All language subtitles for The.Royal.House.Of.Windsor.s01e04.720p.HDTV.x264.mkv.eztv

This year, the royal House of Windsor

celebrates 100 years
on the British throne.

They are now the most famous
royal family in the world

and have prospered while other
great dynasties have fallen.

They've seen their relatives overthrown,

murdered and exiled,
overcome family feuds,

fire and betrayal.

And they have always
followed one crucial rule…

survive,

whatever it takes,

whatever the cost.

The Windsors learned
the dark art of survival

in the days of war, a century ago.

They've never forgotten it.

Now, Channel 4 can uncover their secrets,

with the help of family insiders,

royal experts,

and some of the most closely
guarded papers in the world.

We've combed through letters,
diaries, government memos,

confidential royal reports,
and for the first time,

cameras have been allowed

into the Queen's personal
family archives at Windsor.

What we found rips aside
the mask of royal pomp,

to reveal the human frailties

and the secrets of the family

that built Britain's
most powerful dynasty.

On the 1st of July, 1969,

the Windsors introduced
their new hope to the world.

To survive,

the family needed to
mould Prince Charles into

a strong and dutiful king.

But instead, Charles's
love life went off script

and began to mirror the man

whose abdication had almost
destroyed the dynasty.

There was always an anxiety that

Charles would go the way
that his great-uncle,

the previous Prince of Wales had done.

To the rescue came the Windsors
flamboyant elder statesman,

Lord Mountbatten.

Yet before his work was done,

a terrorist murder tore the
heart out of the royal family.

Charles was absolutely devastated.

He felt he'd lost everything.

Now, using personal documents and
royal family private photographs,

some filmed for the very first time,

we reveal the Prince's
agonising search for a queen…

…how violence shattered the Windsors

and helped push Charles into the arms

of Diana Spencer.

Caernarvon Castle in north-west Wales.

Seat of ancient tradition.

And in the summer of 1969,

the stage for the debut

of a new leading man.

I, Charles,

Prince of Wales,

do become your liegeman of life and limb

and of earthly worship

and faith and truth I will bear unto thee,

to live and die against
all manner of folks.

On the 1st of July,

the 20-year-old Charles was
formally invested as Prince of Wales.

It looks like a medieval pageant,

but every minute detail of the ceremony

had been crafted by the Windsors
as a modern TV spectacular.

A great canopy was made
of transparent perspex

to make sure the TV cameras
didn't miss a bit of the action.

While, in case it got too
heavy during the filming,

the great orb on top of Charles's crown

was really a ping-pong ball.

As the Queen and Charles paraded
before 500 million global viewers,

the Windsors sent a clear
message to their public…

the future of the dynasty was secure.

Yet behind the smiles

lurked an agonising chapter
in the Windsors' story.

The last time the royal family
had gathered in this very castle

to launch their future face,

the results had been catastrophic.

58 years earlier,

Caernarvon had hosted the investiture

of Charles's predecessor
as Prince of Wales.

The future Edward VIII,

known to the family as David.

Just like Charles,

it was a calculated media spectacular

to reassure the world of the
future security of the royal family,

but instead, this Prince of Wales

brought scandal and disaster.

The temperamental David

clashed with his authoritarian
father, George V,

and threw away his crown
to marry Wallis Simpson,

an American divorcee.

Because the Duke of Windsor
had reacted with rebellion,

had made what the rest of the family
thought was an appalling mistake,

a dereliction of duty,

everyone was very determined

that no future royal
would make that mistake.

Charles's childhood was completely
overshadowed by the spectre of what

happened to the Duke of Windsor.

Charles was very close to his
grandmother, the Queen Mother,

and his grandmother of course was…

Her whole life was completely altered.

The future she'd seen for herself
was derailed by her brother-in-law

abdicating the throne and her husband,

therefore, having to become king.

So she would have drilled into
Charles at a very early age

that duty to the Crown and to the country

came ahead of everything else.

Everything else.

But the Windsors attempt to mould Charles

into a well-rounded future king

had got off to a bad start.

Up till now, Charles's
father, Prince Philip,

had been in charge of his upbringing.

I think what Prince Philip wanted in a son

was a man in his own image…

a man's man, a rough, tough,

outdoorsy, real alpha male.

And what he got in Charles
was a very sensitive child.

Philip had sent Charles to his old school,

the tough Gordonstoun,
in north-east Scotland.

Philip had loved it.

Charles called it, "Colditz in kilts."

He was a sensitive boy.

He was diffident, he was shy.

Phillip's approached to
Charles was typified, I think,

by the fact that in order
to teach him to swim,

he just threw him in the swimming pool.

