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00:00Over 100 years ago, at the close of World War I, Britain's monarchy felt under threat.
00:11More than eight monarchs had fallen across Europe, and Britain's ruling classes feared revolution.
00:18Anxiety about this new democracy went all the way to the throne.
00:23It's really quite clear what King George V was thinking, the survival of the family business.
00:28The King would rebrand the monarchy, sending his children out to win over the public and help save the family business.
00:36First, there was Prince Edward, the charismatic heir.
00:40He was stunting. He was engaging in good propaganda, as he said, terms which infuriated King George V.
00:47Next in line was Prince Bertie, the shy retiring spare. Prince Henry was the military man.
00:54Then came Prince George, the family darling. And the only girl in this Windsor pack was loyal Princess Mary.
01:00If you can think the most extreme show mum, that's how Queen Mary is. Her daughter is this performance piece of royalty.
01:10Now, never-before-seen letters and diaries belonging to the young royals, Queen Elizabeth II's father, aunt, and uncles reveal their hidden story through abdication, war, and deep family divisions.
01:24This is a letter that Edward writes to Mary. My darling Mary, I can't tell you how I feel for you, kept almost in prison at Buck House.
01:31We never get windows like this into the royal family.
01:35The young royals would be subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. And behind the facade, their personal lives were potential bombshells.
01:44He was sailing very, very close to the wind. You know, men, women, he didn't discriminate.
01:51The fact that he was a royal prince who might have fathered a legitimate child is simply extraordinary.
01:57The potential for disaster was huge.
02:02Behind the royal facade, a family drama would play out. And the parts these siblings played in it would shape the monarchy we know today.
02:11Unless he mended his ways, would soon become no fit wearer of the British crown.
02:32Harwood House in Yorkshire was once the marital home of Princess Mary, the only daughter of Queen Mary and King George V.
02:40Mary was sister to two of Britain's most famous kings.
02:44Edward, who the family called David, the one who would abdicate.
02:48And Albert, who the family called Bertie, the one who would replace him.
02:52She was also auntie to Queen Elizabeth II.
02:55It is here at Harwood House that Mary's collection of letters, diaries, and photographs reveal the hidden story of the siblings who would conform and rebel across three decades.
03:07My darling Mary, I was so pleased to get your dear letter.
03:11I can't tell you how much I feel for you kept almost in prison at Buck House.
03:15It's not Mama that keeps us in.
03:17Only Papa, and he really does lead a wretched, dreary life.
03:21All my best love to you, darling Mary.
03:24And I remain ever your very, very devoted David.
03:28I think one of the most exciting things about this is this is the first time we've ever had access to Mary's personal archive and her letters.
03:37What was such a revelation, really, is this connection to her older brother, to Edward.
03:43It's obvious that when they're young, Edward feels intensely protective of Mary.
03:48One royal functionary said the Windsors were like ducks.
03:53They trampled on their children, and they treated their children with strictness bordering on brutality.
03:59Edward talks about how when George wasn't there, Queen Mary was a much warmer parent.
04:07He has these memories of going to her room in the early evening before dinner,
04:12when they get to sort of brush her hair and she reads some stories.
04:15He feels that his father sort of took his mother away from them.
04:19There was nothing more disconcerting to the spirit, as he put it, than a summons to his father's library.
04:27And this was approached down a darkened hallway that seemed to somehow summon up the oppressed spirit of his father.
04:34This was the room in which the children learnt the meaning of fear.
04:40That kind of idea that we slowly start to build is the children are almost making their own little world
04:47and are talking to one another as companions and as confidants,
04:52as kind of a way to deal with the world they find themselves in.
04:56By the time they reach their teenage years, the King and Queen had packed all of the boys off to boarding schools,
05:02leaving their sister Mary alone.
05:05Mary lives this incredibly sheltered, I think, stultifying life in which,
05:12at the age that her brothers are all allowed to start leaving
05:15and she has to stay behind and do whatever her parents want.
05:20I think all the children were, in one way or another, psychologically damaged by their upbringing.
05:25And you will see this play out in their adult lives.
05:32But 100 years ago, as World War I came to an end,
05:36King George V would need to call upon his children to help him save the family business.
05:41At least eight monarchs had fallen across Europe, including some of King George V's first cousins.
