Secrets Of The Royal Palaces S01E02 : Balmoral Castle -British Royal Documentary
9 Video Views·Nov 1, 2022
Britain's royal palaces.
Majestic.
It's absolutely dripping in history.
Luxurious.
The White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace
is like a scene from a Disney film.
And packed to the rafters with incredible secrets.
Secrets that the royal family would much prefer
not to be made public.
From royal courtships to royal births
to royal marriages and scandals,
the palaces have played host to all of that.
This series goes behind palace walls.
The royal palaces represent the monarchy
and have incredible history.
We learn how these iconic creations were built.
16th century kings built with brick in a way
that we wouldn't recognise today.
This is George IV leaving his mark on the centre of London.
Uncover the spectacular palace art housed within.
The royal collection is vast, and I mean vast.
It has more than a million objects spread
across all of the royal palaces.
Just imagine what has been collected over centuries.
This collection is unlike any other collection in the world.
Discover their gruesome stories.
It's an amazing insight into the royal's history
but also our common history.
Frankly, we've got to cut the head off a king.
It's got to be done in a palace.
And relive the recent events that shaped the modern royal family.
The whole case was an absolute fiasco
and a huge embarrassment.
The Queen was particularly aggrieved
that Harry had done it in the way that he had.
This is The Secrets of the Royal Palaces.
This time, a conversation between the Queen and Dianus Butler
is kept secret, landing him in the Old Bailey.
I just felt as if I'd betrayed the princess's legacy
when all I'd ever wanted to do was protect her.
We explore the royal's hidden getaway,
the vast estate of Balmoral.
They can walk for four or five hours
and not come across a living soul.
We discover that Henry VIII's great lost palace
was a stadium for violence.
What he does when he restores Whitehall Palace
is he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfighting pit.
And we reveal the secret story
behind one of the most iconic statues in the country.
To their astonishment, they found out
that it was actually one of Queen Victoria's own daughters.
And royal protocol is tested
with President Trump's state visit to Windsor Castle.
There was a lot of nervousness about how Trump would behave.
All eyes were on him.
The royal palaces are stuffed to the brim
with priceless objects and paintings.
Every wall, corner and staircase of the palaces
is lined with sensational pieces of art,
including hundreds of portraits.
Throughout history, portraits have normally been
for the purposes of state or for propaganda.
They are kind of weapons, if you like,
in the kind of paraphernalias in her reign,
often multiple times a year.
She has a room in Buckingham Palace, the Yellow Drawing Room,
that is specifically set up for artists.
And I suspect that she takes the view
that sitting for a portrait painter is an occupational hazard.
Many of these portraits are displayed across the royal palaces
for all to admire.
But sometimes an artist delivers the unexpected.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lucian Freud.
Lucian Freud was one of the most successful,
popular figurative artists of the 20th century.
He was particularly well-known
for his really searingly truthful images of people.
For nudes, which are very uncompromising,
quite gritty, not particularly pretty.
So eyebrows were raised when the Queen agreed to be his subject.
It's quite a brave decision of the Queen.
Freud offered to paint the Queen for free.
After years of secret negotiations, the Queen accepted.
He kept insisting that the Queen would need to come to his studio
and he was asking for at least 72 sittings.
The Queen, of course, is a phenomenally busy woman.
She doesn't normally give more than a handful of sittings
to any one portrait painter.
Eventually they compromised.
Freud would come to the Queen,
painting her in the Royal Collection's paint conservation studio
in St James's Palace, where she would sit for 20 sessions,
far fewer than the original 72 sittings requested.
When he realised he would have much less time,
he just immediately shrunk the size of the canvas.
It's a really small, almost postcard-sized painting of the Queen.
You'd see this cropped version of the Queen's head and shoulders
with just that edge of the crown coming over her head.
She could almost be one of us.
The finished piece, a small headshot,
just 9.5 inches by 6 inches,
caused to stir when the public got its first glimpse in December 2001.
