The crown,
once the ultimate symbol of power throughout the world.
We want the king!
But today,
the very nature of royalty is under threat.
In this landmark series,
we use specialized archive colorization techniques
to bring to life over 100 years of royalty,
(dramatic music)
and discover why over half the world's royal families
have lost their thrones
while others have kept their crowns on their heads.
(suspenseful music)
In this episode,
Britain's Royal House of Windsor
look to relaunch the family brand
with a new fairytale princess.
It's like the scriptwriter's stroke of genius.
Prince Charles and the blushing English rose,
Lady Diana Spencer.
But Princess Diana
will become a magnet for media controversy.
The paparazzi were on her tail morning, noon, and night.
She was sometimes physically frightened.
Her tragic fate will shock the world
and bring popular revolt
to the gates of the British monarchy.
I would say the most dangerous moment
for the monarchy in modern times.
(dramatic music)
(crowd cheering)
(dramatic music)
In 1977, Queen Elizabeth II
marks 25 years on the throne of Great Britain
with months of Silver Jubilee celebrations.
As monarchies all over the world have fallen,
she has survived.
(pompous fanfare music)
Elizabeth is lavished with wealth, palaces, and prestige,
but she sits inside a fully-fledged democracy.
To keep her crown, Queen Elizabeth II has had to make sure
she earns the love and respect of her people.
The British monarchy has influence, but no real power.
The power rests with the people.
She has to bow down to the elected representatives
because the monarchy only exists if the people wish it to.
To cement her place as monarch,
the queen has worked to create
the image of the perfect family
with her husband of 30 years, Philip,
and four grownup children, Anne, Andrew, Edward,
and the heir to the throne, Prince Charles.
We need to believe for the whole edifice to work
that they are better than us in some way.
She's almost presenting the model family to the world.
Devoted to duty. Devoted to the country.
And we love her for that.
(crowd cheering)
But behind the glittering pomp of her jubilee,
the queen is facing a new challenge
that will test the popularity
of the royal family like never before.
In the 1970s,
a powerful anti-establishment voice
is emerging in the press.
Australian media baron, Rupert Murdoch,
plans to shake up the stuffy, deferential British journalism
that has until now given the royal family an easy ride,
and he won't be silenced with the offer of a knighthood.
He buys Britain's tabloid newspapers
"The Sun" and the "News of the World."
His ambition is to transform it
into the number-one newspaper in Britain.
And they're gonna do it through lots of football,
lots of sex stories, lots of scandal,
speaking for the common man against the snobs.
Part of that is, it bashes the royal family as well.
Whilst growing up in Australia,
Murdoch has come to believe that the British monarchy
is elitist and should be disbanded.
And he won't be afraid to go after
the royal family in his newspapers.
Most newspapers are rather in awe of the queen.
He thought everybody was worth taking on.
But there's an enormous wealth of love for the royal family,
but not so much love that they can behave badly.
(bright music)
In the winter of '76,
the queen's sister, Princess Margaret,
is enjoying the white sands of her Caribbean home.
Her glamorous marriage to photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones
made her the darling of the press.
And Mustique Island has always been respected
as a haven of privacy.
But Murdoch's "News of the World"
is about to shatter that arrangement.
The "News of the World" had this brilliant idea
of sending just a private citizen.
He just would walk along the beach and walk along the sea,
casually holding a camera in his bag, waiting.
(camera shutter clicks)
The photographer secretly
snaps Princess Margaret on the beach.
But it's who she's with that is the real revelation.
She's getting close to a younger man,
and it's definitely not her husband of nearly 20 years.
In truth, Margaret's unhappy marriage
has been over for some time,
and both are having affairs.
But that reality has been hidden from the public until now.
The pictures of Margaret with her young lover
are splashed across the front pages
of the "News of the World."
People in Britain pick up their newspapers,
and on the front page,
the queen's sister shamelessly cavorting
with a half-naked man,
her toyboy.
The queen has worked so hard to build up
the perfect royal family.
It's been smashed to pieces by Margaret on the front page
of the "News of the World" with her lover.