05:54Monarchy stood exposed. There was an atmosphere of disintegration and threat.
05:59People came back from the Great War. Their lives had been wrecked.
06:02There was a housing crisis, there was an economic crisis.
06:07There was an enormous disillusionment with everything that had happened.
06:12A whole generation was saying,
06:14we are not going to tolerate the sort of grotesque inequality that existed before we went out of the war.
06:22The war has changed everything.
06:24In 1918, millions of working class men, and even many women, were given the vote as thanks for their part in the war effort.
06:35But also to stave off the potential threat they posed to the elite.
06:38There was a real power shift. Until this time, the upper classes, the gentry, people with land had really ruled.
06:48And now working people had got a voice, and no one knew quite what they were going to do with it.
06:54One trade union leader said, you know, he looked to the time when the red flag would fly over Buckingham Palace.
07:00It was uncharted water for the monarchy. They, above all others, would need to reflect this new democracy.
07:09And image would be everything.
07:12King George realizes that if he's going to hold on to the throne,
07:17he has really got to sell the royal family to the population of Britain.
07:22They have to go out to win over hearts and minds.
07:25One of the first steps in the king's rebrand had been to change the family name from the German Saxe Cobra Gotha to the quintessentially British Windsor.
07:34Then, the king would use his children to help front the campaign.
07:39Prince Bertie, who became known as the Industrial Prince, was dispatched to the factory floors, which had been the engine of the war effort.
07:47Prince Henry, an army man himself, saw to his lot, the soldiers returning home from the front, who had sacrificed so much.
07:56And Princess Mary, who had trained as a nurse during the war, gave thanks to the wounded and those who cared for them alongside her mother, the queen.
08:04The secret weapon that the family launches on the world is Edward.
08:17The king is keen for Edward to circulate the empire. And that's what he does. He becomes the ambassador of empire.
08:25The British Empire was at its peak post-war, but like at home, starting to show dangerous divisions.
08:34It would be Edward's job as son and heir to shore up his father's empire, which made up almost a quarter of the world's landmass,
08:41and whose people had made a huge contribution to the war effort.
09:00Edward, on these tours, was a huge success. He had glamour. He had an ability, actually, to relate to people.
09:08He made a conscious effort to step down off the pedestal. His father had always occupied the pedestal,
09:14but he thought, in the new age, royal personages should be more accessible to democracy.
09:22Film and radio were modern, relatively speaking.
09:26Edward just had the right instincts, the right look, the right personality to project himself.
09:33He was great for the part. He was stunting. He was princing. He was engaging in good propaganda, as he said.
09:41Terms which infuriated King George V back then, no, that's not what we're doing at all.
09:46But that was what he was doing. That was his attitude towards it.
09:50Well, Edward and the Windsors were really, in one sense, made by the modern media for the monarchy.
09:59It was about perception and the creation of a certain image.
10:03But for the popular press, the Daily Mails and the Daily Expressors,
10:07the ones selling a million and more copies a day, this was a symbiotic relationship.
10:13The flip side of the hugely successful PR campaign was that, behind the scenes, Edward was living for pleasure.
10:23He was having affairs. He was drinking. He was smoking.
10:27And this did not get into the British press. The British press portrayed him as an immaculate figure.
10:34While the empire would be sold on their modern prince, his sister, Princess Mary, was now 22, still at home with her parents and a target for the press.
10:47They reported her engagement to an eligible friend of her brother, even though it wasn't true.
10:54So this is Mary's diary entry, and she says,
10:57The Daily Express put an announcement in their paper this morning that they were able to announce my engagement to Lord Dalcaith.
11:04I am furious about it and think it very unfair towards us both, as there is not a word of truth in it.
11:11Mary cannot even speak to a man, it seems, without tabloid gossip.
11:19Her life will never be her own, and her fury at the Daily Express is kind of a flash of who she really is.
11:32So this is Edward to his mistress, Frieda Dudley Ward.
11:36He says,
11:37I mean, you can just see his desperation for her, and also his kind of complete rejection of court life.
11:54Complete rejection of the world of his parents.
12:09Mary would have to wait two more years to finally meet her match.
12:13She became engaged to Viscount Lassels, one of the wealthiest landowners in Britain.
12:19Darling George, imagine my surprise yesterday evening when he asks me whether I will marry him.