It was definitely a Marmite moment.
People loved it, people who hated it, and nobody was in between.
You had some newspapers saying it was deep and exploratory
and then you had others saying it was an absolute travesty
and how could this thing be let out in public?
He's not exactly a flattering portrait painter.
But there was a secret reason the portrait didn't look quite right.
Freud's painting had gone to plan.
Freud actually slightly mucked it up.
He decided that he wanted to add the diamond diadem on the Queen's head,
but he didn't have room on the canvas,
so what he had to do was actually add a layer of canvas at the top.
It's quite funny that after all those years of planning,
he actually had to slightly bodge the job in the end.
What the Queen thought, but he gave it to her
and I think it's one of the most valuable things in her collection.
The Queen doesn't actually own the priceless art and artefacts
that are given to her.
As sovereign, she holds them in trust for her successors and the nation.
And the same is true of her palaces.
Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, Holyrood House,
they are all owned by the country, the state.
The only two royal residences that the Queen actually owns
are Buckingham Palace, a beautiful Sandringham estate in Norfolk,
and Balmoral in Scotland.
For nearly 170 years, Balmoral has been the royal family's secret retreat
in the Scottish Highlands.
Balmoral is very Scottish.
It's set in the most beautiful countryside
in the Highlands of Scotland.
The royal family's annual summer holiday here
is a time for them to embrace all things Scottish.
So you're quite often going to be woken up with the sounds of bagpipes.
Being a Scot, that's something I would...
I may actually have my paper waking up.
In 1842, Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert,
fell in love with Scotland.
She was infused by the romance of Scotland.
She loved it, and so did Prince Albert.
It reminded him of his native Germany, the great mountains of Bavaria,
which, of course, were dotted with romantic castles.
Victoria and Albert decided to invest in a Scottish castle of their own
and bought one without ever having seen it.
A painting was enough to make them part with £30,000,
around £4 million in today's money,
for Balmoral in the Cairngorms.
Queen Victoria said it was a perfect place
to escape from the sadness of the world.
At that time, wars were raging across Europe.
They'd found the perfect location,
but there was one small issue with the castle itself.
When they got to visit in 1848,
Victoria said, well, yeah, it's lovely, but it's a bit small.
So they moved into the existing castle
and started building a bigger one 100 yards away.
When it was finished, it had 70 rooms, including a huge ballroom.
Its seven-storey tower harks back to medieval defensive tower houses,
while its pepperpot turrets are reminiscent of French chateau.
But Victoria and Albert's fantasy Scottish castle
is not to everyone's taste.
Balmoral is a really ugly building.
I mean, phenomenal.
It is a country house with an overscaled tower.
It looks like a water tower and landscape.
In addition to the castle,
there are 150 other buildings dotted throughout the estate,
including farms, cottages and a distillery.
But hidden away in a remote part of the estate
lies a particularly important building.
This is Glas Old Shiel on the shores of Loch Mic.
Nestled beneath a mountain,
this remote spot is perhaps the most beautiful place on the estate.
And this lodge reveals the untold story
of Balmoral and Victoria and Albert's lost love.
Coming up on Secrets of the Royal Palaces.
The Kensington Palace butler fighting for his life.
I had no backup, no defence. I was heading straight to prison.
And the secrets of the witches of Holyrood.
They find what they say is the devil's mark on her genitals.
And she said, yep, it's true. I was the devil's witch.
Each royal palace is as unique as the monarch who lived there.
George IV's Buckingham Palace was designed as a showpiece
which would dominate London.
While William III's Kensington Palace was built outside of London
as he suffered from asthma and wanted to avoid the pollution.
But none of the palaces are as closely associated
with a particular monarch as Queen Victoria's Balmoral Castle.
Balmoral, the royal Scottish retreat.
It's not just a house, it's a 50,000-acre estate.
That's almost twice the size of the city of Manchester.
Balmoral is hundreds of acres of nothingness with nobody.
They can walk for four or five hours and not come across a living soul.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought the estate
as their ultimate secret love nest.