(suspenseful music)
Within a month of the front-page splash,
Elizabeth is forced to agree
to Margaret's separation from Armstrong-Jones.
It will be the first royal divorce for nearly 500 years,
and comes as Britain is recovering from a deep recession.
Those who are representing public opinion,
members of parliament who have been very respectful before,
are saying things that are really hard.
They're saying that Margaret's a parasite.
Are the royals value for money?
Should we be paying for them at all?
The palace are now thrown into a different world.
The queen is walking on a tightrope with the tabloid press.
And at the end of the '70s, coming into the '80s,
after the Margaret expose, the Windsor brand is damaged.
And what they really need is something fresh
to sell the royal fairytale.
(printing press clacking)
(upbeat music)
By 1980, Queen Elizabeth II's eldest son
and heir to the throne, Prince Charles,
is the most eligible bachelor in the world.
But now that he's 31 years old,
there is fevered speculation,
both in the press and amongst his family,
about whom he will marry.
He's quite a catch. He's good looking.
He's a bit of an action man. He plays polo.
He's been in the navy. He flies aeroplanes.
He will be king one day.
(bright music)
There's a bit of a caricature
in this idea of Charles as a playboy.
But actually, Charles was quite an insecure figure
locked into this system where he knew
that his number-one duty was to find a wife,
produce children to secure the line of the House of Windsor.
Senor Charles.
Hope we're not too late.
And Charles is under pressure from his family
to find the right type of bride,
someone that will fit the royal mold
and not attract any scandal in the papers.
The requirements are very clear.
She must be pure and she must be untouched.
They don't want all kinds of ex-boyfriends
coming out of the closet and saying
what it was like to go out with the future queen.
She must be from a family they know.
But most of all, she has to be a virgin.
(suspenseful music)
In 1980, at an aristocratic function,
the prince is seated next to 19-year old Lady Diana Spencer.
Charles has dated her elder sister before,
but now it's the younger sibling, 12 years his junior,
that grabs his attention.
Diana was vivacious, she was fun, she was quick-witted,
and very pretty, very beautiful.
Charisma is a rare thing, but you know it when you find it,
and she certainly had it.
And he invited her up to Balmoral,
to the family's house in Scotland,
and everybody thought Diana was wonderful.
She made everybody laugh.
You cooked her breakfast yet?
I don't eat breakfast.
(people laughing)
She was easy. She was relaxed.
She was young, therefore she was a virgin.
She was the daughter of an earl.
She actually ticked all the boxes.
And he thought, he looked at her and he thought,
"You know, I think this is somebody
that I could fall in love with, in time."
In Diana, the queen and the royal family
can see a chance to get their image
back on track in the tabloids.
And after meeting just 13 times,
Charles proposes.
What a mind-blowing moment.
Diana was a young, innocent, sheltered girl.
To be asked to marry, to be the Princess of Wales,
to be the future queen.
Diana saw everything she wanted in marrying Charles.
She was in love with him.
It was the ultimate princess dream.
I'm amazed that she's been brave enough to take me on.
And, I suppose, in love?
Of course.
Whatever "in love" means.
Yes.
(suspenseful music)
But as Diana makes her first public appearance
since the engagement at a gala ball in London,
she immediately faces a harsh introduction
to royal life in the glare of the press.
She's already broken royal protocol
wearing a low-cut black dress.
She is visibly upset and nervous.
Charles had criticized her for choosing black,
because that's the color of mourning.
She's very conscious of the fact
that her dress is very revealing.
Every little gesture that she makes is under scrutiny.
As the young princess-to-be
wilts in front of the cameras,
someone comes to her rescue, Princess Grace of Monaco.
Once a Hollywood icon,
Grace Kelly sacrificed her acting career
to marry into the royal French principality of Monaco.
She has been a princess for nearly 30 years.
Tied to strict protocol,
and constantly scrutinized by the press,
she knows how hard royal life can be.
Grace responds to this nervous teenager,
and she puts herself right next to Diana.
Grace could see a lot of herself in Diana,
and Diana needed the reassurance
of an older member of the royal family,
another the princess, who could tell it as it is.
Diana is taken aside by Grace,
away from the cameras, for a pep talk.
