost.

There was the sense of personal connection.

And these golden gates, almost buried in a sea of flowers, became a symbol of this new royal relationship.

♪♪ The Tower of London... Hampton Court... and Kensington Palace are products of extraordinary power and privilege.

But they're also unique windows into the hopes and fears, the triumphs and the tragedies of Britain's kings and queens.

I don't think we'll ever tire of wandering around these three extraordinary palaces, marveling at their splendor, poking into their hidden corners, because these buildings, in parts opulent, in parts very ordinary, reveal what it means to be royal.

♪♪ ♪♪ -To order "Lucy Worsley's Royal Palace Secrets" on DVD, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Also available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪ ♪♪