Charles felt he was going to drown.

The difficult father-son relationship

was a troubling echo of George V and

his rebellious son, David.

Charles and David both
had autocratic fathers,

fathers who had a very definite vision

of how their son should develop and

come to the throne.

And I think that both fathers,

both George V and Prince Philip,

really knocked aside any
expectation that their child

might be a bit different

or, you know, may be a
more thoughtful child.

If Charles failed to get moral
support from his father,

his relationship with his mother
wasn't especially warm, either.

The Queen, to be fair
to her, was being Queen

for most of Charles's childhood
and the rest of his life.

She was on a pedestal

and he did not have a warm and
cosy relationship with his mother.

By the mid-'60s, Charles had
grown into a sensitive teenager.

He was already painfully aware
of his greatest duty in life,

as his first ever TV
interview would reveal.

This is obviously difficult,
because you've got to remember that

when you marry, in my position,
you're going to marry somebody who,

perhaps, one day is going to become Queen,

and you've got to choose
somebody very carefully, I think,

who can fulfil this particular role,
because people like you, perhaps,

would expect quite a lot
from somebody like that,

and it's got to be
somebody pretty special.

Charles's words show he was already
feeling the weight of expectation

over his future bride.

But in the absence of hands-on parents,

there was no-one to provide the
guidance he desperately needed.

Yet in the grounds of Caernarvon Castle,

one of the most experienced
and colourful royals

was waiting in the wings.

Lord Louis Mountbatten
was Charles's great-uncle.

On his mother's side,

he was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria,

who had held him as a baby.

In a spectacular career,

Mountbatten had been head
of the British Armed Forces

and the final Viceroy of India.

He was vain.

He was charming.

Somebody in the Second World War said that

he could charm a vulture off a carcass.

He is the personification of

Britannia the imperial power.

And I think he therefore
carried almost a prestige

that no other m… not even
the Queen could really match.

As he'd shown in a 1969 interview,

modesty was of Mountbatten's
strong points.

When have you lost your self-confidence?

- When have I lost it?
- Yes.

- How d'you mean?
- On what occasion in your life, looking back now,

have you consciously lost
your self-confidence?

Well, I wouldn't be where I
am now if I had ever lost it.

That's the difference, isn't it?

Mountbatten was the elder
statesman of the royal family.

But it was his experiences as a young man

that now become critical to the Windsors.

In the '20s and '30s,

one of the royals who was closest
to the rebellious Prince of Wales

was Mountbatten.

Mountbatten was eyewitness
to the abdication.

He was in there. He was a close friend,

so he saw the disintegration
of this monarchy.

Mountbatten was the living
link between the Windsors

disastrous past and their fragile future.

He could steer Charles away
from his great-uncle David's fate

but Mountbatten also
had another motivation,

one driven by a trauma
buried deep in his own past.

Like Charles, Mountbatten
himself had been born a prince,

in the German descended
family of Battenberg.

But during the First World War,

anti-German hostilities swept Britain.

In 1917, the royal family
changed its German name,

Saxe-Coburg Gotha, to Windsor.

The Battenbergs had to
become the Mountbattens.

And the 17-year-old Louis

was stripped of his royal title.

Mountbatten's ambition to get back
to the centre of the royal family,

rather than the outer
edges, was born there.

For the next 40 years,

Mountbatten worked his way back
to the heart of royal power.

In the 1940s,

he'd engineered the
marriage of his nephew,

Prince Philip, to the Princess Elizabeth.

But now he could go one better.

He would mould the future king.

Mountbatten wanted to
be a power in the land.

There's absolutely no question that
Mountbatten wanted to be close to

Prince Charles and wanted to exercise

the absolute maximum influence

in his role as a kingmaker,

almost in the most literal sense.

Mountbatten was now a man with a mission.

He would boost his own power

and guide Charles away from
his great-uncle David's fate.

So just three days after the
Caernarvon Castle ceremony,

he wrote to the prince with a warning.

"Realise how fickle public support can be."

"Your Uncle David had such popularity"

"that he thought he could flood
the government and the Church"

"and make a twice-divorced woman queen."

"His popularity disappeared overnight."

But Mountbatten's mission
soon ran into trouble.

Behind the scenes,

the young Charles would
begin a secret love life

that echoed the rebel king

and threatened the future
of the Windsor dynasty.

On 3rd October, 1971,
in a windswept Paris,

a secret Royal meeting
was about to take place.

Away from the eyes of the public,

the old man who had thrown away the Crown

and the young man who
would one day wear it

were about to meet.