12:25He is 39 and I am 24.
12:28He is charming and very intelligent.
12:31I'm very lucky in having such a particularly nice man as a fiancé.
12:35My hunch is that Mary didn't really have any say in who she married, partly because of who she was.
12:41You know, she'd basically been brought up to be very biddable, and she was.
12:45You can think kind of the most extreme show mum.
12:49That's how Queen Mary is.
12:51Her daughter is this performance piece of royalty.
12:55And the first major Windsor wedding would sell the fairy tale back to their people.
13:05At the beginning of the 1920s, Britain's royal family were on a charm offensive to protect the monarchy.
13:12And Edward, son and heir, became chief poster boy for his father's empire.
13:17The prince visited India, and his arrival in Calcutta was the signal for further great demonstrations of loyalty.
13:23By the time he reached India in 1921, Prince Edward had spent two years touring the empire.
13:31But all was not as the royal press reels would promote in the jewel of the imperial crown.
13:37India, after the First World War, was a seething cauldron of disaffection.
13:45So this is the ambassador of empire being parachuted into a very difficult, volatile situation,
13:52and being well aware that there would be opposition on the streets to his visit,
13:58such that he had probably never faced before when he had gone to the loyal dominions.
14:03Sending Edward out on really grueling tours of the empire was one thing.
14:10But nowhere is there any sign that George V tried to train him in the actual job of being a king,
14:18rather than being a parade horse.
14:20India had contributed greatly to the First World War in blood and in treasure.
14:28And it hoped to get its reward in the shape of some kind of independence.
14:33This was not given.
14:35And indeed, the British cracked down on demonstrators who were campaigning for independence, led by Mahatma Gandhi.
14:43One of the terrible results of this was the massacre at Amritsar.
14:50A British officer in the holy city of Amritsar had ordered troops to fire on unarmed civilians,
14:57deemed to be violating colonial rule.
15:00379 people were reported killed.
15:04The Indian National Congress estimated the number was as many as 1,000.
15:10Now this episode has gone down as one of the darkest episodes in the history of the British Empire.
15:16Gandhi regarded the British Empire as a satanic empire as a result of the Amritsar massacre.
15:23And he said that there should be a boycott of the royal tour, which there was.
15:34Edward's visit becomes politically charged and therefore propaganda and perception becomes really important.
15:42So whatever the reality, the government was very concerned to show Indians welcoming their prince, this wasn't the case.
15:53But Edward was no fool. He knew he was the subject of propaganda.
15:59Let me tell you at once that the newspaper accounts have almost invariably been hopelessly exaggerated.
16:06People at home are being given a wrong impression.
16:09This tour is by no means the triumphal progress that is reported to be at home.
16:14There is this clash of both personality and a sense of duty between father and son.
16:21George V says to him, if you hadn't gone, then everybody would have believed that the British Raj was at an end.
16:29Because the impression would have been that India was so disloyal that the Prince of Wales, the son of the King Emperor, could not visit.
16:37And Edward had already made his personal views on his public role clear.
16:45Christ, how I loathe my job now and all the press-puffed, empty success.
16:51I feel I am through with it and long to die.
16:54For God's sake, don't breathe a word of this to a soul.
16:57No one else must know how I feel about my life.
16:59Edward would remain on tour for the rest of the year and would be forced to miss the first major Windsor wedding.
17:08His sister Mary to Viscount Lassels.
17:19The royal family took advantage of this wedding to sell the monarchy.
17:23Mary would be the first child of a reigning monarch to marry at Westminster Abbey since a daughter of Edward I over 600 years before.
17:34And of course, now we have radio and we have the popular press.
17:41It's turned into this massive propaganda event.
17:44This first major Windsor wedding drew crowds to rival the King's coronation.
17:56Suddenly, here's some magic. Here's the fairy tale.
17:59And it's British. She's marrying British aristocracy.
18:03So, you know, gone were the days where British princesses were carted off to marry foreign princes.
18:09And it's seen as a very British wedding.
18:10In the King and Queen's eyes, Lassels was like the ideal husband for Mary.
18:17He was aristocracy, very wealthy landowner.
18:22Viscount Lassels was also a decorated war hero.
18:26And at this celebration of all things British, no foreign royalty were formally invited.
18:31Pathé News starts to plot the royal marriage in a way that we recognize from royal marriages today.