She later reveals in a memoir that Grace jokes,
"Don't worry, it'll only get worse."
It is quite ironic that Grace's advice to Diana
soon becomes a prophecy.
(people cheering)
A few months later,
it's Diana and Charles' wedding day.
With this ring.
I thee wed.
(bells pealing)
An estimated 750 million people
tune in around the world to the ceremony in July 1981.
To the queen's delight, after a rocky few years,
the marriage seems to instantly restore
the royal family's popularity with the people and the press.
It looks like Britain can put the economic strife
and upheaval of the '70s behind it
and enter a hopeful new decade.
(bright music)
It's like the scriptwriter's stroke of genius.
Prince Charles and the blushing English rose,
Lady Diana Spencer,
the perfect person onto whom people could project
all their sort of dreams and fairytale hopes for the future.
(soft music)
But I don't think anyone knew quite how dramatic
her impact was going to be on the royal family
and on all of us.
(people cheering)
Within a year of the wedding,
Diana dutifully produces a son
and heir to the throne, Prince William,
and shortly afterwards, a spare, Prince Harry.
(suspenseful music)
But privately, the princess is soon struggling
with the pressures of royal life.
Her marriage is a constant parade of public engagements,
and she's expected to keep her emotions
and personality bottled up.
The idea was that once she married Prince Charles,
she would become his appendage, if you like,
attractive, demure, a mother to children,
and then sort of quietly retreat into the background.
She thought that she was marrying a man
who would devote all his time and attention to her,
and she found, of course, that she was marrying a position.
In September of 1982,
Diana is rocked by the news that Princess Grace of Monaco
has been killed in a car crash.
Her car has accidentally plunged
off a mountain road in France.
The suddenness and the sheer horror of Grace's death
is what makes the event so much more traumatic.
At Grace's funeral, Diana is so distressed, she's weeping.
Diana said of Grace, she told a friend, she said,
"She was wonderful and serene,
but I could sense there were troubled waters underneath."
So Diana saw how unhappy Grace was,
and a proof of what royalty could do to you.
Your life could be crushed.
Your personality can be squashed.
And yet, it's also a moment for her,
this moment that she says to herself,
"I'm not going to be trapped like Grace."
She's going to be her own princess,
and she resolves to be herself.
(suspenseful music)
In 1983, not long after Grace's funeral,
Diana accompanies Charles
on her first-ever foreign royal tour to Australia.
That very first tour of Australia,
it had this extraordinary effect.
Yes, she was glamorous and attractive,
but there was something, she possessed something
that connected with ordinary people.
People screaming for Diana. People wanting to touch her.
People would try and stroke her face, hold her, grab her.
Diana would get out of the car on one side
and there'd be a huge cheer.
Charles would get out on the other side
and there'd be a groan.
He is the one who's going to be king,
and here is his wife stealing his thunder.
Suddenly he was surplus to requirements
and he was carrying flowers for his wife.
He was losing traction as well as face.
I haven't yet worked out a method
of splitting my wife in half so she can do both sides.
What concerned the royal family
was that she was sort of doing it deliberately
to upstage her husband on the one hand
and upstage the wider royal family on the other.
Every moment of that tour was captured by the tabloids.
She was on the front pages, either a picture or a story,
every single day for six weeks.
And the fascination with her was absolute.
I can remember the hours that I waited
holding the front page back
to do the picture of Princess Diana.
She sold newspapers, without any doubt.
By the end of the Australian trip,
Diana mania is threatening to overshadow
the future king completely.
Prince Charles struggles to understand Diana's popularity,
and he finds he has a little connection with his young wife.
Charles had many doubts.
Diana was 12 years younger,
and the Prince of Wales
had great many other interests in his life.
Turned out he wanted to carry on pretty much living the life
of the bachelor prince he had before
with the added extras that, of course,
he's got a wife at home when it is convenient for him.
By 1988, Charles is living almost permanently
at his countryside house, Highgrove,
while Diana is left alone at Kensington Palace in London.
That year, Patrick Jephson joins Diana's personal staff,
and becomes the princess' private secretary.
