Original subtitles

(crowd cheering) NARRATOR: The British Royal Family,

one of the most famous dynasties in the world.

CROWD: God save the Queen!

NARRATOR: For more than a century,

the lives of the Windsors have enthralled the nation,

mesmerized the press,

and inspired some of the most popular films

and dramas of recent decades.

But what's fact and what's fiction?

There were rumours that not everything was right in the marriage.

PIERS: He was only on extremely loose terms with monogamy.

KATIE: That's the moment when the Palace

absolutely lost grip of the narrative.

NARRATOR: In this series, we delve deep into the archives

to reveal controversial documents concealed for decades

ROBERT: This is a hand-written note

saying: "We're going to tap the King's phone".

NARRATOR: And meet royal insiders

who witnessed history first-hand.

She steps out and we realise this is a horror story.

I'm about four feet from the Princess.

It was the first sign

something was wrong.

NARRATOR: In this episode, we look at the perpetual conflict

for the royal family between love and duty.

One of the hardest challenges of being a royal is marriage.

You're not just marrying a person, you're marrying a job.

- There is this added component, this duty thing.

NARRATOR: After the fairy tale wedding,

comes a reality which has seen

three out of four of the Queen's children divorced.

We were living a lie, the marriage was pretty much dead.

NARRATOR: The Queen and Prince Philip, however,

have reconciled both love and duty.

It has been the great royal love story.

He calls her "cabbage", for goodness sake.

WESLEY: Seventy-two years is a very, very long marriage.

But what Prince Philip said, I think, is "the key, is tolerance".

NARRATOR: But will the next generation be able to do the same

in the pressure cooker of the modern monarchy?

The fact that I fell in love with Meghan so incredibly quickly

was a sort of confirmation to me that...

all the stars were aligned, everything was just perfect.

It was this beautiful woman just tripped and fell into my life,

I fell into her life.

Meghan and Harry are an incredibly tactile couple.

There's a lovely chemistry between them,

and, without a doubt,

it has increased Harry and Meghan's popularity.

You know, they suddenly seem more real than royal.

NARRATOR: Love has never seemed more important

to the royal family's popularity,

but it's only part of the picture.

I know the fact she'll be unbelievably good

at the job part of it as well. It's obviously a huge relief to me.

She'll be able to deal with everything else coming with it.

I really believe that William and Harry have learnt a lot of lessons

from watching their parents' marriage.

KATIE: Diana told William and Harry to marry for love,

and, to their great credit, both of them have married for love.

William is completely devoted to Kate,

they're very much in love, they make a great team.

The big difference was that William knew Kate

before they married one another.

WESLEY: They were at university together,

they shared a house together as flatmates

before they started going out, so there was a long courtship.

And I think that she'd been sort of inducted into the family

and knew what she was getting into.

NARRATOR: Harry's marriage to Meghan was more of a whirlwind.

KATIE: Here is Prince Harry,

he's married an American, he's married a divorcee,

and, without a doubt, this has been a very fast-moving royal romance.

Yes, behind the scenes, there were some questions being asked,

just to make sure that Harry was sure, because of course,

divorce is something that has tainted the House of Windsor.

NARRATOR: The spectre of divorce has been

hanging over the Windsor dynast since 1936,

when Edward VIII chose love over duty,

and abdicated rather than give up Wallis Simpson.

REPORTER: The same loyal welcome, the amazing scenes of enthusiasm

that mark him as undoubtedly deserving his well-earned title:

the most popular man in the world.

NARRATOR: Despite his huge crowd appeal,

Edward VIII was, behind the scenes, obsessed by Miss Simpson.

PIERS: Wallis Simpson was "an American adventuress",

in the words of Queen Mary.

She absolutely captivated, entranced, bewitched him.

NARRATOR: Although she was still married to her second husband,

the King was determined to make her his wife,

which put him at loggerheads with the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

He said to Baldwin that he was going to marry her,

and Baldwin said: "Look, this simply isn't on.

Parliament won't wear it".

NARRATOR: The King responded that he would marry Mrs Simpson

without government approval, and, if necessary, abdicate.

