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00:01For the royals, tradition is everything.
00:04Monarchy is about the past, the present, and the future,
00:07and tradition is absolutely central to that.
00:10Spectacular.
00:11All of the parading, the history, it's almost a fairytale thing.
00:15Sacred.
00:16If you were royal, you had been chosen by God and very British.
00:21Meeting the queen is an experience
00:24that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives.
00:28Now we venture behind palace walls into the riches beyond.
00:33Not all royal jewels are the crown jewels.
00:35We know that this was a gift of love.
00:38And delve deep into rare royal records.
00:42Written in early January 1642.
00:44It's the equivalent of a live blog.
00:47This is right in the eye of the storm.
00:49To discover the untold secrets of Britain's most loved
00:52and mysterious royal traditions.
00:55He liked to show that he could control nature.
00:58It's a rich royal heritage steeped in war, intrigue, and scandal.
01:04In order to get your face on this wall, you had to be somebody.
01:08Perhaps even a royal mistress.
01:10But at its heart is a deep-seated duty to the nation.
01:14Queen Elizabeth II met more people than anybody else in history,
01:19no matter what the task.
01:21As I heard him, I thought,
01:23Oh, you're not gonna like that, Charles, are you?
01:25This is how, for over a thousand years,
01:27the royals have shaped the history and traditions we know today.
01:32Tradition is what actually keeps them in power.
01:36It wouldn't be Britain if we didn't have these sorts of things.
01:39These are the secrets of the royal traditions.
01:51This time, the strict royal rules of succession.
01:54I too now solemnly pledge myself.
01:57That ensure a smooth transition from one monarch to the next.
02:01From the first broadcast he made that evening,
02:04we all viewed him, not as prince anymore, but as king.
02:07The extravagant royal tradition that cost a king his head.
02:11He wanted to send a message,
02:13I'm here and I'm powerful.
02:15And the gruesome rituals of royal medicine.
02:18Plunging him into icy cold baths,
02:21or rub corsic soda onto his legs,
02:23or hot glass cups on his back.
02:26For centuries, Britain's king or queen
02:31has presided over one of the United Kingdom's most meaningful
02:36and mysterious royal traditions.
02:41The state opening of parliament.
02:43It is one of the, I think, most iconic spectacles
02:47that we have in Britain nowadays.
02:49The state opening of parliament is all about pomp and circumstance.
02:55The carriage ride from Buckingham Palace to parliament.
03:00The theatre of Black Rod going through to the House of Commons.
03:10It's the sort of thing you don't really see anywhere else in the world.
03:16Some of the traditions are seriously wacky.
03:23Today, the rituals might look a little bizarre,
03:26but they're rooted in a thousand-year-long bond
03:29between the monarch and parliament.
03:32It goes back to at least Anglo-Saxon times,
03:35when the sovereign would regularly turn to a trusted group of bishops
03:39and bigwigs for advice.
03:42These ad hoc chinwags later came to be known as Pali's.
03:47The word parliament has its origins in Pali to discuss,
03:51and that goes all the way back to Norman times.
03:55But parliament really becomes a political force
04:00to be reckoned with during the Tudor period.
04:04Henry VIII really started this tradition of processing to parliament
04:09because he appreciated, perhaps more than any other monarch,
04:14the power of display.
04:16You had to show off your magnificence.
04:18You had to make yourself the focus of public attention
04:22and also really put your stamp on the government.
04:27Yes, parliament might be meeting to agree your laws
04:31or to vote you taxation, but you're the one in charge.
04:37But a 380-year-old document kept at the National Archives
04:41reveals this absolute power didn't last for long.
04:45And when royal control ended,
04:49it would give us one of the most iconic traditions
04:51in the state opening of parliament.
04:54This document's absolutely fascinating,
04:56written in early January 1642.
04:58It's the equivalent of a live blog,
05:01and you can see his annotations where he's scored stuff through,
05:04but he's absolutely got the gist of the action.
05:09In 1642, King Charles I was on a collision course with parliament.
05:14He believed five MPs had committed treason
05:18by colluding with his Scottish enemies.
05:21So what does the king do?
05:22He takes himself to parliament.
05:24He actually sits in the speaker's chair and he says,
05:27therefore I am come to tell you that I must have them.