Being royal, I realized, is a pretty lonely business,
that there was no affectionate welcome
waiting for her inside,
nobody to listen to her worries, fears, hopes, jokes.
She was living a pretty lonely existence.
Pretty isolated. Certainly very saddening.
Not least because so much of our energy was taken up
with presenting an image to the outside world
that we knew was untrue.
Diana is required by the royal family
to join her husband and put on a brave face
at public events and photo calls
with their two young sons, William and Harry.
The happy family scenes are enough to hide
their dysfunctional marriage from the tabloids.
(ominous music)
Ever more estranged from her husband, in 1989,
Diana arranges a solo visit to the United States.
She's expected to stick to protocol
and follow a traditional royal itinerary.
But Diana has decided she wants to use
her growing media profile to modernize the monarchy.
And in America she shatters the royal mold,
visiting impoverished areas and confronting
one of the greatest medical stigmas of the time.
I remember on that visit
she went to the Harlem Hospital Center,
visited the pediatric AIDS unit,
picked up a little African-American baby dying of AIDS.
And the hospital director said to me, "You know,
this is the first time anybody in public life
has even spoken about AIDS."
This was a time when AIDS was considered
to be kind of like the plague,
that you couldn't touch somebody with AIDS.
And here was Diana leading by example and using her profile
to draw attention to people who were stigmatized, outcast,
in every way deserving of sympathy, but not receiving it.
That sent out a message to the world that Princess Diana
was a whole new humanitarian force in her own right.
(camera shutters clicking)
(calm music)
This sort of emoting gives her another level.
It makes her as almost a saintly figure for lots of people.
And this just stuff that members of the British royal family
didn't really do.
And I think it does explain why, certainly for some people,
she does become this genuinely beloved figure.
(people cheering)
But Diana finds that even saints
can't defy reality.
(melancholy music)
She's discovered that her husband, Charles,
has rekindled a romance with his old flame,
the married Camilla Parker Bowles.
Diana is devastated by the affair.
She fears her marriage has been a lie from the very start.
The princess would would talk to me
about "my husband and his lady."
She struggled to do her public duties sometimes
because she was so preoccupied
with this private unhappiness.
There was a horrible dread that we were heading
towards some kind of marital catastrophe, a blowup.
Distraught, Diana goes to the queen
and her father-in-law, Prince Philip, about Charles' affair.
But Elizabeth won't intervene,
and Philip simply reminds Diana
to do her duty and keep up appearances.
The problem is that the queen and Prince Philip
don't understand the severity of the problems.
The queen feels very strongly
that the marriage has to continue.
This is the marriage at the heart of the succession.
There cannot be a divorce.
But Diana felt that her disappointment, anger,
was not registering with the queen,
and that was something that she responded to
with a degree of defiance.
(suspenseful music)
Not long afterwards,
unknown to anyone at the palace,
Diana reaches out through a friend
to a tabloid journalist called Andrew Morton,
and lets it be known she has a hidden story to tell.
She secretly smuggles tape recordings
out of our royal home, Kensington Palace.
I was stunned when I put on a pair of headphones
and I was listening and I was hearing
these extraordinary stories.
Found that she suffered
from an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa,
that her husband had effectively been living
with another man's wife, Camilla Parker Bowles,
and that she'd made these suicide attempts.
She had a real sense of despair and isolation
that she was living a lie.
In the summer of 1992, with Diana's blessing,
Andrew Morton drops a bombshell on the British public,
revealing everything he knows in his book,
"Diana: Her True Story."
I knew that it was absolutely explosive.
These revelations were absolutely shocking and stunning,
and people could not believe it.
It made people confront the reality
that the facade of family happiness
that the royal family had created was a sham.
But one of the worst parts of the fallout
from the Morton book was that it made difficult relations
with the rest of the royal family even more difficult.
In the palace, there was a sense of outrage,
that this was dirty linen being washed in public.
It was Diana throwing a hand grenade
into the family that she'd married into.
For the queen, this was outside anything she'd ever known.
This detail about relationships within the family,
very hard to take.
The queen desperately tries
to maintain the public facade.
She sends Diana on a royal tour of Korea with Charles,
hoping for a display of unity in front of the cameras.