JANE: What Edward VIII did was to say,

"I have to be with the woman I love

and that takes priority over everything".

NARRATOR: Royal biographer Robert Hardman

has spent his career

examining the decisions the royal family make.

His investigations at the National Archives at Kew

have uncovered secrets about the abdication,

kept under wraps for over eighty years.

ROBERT: Everyone from the Prime Minister down was extremely worried

about the state of the King's mind, which way he was gonna go.

This is an extraordinary document

from senior Home Office official

to the Head of the Post Office

saying, "We're gonna tap the King's phone.

You'll arrange the interception of telephone communications

between Fort Belvedere, certain addresses in London,

and the continent of Europe".

This is effectively saying, "Yes, he is our head of state,

we have sworn oaths of allegiance,

nonetheless, we're gonna spy on him,

because we feel it's in the national interest".

Mrs Simpson has all sorts of devious contacts

and friendships, not least with German diplomats.

The King was known to have met leading members

of the British fascist movement. They want to know it all.

And indeed, it was later discovered that it was an MI5 operative

hiding in a bush in Green Park listening to the conversations.

You actually heard the first conversation where

King Edward VIII told his brother,

the Duke of York, that he was going to abdicate.

PIERS: The public only knew about it

on 3 December, and by 10, 11 December, the King had gone.

NARRATOR: On 12 December, his brother was proclaimed George V

and Edward left the country. He married Wallis in France in 1937.

None of his family attended the wedding.

Putting love over duty had changed the course of British history.

PIERS: None of them had been prepared for this.

They'd been prepared for a life of living in a country house

with horses and dogs: basically what Elizabeth wanted to do.

That's what she was prepared for, she wanted to be a country lady.

NARRATOR: Just a decade later,

the girl who had hoped to live a quiet life in the country

had fallen in love,

and the Palace thought her choice, Prince Philip of Greece

was also unsuitable.

There was this strand of British establishment thinking

that he was a slightly dangerous outsider

from a foreign royal house.

The Greek royal family had been imported from Denmark

and so Prince Philip is not actually Greek at all,

he has quite a lot of German and Russian blood in him.

NARRATOR: When he was just a baby,

Philip's family went to live as impoverished exiles in Paris

and soon after, the Greek royal family were deposed.

He was very much a man who had to make his own way in life.

He said to me once that his mother was ill

and his father was away so he said, "I had to get on with it".

And get on with it he did.

NARRATOR: Luckily for Philip, he was rescued by his extended family,

his mother's brother, Louis Mountbatten,

helped transform Philip's fortunes

by encouraging him to join the Royal Navy.

PIERS: He'd come up through this school of hard knocks

and been very successful, he was good looking,

he was extremely attractive to women

and he caught the eye of Princess Elizabeth at Dartmouth.

WESLEY: And Philip was a naval cadet,

and he impressed the girls, he jumped over a tennis net,

and then, as the Royal Yacht was leaving,

he went behind it in a rowing boat.

NARRATOR: 13-year-old Elizabeth fell in love with Philip

at Dartmouth Naval College. But her mother was less enamoured.

HUGO: Queen Mother would have much preferred her

to marry a Grenadier Guard and indeed spent

quite a lot of time putting Grenadier Guards in her path.

NARRATOR: After the Second World War,

the prevailing feeling

was that Elizabeth should marry someone British.

PIERS: The Queen Mother saw him as a Hunnish Junker,

with all sorts of very embarrassing Nazi relations.

NARRATOR: But the determined princess

saw something in the dashing young naval officer

and remained resolute.

HUGO: She was still very young and, so,

the King took them all to South Africa on the African tour.

NARRATOR: George VI had agreed they could marry

as long as his daughter waited

until they came back to announce her engagement.

One of the most welcome feature of the royal train,

which transported the family across South Africa,

was the post-office carriage with its telephone exchange.

A vital lifeline to Philip.

PIERS: She was strikingly in love with him and made it clear.

He certainly saw the advantages of marrying into the House of Windsor.

