Ugly Secrets Inside the Home of a Princess - Dirty - Meghan Markle -British Documentary
2 Video Views·Nov 1, 2022
It is just a stone's throw away from the Queen's residence at Windsor Castle.
After a $4 million upgrade, it's decorated for a duchess.
Velvet sofas, old mirrors, light-coloured cushions.
There is a granny annex for the glamorous Granny Doria.
Meghan's keen to have a space for yoga.
Life as a princess may be privileged.
The butlers, the chauffeurs.
The cleaners, the cooks.
It's all very Downtonesque.
But Meghan's every move is in the public eye.
Probably the most difficult part of marrying into the Royal Family
would be the fact that there's no privacy.
I think I'd find it quite difficult having people around you the whole time.
So she needs her palace to be a private sanctuary.
It's countryside, it's private, secluded.
It has a wall built around the property.
They can literally throw open their doors and windows,
be totally free, totally private.
And now baby makes three.
It's going to be a much smaller, intimate household
in which they want to bring up their baby.
We know that they're going for a grey in the nurse,
which I think is actually very chic.
It's going to be the chicest baby there is.
Well, I should hope so.
How will Meghan redefine what it means to live like a royal?
They want the craziness of being a member of the Royal Family
to end when they go inside their homes.
It's a very modern princess thing to do, I think.
Modern princess, I like that.
Marrying a royal has given Meghan Markle
access to one of the world's most famous real estate portfolios.
As the current reigning monarch,
the Queen's actually one of the biggest property tycoons in the country.
The Queen has a property empire worth billions.
Everything from cottages, castles, palaces, all up and down the country.
Windsor.
Sandringham.
Holyrood House.
Clarence House.
Anmer Hall.
Buckingham Palace.
Balmoral.
Frogmore Cottage.
Kensington Palace.
There's a very sumptuous palace in the middle of London.
With so many properties,
the Queen has plenty of space to house her family.
After Meghan and Harry said, I do,
she needed to find them a palatial pad.
It's long been tradition in the Royal Family
for newlyweds to receive a home to start their new royal family life.
The Queen is also being very practical.
They need somewhere to live that is secure,
that affords them the life that they would like to live,
that gives them enough private space
while also recognising that they are royal.
She doesn't sit there sort of with a monopoly board.
What is it that you would like? Where would you like to be living?
Then she looks to see what's available.
When we got married, we didn't quite receive a house, did we?
Maybe a toaster.
A small sausage stall for our wedding present.
The Queen's youngest son, Edward, and wife, Sophie,
got lucky with their wedding gift in 1999.
They live in one of the Queen's most splendid houses,
a Victorian Gothic mansion with 57 rooms set in 87 acres.
Bagshot Park is one of the largest properties
that the Queen's given out to her children or grandchildren.
It's so big that just a few years ago,
Edward and Sophie had to hire a programme coordinator
just to look after the various members of staff.
There's the glass coach driving directly past our camp.
When the perfect property isn't available, the Queen goes shopping.
She splashed the cash to buy her daughter her dream home.
Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, who she married,
were both very, very keen horse people,
and when they married,
there were no properties available within the royal portfolio,
and so the Queen found Gatcombe Park for them,
which is absolutely perfect for their equestrian needs.
Gatcombe Park is very much a working farm,
and there are saddles and riding boots and hay.
No-one is standing on ceremony.
The Queen funded her second son, Prince Andrew,
when he and wife, Sarah Ferguson, built their own home.
They designed and built this huge country house
not far from Windsor called Sunning Hill Park.
It seemed to be very brash and modern and very unroyal.
It was of a time, it was of the 80s,
and the 80s were not the most beautiful.
I imagine inside it was filled with helmets of swags,
of shot silk everywhere.
If you look at how Fergie dressed in the 80s,
I imagine it would look like that.
I'm seeing big puffed shoulders, like the curtains reflecting that.
For sure.
It was immediately labelled South York after South Fork,
the Dallas television series.
I thought it looked more like a Tesco supermarket.
But Fergie and Andrew took it on the chin.
They didn't care, they loved living there,
and it's where they began raising their children.