Her royal press secretary, Dickie Arbiter,
goes along on the trip as well.
I remember that Korean visit.
They had a job of work to do,
but the media were well aware
that the marriage really was down with tubes.
There was no picture you could ever get
where they were looking at one another.
And in fact, the newspapers started to call them "The Glums"
because they looked so miserable around one another.
By combining British design with Korean workmanship,
it is a further embodiment of our relationship.
I said to the protection officer who had come out with me,
"We've lost this one."
Not long after the Korea trip,
the queen faces the fact
that the marriage at the heart of the succession
has become a public liability.
And although she can't countenance a divorce,
she gives her permission for a formal separation.
In a devastating coincidence, that same year,
her eldest daughter Anne's marriage collapses into divorce.
And her younger son Andrew's wife,
Sarah Ferguson, known as Fergie,
is photographed by a tabloid
having her toes sucked by a lover,
and she will also accept a divorce.
To add insult to injury, at the end of 1992,
the queen sees her childhood home, Windsor Castle,
ravaged by an accidental fire.
The House of Windsor was burning.
You couldn't escape the metaphorical significance
of what we were seeing.
The organization was in trouble.
(fire roaring)
In the space of just 12 months,
The image of the perfect royal family
has been completely shattered,
and the queen is in a fight for survival.
(calm music)
In a rare show of public emotion,
she uses Latin in a speech
to share the struggles of her horrible year.
It's not a year on which I shall look back
with undiluted pleasure.
It has turned out to be an annus horribilis.
It was actually a critical moment,
because for the first time
there were some serious questions being asked
about Britain's relationship
with the monarchy and with the royal family.
The newspapers encapsulate what Britons
thought about the royal family.
And by 1992, they didn't think a great deal of them.
(bright music)
While the Windsors struggle
to rebuild their damaged public image,
Diana is liberated by the separation.
She can now use her status as she pleases,
and she starts to actively build
a new celebrity profile in the media
as an independent, single mother.
She's ringing them up at times and saying, you know,
"If you come along to a theme park,
you might see something you wanna take a photo of."
She's trying to demonstrate that she's a great mother.
She's a great, compassionate, wonderful working princess.
There was huge interest in an independent Diana.
In part it was because of the way she photographed,
and that she knew she could make a very good photograph
just by a tilt of her head, a smile here, a smile there,
and she became very adept at it and very expert at it.
She was fascinated by the power that she possessed
in the sense that her image was often on the front page.
(ominous music)
But by courting the popular press,
Diana is being sucked toward
a dangerous game she can't control.
In the early '90s, cameras become lighter,
cheaper, and easier to use,
and almost anyone can become a freelance photographer,
or paparazzi.
And a shot of Diana can be sold
to a newspaper for big money.
Only her royal protection officers
keep the paparazzi mob at bay.
Paparazzi were kept at a safe distance.
But walking down the street with Princess Diana
was very unsettling.
Diana wanted to keep the more glamorous
photogenic parts of royal life,
but I don't think Princess Diana ever got used to it,
and nor would anybody.
By 1993, Diana is finding the media maelstrom
and her huge celebrity status too much to handle.
She tries in vain to change it.
I was not aware of how overwhelming
that attention would become.
At the end of this year,
when I've completed my diary of official engagements,
I will be reducing the extent
of the public life I've led so far.
But Diana's step back from public life
fails to cool the media interest.
(ominous music)
The tabloids relentlessly run stories about her private life
and rumors swirl about past extramarital relationships.
Eventually, Diana feels forced to accept an interview
with the BBC's "Panorama" program to address the rumors
and give her side of the story.
The controversial interview
is under a BBC broadcast embargo.
Shortly after it goes out,
the queen feels she has to bring
the embarrassing saga to an end,
and asked Charles and Diana to formally divorce.
The princess relinquishes her Royal Highness title
and decides she has little option
but to give up her royal protection officers as well.
But without these men with a gun on their hip at her side,
Diana was very vulnerable.
(suspenseful music)
(camera shutters clicking)
And the paparazzi took advantage.
And they were on her tail morning, noon, and night.