Somebody described him as a big dog wanting a basket.

NARRATOR: The Queen's was a love match which endured,

but fast forward a generation,

and her son felt impelled to sacrifice love on the altar of duty.

INDIA: What I do remember is as the weeks passed,

Diana became thinner and thinner and thinner.

PENNY: By the time they walked up the aisle,

the relationship was in a very, very bad way.

NARRATOR: In 1980, Prince Charles was 32,

and the pressure was on for him to marry and produce an heir.

In a way, it was the last marriage played out

by old royal rules -

that the Prince of Wales had to find a suitable bride,

a young, aristocratic, virgin bride.

And of course, Diana Spencer ticked all these boxes.

PENNY: Everybody loved her. She was funny, she was uncomplicated.

But the reality was actually rather different.

It was the most curious engagement really,

they didn't know one another.

Diana was taken out of her lovely flat

where she shared with bubbly girls

and she was given a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace.

The perfect girl Charles thought he was falling in love with,

was much darker, and was much more moody,

and by the time they walked up the aisle,

the relationship was in a very, very bad way.

NARRATOR: An interview filmed on the eve of the wedding

exposes the state of their relationship.

INTERVIEWER: What sort of reactions

have you encountered to your marriage?

Well, the most overwhelming and touching reactions as far as

we've been concerned.

They're stiff, they have no kind of body contact.

INTERVIEWER: When you make your vows, that's the most personal moment.

And hardly any sort of eye contact.

INTERVIEWER: Is it gonna be that for you, even though you know

the eyes of the world are watching you

at that very important moment?

Well, I hope so, yes. I don't know about...

People often say, "Why did Charles not marry Camilla

"when he had the opportunity? When they first met,

"when they were young Both were single?"

But Camilla was in love with Andrew Parker-Bowles.

Charles, I think, fell very much in love with her.

But actually, he didn't ask her to marry him.

But I don't know that she would have accepted if he had done.

Charles always said that when he married,

he would marry with his head and not his heart.

And that, I think, was a hangover

from the lesson learnt from Edward's abdication.

It could not be a passion

that swept him away.

I suspect they quite quickly found

they weren't ideally suited to each other,

but unfortunately, the world had fallen in love with her.

(crowd cheering)

NARRATOR: Charles and Diana's wedding

was to be the biggest national celebration since the coronation,

with Lady Di in the starring role.

Everything was huge about it.

St Paul's, because it could take this enormous crowd.

A wedding dress that practically covered the steps.

It was a sort of surrogate love affair for the nation.

It seemed to be a completely romantic wedding.

Of course, we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes.

NARRATOR: Prince Charles's god-daughter, India Hicks,

was one of the five bridesmaids

and witnessed the feverish speculation

surrounding the wedding dress.

There were extraordinary...

An extraordinary experience for a 13-year-old child.

Whenever we turned up for dress fittings,

the organisation of the car coming up,

and the world's press descending and trying to get any snap.

When we were actually inside the Emmanuel's studio,

I remember they had blocked out a lot of the windows

because, of course, cameras had camped out

on neighbouring buildings, with long lenses to spy inside

to see what the greatest fashion secret was going to look like.

There was a feeling of fun around it all.

We would be on the floor above, she would be on the floor below.

What I do remember is as the weeks passed

Diana became thinner and thinner and thinner,

and they had to take the dress in and in and in and in.

And so, there was a lot of scurrying around

to make sure that dress was fitting her.

You got pretty close to Diana during those times,

and there was always this feeling of Diana being the head girl,

and we were in awe of her.

And looking back, you think: "My god, she was 19,

she was just a child herself".

But as a 13-year-old, I was quite impressed by her.

During the dress fittings, this beautiful silk taffeta

felt very princessy and very fairy-tale-ish.

Of course, what no one had tested or anticipated

was cramming that amount of fabric into a very small carriage.

Her father, herself, her dress and her 25-foot train

trot gloriously down The Mall as the world watches.

The carriage draws up, and the trumpeters, the horses,

and the atmosphere was sensational, and the crowds are going crazy.

