Secrets of the Royal Palaces

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

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

(narrator) ...lavish... (Anna) 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... (Jonathan) The Regal Bog, that would be used by Queen Victoria herself.

(narrator) ...reveal the extraordinary royal art hidden within... (Janina) The Queen's stamp collection is worth a hundred million pounds.

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

(narrator) ...dig up the royal palaces' dark history... (Kate) 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 her to bits.

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

(dramatic music) In this episode, we uncover the inside story of the hours after Diana's death... (Colin) Just for that millisecond, we thought she was alive.

(narrator) ...discover the secret behind the building of the palace of Versailles... (Anna) This was the kind of Machiavellian side of Louis XIV.

(narrator) ...reveal The Queen's mysterious art collection tucked away at St. James' palace.

(Janina) She loves to show them to visiting dignitaries.

(narrator) We uncover how even grand royal palaces couldn't protect the princes' private lives... (Bidisha) Scotland Yard told the royals, "We're going to investigate, this is serious, and it is illegal."

(narrator) ...and hear how one photographer captured one of the most intimate portraits of the Queen at Windsor.

(Tessa) She enjoys his mimicry, she likes his sense of humor.

There is a fondness there.

(triumphant music) (inquisitive music) (narrator) Britain's palaces provide the setting for important state events and royal celebrations.

But they also have another function.

(Daisy) To the royal family, this is their office, it's their home, it's where they conduct their work, it's where they conduct their relationships.

(narrator) And some palaces grow in stature due to their royal inhabitants.

(Emily) Kensington Palace, no one lived there apart from old dowager duchesses until Princess Diana moved in, and then it became the place to be.

(narrator) But when Diana died in 1997, she wasn't at home at Kensington Palace.

She was in Paris, and as she was no longer an official royal, post divorce, there was no one there to bring her home.

It was up to members of her household in London to take charge, including her driver, Colin Tebbutt.

Colin had been working for Diana for two years when her private secretary, Michael Gibbons, shared the news he had just received.

(Colin) She's all on her own.

Where is she?

Who is with her?

Michael said, "Colin, go to Paris for me and be my eyes and ears."

This lady was down to us, she was our lady.

(narrator) Colin got on the first flight he could to Paris with another member of Diana's household, Paul Burrell.

Once there, they made their way to the hospital.

I walked into the room, and there was the Princess, lying in a bed.

The face was not covered up, but not, as I thought it would be, a dreadful thing to look at.

And there she was, in the room, with people walking in and bowing and walking out.

Why have people got to walk in and out?

We started to take control, and we sealed the room.

(narrator) It wasn't just well wishing passers by that Colin had to contend with.

(Tessa) The car crash happens, but most of us wouldn't expect those injured persons to then be followed to the hospital by this relentless, paparazzi braying mob.

(Colin) There were big rooms with massive windows, with no curtains, and I looked up, and I said, "The press are on that roof!"

I got some blankets, that's all I could find, and I got up and covered the window with blankets which really made it hotter.

So I asked for some fans to be brought in, and they brought some very big fans, and I put them into the corner and turned them on.

I turn round to look at the Princess, and her hair was moving, and her eyelashes were moving.

And just for that millisecond, and Paul did as well, we thought she was alive.

(mournful music) (Tessa) I'm glad that someone was there to shield her from what had been a relentless glare in her married life.

She deserved that in death.

(narrator) As mourners gathered outside Diana's home, Kensington Palace in London, Prince Charles was breaking the news to Prince Harry and William in Balmoral.

It must've been the worst day in Prince Charles' life to have to wake up his boys having got this ghastly news in the middle of night.

He was devastated that would have happened to his wife, to the mother of his children.

(narrator) The royal family decided that Charles should travel to Paris with Diana's two sisters in a royal plane to bring Diana home.

(Colin) The prince came straight up to me and thanked me for being there and everything I'd done, which was nice.

(narrator) Prince Charles and Diana's sisters were able to say a private goodbye to the Princess.