But the house didn't last much longer than the marriage.
It was sold to a Kazakh oligarch
who let it fall into disrepair and then pulled it down.
The Queen gifted Kate and William use of an apartment in Kensington Palace
and Anmer Hall on her Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
William obviously has been going to Sandringham since he was a dot,
so he knows that area very well.
It's relatively private.
Part of William and Kate's decision to go to Norfolk
was because they had this very tight-knit group of friends there.
The Turnip Toffs, these would be very...
People who'd been mates with the Queen and Prince Charles,
you know, multiple generations.
That area of Norfolk in the summer is very happening for posh people.
North Norfolk, the coastline, it's got very beautiful beaches,
big houses where other sort of posh earls
and friends of the royal family live, lots of big estates.
It's certainly a very popular posh British hangout.
With so many homes already gifted, what was left for Meghan and Harry?
The Queen found them Frogmore Cottage,
a des res hidden away on the Windsor Castle estate.
It makes sense to me that Harry and Meghan wanted to move to Windsor.
For obvious reasons, Frogmore is very personal to them
because it's where they held their wedding reception,
it's where they did their engagement photographs.
Harry has spent a lot of time in Windsor when he was at school at Eton.
He loves Windsor.
It's not too far from the city of London,
so they can easily get into town,
but they've got the best of both worlds.
It's countryside, it's private. It's secluded, isn't it?
Frogmore itself has this fantastic history.
Victoria adored it, that's why she wanted Albert to be buried.
All sorts of fascinating people have lived at Frogmore Cottage,
including Abdul Kareem, who was Victoria's favourite Indian servant.
They used to curry together, they used to talk about India together.
They have this incredibly intimate friendship.
One of the nicest things about Frogmore Cottage
is that it is just a stone's throw away
from the Queen's residence at Windsor Castle.
You're not far away from the Long Walk,
and from there it's straight up to Windsor Castle itself.
And I think for the Queen, having one of her favourite grandchildren nearby
is quite a nice little luxury.
I'm sure that would have gone through her mind
when she gave Frogmore Cottage to Harry and Meghan.
Meghan and Harry's new home was under wraps for months,
while a team of builders blitzed it inside and out.
Frogmore Cottage needed huge amounts of renovation.
£3 million?
Yes, £3 million worth of renovation.
It was previously five separate staff apartments
for staff working in Windsor Castle,
and of course needed to be returned back into one home,
and a very different home to what it used to be as well.
There is an annex for the glamorous granny, Doria,
who's going to be flying in.
Heathrow's so close, so it makes sense that there's somewhere for her to stay
when she comes to look after the baby and visit the family.
Harry and Meghan are a modern family.
They want certain spaces that weren't even thought of in previous eras.
Meghan's keen to have a space for yoga, and Harry wants a home gym.
These are things that members of the royal family didn't have in the past.
Meghan has opted for a very large grand staircase in the entrance
with a double set of stairs either side.
You can imagine, gone with the wind.
It's quite an American move, I would say.
I think so. I think the whole place is going to be a mishmash
of very British and some American traditions.
And this grand staircase, you can imagine, you know,
the car waiting outside as she sweeps down the stairs in a ball gown
off to a glamorous...
Meghan's in-laws, Kate and William,
also took on a major renovation at their London home, Kensington Palace.
It had once belonged to the Queen's sister.
When Princess Margaret had apartment 1A in the late 60s, 70s,
it was very luxurious.
It was beautifully decorated.
Very bold blue colours on the walls.
She had a wonderful sink in her bathroom
that was pale pink, an orchid-shaped sink.
I mean, I think I would have loved that more than any of them.
Princess Margaret was the polar opposite to her sister.
Where Elizabeth was always rather frugal and restrained,
Margaret lived in a much more extravagant way.
She had a much greater sense of style than her sister.
Her flat at Kensington Palace was famed for rather wild parties.
But the apartment was neglected after Margaret's death in 2002
and rapidly deteriorated.
When William and Kate took over apartment 1A,
it needed extensive work.
The windows, the roof, pipework, electrics.
There was asbestos, there was really bad wiring,
heating that hadn't been updated.