And the carriage door is opened by the footman and she steps out

and of course the train then begins to unfold itself

and we realise this is a horror story.

It is just 25 feet of crumpled mess.

And so, Sarah Armstrong-Jones and I just set to work

and really all he would see of me was my bottom in the air

as I'm bending down trying to undo this.

There was a great ball afterwards at Buckingham Palace

and I was so excited that was going to be my first ball.

And after Charles and Diana's wedding,

we went home and I lay down for a moment, just a moment,

and I woke up to discover my family had gone to the ball

and I had been left alone in the house. I was livid.

I was so cross. Why had they not woke me?

My mother thought: "She's so tired, we'll leave her behind".

I thought: "Bloody hell, I've missed the ball".

NARRATOR: In contrast to the extravagance

of Charles and Diana's wedding,

when Elizabeth and Philip got married in 1947,

the country was in the grip of post-war gloom.

PIERS: People felt that they hadn't had the rewards

that they should have got as a result of victory.

And all of a sudden, this great event took place,

the marriage of the future Queen of England.

And it was, as Churchill said, a great flash of colour

in a period of grim, grey,

dark, gloomy austerity.

People were standing in queues.

Rationing.

People really had not enough to eat.

NARRATOR: In keeping with the straightened times,

the Prime Minister refused to make the wedding day

a national holiday.

The royals themselves wondered whether a private ceremony,

out at Windsor maybe, would be more appropriate.

NARRATOR: Robert Hardman has sifted through dozens of documents

at The National Archives

that show a government determined to economise.

ROBERT: It's two years after the Second World War,

the country's broke, there's no money for anything,

and what you see here is the extraordinary extent

to which the government is going to try

and scrimp and save on everything.

This is October, one month to go,

and the Palace are finally approving

a press stand, 275 pounds.

6-foot red carpet from the West Door to the Sacrarium steps.

There's a debate going on about whether they're gonna have

new blue carpet in Westminster Abbey for 100 pounds,

or there's a second-hand red carpet

that might be used which would 83 pounds,

although someone else has found another red carpet that might do

for 75.

NARRATOR: While other couples couldn't afford to get married,

there were inevitably concerns about wasting money.

ROBERT: Here is a letter of complaint

from a branch of the Labour Party

saying there can be no undue expense on anything.

This has got to be an austerity wedding.

"Intolerable for any substantial quantity

of labour or materials to be diverted". "Justified indignation".

"The British people will be discouraged in the immense efforts

"they are making towards economic recovery

"if this wedding is made the occasion

"for displaying a vast inequality of sacrifice".

NARRATOR: But in the end, the public didn't have the appetite

for a wedding done on the cheap

and they wanted to play a part in making it a day to remember.

Wedding gifts were sent from all over the world,

and displayed at St James's Palace.

And huge numbers of people turned up to see them.

ROBERT: A lot of people abroad thought Britain was starving,

so a lot of people sent the Princess food.

She received something like 500 tins of pineapple.

A lady in Brooklyn sent a turkey.

She also received 148 pairs of stockings.

And a couple of kittens, sent by a pair of district nurses.

Highbank Council decided it'd be a good idea

to send her a sewing machine.

Oh, and Gandhi sent a tray cloth that he'd spun on his own loom,

and old Queen Mary, famously, thought--

mistook it for a loincloth, and complained about the indelicacy.

NARRATOR: Hundreds of sympathetic women across the country

sent in clothing coupons for the wedding dress.

Designed by Norman Hartnell,

it was an exquisite austerity miracle,

complete with 15-foot train.

LADY MARY: Oh, look at all that! I love that dress.

It was a beautiful sort of satin,

and I think there was a huge lily somewhere,

and it was embroidered with sequins.

I just remember it being lovely for her.

NARRATOR: Lady Mary Colman

is the Queen Mother's niece, and the Queen's cousin.

She's never spoken about the Queen in public before.

Now, at 87, she's agreed to remember that joyous day back in 1947.

We were 14, my twin and I, we were at boarding school.

And...

the thought of coming up to London

was dread instead of excitement.

