Secrets of the Royal Palaces S04E03 - Scandals

This time, we uncover secret stories of palace scandal, as Diana confesses all to one of her closest member of staff, King Charles tries to move out his scandal-hit brother and we reveal the shocking link between Queen Victoria's favourite lapdog and a palace massacre.

We start with Princess Diana on holiday at Marivent, the Spanish royal family's summer palace on Mallorca. Diana spent four summers here with Charles, Wills and Harry as her marriage began to disintegrate. We hear first-hand from Royal Protection officer Ken Wharfe about an extraordinary pool-side confession that Diana made to him revealing that her marriage was "a sham" and that both parties were in the midst of secret affairs. It was a confession that marked a turning point as the scandalous secrets of their marriage began to seep-out…

Royal affairs are nothing new of course. Prof Kate Williams tells the remarkable story of George III's six unmarried daughters whose illicit affairs with servants and numerous illegitimate children at Frogmore House were kept hushed up by any means necessary. When one writer drafted an explosive tell-all memoir, and then attempted to blackmail the Princesses, he found his manuscript mysteriously stolen.

Of course, scandals aren't restricted to affairs of the heart. We investigate the murky story of how King Charles, when Prince of Wales, ended up with four priceless masterpieces from Picasso, Monet and Salvador Dali proudly displayed on his walls, before discovering his new pictures were all fakes. How did it happen?
At Windsor Castle, the most formidable of all royal residences, we discover that appearances can be deceptive, as we expose two scandalous security failures, the most serious leaving an armed assailant loose on palace grounds on a mission to kill the monarch.

We tell the surprising story of Queen Victoria's beloved little Pekingese Looty, one of the first Chinese lap dogs ever seen in this country and memorialised in a very cute oil painting. But the dog's appearance belied a shocking story. Looty, as the name implies, had been looted by the British after they had razed China's summer palace to the ground, destroying priceless works of art and massacring the staff in what would now be called a war crime.

Finally we tell the story of one of the most secret, desirable and scandal-hit of all the royal residences: The Royal Lodge. Once a symbol of the excess of George IV, and bulldozed and rebuilit by his son, in recent years it has been a home to Prince Andrew. We explore how his older brother King Charles has attempted to get the place renovated while moving out his scandal-hit brother, and why he has (so far) failed.