So it was a massive renovation job because it is quite a big property.
For you and I doing up a home,
we're going to be thinking about the bedroom, bathrooms and the kitchen,
and that's about it.
For William and Kate, there were 22 rooms to think about.
It might be a palace,
but the Cambridges were keen to lead a modern domestic lifestyle.
It was important that the kitchen would be the heart of that home.
So it was the first time, actually,
that apartment 1A had a proper kitchen installed
that a family could use, not just a chef.
It is Kate and William doing the majority of that cooking themselves.
Kate came from a pretty regular family home
where lunch around a kitchen table,
entertaining in that way, was really important.
And I think it's great that she wants to continue that tradition
with her family and her children.
It's a very modern princess thing to do, I think.
Modern princess, I like that.
There was a report that the Queen didn't quite understand
why would they want another kitchen?
Because surely that's where the staff work,
and of course that's the life that she knows.
Although the royals spent $4 million on the renovation of Meghan's home
and around $1.3 million on Kate's,
the Queen likes to be frugal when it comes to her own homes.
The Queen is very aware that many people in the country don't have much money,
only have small houses, lots of people don't even own their own home.
She's very aware of her public image,
and unlike many other royals, before and since,
she really hasn't renovated the palaces very greatly.
They remind her of her happy childhood with her parents.
She has moved into what they are and been happy with what she has.
However, after years of neglect,
the Queen had to give Buckingham Palace a much-needed makeover.
2016 saw the start of a 10-year renovation project.
There's a lot on the dilapidated side.
Bits were, frankly, falling off.
Chunks of masonry from the portico.
One nearly hit Princess Anne a few years ago.
It's incredibly run down in places that we, the public, don't get to see,
and requires a lot of money to bring it up to any kind of livable state.
Much of the palace's 100 miles of electric cable
and 20 miles of heating pipework
will be replaced in the $480 million refurbishment.
Now, much of Buckingham Palace hasn't been touched in 50 or 60 years,
so there's boilers that are leaking,
there's asbestos, there's dodgy wiring,
there's so much that hasn't been replaced.
A major justification for the Buckingham Palace renovation
was to avoid a catastrophic fire
like the one which ravaged Windsor Castle in 1992.
The Queen was devastated by the Windsor Castle fire.
She really sees herself as a keeper of royal history,
so to see it go up in flames as quickly and voraciously as it did
was devastating.
The firemen, they were amazing.
Prince Andrew did a very good job of leading a chain
where they were getting all the artefacts out,
the art and the priceless antiques.
Imagine the devastation.
She is the president inside the castle,
helping to take stuff out of the castle.
She works hard.
The castle needed a five-year, $50 million restoration
to repair the destruction.
When they were doing the renovation,
they did think, now that it's a burnt-out heap,
how can we make this more energy efficient moving forward?
How can we make sure that we restore it to its former glory,
but make sure that the wiring is correct this time round?
So, yes, they were able to use it to correct some old issues
and bring it up to the present day.
As a future queen consort, the Duchess of Cambridge
has to combine royal heritage, contemporary style
and the needs of three young children in her home.
Although Apartment 1A is the family home,
William and Kate do use it for official purposes.
It's a potential palace for them
when they are king and queen of the country,
and Apartment 1A has to adhere to strict royal traditions.
Whilst it's their home,
it also needs to perform those formal functions,
and it's mixing that traditional with the modern vibes.
So getting the interior design right was critical.
Kate called in the professionals.
I knew that Ben Pentreith was helping Kate.
He is very traditional, he likes guilt,
and he puts things around fireplaces.
Posh people are obsessed with fireplaces and mantelpieces,
and then they have these sort of seats
that you can sit on around fireplaces.
Ben Pentreith is perhaps the perfect designer for this space
because he naturally, instinctively mixes
the traditional and the modern.
He uses touches of color that bring a space
into a more contemporary setting, and he...
...received the royal seal of approval
when Kate visited to pick out fabrics.
When they've got a new client,
interior designers will come to us.
They'll probably have an idea in their mind
of the look they're trying to achieve.