05:31So pretty threatening language,
05:33but very quickly he realises he's arrived too late.
05:36They've escaped through the back door of Westminster Palace,
05:39escaped in a boat and he says,
05:41since I see all the birds are flown,
05:45I do expect from you that you shall find them.
05:49Sozme, you're not going to be able to get your hands on those five MPs.
05:53And not only have all the king's birds flown,
05:55but most of his power has flown with them.
05:59He's been exposed not only as a man of violent and unconstitutional intent,
06:05but also a pretty impotent king.
06:08This confrontation ignited a civil war that would consume the kingdom for nearly a decade.
06:15It becomes one of the bloodiest conflicts in English and Welsh history
06:21to give an idea of just how brutal it was.
06:24Adjusted for population sizes,
06:27the civil wars kill a higher percentage of the Welsh and English population
06:31than the First World War.
06:33Among the dead was the king himself.
06:36On the 30th of January, 1649,
06:39Charles I paid the ultimate price for challenging the power of Parliament
06:44when he was beheaded just metres from the House of Commons.
06:49So when his son, Charles II, was restored to the throne a decade later,
06:54he set out to keep the politicians firmly on side.
06:59He's a much more pragmatic figure than his father.
07:02He knows that this can no longer be an oppositional relationship,
07:05it has to be one that works together.
07:08This is why, three centuries later,
07:10the monarch can never enter the House of Commons,
07:13and why even their messenger, known as the Usher of the Black Rod,
07:18is ceremonially barred.
07:20Take the door.
07:23Instead, they must knock three times with the ebony staff of office
07:28from which they get their name.
07:30Black Rod, take the door.
07:33Only then is Black Rod admitted
07:35to summon the MPs to the monarch's speech in the House of Lords.
07:40Mr Speaker, the king commands his honourable house
07:43to attend his majesty immediately in the House of Cairns.
07:47It's all part of a political theatre that says what happened in the 1640s
07:55does not happen again,
07:56and the privileges of the House of Commons
07:59are things that no monarch can trample upon.
08:02So, yes, it looks like silly costumes and lots of gold carriages,
08:08but in fact, it really does display what it means for our democracy today,
08:13which is hugely important.
08:15The ritual of the state opening of Parliament is a regular occurrence,
08:25but some royal traditions might only be witnessed once or twice in a lifetime.
08:30I speak to you today with feelings of profound sorrow.
08:35And one of the most important is the seamless succession from one monarch to the next.
08:41When our late queen died, there was a plan for a funeral
08:46and a plan for the next succession.
08:48It's all set in concrete.
08:50The day after his mother's passing, the new King Charles spoke to the nation,
08:55reassuring them that the updated line of succession was already in place.
09:00I, too, now solemnly pledged myself.
09:04He made sure any ambiguity about his title,
09:08his son's title was cleared up swiftly.
09:11They weren't going to wait for an investiture.
09:13Today, I am proud to create him Prince of Wales.
09:18Prince William was now Prince of Wales, next in line.
09:22All of this was done very, very smoothly.
09:25Some people were quite surprised at how incredibly smooth it was.
09:29From the first broadcast he made that evening.
09:32We all viewed him, not as prince anymore, but as king.
09:37But for the royals, the seamless transfer of power was a hard-won tradition.
09:42Learned from the lessons of a bitter, and sometimes bloody, history of botched successions.
09:48Until very recent times, succession wasn't guaranteed.
09:54Ill health, illness and disease was no respecter of royalty.
10:02When Queen Anne died at Kensington Palace in 1714,
10:06the ruling Stuart dynasty discovered this the hard way.
10:10Queen Anne only had one surviving son after 17 pregnancies.
10:15And unfortunately, he died after his 11th birthday.
10:19And with that, the whole Stuart line died with him.
10:23To keep the crown in the family, and keep the Stuart's Catholic cousins off the throne,
10:28Parliament dredged up a distant German relative and shipped him over,
10:33to be crowned George I.
10:40George I turns up with all the charm of a wart.
10:43I mean, no one is happy to see him.
10:45He can speak fluent English.
10:49Any English he does speak is with a very, very heavy accent.
10:52He makes no secret of the fact that he prefers Hanover to Britain.
10:55He is cold.
10:57He is reticent.
10:58All that he has going for him is that he's a Protestant and not a very devout one.