(camera shutters clicking)
She was sometimes physically frightened, physically upset.
The problem was, these pictures were very compelling,
and they became very hard to resist for many publications.
(ominous music)
In the summer of 1997,
Diana attempts to start afresh and rebuild her personal life
dating Dodi Al Fayed, the son of a prominent retail tycoon.
But a long-lens paparazzi
snaps her on board his yacht in the South of France,
and sells the pictures to a tabloid paper
for over half a million dollars.
Feeling under siege by the press
and missing her two young sons,
that night, from Paris,
Diana calls journalist and friend,
Richard Kay, looking for support.
She felt very alone.
She felt that the entire establishment
was on her husband's side, as she put it,
and she wanted to make changes,
to get away from the photographers who made her life hell,
as she saw it at that time.
She was anxious about getting home.
She was very much looking forward
to seeing William and Harry.
It was obviously extremely poignant
that I should be among the very last people she called.
(dramatic music)
The Press Association announced with a news flash at 4:41
that Diana, Princess of Wales, has died.
Just a few hours after her phone call,
Princess Diana is dead,
killed alongside Dodi
in a horror car crash in Paris.
She is just 36 years old.
Few if any events will touch the lives of so many of us
as the death in the early hours of this morning
of Diana, Princess of Wales.
(melancholy music)
I remember waking up for no obvious reason
and couldn't go back to sleep,
so I went downstairs and made myself a cup of tea,
and turned on the TV, and there it was.
To be honest, nearly 25 years later, it's still sinking in.
It was an absolute tragedy that somebody
should have her life snuffed out just like that.
And when I talk about it, I still get emotional about it,
because it shouldn't have happened.
And you just felt that she was in the process
of being able to achieve great things, and then she dies.
As the news of Diana's death sinks in,
Britain is gripped by a public outpouring
of collective grief,
the likes of which has never been seen before.
The princess they've seen in the press
or on television every day
is now gone.
People in this country thought they had a bit of Diana.
That's how people felt that morning.
They felt that somebody they knew,
somebody they loved, had died.
She's a mother of young children.
She is somebody who's suffering has been played out
in the tabloids and on television,
so people felt a personal connection with her.
But as the day wears on,
there is a shocking revelation.
Diana's car crashed while being chased
by a gang of paparazzi on motorbikes.
We knew the paparazzi were involved
because the paparazzi where each side taking pictures.
Diana, the last thing she saw
would've been the pop of a flashbulb,
because while she was dying in the back of the car,
they didn't stop.
They carried on photographing her,
because those photos were gold.
When the news of the paparazzi's involvement
reaches the streets of Britain,
the public lash out at the press in fury.
It's you, the press, that killed her.
You're the scum.
Yes. (people applauding)
You're here to pick the bones.
I went to Buckingham Palace, and there was a photographer,
and he said to me, "It's been really scary."
He said, "People would come up and try to biff me
because they think I'm somebody who drove
Princess Diana to her death."
There was hostility,
and I remember people remonstrating with me.
They were shaking their fists, even, saying,
"You're to blame for this."
Sensing the mood, the tabloid newspapers
look to shift the public's anger to a different target.
(bright music)
24 hours after Diana's death,
the queen is still with the young princes,
William and Harry, at the family retreat,
the Scottish castle, Balmoral.
Shocked by the news and the grief of her two grandsons,
the queen is unsure how to react
to the unprecedented death of a royal divorcee.
The queen, I think,
felt Diana is actually no longer a member of this family,
and therefore she should be treated
as a normal citizen under these circumstances.
It's the first time, actually,
that she's put family before duty.
The queen stayed up at Balmoral
to protect her grandsons, William and Harry,
to help them through the traumatic first few days,
in the knowledge that their mother
had been killed in a car crash.
Even as London becomes the epicenter
of mourning for Diana,
Elizabeth believes the royal family
should continue to grieve in private in Scotland.
One day turns to two,
and then three,
and they remain at Balmoral.
Smelling blood, the tabloid press starts to openly
call out the queen with screaming headlines.
They were looking for another story.
And the other story was really,
why isn't the queen in London?
They were the screaming headlines.