A place where they could get away from the court and be together.
What they were buying into at Balmoral, it was a way of life.
It was an escape from royal duty and ceremonial and stuffy staterooms
and interfering prime ministers.
This was their pad. It was where they could indulge in their hobbies.
Here, Albert would stalk deer and Victoria would paint.
But all that came to an end in 1861 with Albert's premature death.
Victoria was devastated.
She retreated from the world and found solace at Balmoral.
And here on the shores of Loch Mic,
she built what she called her widow's house, where she could mourn in peace.
It was an additional place where she could retreat into it.
It became hers, her widow's cottage.
And it just shows the depth, I think, of her despair and her need to escape.
And it was at Balmoral that she found a place to do that.
Victoria spent her first night in the lodge in October 1868
and recorded her sorrow and loneliness in her diary,
missing her dearest Albert, with whom she had been so happy at Balmoral.
In recent years, this lodge has been a favourite spot for royal picnics.
And sometimes they open it to non-royals.
One of its outbuildings is a bavi, a resting place for hikers.
So it's the only royal residence where you can drop into sleep for the night for free.
Another hidden building on the estate, about a mile from the main castle,
is particularly special to our current Queen.
Every year she starts her summer holiday with a stay at the seven-bedroom Craigowan Lodge.
So since the house is open to the public for much of June and July,
often the Queen will arrive in Scotland before the big house, Balmoral, is open.
So she stays at Craigowan Lodge.
And I don't know, I don't imagine she's doing the cooking or anything,
but she and the Duke would fare as an ordinary married couple without the grandeur.
I think the Queen sees the grandeur of these amazing houses as sort of part of the job.
But the Queen, like anybody else, can only be in one room at a time,
so one room at a small house is probably rather a nice change.
For a person who can never go on a normal holiday like the rest of us,
Balmoral is incredibly important in the summer
as her retreat and her place to explore the Highlands.
Balmoral has been the royal family's secret escape for generations,
hidden away in the vastness of the Scottish Highlands.
But not all Scottish palaces have such sedate and serene history.
Scotland's James VI, who became James I of England
after the union of the Scottish and English crowns,
used the other Scottish palace, Holyrood House, as a court.
He made himself judge, jury and executioner in the trial of Agnes Sampson.
James VI is convinced that witches are out to get him.
And it all really starts with bad storms.
His wife, Anne, she's coming over from Denmark to marry him,
and he decides that the bad storms on the way
are caused by witches who are trying to kill the future Queen.
So James called for one woman, Agnes Sampson,
to be brought to Holyrood House, and she's questioned.
And in front of the King, she refuses to say she's a witch.
She says she's innocent, so she's taken to the Holyrood cells.
And the four teeth, two go into one cheek and the other two go into the tongue.
It's really torture.
And still, she's not saying anything. She's not giving up.
And then they decide to look for the Devil's Mark.
And what they mean by witch mark is what we'd see as a mould, even a freckle.
I mean, that desperate sometimes even a freckle will do.
So finally, they find what they say is the Devil's Mark on her genitals,
on her privates, they put it.
So that is really the moment when Agnes crumbles.
She says, yep, it's true. I was the Devil's witch.
So Agnes, poor woman, is burnt at the stake,
and James, he is convinced that witchcraft exists.
He writes a witch-hunting guide, demonology,
a book that you can use for hunting down witches,
and we think about 4,000 people are burnt and killed as witches in Scotland.
And all of this hysteria, all these deaths,
they all began with James's trial of Agnes Sampson at Holyrood House.
Throughout history, the royal palaces have played the part of the ultimate backdrop
to some of the greatest affairs of state and political intrigue the country has ever seen.
They've seen death, they've seen murder, they've seen marriage.
Look at them. It's called a microphone.
There's absolutely nothing that hasn't happened in these palaces.
But what really gets the public interested are the secrets behind the drama.
June 1998, Kensington Palace.