11:03The public didn't much want a German on the throne.
11:06And Anne not having that smooth line of succession meant that we ended up with basically the worst of all cases.
11:12A century later, when a republic was a viable option, the monarchy mightn't have survived.
11:17Which is why today, every element of the succession is planned years, if not decades, in advance.
11:24There's always placed, unspoken or otherwise,
11:27huge pressure of making sure that you have got your successors lined up like ducks in a row.
11:36But sometimes protecting those ducks, and that line of succession,
11:41comes at the expense of a normal family life.
11:44You have a very morbid tradition of making sure that people who are next to each other in the line of succession
11:50don't travel on the same plane.
11:53According to this tradition, the first and second in line to the throne must travel on separate planes
12:00once the number two turns 12.
12:03Now that George is 12, we're waiting to see, actually, whether William does adhere to this rule, this tradition.
12:09I think he will largely have to stick to it.
12:13But, you know, if you're a family, you want to go together.
12:16You know, you want to get on the same plane.
12:18It's pants, really, isn't it?
12:21Coming up, the time-honoured royal tradition of keeping secrets.
12:26They didn't even tell the king what was wrong with him.
12:29The awkward rituals that sustain our democracy.
12:32As I heard him speak, I thought, oh, you're not going to like that, Charles, are you?
12:37And the royal tradition that almost prevented a planet from becoming the butt of playground jokes.
12:42So, schoolchildren have had a planet whose name they can laugh about for centuries.
12:56Some royal traditions are rarely seen.
13:00But there's one that's almost impossible to escape.
13:04Royal names plastered on buildings, streets and pubs.
13:09You can't get away from them, really, can you?
13:11They're everywhere, all of the Queen Vic, the Crown, the Royal Oak.
13:15If you look, I think the top four most popular pub names in Britain have a royal genesis.
13:21Of course, sometimes it can land you in hot water.
13:24Using a royal name requires careful handling.
13:29The use has to be dignified and appropriate.
13:34Which is why the Cabinet Office, at the heart of the British government, keeps a close watch over their use.
13:41The best example of it not being really easy to name anything after a royal or to call anything royal
13:48is Harry and Meghan not being allowed their royal Sussex website.
13:54In March 2020, the couple formally stepped down from royal duties.
14:00Prompting Buckingham Palace and the Cabinet Office to insist that as non-working royals,
14:06they no longer use the word royal on any branding or media.
14:10But if you can prove there is a valid connection,
14:14then you may well be granted permission to christen your road, your chapel
14:20or indeed your communal garden potato, King Edward Potatoes.
14:26Those fine spuds, named of course in the coronation year.
14:30From the humble spud to the mighty cruise ship,
14:35a royal name bestows glamour and the chance of royal favour.
14:40It has that little sprinkle of magic, the little flavour of royalty.
14:45On the tip of everyone's tongue and at the heart of every high street,
14:49the tradition has woven the royal family into the fabric of British life.
14:54Whether it's a group or an organisation or a building,
14:57having things named after them helps leave a much stronger legacy
15:00than us normal people might be able to.
15:02And the grander the thing, the longer the legacy.
15:07New York, for example, is named after the Duke of York,
15:11who became James II.
15:13Georgia, Augusta.
15:15Yeah, these are places in the United States
15:17which are named after British royals.
15:19Queensland in Australia.
15:22Even the solar system nearly had its own royal tribute.
15:26In 1781, astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet
15:32during the reign of George III.
15:35His original loyal and patriotic instinct was to name it after his king,
15:40so the planet would have been called Georgium.
15:43But he's prohibited from doing this,
15:46because planets, it was said, must have classical names.
15:51Eventually, the gods of Roman or Greek mythology won out.
15:55It's proof that sometimes even royal traditions don't reign supreme,
16:00and the result was a cosmic bum joke.
16:03We were gifted Uranus.
16:06So rather than having Georgium,
16:09school children have had a planet whose name they can laugh about for centuries.
16:12But other royal traditions have stood the test of time.
16:22The state opening of parliament happens like clockwork
16:25at the start of every new parliamentary year.
16:28It's pageantry and politics all mixed up together.
16:31There's a lot of symbolism that goes back centuries.
16:36And the most powerful symbol of all is, without doubt, the crown.