We'll help them to pull out those things
that we think they're looking for,
and then they'll usually come back with their clients
who probably want to see larger pieces
of the samples they liked.
I love the fact that Kate was very hands-on
when it came to the interior design of the apartment.
She actually went shopping for the house,
and she took part in the whole process.
It would be very easy to sit back
and have things presented to you,
but it doesn't have your personality.
I think to have something that really means something to you,
you need to have chosen it yourself to put the hard work in.
We eventually got a glimpse of William and Kate's taste
in April 2016.
When they invited the Obamas over
when they were visiting the UK,
we got to see their formal living room.
People were very excited.
All the newspapers were zooming in
on various parts of the official photograph.
My first impression of the Barack and Will picture
was actually that it was quite traditional,
but when you start to break it down and look in more detail,
you can see those modern touches.
It's very gorgeous, and the fashion at the moment
is for elephant's breath and buttermilk and magnolia.
The curtains are a little bit too long, which I love.
It's quite casual and relaxed.
They're obviously a sort of natural fabric,
there's some texture there.
It just is a nod to a slightly more casual.
The loosening of the tie, if you like.
I was lucky enough to go inside apartment 1A.
I had a lot to take in.
I've got George coming down the stairs in his pyjamas
to say hello to Barack and Michelle,
and of course Kate and William.
The place itself is very impressive.
It's very formal, a lot of artwork on the walls.
The juxtaposition of the lewisite table
with the demi-lune behind, gold gilt demi-lune no less,
is just showing very stark contrast
between the old and the new.
We've seen Kate shopping in places like John Lewis
and very sort of, I guess,
normal everyday department stores in the UK,
and you can see touches of that around the home.
I think it's a little bit older
than perhaps what we'd expect for a couple in their 30s.
Kate and William are a relatively young couple,
so I expected their apartment to reflect that a bit more,
but instead we saw something which you sort of expect
in Buckingham Palace, which might have been a room
that had looked the same for sort of 200 years.
I just thought there might have been a more relaxed vibe to it,
and there wasn't, but then on the other hand,
they do need to have a certain level of grandeur in these rooms,
but I think there's a way of doing grandeur
and not making it look quite so sort of 18th century.
Meghan and Harry are known to have more contemporary tastes
and want a cooler vibe for Frogmore Cottage.
Meghan has a more relaxed style than Kate's.
Fewer dead rellies on the walls, perhaps.
More contemporary art.
Harry and Meghan, I think, are creating more of a hotel vibe.
We got a glimpse inside Meghan's home in Toronto,
and she clearly loved white furnishings.
It was all very clean, fairly monochromatic.
It was cosy still, but she loved big white flowers.
Everything was kind of white,
and actually there's a flower seller outside St Mary's Church
on Kensington High Street, and Meghan regularly buys flowers from her,
and she said she always buys white flowers.
Harry and Meghan's first date was at an outpost of Soho House,
Dean Street Townhouse, so they, since the very beginning,
have been big fans of this chain.
Makes sense that they've hung out there.
It's very fashionable, lots of celebrities and members.
And then we know now that Vicky Charles,
who was the group design director for Soho House for 20 years,
has been designing Frogmore Cottage.
And so it's really her vision.
If you go to a Soho House, it's quite shabby chic.
Velvet sofas, old mirrors, sort of multi-coloured cushions, log stoves.
The interiors there are all about atmosphere
and creating somewhere that is really safe and comfortable and elegant,
and I think we're going to see a lot of that translated into Frogmore.
I think there's going to be lots of warm layers and textures
and perhaps some colour as well.
And this modern style even extends to Baby Sussex's nursery.
I'm actually using a vegan organic paint,
which is scented with rosemary and eucalyptus.
We know that they're going for a grey in the nursery,
which I think is actually very chic.
It's going to be the chicest baby there is.
Well, I should hope so.
For Meghan and Harry, Frogmore Cottage is an idyllic escape
from Kensington Palace, where they first set up home together.
The palace is in the centre of London and surrounded by onlookers.
Probably the most difficult part of marrying into the royal family
would be the fact that there's no privacy or very little privacy.