I happened to be in Paris

and I was told that Prince
Charles had come into to Paris

and there seemed to be no reason for it

and it hadn't been announced beforehand.

And on a hunch,

I rang the Duke and Duchess of
Windsor's private secretary,

John Utter…

…and as journalists have
a habit of doing, I said,

"Oh, I believe that the
new Prince of Wales"

"and the old Prince of Wales have met."

I had no evidence for it whatsoever.

But Mr Utter was awfully kind.

He said, "Well, yes, as a
matter of fact, they have."

The ex-king, now demoted
to the Duke of Windsor,

had spent 35 years in lonely exile.

He now suffered from cancer

and was half blinded
by a cataract operation.

Since childhood,

Charles had been told his great-uncle

was the man who almost
wrecked the dynasty.

But now, Charles had set out to
meet the outcast, face-to-face.

In Paris, the two men talked alone.

As Charles confided to his diary…

"We got onto the subject of his
relationship with his father"

"and he said he'd had a
very difficult time with him."

"Uncle David then talked about"

"how difficult my family
had made it for him"

"for the past 33 years."

David had a terrible time with his father.

And while Prince Philip can't
quite be put in the same bracket,

he certainly… towards his son…

behaved in a fairly ruthless way and
they would have had much to discuss.

For Charles, the secret
meeting was a unique chance

to talk to someone else
who had done the job.

Charles was fascinated by
this character from history.

He abdicated. He nearly caused
the end of the House of Windsor,

but people still loved him.

When Charles met David, he had
not yet come out into the world.

He hadn't yet seen those millions.

He'd seen a few thousands.

David had strode the world.

The two men had forged an
unforgettable connection.

Yet they would never meet again.

Eight months later, the
Duke of Windsor was dead.

His body arrived back at
an RAF base in Oxfordshire,

followed by the woman for whom
he'd thrown away his crown.

But the Windsors were about
to be treated to one last show

of the ex-king's popularity.

'2,000 people an hour
came to pay their respects.

'They literally queued miles

'and waited hours for
the man they all loved.'

On 2nd June,

the widow was seen gazing from
the window of Buckingham Palace.

That night, Charles and Mountbatten

accompanied Wallis to see
the body lying in state.

Charles wrote in his diary…

"She stood alone,"

"a frail, tiny, black
figure gazing at the coffin."

"She kept saying, 'He gave
up so much for so little, '"

"and pointing at herself."

But Wallis wasn't the only person
deeply affected by the death.

At the funeral, Charles followed
the coffin down the aisle

and wrote in his diary…

"Somehow I felt deeply moved
by the whole experience."

"And felt that it was right"

"that we were honouring
Uncle David like this."

"My eyes filled with tears."

The Windsors had wanted
Charles to see his great-uncle

as a warning from history.

Instead, he had seen an object
of sympathy, even affection.

David had followed his heart

and retained the love of his people.

It was a dangerous lesson for a young man,

soon to set out on his
own search for a wife.

But first, Charles had
another duty to attend to,

one fraught with its own problems.

Eight months earlier, he had
dutifully followed his father

and his grandfather into the Navy.

Yet Charles wasn't cut out
for a life on the ocean wave.

At sea, he banged his head,

failed to master navigation,

and was seasick.

A despairing Charles wrote…

"I'm afraid I tend to suffer from
bouts of hopeless depression,"

"because I feel I'm never going to cope."

With Charles adrift,

the man who had sworn to protect
him now swung into action.

Mountbatten invited the vulnerable
prince to stay in Broadlands,

his Hampshire home.

Mountbatten recognised that this was

a young man who had very
little self-confidence

and he gave him a safe place.

With the Queen taken
up by official duties,

Mountbatten now began to teach
Charles how to be a king.

Mountbatten talked to him endlessly
to make sure that Charles was given

some kind of preparation
for the role ahead of him.

Few knew more about royal history
and tradition than Mountbatten.

From the quirks of royal etiquette
to the need for pomp and ceremony,

as he'd shown in a 1969
TV series about his life.

I think I've inherited a certain
weakness about dressing up.

I come from a long line of dressers-up.

Seen here, the man in charge
of Mountbatten's epic wardrobe

was his valet, William Evans.

We'd go off on these royal tours.

I would take probably
80 suitcases and trunks.

I would have 40 of 50 different uniforms,

everything from Lifeguards,
tropical uniforms

to Royal Naval full ball
dress and gold lace trousers.

If he split his gold lace trousers,
in the morning, I'd find them,

a note tucked in it
with a pair of scissors,

just to bring me to the
point that there was

a stitch off the gold lace in
case I missed it. Not that I would.