Because it was sort of unknown.

I remember the whole thing,

the crowds, they were just so enthusiastic.

You just gasped when you saw them all waving their flags.

You know, after the war, it was such a break

to have some happiness.

The ceremony was very touching.

The Archbishop said that in many ways

this was just like the wedding of an ordinary couple,

in all the Yorkshire Dales.

(organ plays wedding march)

LADY MARY: She looked as if she could almost see heaven,

she was really happy.

It was wonderful, and he looked happy too,

so that's good.

I remember being glad that we were there.

REPORTER: Following the King and Queen in the procession,

Princess Andrew of Greece, Queen of the Hellenes,

and the Boy King of Iraq.

SARAH: The people who couldn't come to the wedding,

rather tellingly, were Prince Philip's sisters,

because all of his surviving sisters

had been married to German nobility,

who played an active part in the Nazi cause,

so they couldn't possibly make an appearance.

It was that close to the war.

There was a great feeling of euphoria suddenly,

a release of tension, a feeling that things could only get better.

REPORTER: Seldom has a bride and groom

received such a tumultuous expression of goodwill.

ROBERT: We could look forward as a nation, instead of looking back,

and it was a turning point for the monarchy, no question.

NARRATOR: But in just a few years,

Princess Margaret's love for a married man

would threaten to undermine

the bright new era for the royal family.

People were very shocked, they felt he'd taken advantage.

PIERS: The Queen's Private Secretary said to Townsend,

"You must be either mad or bad".

NARRATOR: Ken Lennox photographed the royal family

for over half a century and took the first grainy photograph

of Diana with Charles on the banks of the River Dee in 1980.

He got to know Lady Di trying to capture her on camera

outside her Earl's Court flat.

KEN: I couldn't give away photographs of the royal family

before Diana came on the scene.

When Diana came along, all that exploded.

NARRATOR: Ken was to photograph the Princess

for the rest of her life.

KEN: This is the honeymoon photocall

of the couple, locked up, sat in a little style,

and really full of affection.

They answered questions and they were hugging in front of the cameras.

We'd never seen royals do an official photocall like that.

It's not only an age difference, but there's a mind difference

between the way they thought life should be.

Prince Charles was worried about so many things,

and Diana was young, and wanted to have a young woman's life

and I think Charles found that quite difficult.

I think that Diana was genuinely

in love with Prince Charles at the beginning,

but Prince Charles didn't respond.

I think they were incompatible characters was the basic problem.

NARRATOR: Ken was part of the royal press pack

for their first overseas tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1983.

Before Diana got on the scene,

it was Prince Charles who was the most photographable royal.

He was Action Man, and there was choruses of girls crying out for him.

I felt sorry for Charles now, because no one wanted to see him.

This time, Charles would work one side of the street

and Diana the other, and, at Charles, they would just say to him,

"Sir, can you get your wife to come over here?"

And from being "Mr Popular"

to "Mr Please-can-you bring-your-wife-over-here"

was not a happy situation for him.

I'm about four feet from the Princess

and I'm trying to get a bit of the Opera House in the background

and some of the crowd,

and Diana burst into tears, and wept for a couple of minutes.

After it was over, I went to see the press officer

for the Prince and Princess at that time, and I said, "What happened?"

And he said, "Ken, mozzies and jet lag and heat and so on".

So I just accepted that.

Charles, I don't think noticed it at that stage, you know.

If he has, typical of him to look the other way. (laughs)

But it was the first sign of something was wrong,

and we then began to see other things happening later on.

DICKIE: You could tell by the mid-'80s

that things were not particularly good. It wasn't hostility,

but it was just the sense that everything wasn't right.

PATRICK: The idea that there could be actually anything

seriously wrong with the marriage was unthinkable.

It had to work. And it was our job to make it work,

or at least appear to work.

NARRATOR: Patrick Jephson was equerry and Private Secretary

to The Princess of Wales for eight years,

with responsibility for her household,

and he witnessed the problems that were not yet apparent to the public.

As professional Royal performers, they were unbeatable,

but behind the scenes, it was quite different.