The governess of the Queen said when the Queen was a child,
royals are only private in the womb.
Kensington Palace also houses multiple generations of royals.
It's essentially an upmarket housing estate full of Windsors.
Margaret was there, Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Kent,
the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent,
and now we've got a new generation.
William and Kate and their three children, George, Charlotte and Louis,
they now occupy apartment 1A.
Eugenie and Jack, they live in Ivy Cottage.
Harry and Meghan were living at Nottingham Cottage.
It's a lovely, cosy two-bedroom cottage.
Of course, it's where Harry famously proposed to Meghan.
The palace was William and Harry's childhood home.
Their mother Diana moved there in 1981,
along with many of her staff and their families.
The father had been working in the press office for Charles and Diana.
He was one of their press secretaries.
It was actually very special living at Kensington Palace.
I was in my late teens,
and we would see William and Harry coming and going with their nanny.
Diana would liken Kensington Palace to Coronation Street.
I guess that's the very English version of Melrose Place.
Kensington Palace is filled, stuffed with all the royals,
all living together.
I can't imagine living with my in-laws in that way.
It would be crammed in the same space, aren't they?
Crammed sounds mean, but there's a lot of room,
but you're right on top of each other.
I think it's just, you know,
when you're living in close quarters with family members,
there are curtain twitches,
people are sort of watching who's coming and going.
Princess Margaret, for many years,
lived next door to Diana when she was on her own there,
and I think, you know,
Princess Margaret was very sympathetic to Diana,
but I think there was also a feeling
that the gardens were perhaps overlooked
and it was, there was not much privacy there.
After Diana separated from Prince Charles in 1992,
Kensington Palace was surrounded by press photographers,
eager for a shot of the world's most famous single woman.
She was constantly seen coming and going
because in her era,
paparazzi photographers were allowed to stand at the gates,
so there was any number of photographs
of her driving in and out.
Diana was very good at actually dealing with that,
you know, reluctantly,
would give them a smile and a wave
and look as though she wasn't bothered,
but deep down, yes, she didn't like it.
She did see it as an invasion of her privacy.
If Diana happened to have a gentleman friend
that she wanted to see,
yes, they were smuggled in in the boot of a car
because that was the only way
to avoid any kind of scandal, salacious gossip.
It probably did feel like something of a gilded cage
because she couldn't go anywhere,
and that's why she had asked her brother, Charles Spencer,
if she could have a bolt hole on the Spencer estate.
He at first said yes,
and then he reneged on that offer
because he was worried that there was going to be
too much press intrusion,
and as a result, he and Diana had a frosty relationship.
Sadly, they were never able to reconcile.
Kensington Palace became the focus of the world's grief
after Diana's tragic death in 1997.
Harry watched what happened to his mother,
and he, I think, he's absolutely determined
the same thing will not happen to Meghan.
Frogmore Cottage gives them absolute privacy and discretion.
They're able to raise baby Sussex
in the most peaceful environment
that's only open to the public three days a year.
It has a wall built around the property,
so when that public is there,
they will never get to see the Sussexes.
I think they're going to love their life there
because they can literally throw open their doors and windows,
be totally free, totally private, totally secure,
and it could be a beautiful place to raise a family.
Meghan and Harry may be raising a family now,
but they're also taking on more royal duties
as the Queen steps back.
So where do they escape to
when they need a break from the day job?
When you're a royal,
you can't just pop to a hotel in France for your holiday
or just be chaos, so you have to use your palaces.
You have to go to Balmoral for summer,
Sandringham for Christmas.
Meghan was invited to spend Christmas with the royals
at Sandringham before her marriage.
It was King George V that said there was no better place,
perhaps I'm paraphrasing,
but no better place that he loved than Sandringham.
King George VI, the Queen's father, felt the same way.
And for someone who's not been Queen for 67 years,
there's very few opportunities where you're not on duty.
She has memories in those places with her own family as well,
so those moments are to be cherished.
The Prince of Wales bought himself a hideaway of his own
just before his marriage to Diana.
Highgrove is very much a Georgian country house.
It's got a nice atmosphere about it.
It's just got a much more family-oriented feel.