16:41It's the only occasion where the crown is worn on a regular basis,
16:45the state opening of parliament.
16:47It's not St. Edward's crown,
16:49which is the one that the monarch is actually crowned with.
16:51It's the imperial state crown.
16:53That is a symbol of the United Kingdom.
16:57So important is the crown to the ceremony,
17:00it even travels in its own transport.
17:03Stranger still, the crown's colourful guards
17:06are the king's barge master and watermen.
17:10As their name suggests, they are bargemen.
17:13They are supposed to be on the water accompanying royalty.
17:16The imperial state crown is part of the crown jewels,
17:20which have been kept under guard in the Tower of London
17:23for over 300 years.
17:25And the Tower of London, like the Houses of Parliament,
17:28is, of course, on the River Thames.
17:31It's a reminder of times gone by when actually the river
17:34was the safest, most comfortable route for royals to travel.
17:38And once it's arrived safely,
17:40the crown takes centre stage during the ceremony,
17:43especially when the monarch is unable to attend.
17:46During Elizabeth II's long reign,
17:48when she was in her 90s and struggling with mobility issues,
17:51the Prince of Wales, the future Charles III,
17:54stepped in and would deliver the speech,
17:56but would always be careful to show
17:58that he was fulfilling this for his mother,
18:01not in lieu of his mother.
18:03The late queen's speech may have been read by the prince,
18:06but it was the crown, not the prince,
18:09that represented the queen.
18:11The crown is always present at the state opening,
18:14so whether the monarch wears it or not,
18:16the crown is present.
18:18But while the crown and the pomp and pageantry
18:21suggest the monarch wields authority,
18:24the tradition at the heart of proceedings
18:26makes it clear this power is purely symbolic.
18:29So the queen's speech, or the king's speech,
18:32that is not written by the monarch,
18:34that is written by the prime minister.
18:36And it's presented to the monarch
18:40as a fait accompli.
18:42And that means the monarch sometimes
18:44has to announce government policies
18:46they find hard to stomach.
18:48Her Majesty's ministers will encourage
18:51agricultural and scientific innovation at home.
18:55As I heard him speak, I thought,
18:57oh, you're not going to like that, Charles, are you?
18:59Now, I remember sitting with Charles at Highgrove
19:01on one occasion when he invited me there,
19:03and we were having tea, and he just went on and on
19:06about genetic modification of crops
19:08and how violently against it he was.
19:11Legislation will unlock the potential
19:14of new technologies to promote sustainable
19:18and efficient farming and food production.
19:21In other words, genetic engineering.
19:23So when he had to say those words
19:25on behalf of his government, I thought,
19:27oh, gosh, that must grate.
19:29But that's what he has to do.
19:30It would be highly unusual for the king
19:33to go back to the prime minister and say,
19:35can we just change sentence three?
19:37It just doesn't happen.
19:39And that's because since Charles I lost his head,
19:43political power has rested with the people's
19:45elected representatives, not the unelected monarch.
19:49The opening of parliament tells us in the 21st century
19:53that even though we have all of the trappings of royalty,
19:57royalty does not hold political power.
20:00The voters hold political power.
20:02It is the clearest illustration that there is a separation
20:06between monarchy and parliament and politics,
20:09that he is above politics,
20:11but he must do the bidding of his government.
20:13But beyond the confines of the commons,
20:18the royals are increasingly breaking with tradition
20:21and speaking more openly than ever before.
20:24A new tradition is being born
20:26of being a bit more touchy-feely,
20:29bit more in touch with their emotions,
20:31a bit more candid with the public.
20:33In early 2024,
20:36King Charles and the Princess of Wales
20:38went public with serious health diagnoses.
20:43This new tradition of openness
20:45is a radical departure from previous royal protocol.
20:50Historically, the royal family never admitted to ill health.
20:54If you were royal,
20:55you had basically been chosen by God
20:58to be their divine embodiment here on this earth.
21:02If you admitted to ill health of any kind,
21:04it was a sign of weakness, fallibility,
21:07not being able to govern
21:08and definitely not being part God.
21:11And it wasn't just the public that were kept in the dark.
21:15Sometimes the monarch didn't know either.
21:17George VI had a lung cancer operation
21:21and he had either the whole or part of his lung removed.