18:41Shots of the balcony scene. They don't actually wave yet.
18:46And most importantly, shots of the crowd.
18:50Because this is claimed as a people's wedding, which is the way Bertie writes to Edward.
18:56Edward can't be at the ceremony, but Bertie says it's the people's wedding, not Mary's wedding.
19:05But behind the royal facade, the people's wedding was also a family one.
19:10Most darling David, nothing could have gone off better than the wedding did.
19:19Mary doing her part to perfection.
19:23A very great ordeal before so many people.
19:25Papa and all of us throwing rice and little paper horseshoes and rose leaves after them.
19:32Papa and I felt miserable at parting.
19:36Poor Papa broke down.
19:38But I mercifully managed to keep up as I so much feared Mary would break down.
19:43Mary darling, I'm so glad it all went off so well.
19:50I've been so interested in the pictures in the papers.
19:53And we've got the movie film on board and had it a few nights ago and we were all thrilled.
19:57You just can't think how much I'm longing to get home as I'm so stale and worn out after India.
20:04And it's not very kind for me still to be sailing on east instead of west to England.
20:10Ever your very devoted David.
20:15But when Edward returned to Britain, he would stop following orders and start to stir up scandal.
20:26In November 1922, Britain's newly democratized masses took their chance to use the vote
20:32and made Labour Party history.
20:36The country went to the polls and the results were sensational.
20:41The Conservatives won the day.
20:43And for the first time, Labour became the official opposition.
20:47The rise of Britain's Labour Party would cause concern amongst some members of Britain's aristocracy,
20:53including the royal family.
20:55By 1922, Edward had been touring the empire for nearly three years
20:59and his sister Mary would shortly move to her new husband's estate in Yorkshire
21:04and was expecting her first child.
21:06Darling Mary, I'm thinking of you so much all this time
21:10and know what a relief it will be when it's all over.
21:13The results of the polls were very interesting indeed.
21:17It's no good shutting one's eyes to the fact that the masses,
21:20or the labouring classes, or whatever you like to call them,
21:22are in a state of great unrest and discontent owing to the terrible distress that exists all over the country.
21:29Nobody dreads a Labour government more than I do,
21:32but as long as the upper classes can retain a majority, these labour gains don't matter.
21:37Please burn, as I suppose I'm not allowed any views.
21:40This letter's fascinating because what it shows is the ambivalence of Edward towards the rise of Labour.
21:47On the one hand, he dreads the arrival of a Labour government,
21:52which could be very radical indeed and might threaten the monarchy.
21:56But he sees that it's necessary to do something to quiet the discontents of the masses.
22:03His instruction to burn the letters, since he's not supposed to have any political views, is an interesting one.
22:11He clearly did have views, and these views were developing.
22:16He was warehead both of the Conservative Party and of his own family,
22:20that he had thought through what had happened.
22:23What he is going to say is the royal family has to catch up with that.
22:27We can't pretend that nothing has changed, because everything has changed.
22:36King George V and Queen Mary would project themselves as the embodiment of constitutional monarchy,
22:43rising above politics at all costs, and expected their children to follow suit.
22:48It's really quite clear what King George V was thinking,
22:52essentially about personal survival and the survival of the family,
22:54and the survival of the family business.
22:59And in a time where image was everything for the royals,
23:03the homecoming of their youngest son George would bring controversy to their doorstep.
23:08George was the fun-loving boy.
23:11He was the brightest, he was the most artistic.
23:15George did not want to go into the Navy, but his father was not going to give in on this.
23:20So off he went first of all to Osborne and then to Dartmouth, and George absolutely hated it.
23:30George's arrival on the London scene would coincide with the return of his older brother Edward from his latest Empire tour.
23:37George takes the role of the companion, really sort of rather naughty companion of Edward, and they live it up together, a pair of princes utterly devoted to pleasure.
23:56George and Edward were at the very centre of things. They were, well, the royal bright young things.
24:03George and Edward would form this alliance at the height of the Roaring Twenties society scene, when a generation of young aristocrats attempted to wash away the cares of the country in the nightclubs of London's West End.
24:16The bright young people certainly represented freedom.
24:20They were rebelling against the prescriptions of their parents, and they were rebelling the lives that their parents wanted them to lead.