It's a place he loves to spend the most amounts of time,
it's a place he feels most at peace.
But Highgrove isn't everyone's idea of the perfect hideaway.
I think Camilla finds Highgrove...
It's Charles's place, it's not their place.
He lived there with Diana.
I guess quite a lot of her memories will be from the Diana years
when the War of the Waleses was in full flood,
when the ghastly tape recordings
were being published of their late-night conversations.
It was a very difficult time for her and a very painful time for her.
The place she and Charles love to be together is Balmoral up in Scotland.
That is, I think, where they are at their most relaxed.
Charles inherited his passion for Scotland from his mother.
The Queen really loves Balmoral.
It is her beloved place, and I'm not sure whether any monarch ever again
would love Balmoral like the Queen.
I think she just loves the family time that she's afforded them.
The Queen ensures she's surrounded by family at this remote Scottish castle,
inviting William, Kate, Harry and Meghan to spend summer holidays there.
Only a few privileged guests from outside the family get to join them.
My dad has a great story. He got to go up to Balmoral,
and the Queen invited him and their other guests for the weekend on a picnic.
And then after the picnic, everybody clears up together.
And he went to the sink, and he didn't really pay attention
to the person standing next to him.
He just said, as one would, I'll wash you dry.
And his voice very curtly says, no, I'll wash you dry.
And it was the Queen.
She's not precious.
Yes, we want her to behave like the Queen when we're seeing her out in public,
but I kind of love that she's like the nation's favourite granny too.
And when Meghan stays at Balmoral, she'll need to be careful what she packs.
I know that Cherie Blair, the wife of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair,
the Prime Minister's always invited to go and stay up at Balmoral,
the Queen's Scottish castle.
And Cherie had packed and didn't realise the first year they went
that a butler or a valet would unpack for her.
She was then mortified to find out later that they'd unpacked her stuff
and her contraception had been put in a bathroom cupboard.
This is why they say their son Leo came about,
because when they went back the next year,
she didn't pack contraception, supposedly,
because she was so embarrassed at the thought of that.
A fixture on the Queen's calendar.
But is it really the perfect summer vacation spot for Kate and Meghan?
Kate loves that same royal lifestyle.
She loves all the outdoorsy things.
She wants to be surrounded by dogs and out in the stream.
Meghan, I'm not sure. She's a California girl.
So while I think she would appreciate the countryside,
I think she'd find Scotland quite tough.
Meghan's made no secret of how much she loves the sunshine
and yoga outside on the beach.
And Balmoral, you've got to be made of pretty stern stuff
because it can be very cold up there, even in the middle of August.
I'm sure she will go because Harry will want to go
and she'll want to go and share that part of his life with him.
But I'm not sure we will see them go for perhaps the same length of time
as they would have done in previous years.
Meghan and Harry will be spending a lot of time at Buckingham Palace.
They have a suite of rooms there to house their support staff
and provide them with a London crash pad.
The palace is also the Queen's office
and needs a cavalry of staff to keep the wheels rolling.
There is a difference between the Queen and the younger royals
in terms of servants.
So essentially the Queen has the biggest staff,
not only is Buckingham Palace the hugest residence,
but also her needs in terms of events, her political work,
there are still a huge amount of state visits to her,
so the staff necessarily has to be very large.
There's 450 Buckingham Palace staff
working just on the private residences there,
and that's not including the spaces that are open to the public
or to any of the kind of garden spaces.
It's a very busy palace, from the footmen...
The private secretaries, the butlers, the chauffeurs.
The cleaners, the cooks, the office staff, the PR.
The housemaids, the housekeeper.
It's all very Downtonesque.
The royals have jobs done for them that we don't.
The man who winds the clocks.
There's 450 clocks in Windsor and 1,000 clocks in Buckingham Palace.
The clock wind up Windsor Castle,
it took him 16 hours to wind up all the clocks there,
so by the time you've done one load of clocks
you've got to start all over again.
The dresser is something that seems a very unique royal job.
They will organise the outfits,
they will sort out everything with the dry cleaners,
they will pack everything, and they will also help to dress you.