21:24Um, and obviously the surgeons
21:26are perfectly well aware of what was going on,
21:28but he wasn't. He wasn't told.
21:29This private secretary said,
21:30Poor fellow. He doesn't really know what's wrong with him.
21:33You know, they didn't even tell the king what was wrong with him.
21:36He was prone to anxiety.
21:37I think they felt that if they told him he had the big C,
21:39that would be the end.
21:40So there was utter secrecy even from the man himself,
21:43which is bizarre.
21:45Today, the royals have flipped the script,
21:48swapping secrecy for transparency.
21:51The royal family have done an absolute about turn on this tradition.
21:57Now they talk about their ailments.
22:00They talk about receiving treatment.
22:01They pay tribute to the NHS and doctors and nurses.
22:06There's been a sea change in the way the public perceive illness.
22:11We now live in the Instagram age when you're considered brave
22:16if you share, not weak because you're sharing.
22:21And this new tradition of openness has given us the nudge many of us needed.
22:27The King's public announcement sent NHS website searches
22:31for cancer symptoms soaring by over 50%.
22:36Everyone starts Googling.
22:37People book in for their own check-ups
22:40and actually the nation's health sees an uptick.
22:45Coming up, the royal tradition of keeping secrets
22:49and its toxic consequences.
22:51Wild conspiracy theories develop that the king's secretly being abused
22:56or tortured by members of his family.
22:58The royal custom of conspicuous consumption.
23:01You name it, they've got it.
23:02And if they didn't have it, they made it quite clear they wanted it.
23:05And the younger royals overturning centuries of tradition.
23:09They are putting themselves at risk of being laughed at by the tabloids,
23:12the great enemy of the British royal family.
23:15It's a huge gamble, a huge risk.
23:21Royal traditions come in many forms.
23:26Some are symbolic, others practical.
23:29But there's one royal tradition that's neither duty nor necessity.
23:34It's dedicated to pleasure, prestige and the pursuit of beauty.
23:39The tradition of collecting art.
23:42There's hundreds of years' worth of deep pockets
23:46and extraordinary artistic connections.
23:49I mean, you name it, they've got it.
23:51And if they didn't have it, they made it quite clear they wanted it.
23:54The result is the royal collection.
23:57A treasure trove of more than a million items,
24:00with an estimated value of over ten billion pounds.
24:04I would have it all to myself some days.
24:06I'd take the queen's tea tray on a daily basis
24:09and pass Charles I by Van Dyck.
24:14A Vermeer in the corner of the lady at her Virginals playing the piano.
24:20And I used to stand there and look at them thinking,
24:24these are priceless treasures.
24:26You've got Vermeers and Canalettos and Rubens.
24:32But you've also got Warhol and Lucian Freud.
24:36So it's both about the past and about the present.
24:41It's some of the greatest art of the last 500 years.
24:45But despite its name, the royal collection
24:49doesn't actually belong to the royal family.
24:51It belongs to the nation.
24:54The monarch can't sell things in the royal collection.
24:57And although they're on display in royal palaces,
25:01they're all royal palaces which are open to the public.
25:04So yes, it's part of the tradition of the monarchy,
25:07but these are our works of art, not the king's works of art.
25:14Kensington Palace is home to some of the collection's finest artworks,
25:18including a piece that reveals the origins
25:21of this most decadent of royal traditions.
25:25Dominating the king's gallery
25:27is a version of a spectacular 1633 portrait
25:31of King Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck.
25:36The painting's huge.
25:37It takes up most of the wall,
25:38and you just have to think about how long this would have taken
25:41to have painted by van Dyck, and then also how much it cost.
25:44The scale of the piece really just shows it was there for impact.
25:49Charles commissioned it because he wanted to send a message,
25:52I'm here, and I'm powerful.
25:55Charles was keenly aware of the power of art.
25:58He really could see how useful of a tool it could be
26:01to present this image to the people of a king who knew what he was doing,
26:05was in charge, and was there to protect and defend his nation.
26:09Which is why the king embarked on one of the most extravagant shopping sprees
26:14in royal history.
26:16We know that between 1636 and 1638,
26:19Charles I actually acquired 500 paintings,
26:22and by the time of his death in 1649,
26:25there were over 1,500 paintings in his collection.