Ten months after Princess Diana's death,
her former butler, Paul Burrell, is spotted by the police.
A duty police officer at Kensington Palace
noticed Paul Burrell pulling up about 3.30 in the morning,
loading up his car with a couple of evening dresses and a wooden box.
Three years later, police launch an investigation
into the suspected sale of Princess Diana's personal possessions in America.
It led police to Burrell's Cheshire home,
where he was then living with his wife and two sons,
and a dawn raid.
When the police came to my family home that day,
the bottom of my wall fell out.
I felt completely helpless and hopeless.
Police spent 12 hours searching his house
and found hundreds of Diana's possessions.
It didn't take them very long to find about 2,000 different items.
One officer went up into the loft and said,
it's wall-to-wall royal dresses and stuff up here.
The police's view was that this man was helping himself
and stealing Diana's possessions.
Burrell had worked for the Queen for ten years.
He was then asked by Diana...
I was invited into her world.
I became part of her world
and became closer and closer as the years went by.
Diana felt that she could trust him, she confided in him,
and, as he later revealed,
she did ask him to provide some very intimate services,
including smuggling boyfriends into Kensington Palace late at night.
It all came to a boiling point
when the couple decided to lead separate lives and separate.
Charles said to Diana,
you can have anything you want, what do you want?
Do you want the furniture? Do you want the silver?
You name it, make a list.
So she made a list.
And on top of that list, she put my name.
And when Charles saw it, he said,
you can't have Paul.
Paul came from my mama and I need him for the future.
But Charles, Princess Diana said,
you said I could have anything I wanted
and I'm taking Paul with me to London.
She believed that Paul Burrell was one of the few people in the world
that she could trust implicitly to do what she wanted
and to be her man, if you will.
After Princess Diana's tragic death in 1997,
Burrell was heavily involved
in sorting her belongings at Kensington Palace.
It was an arduous task, but I found it quite cathartic, really,
to be in her world, to still be in control,
to still be taking care of the things that she loved most.
But Paul felt members of Diana's family
were deliberately destroying her legacy,
getting rid of material they didn't want the public to discover.
He could see her mother and sister tearing up letters and removing things
and he felt that there were things in that palace
which should be preserved for William and Harry.
A Mrs Shankid would sit on the settee in the princess's sitting room
and constantly shred the princess's correspondence.
She really did destroy part of the princess's world.
Burrell started secretly protecting her possessions
and removing them from Kensington Palace.
And it was these items the police found in his home three years later.
The 43-year-old former royal servant
left a London police station this evening
to return to his home in Chester,
having been formally charged with stealing 342 items of personal property.
The police believed they had enough evidence to take Burrell to court
with the apparent approval of Prince Charles.
The police told the Prince of Wales
they had photographic evidence of me wearing Diana's clothes.
Of course, none of it was true.
None of it was true. It never happened.
The stage was set for a trial.
Paul Burrell has denied three charges of theft.
And intimate details about the royal family could be exposed.
It's impossible for anybody to have witnessed what happened.
So because of that, I had no backup, no defence, none whatsoever.
I was heading straight to prison.
Coming up, the Queen reveals a secret conversation
that will change the outcome of the Burrell case.
Never before had a monarch intervened in a criminal court case.
And Henry VIII sees a palace as the perfect backdrop for extreme sports.
When he restores Whitehall Palace,
he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfighting pit.
Behind the pomp and glamour of the British royal palaces
is a hidden army of staff working night and day
to keep the engine of the monarchy running.
Very rarely do any of these backroom staff make it into the headlines.
But in October 2002, all that changed
with the trial of Princess Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell.
Burrell was accused of stealing possessions worth millions
The police wanted my head on a spike.
They wanted me in prison,
because then I would never, ever be believed again.
In his defence statement, Burrell mentioned a conversation
he had had with the Queen after Diana's death.
We were standing in her sitting room, just the two of us,
and we had a very open, frank discussion.