(Colin) They went in with the clergy, and we shut the door, so they were in there for about twenty minutes, and then we went down through the hospital, and it was crowded, there were people everywhere, and I got in with the clergy in a following vehicle, and we drove through Paris.

(narrator) Onboard the royal plane, Diana was finally free from the glare of the paparazzi.

(Tessa) You don't keep chasing her down.

Is that really how you earn your living?

And we all have to reflect on the part we play in this narrative, because why are they chasing her down?

Because actually the photographs they get have currency, because us, the public, consume them.

But there is a line, isn't there?

And I think somewhere in the Diana narrative, we lost sight of where that decency, that line was.

(narrator) Britain's palaces have provided the royal family with a private space free from the public gaze.

(Bidisha) The palaces are the place where the royals can be themselves.

They can relax... as much as a royal ever relaxes.

(narrator) Of course, royal palaces are far more than just a home.

These lavish buildings are built to symbolize a monarch's wealth and status.

We, as the public, expect to see glitz and gold and pomp and circumstance when we go and look around the palaces.

(narrator) And across the channel, one palace did this better than all the rest.

Versailles.

11 miles West of Paris is one of the most famous palaces in the world.

For over a century, this was the center of French government and power, and a pleasure palace for the elite, and was visited by many British monarchs, including Queen Victoria and George VI.

Built for the Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1661, it is set in over 2,000 acres of gardens laid out in the formal French style, making it among the largest palaces ever constructed.

(Anna) Versailles was a complex, it was almost like a small town.

It was a sprawling mass.

(Jonathan) Versailles is optimally luxurious.

We're talking about marble floors, you're looking at gilding by the acre, and then the hall of mirrors.

(narrator) Its two wings contain over 2,000 rooms spread over an area almost 13 times bigger than the White House.

(Anna) We might think of it today with tennis courts and an opera house.

I mean it was like a kind of footballer's mansion writ large.

(narrator) Louis XIV first came to Versailles as a child.

Back then it was his father, Louis XIII's hunting lodge.

(Ed) This was a place where he learned to hunt, he had a great love of the outdoors, and he very quickly fell in love with this place.

(narrator) So besotted was Louis with this rural chateau that in 1661, at the age of 23, he started works on it to expand it into something fit for a king.

It was deliberately grand, and all of this very much encapsulated the idea that this was a monarch who was divinely appointed.

He was the Sun King.

(narrator) But Louis XIV also had a secret reason to build this monument to luxury.

Louis was naturally suspicious of nobles plotting against him.

Versailles was a place to entertain, it was a place to come to and be seen.

But also, it had a second function, which was to attract courtiers.

(Ed) He had them living in the grounds, living in the palace in other apartments, and the idea was that if they were away from their sort of provincial centers of power, they couldn't challenge him.

It managed to curb the ambitions of those who would seek to overthrow him because they invested in this project as well.

(Anna) This was the kind of Machiavellian side of Louis XIV, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

Yes, he put on a great spectacle and you lived in great comfort, but the flip side of it was that you weren't really allowed to go home.

It was very much a golden handcuff.

(narrator) So the question is, did Louis' secret plan work?

When we think about Louis' 72 year reign, I think one of the reasons why he went unchallenged ultimately was because of the success of Versailles.

(narrator) And Louis XIV's passion for extravagance would have deadly consequences with the piece de resistance he was yet to build.

(triumphant music) (narrator) Coming up on Secrets of the Royal Palaces, we discover how one photographer was able to gain access to the palaces and capture the Queen like never before.

He had a closeness to the Queen and all the members of her family that no other photographer before him or after him has had.

(narrator) We reveal how secrets about the Princes' private lives slipped through the palace walls' protections and found their way into the tabloids.

(Emily) I don't think the palace wanted the investigation to happen.

Who knows what could have been uncovered?

(narrator) And discover the length the Queen Elizabeth I went to to keep her cousin, Mary, at bay.