The Queen's relationships with her dressers is incredible,
and there's a brilliant story that one time
two of her dressers were arguing so much
that she came down to the servants' quarters to bed down
because she just didn't want to interrupt,
because they're both so important to her.
She didn't want to interrupt and get in the middle of the fight.
The Queen has her own shoe-breaker in her,
and why not? She has a lot of walking to do.
They are custom-made shoes,
and the shoe-breaker in her takes them
and walks around Buckingham Palace
until they are the perfect level of softness for the Queen to wear.
Some of the traditional jobs at the Palace
might seem rather eccentric to a modern-day princess.
For the Queen at Buckingham Palace, things are a little different.
She has a piper, a bagpiper, that plays for her
every morning without fail.
She loves the sound of the bagpipes,
and for her that's the perfect way to start the day.
The royal footmen have the key job of looking after the royal corgis,
and sometimes they are a bit resentful
that they don't get to serve the actual royals,
because the corgis have a lot of needs.
Fresh chicken, fresh meat, cooked for them freshly,
put in their bowls.
Their bowls and their baskets are off the ground
so they don't get draughts.
And some footmen in the past have been a little bit frustrated by this.
When Meghan's at the Palace,
every royal servant she comes into contact with
is governed by a strict code of conduct.
The house is packed full of people.
You're really supposed to try and be as inobtrusive as possible,
because you cannot bump into a royal.
So it's not an equal sharing of the house,
it is the royal's house,
and so if they are trying to get somewhere,
you need to get out of the way, and that's the way it works.
And all staff are sworn to secrecy.
It's the fear that even the most trusted servant
might one day sell his soul,
and your story, your innermost secrets,
will be splashed across the front page of a newspaper.
There have been royal members of staff
who've gone on to a degree of fame, notoriety,
to a degree of financial reward.
I think the most fascinating story is Miss Marion Crawford,
who was the governess of the Queen and Princess Margaret
when they were little girls.
She went with them to Buckingham Palace
when their father became king.
She was there for the courtship between Elizabeth and Philip,
and she was such a trusted member of the household.
They told her everything, they were devoted to her,
and when she left the household,
she wrote a book about the princesses, about everything,
and this was published in America.
Now this incredibly private family,
all these secrets are laid bare,
and the royal family were really shocked.
They were shocked, they felt betrayed,
and they never spoke to her ever again.
If you leave and you talk,
then that is the end of any relationship
you've ever had with the royals.
Harry's been brought up with servants,
but for Meghan it's a whole new and luxurious way of life.
Prince Charles's former butler, Grand Harold,
trains staff to cater for the famous, rich and royal.
At the state dinner at Buckingham Palace,
pudding cutlery always goes at the top.
As well as doing all the traditional things you expect,
I teach them how to shake hands,
how to sit down correctly,
how to walk correctly.
When you do a breakfast tray in a royal home,
the teapot makes sure that it's already pre-warmed.
We've got some toast.
Royal homes, stately homes, they tend to cut the crust off.
Now, there was an old rule from years ago
that married ladies could have it
because they weren't married and they weren't looking for a husband.
Princess Margaret famously used to be brought a breakfast tray
I think at 9 o'clock every morning,
and then she'd spend the next two hours lying in bed,
reading the papers and chain-smoking.
Try and keep it level as you go up the stairs.
She'd be brought buttered eggs.
They weren't supposed to be called scrambled eggs
because scrambled was deemed common,
but buttered eggs supposedly was what she was brought on her breakfast tray.
When you get to this point, knock twice.
You just want...
Come in. Good morning.
Good morning. Is the trail right here?
Perfect, thank you.
Meghan can learn from the Queen
how to be the hostess with the mostess at her own royal palace.
You and I might have a dinner party and invite perhaps six friends round.
The Queen very often will have a banquet
for hundreds of people at Buckingham Palace,
and although she has all these people to do the work,
she is actually a fantastically good hostess
and quite a proud hostess,
and she will go and check the arrangements before any banquet.
If she's got a visitor coming to stay, like Barack Obama...
Thank you so much.
..she will inspect the rooms.