26:28Splurging tens of millions of pounds in today's money,
26:32the king snapped up works by Renaissance big hitters
26:35like Titian and Raphael,
26:37and commissioned cutting-edge contemporary artists
26:40like Rembrandt and Rubens.
26:43In the process, he established a new royal tradition.
26:47One thing that we can actually commend Charles I for
26:50is beginning the tradition of royal art collecting.
26:53It really wasn't a common or a consistent theme in monarchs before him.
26:58So without Charles I, there would be no royal collection.
27:02But the king took this new tradition too far.
27:06As his appetite for art outgrew the royal purse,
27:09he forced Parliament and the public to bankroll his obsession.
27:14He spent so much time focused on the sort of the trappings of monarchy,
27:19the displays of monarchy,
27:21and he neglected the heart of monarchy,
27:24which was his relationship with Parliament,
27:28and that would have fatal consequences.
27:32In 1649, the king was condemned to death by a parliamentary court.
27:37On his way to the scaffold,
27:39he passed beneath his most extravagant commission,
27:43Rubens' spectacular banqueting house ceiling.
27:46It seemed the tradition of royal art collection had died with the king.
27:52The collection was split up.
27:54Much of it sold off across Europe.
27:57But a decade later,
27:59Charles II set out to rekindle the tradition his father had started.
28:04Charles II didn't quite manage to get back all of his father's collection,
28:09but he also collected older art himself, such as Leonardo da Vinci.
28:16And that's a tradition that then continues during later royal dynasty,
28:22which means that today the royal collection is vast.
28:25It's one of the best, most magnificent art collections in the world.
28:32For the royals, displaying their wealth is a deep-rooted tradition.
28:35But when it comes to discussing their health, the rules are very different.
28:41There's a tradition of British stoicism, royal self-containment.
28:50You're supposed to never admit to weakness of any kind.
28:54And there's one taboo that's even greater than talking about physical ill health,
28:58particularly in the royal family, and that's mental health.
29:04And inside the picture-perfect Kew Palace lies the ugly reality of this long-standing royal taboo.
29:12It was here in 1788 that King George III was confined,
29:18after suffering years of what was then known as madness.
29:22And where his doctors kept a daily record.
29:25We see a sort of diary listing his symptoms, his treatments.
29:32There's lots of accounts of him talking himself hoarse,
29:35frothing at the mouth, really demented.
29:38And you can see that meticulously logged is the need to restrain him
29:42on almost every one of those days, sometimes a couple of times.
29:46Walked about the room, slept in his chair, slept only two and a half hours.
29:56I mean, really, he is raging.
29:58But the restraint is what stands out, really.
30:01This morning, hear what the physicians have to say, but soon lost in reverie.
30:06So we have a man who's sleeping, he's restrained quite a lot at the time,
30:12or he's away with the fairies.
30:14The cause of the King's illness was, and remains, a mystery.
30:19The general consensus today may have been that he suffered from a bipolar disorder.
30:25We still don't know. All we can be certain of is that it caused him a great amount of mental anguish.
30:32But whatever the cause, his doctor's so-called cures can only have made his condition worse.
30:39They thought that they could snap him out of it by plunging him into icy cold baths,
30:44or rub corsic soda onto his legs to get blisters going on,
30:48or hot glass cups on his back to, you know, cause it to swell up.
30:52The physical pain was thought to help him recover or snap him out of this delirium.
30:57Locked inside these stately rooms,
30:59the British King endured a barrage of barbaric and abusive treatments.
31:04And if he did something that was perceived to be bad,
31:08he would be put in a straitjacket.
31:11And if he ate up all his dinner and was a good boy,
31:14he got to go into his library and look at a book for an hour.
31:17Now, this is a grown man who is clearly vulnerable,
31:21and it just really seems quite cruel from today's point of view
31:24to know that he went through those treatments.
31:29I really just feel for George III, knowing that this is what was going on,
31:33to who was supposed to be the leader of the country.
31:36According to royal tradition, news of the King's illness was kept firmly under wraps.
31:42It was a case of not wanting to show weakness within the monarchy,
31:45because that, of course, could lead to the whole system falling down.
31:48But in the absence of facts, rumours ran riot.
31:53Wild conspiracy theories develop that his wife, Queen Charlotte,
31:58is in league with the Prime Minister to kill the King and seize control of the government,
32:03that the King's secretly being abused or tortured by members of his family.