What do you do with a problem like Mary?

(narrator) Britain's palaces are official royal residences, but as monarch, Queen Elizabeth counts Windsor, Balmoral, Sandringham, and Buckingham Palace as her private residences too.

But one of these palaces stands out as the Queen's true home.

(Emily Windsor castle really does feel like you're in the monarch's home, much more so than Buckingham Palace, which is Monarchy HQ.

(narrator) One photograph, taken in 1978, shows Her Majesty looking very much at home at Windsor Castle.

But who could capture such an intimate shot, and what are the secrets behind it?

(festive music) The Queen is probably one of the most photographed people on the planet.

She has been papped and posed since the day she was born.

But rarely do photographers capture Elizabeth, the person, not Elizabeth, the Queen.

(Michael) Here's the Queen, and she's not the queen in that picture, she's a grandmom holding that grandchild and loving it.

(narrator) Taken in 1978, the photo shows the Queen with her first grandchild, Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne and Captain Phillips.

Behind the lens is someone the Queen knows well.

It's her sister, Princess Margaret's husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones.

This is the first person to marry so close to the monarchy who's not from top drawer, who's not titled.

But, he knows how to talk to the royals.

(Susanna) Antony Armstrong-Jones was well known for fashion pictures and magazine photography, and by the time he married Princess Margaret in 1960, he was already very well established as a professional photographer.

(Tessa) All their friends would say this was a sexy relationship, you know, Margaret and Tony really loved each other, they were dubbed "Barbie and Ken."

(narrator) Armstrong-Jones, with the new title of Lord Snowden, now had access to the heart of the royal family like never before.

He's the advance guard of the Swinging Sixties.

He's got the skinny hips, the svelte, suede trousers, he's the cool man in the room, he's the snapper with the camera on his shoulder, and he makes everyone feel pretty good about themselves.

(Susanna) He had a closeness to the Queen and all the members of her family that no other photographer before him or after him has had.

(lively music) (narrator) There's no doubt the Queen felt at ease with her brother-in-law behind the camera.

I think Lord Snowden brings something quite distinctive to this picture.

It's a beautiful black and white portrait, the Queen's smiling, looking on at the camera, holding the baby.

Had it been another photographer, it would've been a quite different type of portrait.

(Tessa) The Queen likes him, she enjoys his mimicry, she likes his sense of humor, she always did.

(narrator) But there is a secret truth lurking behind this photo.

It's really telling, the date of that picture.

That is the year, 1978, when Margaret and Tony's divorce is confirmed.

It's the first divorce in the inner folds of the British royal family since Henry the blooming VIII!

The fact that the Queen chose Snowden to take this portrait of her with her first grandchild suggests that the Queen really valued his skills as a photographer and had a good enough report with Snowden to continue working with him.

(Tessa) But Margaret accuses him of being positively oily with her sister, the Queen, and with the Queen Mother.

She's annoyed that they like him so much, ... can't they see him for what he is?

He's a philanderer, by the way, from the get-go.

(narrator) In spite of the tension between Margaret and Elizabeth, Lord Snowden remained the Queen's photographer of choice, the only one to capture her in every decade of her reign.

(Tessa) That affection for one another between the Queen and her brother-in-law is retained throughout the trials and tribulations of the marriage of Margaret and Tony.

You know, there is a fondness there.

(narrator) As with this image from 2010, the chemistry between photographer and sitter is palpable.

(serene music) Palaces and castles are the setting for many happy moments for the royal family.

(Richard) So many incredibly important events have taken place within their walls.

They are so much woven into the history of the country.

(narrator) But relations between royals are not always rosy.

For Queen Elizabeth I, her home at Hampton Court Palace was happily far from that of her cousin and bitter rival, Mary, at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.

(courtly music) After so many years of male monarchs, suddenly, you've got two female monarchs: Elizabeth in England, Mary in Scotland.