"Your country needs you, ma'am.
Where are you, ma'am? Your people need you."
And yet, all these thousands of people
had just instinctively gravitated towards the palace.
And when they got there, there was nobody at home.
I remember thinking, "Gosh, this is really bad."
(suspenseful music)
Four days after the death of Diana,
anti-monarchy sentiment starts to grip the capital,
and the queen's place on the throne is openly questioned.
Very, very, very disgraceful.
I find their behavior very disgraceful.
What do you think, madam?
I think it's disgusting that they have not appeared
or said a word relating to all this.
I think it must be very, very cold-hearted
not to have a flag up.
I think it's a disgrace on the whole royal family.
The public mood is shifting to,
they must be terrible people.
They must be really horrible people.
They drove this poor saint out.
Now she's dead, and they don't care.
And that's the dangerous moment for the royal family,
because if they don't fix that,
people will say, "The murderers of Diana!"
The tabloids are whipping up fury in the country,
and people want to see their monarch.
They want to see that she's grieving.
I would say, the most dangerous moment
for the monarchy in modern times.
The 5th of September, 1997,
the day before Diana's funeral.
With the scent of popular revolt in the air,
the royal motorcade snakes through the streets of London.
Thousands of onlookers line the pavements in eerie silence.
And in the hush of that huge crowd
outside Buckingham Palace,
they wanted to see some feelings from her.
They wanted to see that she was hurting.
Through all the years that they've known her,
she's been emotionless.
I think the car is going to stop.
The car has stopped.
And Her Majesty- Her Majesty has got out.
Is going to get out.
There she goes out of the other side of the car.
And the queen comes out,
and she looks at the flowers, she looks at the tributes.
And the atmosphere is very febrile.
And she walks with no bodyguard,
and she goes up to people and she talks to them.
I actually was with her.
She felt a little bit apprehensive, given all the bad press.
They passed a young girl who was holding some carnations,
and the queen said, "Can I put those down for you?"
And this girl said, 11-year-old,
she said, "No, Your Majesty, these are for you."
And as far as I was concerned,
it sort of heaving a sigh of relief
that people were pleased to see her.
And the fact that she was there
to look at the floral tributes meant a lot to them.
And she looked at me, and you have to read the queen,
and I could see what she was saying to me
without actually saying anything.
She had struck the right chord.
And I just said, "That was fine, Your Majesty.
That was fine."
Talking to members of the crowd,
hearing their feelings.
Above all, they were listening to people.
Very much what the public seem to have been demanding.
She looks like a woman grieving,
and there's a ripple of applause for her.
She has saved the day.
(people applauding)
And I think that that was the point
at which people felt they could resume
what is an instinctive loyalty to the monarchy.
The monarchy is that constant in British life.
It runs very deep.
(people applauding)
The next day,
as Diana's coffin makes its way past Buckingham Palace
ahead of the funeral service,
the queen bows her head.
As the most senior royal in the land,
it's the first time a monarch
has ever bowed to a lower rank.
At the funeral service,
Diana's brother, Earl Charles Spencer,
returns the finger of blame to the press.
A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting
was in the end the most hunted person of the modern age.
As Earl Spencer's words are beamed
to the huge crowds of mourners gathered outside the abbey
in parks and on pavements,
there is an overwhelming reaction.
(people applauding)
It began among the hundreds of thousands of people
who heard it outside.
And I was sitting inside the abbey,
and this noise like thunder got louder and louder and louder
and came in through those famous Great West Doors.
(people cheering)
In the months following Diana's funeral,
the tabloid press feels the backlash
from her brother's eulogy.
Sales of Murdoch's "The Sun" and "News of the World" plummet
as readers desert the newspapers.
Princess Diana left an indelible mark
on British society and the royal family.
She has also left behind two devastated young princes.
The British monarchy now lies in their hands.
It does seem a significant moment,
because we're all wondering how the monarchy
is going to find a new course.
William and Harry,
who are walking behind their mother's coffin,
now represent the future.
They are the ones who are gonna carry on
with Diana's slightly different views of monarchy,
and it was gonna rest very much
on how William and Harry develop as adults.
(dramatic music)