She will choose which suite of rooms they're going to stay in in Buckingham Palace
and she will check them out.
She will select some books to put by their bedsides
and she would generally prepare for a guest
like you and I might prepare for a guest.
There are even strict rules for those royal guests to follow.
If you're lucky enough to go to an event at Buckingham Palace,
what might surprise you is that the menu will not be in English,
it will be written in French, which is a very old royal tradition.
It's quite nice and I think it keeps people on their toes as well
because when they sit down, they've suddenly got to really concentrate
on what the menu says.
If you're dining with the Queen, you've got to make sure
that before the Queen stops eating, you've finished.
If you haven't, then, unfortunately,
the staff will come in and take your plate away.
But dinner at Meghan's place is likely to be a much more informal affair.
Meghan loves to cook, we know that,
and she loves to entertain and prepare food for her friends,
so I think moving to a much bigger space,
we're going to see her entertaining more,
lots of private parties with pals where I think it'll be quite relaxed.
I don't think you'd be very relaxed if you were invited over to Meghan's house
for a party, can you imagine?
Meghan and Harry's more relaxed attitude to protocol
means they won't surround themselves with servants.
There has been an attempt from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
to have fewer staff around them,
and I think that the trend of the younger royals having a smaller staff
is going to be even more intensified with Harry and Meghan
setting up home in Frogmore Cottage.
I can't think that Meghan and Harry will ever want a huge number of staff,
but I do think that they will need somebody who will manage
whether Harry and Meghan would go the whole hog
and have valets and footmen.
Harry, I think, finds his father's lifestyle probably a bit over the top.
He is of a much younger generation, obviously,
and he's had a lot of friends and he's been to their houses,
he was in the army.
He is probably more comfortable with the frugality
than the huge staffing levels and luxury.
At the last count, Prince Charles had 118 staff,
which means he never has to do his own chores.
A 2003 documentary shows Harry cleaning his own boots,
something his dad can't get his head around.
What? Yes, I'm not just doing it for them.
I'm not just doing it for them, I always do it.
I always clean them. I played yesterday, I didn't have a chance.
Someone else will do it for you.
Prince Charles famously had valets who did quite a lot for him.
They put toothpaste on his toothbrush.
Sometimes if you have that level of assistance,
it can seem that you're divorced from reality to a degree.
There have been a lot of stories about Charles.
There is no doubt that he likes his luxury,
and he is a bit pampered because he has the staff to pamper him.
He does have a very bad back
and does like to sleep on his own mattress,
if that is humanly possible,
and he certainly takes cushions to sit on
and to put his back against on chairs.
The idea that he travels the world with his own lavatory seat is nonsense.
The first royal moderniser was William and Harry's mother,
the Princess of Wales.
Diana was revolutionary.
Diana wanted a completely different approach
to how royalty dealt with staff.
Before her marriage in 1901,
she had spent some limited time at Buckingham Palace
and was befriended by one of the Queen's stewards,
who was incredibly helpful to Diana at a difficult time.
You have an 18-, 19-year-old,
and she thought, well, look,
maybe that's how I should sort of treat my staff.
The protocol before I even went to the King's Palace with her,
you always referred to them first thing in the morning,
Your Royal Highness.
It was from day one when Diana came out of the door
and I said, Good morning, Your Royal Highness.
She said, You can stop all that crap, Ken.
She effectively was running the house by speaking to the chefs,
speaking to the housekeepers, going to see the chauffeurs,
letting them know what her word was,
which was a complete change in how royalty dealt with their staff.
Diana loved to be down in the kitchens
and Harry and William used to go into the kitchen
and ask for treats and snacks.
I remember hearing from a former palisade
that the chef that they had at Kensington Palace
used to get frustrated sometimes
because Diana would just take it upon herself
to go up in the kitchen and make the boys a pudding
or bowls of ice cream, and that was his job.
But she just really enjoyed this closeness to staff,
which was completely, almost anathema to the Prince,
who found that her relationship with staff
was probably too close for comfort.
And Diana's sons clearly want more relaxed households.
We obviously see William as well,
not wanting to perhaps have the closeness of a valet
that his father did.