They are cousins, and when Mary comes over to be Queen, age 18, from France, there's some talk of a huge meet up in York, loads of gold, loads of Tudor excitement, trumpets, everything.

It doesn't happen.

Elizabeth and Mary is the ultimate unrequited love story, with Mary desperately writing to Elizabeth, all she wants is to meet Elizabeth.

It never happens.

Mary is so dangerous to Elizabeth.

They are the ultimate rivals, and the reason is that until Elizabeth gets married, Mary is the closest to Elizabeth's throne, and, for many, Mary has a better claim to her throne than Elizabeth, because Mary was not deemed illegitimate.

So what do you do with a problem like Mary?

Elizabeth first deals with the problem by trying to marry Mary off to her friends, and when Mary flees, desperate because she's been deposed, Elizabeth then imprisons Mary on trumped up charges that she murdered her husband, which she didn't, for nearly 20 years.

Finally, Mary gives in to treason, and Elizabeth is told she has to execute her.

But she really doesn't want to execute her, because she thinks people will attack her for it, it won't be seen as sympathetic or feminine, the Spanish might attack her, but most of all, if you execute a queen, if you take off her head, you are saying that all queens can be executed.

Does this mean that one day, someone's going to execute you?

She's forced to sign the execution warrant, and therefore, Mary, Queen of Scots is the precedent that makes it more acceptable to execute Charles I just a few decades later.

(narrator) Britain's palaces provide a safe place for the royals to live out their private lives away from the public eye.

(Emily) Every palace has seen thousands of years of secrets, and drama, and intrigue pass through their corridors and rooms.

(narrator) But in 2005, the palace walls failed to protect their royal occupants when Prince William's and Prince Harry's residence of Clarence House let the secrets slip out.

(inquisitive music) The British public has always been fascinated by the private lives of the royal family, and the media has strived to satisfy the public's hunger for royal gossip.

(dramatic music) But in 2005, some tabloid newspapers went a step too far.

What followed would become one of the great royal scandals.

One that would change the royal family and the British press forever.

(Bidisha) The royals realized that something was amiss when extremely banal but detailed bits of information about their daily lives found its way into the tabloid press.

(Richard) Prince William, really, was at the heart of it all.

He had been puzzled as to how a couple of fairly trivial stories had appeared in the News of the World.

(Emily) The story was that Prince William was borrowing an editing suite from Tom Bradby, the royal correspondent to ITV.

Tom Bradby, being a very good journalist, couldn't understand how that had appeared in the News of the World.

Only four people knew about it.

(Richard) Bradby and William met to discuss this, and between them, they worked it out; Someone must be accessing messages.

(narrator) Scotland Yard was called in to Clarence House to examine the evidence.

(Bidisha) Scotland Yard told the royals, "We're going to investigate, this is serious, and it is illegal."

(Emily) If you're able to hack someone's voice messages, and you're able to listen to plans, you know, William saying, "Kate, I'll see you at X and Y," you know their movements.

That's incredibly dangerous.

(Edwina) There's also just that feeling of invasion of privacy, you know, there's some things you don't always want to share, like conversation you have with a doctor.

(Richard) They had every reason to expect their privacy to be respected, so there were some serious issues at the heart of all this.

(narrator) By January, 2006, Scotland Yard confirmed the royals' suspicions.

Tabloid reporters were listening in to private voicemails left by members of the royal family to their personal aides.

(Bidisha) When you think of phone tapping, you think of Mission Impossible, satellites, wires, all sorts of secret bugging devices, lots of subterfuge.

In actual fact, these royal reporters had found out the pin numbers of the voicemail.

(narrator) The police quickly identified their main suspects: News of the World royal journalist, Clive Goodman, and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.

(Emily) It was determined that this particular story about the portable editing suite had been got from Mulcaire listening to the voicemail of Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, who was one of William's top aids.

(narrator) The police couldn't yet prove that Goodman and Mulcaire were responsible for the hack, so they asked the royal aids to use their phones as normal while they monitored them for any suspicious behavior.