I told her everything that had happened,
and I said, I've taken it upon myself
to keep things the Princess had given to me for safekeeping,
and I've protected them.
She understood that.
But due to an age-old palace protocol,
Burrell was duty-bound to keep the details of this conversation secret.
Paul Burrell couldn't say to his lawyers,
look, I told the Queen I'd taken all of this.
He was just prevented from doing so.
Many people will not be aware of the protocol
that when you have a private audience with the Sovereign,
you're not supposed to repeat what has passed between you.
It is entirely confidential,
and the confidence belongs to the Sovereign.
So it is up to the Sovereign
whether she reveals what you spoke about or doesn't.
I'm not going to tell them how close I was to Her Majesty.
I'm not going to tell them.
That's going to be my privilege.
But I would have to pay the cost,
and the price I would pay would be prison.
After 11 days of the trial,
Burrell was thrown a lifeline from an unexpected source.
The Queen had only realised Paul Burrell was on trial
when she drove past the Old Bailey
on her way to a church service for the Barley Bubbly
and noticed all the crowds outside.
And the Queen then, at that point, her memory is jogged
and she realises that she has the vital piece of information
that Burrell had in fact told her that he was doing that,
that he was taking things for safekeeping.
And the Queen, in reply, said,
Oh, hang on, Paul told me he was looking after these things for safekeeping.
We'd better let them know.
The Queen's recollection undermined the prosecution.
She knew Burrell was taking Diana's possessions
out of Kensington Palace.
This wasn't a palace theft, and the trial collapsed.
Essentially, it was clear evidence
that there was no intention to permanently deprive
the royal princes of their mother's goods,
merely that he'd taken them into custody
so that they could have them when they grew to be 18.
So there was no theft.
I was going to make a statement on behalf of Paul Burrell.
I couldn't believe that I was free to walk from the Old Bailey
instead of into a prison cell.
Burrell was jubilant,
claiming that the Queen had come through for him.
Never before had a monarch intervened in a criminal court case.
And she'd saved me.
She saved me from what I thought was my fate.
But I think she saved me because she knew me.
Because I was her boy for 11 years.
And she saw me grow, and saw me marry and have two children.
And I think she was...
I think she cared.
I do. I think she cared.
She cared about me and what would happen to my family.
One of the most high-profile court cases was now over.
The Kensington Palace Bar was free.
Henry VIII's great lost royal residence, Whitehall Palace,
stood in the heart of the British establishment
before it was destroyed by fire in 1698.
This palace was built for excitement.
It was a pleasure palace, thanks largely to the cockpit at court.
Henry VIII's Whitehall Palace.
It wasn't what we'd imagine to be a palace.
There were four tennis courts and a tilt yard for doing jousting.
Henry VIII was a great sportsman.
And when he was outside London, in Hampton Court or Windsor,
he went out hunting.
And when he was in London, the sport he did was watching animals.
It had really been wearing down in its popularity.
Henry comes to the throne and cocks are back.
And what he does when he restores Whitehall Palace
is he makes sure it has to have its own special cockfighting pit,
the large building surrounded by seating,
so that when those two cocks go and fight it out,
everyone can watch them and cheer them on.
And Tudors loved it.
It was not a time for happy lives for animals.
You know what stands on the place of Henry VIII's cockfighting pit?
That is now 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's residence,
where those big, puffed-up cocks fight it out
with that power and glory behind closed doors.
Whereas Henry VIII's Whitehall Palace
was built in the centre of London in the British establishment,
Balmoral was built as far away from it as possible.
For Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, it was their secret getaway,
a break from the hustle and bustle of court politics.
Here they embraced the local culture
and incorporated it into their castle.
Balmoral is quintessentially Scottish
and quite deliberately it was seen very much as an opportunity
to make the British monarch seen as more Scottish
rather than simply an English monarch.
Victoria and Albert immersed themselves in the Highland life,
especially when it came to their decor.
Balmoral is entirely clad in tartan.
That was always the intention.