They didn't talk to each other, there was the minimum of eye contact,

they were short-tempered with each other.

Diana, of course, being who she was,

enjoyed upstaging her husband.

And if she was laughing or smiling or...

it wasn't just because she was happy and smiley,

it was also because she knew it got on his nerves.

I remember on one particular occasion in Seville,

he was looking one way, and she was looking the other way,

and you could have driven a double-decker bus

between the two of them, such was the hostility.

PATRICK: We went to Glasgow for the Glasgow Garden Festival.

Charles and Diana were seen happily together among the crowds,

but they had actually arrived quite separately in different aeroplanes.

We were living a lie,

we were covering up for the fact that the marriage was dead.

The piece de resistance, in terms of the ending of the marriage

was South Korea. They looked like "Mr and Mrs Glum".

They looked like two people

who didn't want to be in each other's company,

and who didn't particularly want to be in South Korea.

It says just how bad it had got that divorce, even to Queen Elizabeth,

looked like the solution, not the problem.

JANE: The Queen intervening to say

"enough is enough, the time has come to divorce"

was really giving closure to something that was going to happen

at some point in the near future.

NARRATOR: The idea of the Queen ordering her son to divorce

would have been unthinkable in a previous era.

In the early 1950s, the possibility that her sister might wed

a married palace equerry with children

led to a crisis that ended with the Princess giving up

the man she loved.

LADY GLENCONNER: I remember Peter Townsend was very good looking,

he was a war hero, the King adored him,

he was like sort of proxy son.

Princess Margaret said that it was very romantic because, every evening,

they all went riding off into the sunset.

And that, I think, was the first time

that, you know, they sort of, I suppose, fell in love.

NARRATOR: Lady Glenconner has known the royal family her whole life.

She was the Queen's maid of honour at the coronation,

and Princess Margaret's lady-in-waiting and close friend.

LADY GLENCONNER: Here's a picture of me,

Princess Margaret, the Queen,

and Princess Margaret is looking at my feet.

And when she was staying with me,

we were looking at old photographs,

I said, "Why are you looking at my feet?"

And she said, "Well, because you had silver shoes,

I had brown ones, I was so jealous of your silver shoes".

Anyway, Princess Margaret and I did have great fun,

and in those days, we had this nursery footman,

and we were always hiding behind doors to go "boo",

you know, when he came along with his tray.

And I can remember the Queen saying,

"Margaret and Anne, what are you doing? Are you behaving?"

Of course, we weren't.

The traditional picture of Princess Margaret

is that she was the naughty one,

while her eldest sister was the goody goody two-shoes.

And there's a lot of truth in that.

HUGO: Her father absolutely adored her,

he couldn't believe he'd created this beautiful creature,

and he always used to say, "Lillibet is my pride,

"and Margaret is my joy".

PIERS: It's difficult to think back

as to the extraordinary glamour and good looks.

She was a pocket Venus,

she was absolutely the Princess Di of her age.

NARRATOR: Margaret had the world at her feet,

but it came crumbling down when her father died

and her sister became Queen.

I remember at the coronation

we arrived back at Buckingham Palace

and the Queen skipped along the passage with us,

and then behind her, came the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother,

and then behind that, Princess Margaret looking so sad.

I remember saying, "Ma'am you look so sad".

And she said, "Of course I do. I've lost my beloved father

"and my sister".

Because she was Queen, she'd moved into Buckingham Palace.

She said: "I've got to live at Clarence House with my mother".

NARRATOR: Princess Margaret had turned to Peter Townsend

in her distress. When he divorced his wife,

she told the Queen she wished to marry this man

16 years her senior.

In those days, being divorced was a really big, you know. no no.

And people were very shocked, they felt he'd taken advantage.

Princess Margaret was so much younger than him.

And of course, Peter Townsend was staff.

PIERS: When the Queen's Private Secretary, Tommy Lascelles,

heard about this, he said to Townsend "You must be either mad or bad.

Your intruding in this way into the royal household

constitutes a danger to the monarchy".