(Emily) I don't think the palace wanted the investigation to happen.

Who knows what could have been uncovered, and it's a massive invasion of royal privacy.

(narrator) In April 2006, The Sun, which like News of the World was owned by News Corp, broke a rather salacious story.

(Bidisha) The first big scandalous story to leak in the tabloids was about Prince Harry visiting a strip club and loving it.

(narrator) But it wasn't the strip club story that broke the hacking scandal wide open.

It was the follow-up story in News of the World by Clive Goodman.

(Richard) It related how Prince William had left a message for Harry in which he, William, had pretended to be Harry's then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, reprimanding him for visiting a lap dancing club.

All very jolly and joshy and all the rest of it, and very amusing in its way.

(upbeat music) But the fact that the News of the World quoted his actual words and his message really did set alarm bells ringing.

(narrator) The police had all the evidence they needed, and in August 2006, both Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested and charged with intercepting private phone messages involving the royal family.

But this was only the very start of the scandal.

(protestors) Creeper Mobile get out!

We know what you're all about!

(narrator) Still to come, we discover the secret behind Louis XIV's spectacular set piece at his palace of Versailles.

(Ed) He managed to smuggle Venetian mirror makers -out of Venice.

-We find out why George III kept his five daughters imprisoned at Windsor Castle.

(Kate) They weren't allowed to go out into London society, they weren't allowed to meet any men, but the daughters found men anyway.

(narrator) And we hear how even the most secure of palaces couldn't protect the princes and their privacy.

(Edwina) We're talking about dozens of journalists being involved one way or another.

(narrator) As well as being spectacular buildings, Britain's royal palaces have stood proudly over hundreds of years of British history.

(Tony) The intrigues, the plots, the conspiracies.

Will we ever know the secrets contained within those royal palaces?

(narrator) One palace has its fair share of secrets, but it is not in Britain.

(classical music) Of the many hundreds of rooms in the Palace of Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors is without doubt the jewel in the crown.

It is excessively big and excessively luxurious, just as its creator, King Louis XIV, desired it to be.

(Jonathan) The Hall of Mirrors has got to be one of the most famous rooms in the whole of Europe, and it deserves that accolade.

What you're looking at is this extraordinary perspective of mirrors where the light from the gardens is bouncing off.

But then you look up to a series of ceiling paintings 240 feet long.

(Anna) Anybody who came to Versailles who the king wanted to impress would be hosted in the Hall of Mirrors.

(narrator) King Louis ordered an outside terrace to be demolished and gave his architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, and interior decorator, Charles Le Brun, orders to produce something spectacular.

Once built, Le Brun created 30 paintings to adorn the vaulted ceiling, presenting King Louis in all his glory.

Le Brun had hoped to install another sort of series of paintings of Louis along the walls.

Mansart, jealous that Le Brun had, if you like, won the king's affections, instead installed a set of mirrored arches to ensure that he couldn't install those portraits.

(narrator) Architect Mansart didn't hold back.

He put in 17 arches on one side of the hall filled with 357 mirrors in total.

But the mirrors have their own secret history, one that once gave this place the name, "the Bloody Hall of Mirrors."

(Jonathan) If you wanted a mirror in 17th century Europe, you might go to Murano, the famous glassmaking center, and an island off Venice.

Problem was, if you want large mirrors to totally surround a room, you couldn't buy them.

Murano off Venice is only making tiny ones, so where do you go?

Well, you make them yourself.

(narrator) But that was easier said than done.

(Anna) The Venetians went to great lengths to protect the method of mirror making, it was so important to their economy, so laws were passed and attempts were made for their method not to be made public.

(narrator) So protected was this trade that artists' and glassworkers' lives were threatened if they dared take their skills abroad.

So in the 1660s, determined to break the Venetian monopoly, Louis' finance minister came up with a cunning plan.