24:27They were consumed, the men certainly, they were consumed with guilt that they hadn't fought in the First World War.
24:33There was this kind of general sentiment, as the song once put it,
24:37après la guerre, there'll be a good time everywhere.
24:40It would not be out of the question to have a bottle of champagne at everybody's placemat.
24:57If you were rich enough and well-connected enough, that was the kind of life that you led.
25:04Prince George dove head first into this subversive and potentially scandalous scene.
25:11It was so different to the form of life he'd been brought up in.
25:14You know, suddenly here, just outside the palace gates, was this burgeoning, free and easy, socially mixed, alternative world that he could take and leave as he choose.
25:26George did have the most enormous charisma.
25:30He was a great pianist, great dancer, great mimic.
25:34He was really, really good company.
25:37And he made the most of that too, because he was having a ball.
25:43They lived in the middle of a burgeoning celebrity culture, when almost everybody was fair game.
25:48But they are princes of the blood, so they have to be watched.
25:51Lying at the heart of the prince's secretaries and the people who manage them, was the dreadful fear that they might be in a nightclub when it was raided.
26:01George would also push the boundaries with his sexual exploration.
26:06Prince George, he savored every excitement that presented himself, men, women, he didn't discriminate.
26:12He didn't recognise any boundaries to his sexual exploration.
26:19He was sailing very, very close to the wind, because we have to remember that at that time, homosexuality was illegal.
26:30You know, you could go to prison for it.
26:32George V is supposed to have said, I thought men who did that shot themselves.
26:36That was the official, official attitude.
26:42He had a whole string of affairs.
26:45Aristocrats, West End starlets.
26:48There was the banking heiress, Poppy Bearing.
26:52And talk of marriage until George V discovered.
26:55Poppy Bearing was known in society circles as fast and fun.
27:00And evidently not considered Windsor material.
27:05When rumours of Prince George's affair with her surfaced, he found himself on an extended mission with the Royal Navy in China.
27:13Darling Mary, we have been here now nearly a month.
27:20There has been some dancing, but I know very few people here, really, and so haven't been out much.
27:25I've got more or less used to being out here now, but it isn't very amusing on the whole.
27:30Much love, Mary, darling.
27:32Ever your devoted brother, George.
27:34By contrast to his brothers, Bertie cut a far more respectable image.
27:44In 1923, he married Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, who had been a bridesmaid at his sister Mary's wedding.
27:54So Bertie and Elizabeth soon settled down.
27:57Princess Elizabeth was born in 1926, and he just adored her.
28:01Whenever you see the pictures of them at this time, there's that real sort of domestic family feeling that comes through very strongly.
28:10And you can see with shaping who he became in the 1920s.
28:15So while all his other brothers haven't yet settled and having a wild time, Bertie is really going quite a different direction.
28:24Bertie's little brother, Prince George, returned home from his naval tour in China, only to fall back in with a fast crowd and develop worrying habits.
28:36It's rumored that Prince George was taking cocaine and morphine for quite some considerable time.
28:43And if it had come out, he probably wouldn't have ended up in a police court, but the scandal would have been absolutely enormous.
28:53Prince George, who really didn't recognize any boundaries, unlike Edward, who seemed to know when something was actually becoming destructive.
29:01George didn't seem to have anything to alert him to the fact that he was perhaps overstepping the mark, putting himself at risk.
29:08It was irresponsible of George to have become addicted to drugs. Very irresponsible, because the potential for disaster was huge.
29:25This is London calling the British Isles a crisis.
29:28In May 1926, Britain was poised for the biggest labor strike in its history, and the royal family would need to maintain neutrality in the eyes of their people.
29:39All efforts at compromise between the Trade Union Council and the government have failed.
29:44We regret to have to announce that a general strike will begin tomorrow at midnight.
29:49There were armored cars on the streets of London, barbed wire in Hyde Park. The army was called in, you know, to protect food lorries.
29:59And no one quite knew where this was going to lead us.
30:02The left was expecting that it would create revolutionary change, and the right was terrified of it.
30:09The strike would last nine days, and result in over one and a half million workers walking out in protest over low wages and poor working conditions.
30:23George V was extremely careful to maintain royal neutrality in it.
30:33And he warned his son, Edward, that he must do the same.
30:38But Edward was indiscreet.