32:06Writers make up stories.
32:09They say that he shakes hands with a great oak in Windsor Park
32:13and thinks it's the King of Prussia, for example,
32:16that he pulls down his britches and exposes his bottom to prove that he doesn't have gout,
32:22that he runs a race with a horse. These are all invented stories.
32:25Royal illness, secrecy, and a void filled by wild speculation
32:30would all sound strangely familiar to today's royal family.
32:35If you look at what happened in social media and in public speculation
32:40just before the Princess of Wales' recent announcement that she was battling with cancer,
32:45it's not too dissimilar to the way in which the public rumour mill went into overdrive
32:51with George III's ill health and the speculation was rampant and wildly inaccurate.
32:57Today, 200 years later, a new generation of royals are determined to overturn this outdated royal tradition
33:07and break the taboo surrounding mental health.
33:11When Catherine, Harry and I launched Heads Together,
33:14it is fair to say that we were ambitious about what it could achieve.
33:18William, Harry and Kate have made it a mission to talk about mental health
33:23and to make that one of the cornerstones of their campaigning, to say,
33:28look, this is very difficult. Life is hard. It's okay to admit to not being 100% your best self.
33:36It's okay to seek help.
33:42William and Harry, to an extent, took the cue from their mother in championing mental health issues
33:46because you remember that Diana stood up and spoke openly about bulimia.
33:52She didn't actually say, look, I've got it, but the inference was there.
33:56And she also championed other charities to do with mental health.
34:00So I think they learnt from their mum that this was something that perhaps we should broach more publicly, more openly.
34:08But as Diana knew all too well, breaking with royal tradition can be risky.
34:14For William or Kate or Harry to say, I had therapy, I wasn't dealing with this or that very well,
34:22it makes them enormously vulnerable.
34:24They are putting themselves at risk of being laughed at by the tabloids,
34:28the great enemy of the British royal family.
34:29And so they are taking a huge, huge gamble when they say, look, this is something I'm going to talk about
34:35because it's something that lots of people go through all the time.
34:40I really take my hat off to all three of them on this.
34:44I think they have changed the way we think about our mental health and the stigma's gone now.
34:50We know that it's vital to protect and promote our mental health and our mental wellbeing.
34:55And this is very much down to the two princes and the princess.
35:03Coming up, a brush with royal tradition.
35:06There's definitely an artist that's trained within the royal family.
35:10And traditions that take their toll.
35:12Oh, Victoria!
35:14Little Victoria, come and let me cuddle you.
35:16The state opening of Parliament.
35:26With its curious blend of pageantry and politics.
35:30It's one of the most magnificent and meaningful of all royal traditions.
35:35It's a reminder that we have a constitutional monarch,
35:38that we have the Lords and the Commons operating together.
35:40and it's a real clear display of how these different sides of democracy work together.
35:47Monarchy and Parliament are the two pillars of British government.
35:52Their ancient bond is a tradition that monarchs neglect at their peril.
35:57There are many occasions when the monarch is allowed not to attend the state opening in Parliament.
36:04And indeed, hasn't done so.
36:07Linked to ill health.
36:09Occasionally poor weather.
36:11But also death in the family.
36:14Childbirth.
36:15At such times, the next in line, or a senior lord, step in to ensure the tradition is upheld.
36:22It's made very clear that they are acting as a proxy.
36:26There's an etiquette that's used to underscore this is a caretaking move.
36:31If a monarch neglects this tradition and fails to attend or provide a proxy,
36:37it's far more than simply a breach of etiquette.
36:40It threatens the delicate balance between Crown and Parliament.
36:43In 1862, devastated by the death of her beloved consort Prince Albert,
36:53the grief-stricken Queen Victoria refused to attend the state opening of Parliament.
36:59People forgive her absence from the opening of Parliament in 1862.
37:04She is the widow of Windsor.
37:06She's draped in black.
37:08She's absolutely grief-struck.
37:10But it becomes an increasing crisis when she's nowhere to be seen in 63, in 64.
37:21Questions are being asked.
37:23Throughout their marriage, Albert stayed close by the Queen's side at the state opening of Parliament.
37:28So when he dies, she is left literally feeling she cannot possibly do this, because she hasn't done it alone for so long.