(Ed) He managed to smuggle a handful of Venetian mirror makers out of Venice into France and install them in a factory.

The secret got out, and the closed guild of Venetian mirror makers back in Venice sent an assassin to get rid of those mirror makers.

(narrator) It's believed the assassins were successful.

Two glassmakers suddenly turned up dead, but the secret was out.

Now the French knew how to produce Venetian style mirrors.

When people walked in there, they had never seen anything like it, and it's because the French made mirrors suddenly on this scale that they became fashionable across Europe.

Suddenly everyone wanted one.

(orchestral music) (narrator) Every monarch prioritizes different aspects of royal life.

While King Louis XIV obsessed over his spectacular Versailles, British monarch, George III, obsessed over more familial matters.

He adapted the majestic Windsor Castle to house his family.

But it wasn't to be a happy place for all.

(fanfare music) (Kate) The seven sons and six daughters of George III had, by 1800, produced between them 56 illegitimate children and one legitimate child.

The 56 illegitimate children were mainly the sons and daughters of the sons.

The sons lived the high life.

Mistresses, money, carriages, fun.

They are the peak of London society.

The daughters, it's completely the opposite.

Royal princesses were normally expected to marry into foreign royal families very quickly.

You would think that he might want to marry off his daughters to create at least some legitimate heirs.

The eldest princess, Charlotte, she marries into the German royal family, and you would expect Augusta, number two, to be next.

But no.

Instead the king and queen keep them prisoner in Windsor Castle.

Augusta, Sophia, Elizabeth, Mary, Amelia who want children, who want husbands, who want families like women at the time did.

He said, "I am happy in their company."

Well, that's all right for him, isn't it?

He was happy.

What about them?

The princesses knew that society laughed at them.

They were called by even their niece, Princess Charlotte, "a parcel of old maids."

That's how they were seen.

Princess Sophia says to her brother, "You might as well put us into a sack and throw us into the Thames."

They weren't allowed to go out into London society.

They weren't allowed to meet any men.

But the daughters found men anyway.

Servants, equerries.

I mean, it was slim pickings in Windsor.

But there is a happy ending.

When the king becomes mentally incapacitated, their eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, becomes the Prince Regent, and he allows them into society.

They're in their late 30s, most of them can't start families, but they are all so delighted to have their own house, to have their own husband, to have freedom.

Being a princess is not all it's cracked up to be.

(narrator) The repressive life inflicted upon the princesses in George III's Windsor Castle is a world away from that enjoyed by its current occupant.

(Lisa) The convenience and fresh air of Windsor have always been appreciated by the royal family, because although it's relatively close to London, it feels like being in the countryside.

(narrator) For Queen Elizabeth II, it is a place in which to retreat and feel at home.

It is well-known that two of Her Majesty's favorite interests are her corgis and breeding race horses.

But what is less well-known is the hobby she inherited from her father.

(Jacky) Amazingly, behind the scenes, for many, many decades, she has been an incredibly keen stamp collector.

(narrator) In fact, she owns one of the most valuable stamp collections in the world.

(Jacky) The reason it's so valuable is that it holds very rare historic stamps connected both to the history of the United Kingdom and also the British Commonwealth.

(Janina) The Queen's stamp collection is worth 100 million pounds.

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

(narrator) The Queen's stamps are stored in hundreds of albums and boxes in St. James's Palace.

(Janina) She loves to show them to visiting dignitaries.

I think it must be quite a strange sensation when you're meeting the Queen of England and she goes, "Do you want to see my stamps?"

(narrator) The collection was originally started by Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, in 1864.

(Janina) It wasn't until it got to King George V that it really took off.

(narrator) Although the stamps in the collection come from all over the world, our monarch's face adorns many of them.

The image of the Queen that we're most familiar with today is the side profile portrait that appears on our first and second class stamps.

The Queen has done something canny with her image.

She hasn't aged over time on her stamps, because the profile face you see still on the stamps today is that of a 40-year-old Queen Elizabeth II.