The carpets were tartan, the seat covers were tartan,
the curtains were tartan. No doubt they wore tartan.
In the servants' quarters, on the floor was tartan linoleum.
And if you looked at the walls, loads of stags, heads and antlers
and deerskins on the floor as you come in through the main entrance.
It was a theme park of Scottishness.
Victoria and Albert's obsession with tartan
was actually a secret political ploy
to win back the support of the Scots.
In the middle of the 18th century,
Victoria's great-great-grandfather, George II,
had invoked the Massacre of Glencoe.
Tartan was banned.
Any affiliation with Scots or Stuarts against the English kingship
was treasonous.
So for Victoria to start to rebind the links with the people of Scotland
went down really well.
A century and a half later, have our modern royals torn out the tartan?
Few had seen inside this private home
until 2013, when New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key broke protocol
and shared a photo of the Queen's private living room.
And what you see there is a glimpse of an interior
which is undoubtedly familiar to Victoria and Albert.
Their own portraits, Victoria and Albert,
still either side of the fireplace that they commissioned and saw built.
There are still tartan carpets wall to wall there.
Some of their furniture still survives in situ.
While in Balmoral, you can walk for miles
without bumping into another living soul.
In London's Kensington Palace,
you can't turn a corner without bumping into a royal.
In fact, it houses more royals than any other residence,
including the future king and queen.
And watching over this palace
is Britain's second-longest reigning monarch, Queen Victoria.
This marble monarch greets over half a million palace visitors every year.
But the creation of this statue is one of the palace's greatest secrets.
Completed in 1893 to commemorate her golden jubilee a few years earlier,
the young, slender figure is not the Victoria we think of today.
The image most of us have of Queen Victoria is when she was old,
when she was a widow, she was dressed in black
and she looked pretty miserable.
But she was a very beautiful young woman.
Commissioning this statue,
the powers that be decided on an open competition,
allowing anyone to enter a design.
Various people sent in sketches.
One came in anonymously,
and it was decided by the commission unanimously
that that was the sculpture they were going to go for.
Little did they know this was no ordinary submission.
To everyone's surprise, the winner was actually a female sculptor,
which in itself was pretty amazing.
But then, to their astonishment,
they found out that it was actually
one of Queen Victoria's own daughters, Princess Louise.
The sixth child of Victoria and Albert, Princess Louise,
was something of a rebel princess.
Princess Louise was probably the least conventional
of Victoria's children.
She rode bicycles, she smoked cigarettes, she had numerous affairs.
She believed strongly in women's rights
and to go into what at this point was a male-dominated world
of art and sculpture.
Unsurprisingly, there were lots of subjects
Louise and her mother did not see eye to eye on,
including her sculpting.
Victoria very much disapproved of her daughter's interest in sculpture.
She thought it was a masculine art form
and really unseemly for a princess.
But the rebellious princess stuck to her guns.
After much pushing and cajoling, she persuaded her mother
to let her go to the National Art Training School,
now the Royal College of Art.
And that made her the very first princess
ever to go to a public education institution.
At first, Louise had not wanted to enter the competition
for the commission, fearing it would be inappropriate.
But now that she had won it, the stakes were even higher.
Not only did she have to satisfy the organisers and the general public,
she also had to please her disapproving mother, the Queen.
Everyone would have had an opinion about the sculpture
and lots of people would have been waiting for Louise to fail,
particularly feeling that a woman sculptor wasn't appropriate
and a member of the royal family.
Coming up, what would the Queen Victoria make of her daughter's artwork?
You get a sense of the pressure coming from all directions.
And President Trump refuses to follow the rulebook
while visiting Buckingham Palace.
Trump being Trump lands his chopper
in the middle of the Buckingham Palace lawns.
Kensington Palace houses more royals than any other residence.
You've got Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank there.
Of course, you've got the Cambridges, the Department 1A and the Gloucesters.
I mean, the royals are very much packed into Kensington Palace.