30:41He got his chauffeur to transport copies of the British Gazette, which talked about gripping strikers by the throat.
30:48And he talked about the strikers as the enemy, showing very clearly whose side he was on.
30:55He's meant to be above it all. He's meant to be a politically neutral figure.
31:00You get the sense that he's champing at the bit, wanting to do things his way, wanting to be a political figure,
31:08when that is not his role as a future king.
31:18Shortly after his transgressions during the strike, Edward found himself off on an extended tour of his father's empire.
31:28In 1928, Edward would arrive in Kenya and be joined for the first time by his little brother, Prince Henry, now a captain in the British Army.
31:38Henry was very much an unlikely traveling companion to Edward. The two of them didn't really get on very well.
31:43But Henry was a great big game hunter.
31:47Henry was five years Edward's junior and the first son of a British monarch to be educated at Eton.
31:54He went on to Trinity College at Cambridge before forging a solid career in the army.
31:59So pleased was the king with Henry that he had just made him the Duke of Gloucester.
32:03Upon their arrival in Kenya, the brothers would separate. But before Henry struck out on safari, he would have a fateful meeting with one of the most notorious women in Kenya, Mrs. Beryl Markham.
32:16She was brought up by her father and brought up by Africans. So as the story goes, she learned to throw a spear and to track lines before she could read and write.
32:27By 18, she'd become the first woman in Africa to have a license to race horses. And in 1936, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
32:38When Prince Henry meets Beryl for the first time, Beryl has been engaged in watching the horses and Prince Henry stumbles across her by accident.
32:52So instead of curtsying, she just naturally does the African greeting of Salaam, holding up her hands in defenselessness.
32:58He absolutely loves it. So this natural woman that can be herself and is not trying to be all simpering in front of him goes down a treat.
33:09To say that Henry at this point is behaving out of character is an enormous understatement.
33:15This is new territory for him. Previous to this, quiet, dull, interested in his army career.
33:21Now he is about town with one of the most wildest women of her time.
33:25By the end of the safari, he is completely in love.
33:31Beryl and Henry parted ways when she returned to Nairobi.
33:36But their love affair was far from over.
33:39In Nairobi, Henry's brother Edward was causing a stir of his own.
33:44From his arrival in Kenya, the Prince of Wales behaved badly.
33:48And he upset not only the upper class Kenyans, but he also upset his entourage.
33:56On the tour with Edward was Alan Lassels, nicknamed Tommy, one of the king's most trustworthy courtiers and a veteran minder of the Prince of Wales.
34:04Tommy Lassels had seen the selfishness, he'd seen the lack of self-control, and he decided that Edward would never improve, that nothing he, Tommy, could do was going to make the blind bit of difference.
34:21So anything he was doing was basically covering up for Edward.
34:27It was a pretty desperate position.
34:29This is from Tommy Lassels.
34:34In my considered opinion, the heir apparent in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was rapidly going to the devil.
34:46And unless he mended his ways, would soon become no fit wearer of the British crown.
34:52And Edward's ability to lead the monarchy was about to take center stage.
34:58George V suddenly fell gravely ill to the extent that his life was in danger.
35:05And Edward and his brother were called back to London.
35:09So, Baldwin writes to Edward in extraordinarily brutal, direct and blunt terms for a politician writing to the heir to the throne.
35:22I suggest that you should both return home at once.
35:26We hope it may go well, but if not, and you have made no attempt to return, it will profoundly shock public opinion.
35:35So, Henry was very distressed. He says, I'm so distressed, I'm proceeding home as soon as possible, which is the reaction you expect.
35:44Edward said, no, we're being taken for mugs. This is just a trick of Baldwin. I don't really believe this.
35:50And this caused very serious distress to Tommy Lassels, who said to him, sir, the king may be dying, and if that doesn't mean anything to you, it means a great deal to us.
36:01And Edward ignored that and went off to complete the seduction of the wife of a district commissioner.
36:12Five days after receiving Baldwin's telegram, Edward finally boarded a ship to return to Britain.
36:18There's their father, seriously ill. The doctor's not quite sure whether he's going to pull through, and there are all sorts of undercurrents, attentions.
36:32All eyes are on Edward, you know, how is he going to behave? Is he going to put his past behind him and become the king that the country needs?