It's obviously an image that she loves, because it hasn't been updated in the 50-odd years since, and it actually was taken from a plaster sculpture made by Arnold Machin.

It must be now the most duplicated image possibly anywhere in the world.

There are more than 200 billion copies that have been made.

(narrator) Aside from the endless self portraits, the collection is a poignant reminder to the Queen of a shared royal passion.

(Janina) I can see why the royal stamp collection means so much to Queen Elizabeth II, because she is continuing a family tradition.

She is adding to it.

(orchestral music) (narrator) Britain's palaces keep the royal family's private lives shielded from public view.

But sometimes secrets creep out.

In 2006, the royal residencies of Kensington Palace and Clarence House couldn't protect Prince William and Harry from the prying tabloid newspapers.

For six months, the police had tracked News of the World journalist Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire as they hacked into the voicemails of the royal household.

On the morning of the 8th of August 2006, the police made their move.

The police actually raided News of the World.

What they found was almost a comical scene, because the journalists were just running around like their trousers were on fire.

(narrator) But it wasn't the News of the World raid that busted the phone hacking scandal wide open.

At the same time, the police also raided Glenn Mulcaire's home.

By now, the issue went far beyond the princes and their royal aids.

It turned out that phone hacking of celebrities, politicians, policemen, soldiers, victims of crime was going on on an industrial scale.

(narrator) On November the 29th, 2006, Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire pleaded guilty to conspiracy to intercepting communications without lawful authority.

The royal family's suspicions that somehow their private lives were being tapped into were well-founded.

Goodman was sentenced to four months, Mulcaire to six months.

In the trial, Mulcaire admitted hacking the messages of five other well-known personalities, including Gordon Taylor, Chief Executive of the Professional Footballers Association.

Six months after the trial, Taylor sued News of the World.

In the investigation, his lawyers revealed Mulcaire and Goodman weren't working alone.

Yet more to be concerned about for the young royals.

We're talking about dozens of journalists being involved one way or another.

Some doing the accessing, some doing the buying of the information, and many of them writing their stories.

(narrator) By July 2009, more than one million pounds had been paid out by News of the World to settle further voicemail hacking claims by celebrities and politicians.

News of the World made an official apology in April 2011, and three months later, it published its final edition.

But it became clear the scandal reached far wider than News of the World.

(Edwina) I was hacked by The Mirror.

Other people were hacked by other newspapers.

We're talking about thousands and thousands of victims.

(bright music) (Emily) Fast-forward to 2013, and a whole host of others from the news international titles were in court at the Old Bailey.

William's phone had been hacked, Harry's phone had been hacked, Kate Middleton's phone had been hacked.

We now know that William used to call Kate "babykins" because of the evidence that was presented in the Old Bailey.

We know that Harry rang Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, his private secretary, saying, "I've got to write this essay on the siege of Iran.

I think I've got the information, but I don't really know, and please can you help?"

I mean, it's a bit embarrassing.

The only reason that Charles and the Queen hadn't been hacked was because they don't have mobile phones.

And that was the only reason.

(narrator) So it turns out that old-fashioned palace walls can protect you if you avoid modern communication.

(phone beeping) Still to come on Secrets of the Royal Palaces, we find out how Henry VIII turned the Tower of London into the most feared palace of them all.

Henry decides to chop off the head of both Catherine and Lady Rochford.

(narrator) And we reveal the secret 21 million pound machine devised to power the fountains at the Palace of Versailles.

(Tony) This engineering marvel of the time took four years to construct.

(narrator) Throughout history, the royals have spent vast sums on their palaces, keen to make them more spectacular than the rest.

(Anna) Splendor, gardens beautifully laid out, literally everything for the senses, for the eye to see.

(narrator) But there is one palace whose magnificence stands above all others.

There is no royal palace in Europe that comes anywhere close to Versailles.

(narrator) King Louis XIV's pleasure palace, 11 miles west of Paris, was the epitome of opulence.