NARRATOR: Less than 20 years after the abdication,

the very mention of the word "divorce"

in Palace, government and church circles caused grave concern.

Townsend was sent to Brussels,

and the Queen asked Margaret to wait a year.

And so, the traditional story begins to unfold

of an unhappy Princess thwarted in love by the establishment.

But documents released by the National Archives

rewrite that history.

ROBERT: What we see here is that, actually, by 1955,

Anthony Eden, himself a divorcee,

and his government have decided that actually she can marry.

In fact, they're gonna give her some more money.

"The civil list have provided that she should receive

"on her marriage a further sum of 9000 a year

"in addition to the 6000 a year which she has already".

This is the government's plan in the event that Princess Margaret

and Group Captain Townsend are gonna get married.

And she would have been aware of this.

"Ministers understand that it is Princess's Margaret's wish

"that despite her renunciation of her right to the Succession,

"she should continue to live in the United Kingdom

"and carry out her public duties as member of the Royal Family".

So, what they're saying is

"We're happy with her carrying on being Royal,

"we're happy with her staying in the country and this marriage.

"The one thing that has to change is she herself cannot be Queen

"and nor can her children".

Life would really not have changed very dramatically at all

for Princess Margaret.

But what we do know from other correspondence in this file,

including the remarkable letter from the Princess herself,

is that it wasn't a sort of crazy love affair by this stage.

This is the Princess writing to the Prime Minister.

It's a very honest letter, it's really rather touching.

She's saying, "I'm not going to see him during this time,

"but in October I shall be returning to London,

"and he will then be taking his annual leave,

"and only really then can I make up my mind".

She says here, "It's only by seeing him in this way

"that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not".

I think, inevitably, as a young woman

who was initially head over heels in love with this man,

but possibly after all this time now,

having had all these people poring over her relationship,

maybe it's started to rub off.

Maybe she's started to think, "You know what? I'll think again".

Within a couple of months,

the couple would have made up their mind

and the Princess issued her famous statement

to say, "Mindful of the teachings of the Church,

"she's not going to go ahead with it." It doesn't happen.

Some people said absence makes the heart grow fonder,

but I think it does make you think

exactly what you're going to give up.

I think during the wait, she started to enjoy herself again,

her friends rallied round...

I think personally, if the King had lived,

she would have married somebody more suitable.

And I did once ask Princess Margaret about her set.

"Among all of them, who would you might have married?"

And she said Sunny Blandford, so she would have had Blenheim.

I think that would have been more suitable.

She would have had a palace, of course.

NARRATOR: The demands of the crown

would not only pit sister against sister,

but husband against wife.

He wasn't even allowed to call his children by his own name.

He became emasculated.

It really sounds as though it threw him

into something like a depression.

NARRATOR: When George VI died aged just 56 in 1952,

it sent shock waves through the entire family.

Not only did Princess Elizabeth

take on the heavy responsibility of the Crown,

but her husband had to give up the career he loved.

This posed a massive strain on the Queen's marriage to Prince Philip,

because Prince Philip imagined, with good reason,

that he was going to have a good career in the navy.

PENNY: Suddenly, she went from being a naval wife to Queen.

And he went from being a naval officer

in command of his own ship, to being a consort,

to walking three steps behind his wife.

Which totally, totally went against the grain

for this man who is the ultimate alpha male.

PIERS: He wanted to modernise and streamline the monarchy,

and, of course, the courtiers weren't having any of this.

Prince Philip came up against

plenty of opposition from the Palace old guard.

He used to refer to these establishment figures

as the "men with moustaches".

And he's not allowed anywhere near red boxes,

he's not allowed anywhere near prime-ministerial audiences,

he's very much kept at arm's length.

He wasn't even allowed to call his children by his own name.

He became emasculated. I mean, he said at one point, "What am I?

Just, am I nothing more than a bloody amoeba?"

SARAH: It really sounds as though it threw him

into something like a depression.

He began living this slightly raffish life.

His membership of the famous Thursday Club,

a lunch club, you know, with other young men about town,

but also with a certain number of party girls.

It must have been a very difficult period for her.