36:50Their father was also their king. He was emperor of India. You know, he was establishment. He was the institution. And the idea that he was likely to die would have been really rather shocking for them.
37:11At this stage in her life, Mary, having gone from a very cloistered upbringing to being the dutiful daughter who marries, is suddenly faced with this terrifying prospect that her father might be about to die.
37:25And this means that her brother will become king. And the question must have been for her, is he even fit for the job?
37:34She knows full well how he feels, how much resentment he has for the yoke of monarchy.
37:41Edward was leading this hedonistic lifestyle. Henry was in the middle of an affair, which could have caused the complete scandal. George was an explosion waiting to happen.
37:55After the drama surrounding the king's illness, prompting Henry and Edward's return home from Kenya, their father would make a gradual recovery after weeks of worry.
38:12My darling George, thank goodness Papa is making satisfactory progress the last three days, but he was very bad on Sunday night, and we have had a terribly anxious time. Poor Mama. I'm thankful to be here to help her at this time.
38:29With his father convalescing out of London, Prince Henry would set about rekindling his African love affair with Mrs. Beryl Markham on the very doorstep of Buckingham Palace.
38:45Prince Henry is quite reckless and daring himself at this point. He has Beryl installed in a corner suite in the Grosvenor Hotel, and in effect, he is living openly with Beryl Markham.
39:01Why is this so shocking? Beryl is twice married, she's a colonialist, she's a commoner, and she is, at this point, eight months pregnant.
39:13The fact that he was a royal prince who might have fathered an illegitimate child was fantastic news to those people who wanted a really good story about the royal family.
39:23But those that knew the situation well worked out that it was not possible that Prince Henry could be the father. The dates just didn't match.
39:34The press were about to report an entirely different royal story.
39:40Edward, heir to the throne, would embark on an unprecedented tour, and one that would court controversy.
39:47Edward was going to a mining community just three years after the general strike, three years after mining communities had been decimated.
39:55Well, there was desperate poverty and anger of the sort that members of the royal family didn't normally see. And when they did see them, they trusted the politicians to deal with it.
40:10Edward would spend three days visiting some of the most impoverished and politicized communities in the country.
40:17In a way which his dominion to us never did, it acquires a political dimension.
40:25It's addressing an issue which the government would hope would go away.
40:32They didn't have any real policy for dealing with poverty and unemployment. They were just living with the consequences.
40:40Edward's tour becomes a big media event. There is no big cordon round him, and some people come through and do address him.
40:52He is quite visibly shocked at the conditions under which people were living, and he says so pretty much publicly.
41:02Edward's big phrase to describe what he sees is, perfectly damnable conditions.
41:09That is getting pretty close to a direct political statement by a member of the royal family.
41:18He's in effect saying, we're looking at economic oppression. We are looking at people being treated worse than you would treat animals.
41:30He was looking at these people in a way that his father could not have done.
41:36And Edward's comments would catch the attention of then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
41:43The political impact of making these remarks are quite severe because the BBC picks it up and runs with it.
41:51Huge phalanx of newspaper correspondents who are trailing around him, pick it up, it's front page news.
41:57And Prime Minister Baldwin has to defend almost indefensible in Parliament as a result.
42:06Edward was starting to look really quite different to George V.
42:11I don't think there is any record of George V being at all interested in unemployment or even the economy.
42:18Here was Edward, the heir to the throne, showing himself interested not just in social questions, but a social point on which the government was really looking very, very vulnerable indeed.
42:37Edward's tour to Northumberland and what he says comes at a very, very bad time for Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government.
42:47They will soon be fighting a general election where the big issue is unemployment and the economic problems of the country.
42:57A few months later, Baldwin's Conservative Party would lose the election and nearly a third of their seats to the Labour Party.
43:06Baldwin and Edward's former private secretary, Lassels, had made their views on Edward infinitely clear.
43:14I can't help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him and to the country would be for him to break his neck.
43:22God forgive me, said Baldwin, I have often thought the same.
43:28Feelings were running high in deprived areas.
43:33There were shouts of, we don't want no royal parasites, give us food, we don't want no royal parasites.
43:39Seeing all his siblings conform made Edward more determined to rebel.
43:46Have you heard of Mrs. Simpson? I expect not, but you will.
43:51This has absolutely destroyed them.
43:54It has sent a tidal wave through this family.