In the gardens, hundreds of water jets and fountains dazzled visitors and were the king's pride and joy.

But right from the start, Versailles was flawed.

(Jonathan) Louis XIV's problem is that he had a palace in a site which was far from a river.

It was about seven miles away from the River Seine.

(narrator) The fountains had all but drained the nearby canals.

A solution was needed.

(Jonathan) Many engineers crashed and burned with ideas of how to service these fountains and create spectacular 40-foot-high jets of water in the air that the king wanted.

(narrator) Then one man cracked it with his secret solution.

(Jonathan) His name was Arnold de Ville, and he had been pumping out water from coal mines in what's modern day Belgium.

(Ed) The idea was that 14 water pumps would send water up to the top of the hill where it would collect at the summit in a reservoir, and from the reservoir, the water would then travel via aqueduct to Versailles.

(narrator) What sold the idea to the king was not just the ambition and scale of de Ville's design, but that this vast pumping machine would be hidden five miles away on the other side of a hill.

This engineering marvel of the time took four years to construct, involving about 1,800 people.

(narrator) And costing over 21 million pounds to build, the machine, named after the nearby Marly Chteau, was unveiled in 1684.

(Jonathan) The king ultimately was delighted.

This was a technological miracle.

(Anna) This was a very lavish, extensive project, which meant 60 workmen at a time were kept on the books to keep this pump working.

(narrator) And therein lies another secret.

The Marly Machine was far from perfect.

(Tony) Even though it was designed to pump out a million gallons a day, it only managed about 800,000, but much of that went to the Marly residence as opposed to Versailles, so it was under-serving Versailles from the word go.

(narrator) Water had to be rationed at Versailles for the next 130 years until the Marly Machine was replaced with a steam-powered pump.

(water splashing) Royal palaces are places of great beauty and wealth, but they have also borne witness to ruthless punishment.

(upbeat music) In Henry VIII's reign, the Tower of London was feared by all his courtiers.

(Kate) Lady Rochford was the person who shows you that being in Henry VIII's court was the most dangerous place you could be in all England.

(narrator) As lady-in-waiting to Henry's fifth wife, Catherine Howard, Lady Rochford enjoyed a comfortable life at court.

Until Queen Catherine is accused of sleeping with her friend.

She's caught up in a scandal and immediately what she does, desperate to save herself, is say, "But it was Lady Rochford, she persuaded me!

She tried to push me into it.

She tempted me, she tempted me!"

And, as a consequence of this, Henry decides to chop off the head of both Catherine and Lady Rochford.

Lady Rochford, by this point, has basically gone insane.

You're not supposed to execute people who are insane.

Henry VIII actually changes the law so you can execute people who are insane just because he wants to take revenge on Lady Rochford, who he feels has enabled and allowed Catherine Howard to get involved in this cheating.

Henry VIII is a two-for-one kind of guy.

First he's going to execute Catherine Howard, then Lady Rochford, the lady-in-waiting.

So Lady Rochford has to watch her mistress being executed, and she goes into a frenzy!

She is hysterical because she sees Catherine's blood soaked remains being wrapped in a blanket.

And then, even worse, she has to lie down on a block, which is already slippery with her mistress's blood.

But Henry doesn't care.

For Henry, Lady Rochford is just another disposable woman.

(narrator) Next time on Secrets of the Royal Palaces, we discover how the purchase of Sandringham House saved the royal family's reputation.

(Lisa) Bertie, as he was known, Dirty Bertie or, indeed, Edward the Caresser really ought to have a respectable home.

(narrator) We reveal the surprising inspiration behind Kensington Palace's controversial Diana statue.

(Daisy) She's wearing that exact outfit, the same belt, the same shirt, the same pencil skirt.

(narrator) And we discover what was hidden inside Prince Charles's crown.

(Emily) I'd love to ask Charles now, does he know that there was a ping pong ball on his head?

(cheerful music) (bright music)