She knew that her husband was hurting and that it was difficult for him

and that some people were not treating him very well.

NARRATOR: A solution seemed to lie in the newly-completed Britannia.

Philip would open the Olympic Games in Australia,

and then tour the far-flung islands of the Commonwealth

aboard the Royal Yacht.

It was to fly the flag, of course,

but perhaps it was also to give Prince Philip

a little time back at sea

and a little time away from the constraints of his role.

REPORTER: Everyone was dressed up to kill.

Indeed, not so long ago that really was the big idea.

- But that all went wrong when one of the close associates of the Prince,

Mike Parker, was summoned back to England

to appear in the divorce courts, and that tar spread.

NARRATOR: The divorce of his close friend

coupled with Philip's four-month absence

was enough to open the floodgates of speculation

about the state of the royal couple's marriage.

There were rumours that not everything was right in the marriage.

NARRATOR: For the first time ever,

the Queen issued an official denial

saying it was quite untrue that there was a rift,

and for added emphasis,

she made the Duke a Prince on his return home.

JANE: It must have been a crisis in the early marriage,

and it's the sort of crisis that is only possible to negotiate

if you actually love the person you're married to.

ROBERT: It has been the great Royal love story,

it's the longest Royal marriage in history.

It's one of the many records that the Queen can lay claim to.

I suspect it's probably the one she holds most dear.

WESLEY: I remembered the Queen,

if the Duke was arriving back from an engagement,

she would sort of perk up a bit,

and become sort of smiley and relaxed.

The Duke of Edinburgh would start fiddling with his hair

or adjusting his buttons when he was going in to see the Queen.

Unlike some of the other Royal marriages

she took on somebody her own size,

and I think she's appreciated over the years the fact that

he is the one person who can actually say exactly what he thinks to her.

There's a lot of intimacy

almost in crowds is that you're these two people

on this very strange journey, and with this unique life

and I think that there's a very, very powerful bond.

As Harry famously said,

"I don't think she could have done it without him".

NARRATOR: Today, the young Royals have more freedom than ever before

to marry who they want.

KATIE: William, without a doubt, tore up Royal history

because Kate was a commoner.

She was a regular girl from the home counties.

NARRATOR: But putting duty first

is still the number one quality in any Royal marriage.

KATIE: There is a sort of tick list that has to be met -

discretion, duty,

and putting duty before self, most importantly.

And the Queen has very much been the personification of that.

Prince William must look at his grandparents' relationship,

which has endured 70 years,

a great example of a successful matrimony.

And I'm sure he hopes that for himself too.

NARRATOR: William certainly seems to have had this in mind

when he proposed to Kate.

I do think that William always has one eye

to the fact that he is going to be King,

so whomever he married is going to be Queen.

I think it helped that Catherine was a personality

who is quite publicly closed, is quite careful,

she never puts

a nude-court-shoe-heeled foot wrong does she?

Prince William lives next door to me up here,

I see them shopping.

Duchess of Cambridge has done a really good job,

she hasn't put herself forward,

which was what happened with the Princess of Wales.

And she's glorious-looking

and sweet and perfect,

but she lets Prince William take the lead

and I think that is what the Duchess of Sussex

may have to learn,

that, you know, that's what we want in a Royal family.

NARRATOR: Kate had the benefit of ten years knowing William

to size up the demands of Royal life before they married.

For Meghan, it was different.

EMILY: Meghan has had a normal life. (chuckles)

If an acting, Hollywood career can be called a normal life.

I think they're massively in love,

and together they are a very powerful couple.

I think they both realise they have this public position.

It's global.

And I've been told by aides that they want to change the world.

CROWD (cheering): Meghan! Meghan!

I think the challenges for the Sussexes

will be balancing that sense of duty

and the life they want as private people,

as a family.

NARRATOR: Like the Queen, both William and Harry

have chosen partners who are their equals -

women they love, but who share their vision for a relevant monarchy

that's a positive force in the world.

But the challenge remains.

Will they be able to live with the conflicting demands

of love and duty?

Only time will tell.