And they're all watched over by the young Queen Victoria
thanks to a controversial statue designed by her daughter, Princess Louise.
The rebellious sixth child of Queen Victoria
had secretly entered and then won a competition
to create a sculpture of her mother at Kensington Palace.
Now she had to deliver.
Louise herself lived in Kensington Palace
and that's where she'd set up her studio.
It, of course, was the palace in which Queen Victoria had been born,
so you get a sense of the pressure coming from all directions.
The statue had been commissioned to mark Victoria's golden jubilee.
Louise had to go through source material
in order to reconstruct what Queen Victoria would have looked like at her coronation.
This was a task of epic proportion.
Louise had studio assistants to help her,
but she made the maquettes, the small-scale mock-ups.
This would have gone to a professional carver
who then would have translated it into that wonderful Carrara marble.
Although the statue had been commissioned for the 1887 jubilee,
it was not completed until 1893, on the anniversary of her coronation.
Victoria herself unveiled the statue, but would she like it?
She said,
It gives me great pleasure to witness the unveiling of this fine statue,
so admirably designed and executed by my daughter.
The rebel princess had pulled it off.
The Queen loved the statue.
Princess Louise carved several other public statues,
but her best-known is the one she made to stand here,
guarding her mother's childhood home.
In her 65-year reign, Queen Elizabeth has hosted 113 state visits.
A heady mix of kings, queens, prime ministers and presidents
have passed through the palace's gilded gates,
but only one has ever gone over them.
June 2019, the ballroom, Buckingham Palace.
Georgian tableware is laid for a very special state banquet.
A state visit is very much about putting on the best of British.
It's a chance for us to show off and say,
this is what we're all about,
and the Queen personally will inspect the table.
So there's no pressure for the butlers.
Feeling the heat on this official visit will be American President Donald Trump.
Americans love the royal family.
Even if you're the President of the United States,
it's a big deal to come and meet the Queen.
You know, you couldn't get two more opposite people
in one room together than President Trump and Queen Elizabeth.
The palace was on high alert for any potential banana skins.
Which wasn't surprising,
considering what had happened the first time
President Trump met the Queen at Windsor Castle.
If you look back at the G20 2018 visit,
you know, he did have that huge faux pas.
Trump walks in front of her, everybody's cringing.
This Queen is dwarfed by his gargantuan size
and suddenly appears from behind him.
It's an absolute shocker.
And his lack of etiquette isn't the only baggage Trump brings with him.
This room is full of mirrors.
If you look at the two state visits,
he obviously took a car to Buckingham Palace
and the streets were lined with people cheering him on.
And completely opposite, when Trump arrived,
the streets were lined mostly with people protesting his visit.
To avoid the anti-Trump protesters,
the President decided on an entrance nobody else had done before.
He was the very first President
to fly in on a helicopter for a state visit.
Trump being Trump, flies over the protesters,
lands in the middle of the Buckingham Palace lawns.
All the journalists, including myself, were stationed on the lawn,
complete silence, waiting to see this momentous moment.
He emerges from the helicopter.
He thought he was going to meet the Queen,
but it was Charles and Camilla who were the first to meet him.
Only then did Trump get to join Her Majesty
and inspect the guard from a safe distance.
I think he probably surprised many people
in that he was quite quiet and subdued.
It's almost like you're visiting your granny.
And you remember when you used to go and visit your granny,
you'd wear your best clothes, you would mind your P's and Q's,
you wouldn't make any mistakes.
President Trump knew he needed to be on the very best behaviour.
You have to remember this Queen has been through everything.
She's seen it all. This is just another, another president.
Next time, at Windsor Castle,
the world's oldest working kitchen rises from the ashes.
The archaeologists revealed something quite extraordinary,
that this was original to Edward III's building.
We explore the mysterious Balmoral Pyramid.
It is really not what you would expect to see
in the middle of the Scottish Highlands.
And Diana's statue fails to materialise at Kensington Palace.
Is this further evidence of the fractious relationship between the two of them?