37:38But public sympathy soon turned to resentment, as Victoria repeatedly refused to respect royal tradition.
37:47She didn't have the excuse of being unwell or in any other way incapacitated from doing her job.
37:54So critics could point to it as an example of willful neglect.
37:59Victoria makes the situation even more difficult through the fact that she doesn't want to perform these functions.
38:06But she also doesn't want to delegate them to her eldest son, the Prince of Wales.
38:10They are either hers to perform or nobody's.
38:13Even supporters of the monarchy feel that Victoria is derelict in her duty and that despite her heartbreak, she is still receiving the privileges, the luxuries and the prominence that come with the crown.
38:26So she is going to have to accept the duty that comes with it as well.
38:30Anti-monarchist newspapers and clubs began appearing across the country.
38:37And radical politicians called for the Queen to abdicate.
38:41There is no doubt that her behaviour in the 1860s and into the early 1870s does cause a crisis for the monarchy.
38:48Five years after Albert's death, Victoria was finally persuaded to put in a rare appearance at the state opening of Parliament.
38:56If you read her diary and personal accounts of how she felt opening Parliament for the first time since her husband's death, in modern eyes, what she's describing sounds very like a severe anxiety attack.
39:10She wrote,
39:13When I entered the house, which was very full, I felt I should faint. All was silent and all eyes fixed upon me.
39:23And there I sat, alone. Oh, Victoria. Little Victoria, come and let me cuddle you.
39:31You feel that sympathy for her. Can you imagine all those smelly old men staring at this poor, grief-stricken Queen, who's really having what we'd call nowadays a panic attack?
39:44So anxious was the Queen, she only attended the state opening of Parliament six times during the remaining 35 years of her reign.
39:53And she never again read the Queen's speech, delegating it instead to the Lord Chancellor.
40:05Traditionally, in times of stress, the royal family have often turned to art for comfort, enjoying their dazzling collection of paintings and treasures,
40:14and sometimes even picking up the paintbrush themselves.
40:19There's definitely an artistic strain within the royal family.
40:23Princess Louise, Victoria's sixth child, was a very accomplished artist and sculptress, studied at what's now the Royal College of Art, which was considered very radical for her time.
40:33There's a statue made by Princess Louise of her mother, Queen Victoria, which is in pride of place outside Kensington Palace, and it's a very, very fine statue.
40:44Queen Victoria herself, no mean draughts woman, and quite a good watercolourist.
40:51So there is definitely talent in the family.
40:54And today, the royal paintbrush is back in action in the King's hands.
40:59There have been exhibitions of his painting, and he's really quite good, I think, at them.
41:03For Charles, it seems painting is more than just a family tradition.
41:08I think for Charles, painting is almost a therapy.
41:11Diana once told me, actually, she felt, you know, she doubted whether he was cut out to be or would be happy in the top job, as she called it, being king.
41:22She said, you know, I just think he would be so much happier sitting in Tuscany painting.
41:27From opening parliament, to collecting treasures, lending their name, to protecting their successors.
41:41For the royal family, following tradition is more than simply habit.
41:48It's a strategy, a way of securing the monarchy's survival and steadying the nation.
41:54The role that the royal family see themselves in is one of guiding good ship Great Britain through sometimes choppy waters and coming out the other side.
42:06And a lot of the time, it means holding onto your history, flaunting your traditions, wearing them publicly, so that people can come together around them.
42:17The cleverest monarchs appreciate the power of tradition, how essential it is to convey this idea of something permanent, something rooted in history, something that will never change.
42:34Next time, the bloody origins of the royal tradition of honouring Britain's best.
42:39It was a very wonderful thing on that day just to be at a marvellous ceremony in this amazing setting.
42:46The dangers of the royal court jester.
42:49Henry VIII hit him so hard that he fell through several rooms and down a flight of stairs.
42:54And the enduring royal custom that reveals an all-too-human side of the monarchy.
43:00Royalty and scandal go hand in jewelled hand.
43:03Catch all that brand new next Saturday at 7.25pm.
43:09And if you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in tonight's programme,
43:14please go to channel5.com slash helplines for information and support.
43:20She survived not one, but eight deadly attempts on her life.
43:23We examine the assassinations of Queen Victoria.
43:26Brand new next.
43:27Brand new next.
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