But as well as his love of display,

Mountbatten knew that what
a future king needed most

is inner confidence.

As Charles struggled in the Navy,

Mountbatten wrote boosting
letters to his protege.

"I don't mind betting that when
you've done as long at sea,"

"you will be a greater legend than"

"your old great-uncle seems to have been."

A grateful Charles wrote
of his time at Broadlands…

"To me, it has become a
second home in so many ways."

"And no-one could ever have had
such a splendid honorary grandpa."

I think Charles… it sounds
very mean to his parents,

but I think he, for the first time,
felt loved, appreciated, wanted.

He felt that somebody
was listening to him.

Mountbatten was in many ways

a remarkably lovable man.

And he did command a very close affection

and I think that probably,

the Prince of Wales came more
closely into that category,

even than Mountbatten's own
daughters, who loved him.

Yet as Mountbatten moved
ever closer to the Prince,

his long-term dynastic
ambitions begin to emerge.

He started trying to
manipulate Prince Charles

to be the sort of puppet
master behind the throne,

as he, Mountbatten, saw it.

Mountbatten played him like a fish.

He exerted all his charm on him.

Part of Mountbatten's agenda was to be

the kingmaker, to be the man
at the heart of the Royal family

who pulled the strings.

And Mountbatten certainly
wanted to increase his influence

within the royal family.

Mountbatten's influence over
Charles was most controversial

when it came to women.

He now designed a programme
for the Royal love life,

as spelled out in a letter in 1974.

"In a case like yours,"

"the man should sow his wild oats
and have as many affairs as he can"

"before settling down."

"But for a wife, he should
choose a suitable, attractive"

"and sweet-charactered girl,"

"before she met anyone
she might fall for."

Mountbatten's home was the perfect place

for Charles to meet
women for casual affairs.

But one of the women he was to see there

was about to change his life.

Camilla Shand was a
vivacious, horse-mad member

of the Sussex country set.

She was funny, she
was outspoken,

a bit outlandish,
she'd lived a bit

and he was still very
green around the ears

and he just fell for her.

Big time.

Charles was young, he was red-blooded,

he was a passionate man

and I think he was looking for
somebody who could blow him away

and the meeting of the two
was like a thunderclap.

Camilla's experience
ruled her out as a wife.

The Windsors had strict
demands for the future queen.

It was absolutely vital
to have on the throne,

somebody who was a virgin, you know,

a future queen must have no past.

I mean, there's no suggestion at
all that Camilla was, you know,

a loose woman, but I mean,
she had had boyfriends.

She had had boyfriends.

Camilla had been in an on-off relationship

with one Charles's polo friends,

Andrew Parker Bowles.

Charles knew his duty.

Despite the intensity of his feelings,

in January 1972, he
walked away from Camilla,

to spend eight months with
the Navy in the Caribbean.

That April, Camilla married
Andrew Parker Bowles.

Charles was absolutely heartbroken.

Absolutely devastated.

He wrote to Lord Mountbatten, saying,

"I suppose I shall eventually get
over it, but I'm just absolutely,"

"you know, this lovely, warm,
friendly relationship that we had,"

"I had imagined it would last forever."

Charles now stepped up his
efforts to find a royal bride.

To the media's delight, over the
next decade, he dated over 20 women.

He's a bit like a sort of pedigree dog.

His breeding, his mating habits
are of intense fascination

to vast swathes of the population.

All he has to do is look
at a girl, in the 1970s

and the press are all over it.

Is this the mother of the
next King or Queen of England?

And that pressure, I think,
must have been almost unbearable.

He was constantly in the
news, which he hated,

because it made girls run a mile.

And he had his father, sort
of, constantly badgering him

and, you know, "Come on,
make something of your life",

"do something, find a girl, get
on with it, stop fooling around."

The press, too, were hungry

for Charles to copy his
decisive, ultra-masculine father.

Bizarrely, at this moment when
people tried to project him

as, basically Prince Philip
Mk II, action man, playboy,

possible contender to replace Roger
Moore's James Bond, you know…

This kind of image of Prince
Charles which is utterly at variance

with the Prince Charles that we know now,

but I think became a bit
of an albatross for him,

because it meant he was
trying to live up to an image

that was completely false.

But Charles had an even bigger problem.

Dubbed an action man,

he was learning that his
real job was to wait.

The problem is, if you hang around
being Prince of Wales for too long,

the gilt starts to wear
off the gingerbread.

You don't get to call the shots,

you don't get to see the state papers

and also, he's hemmed in by the
Secretariat at Buckingham Palace.

Just be the Prince of Wales,
don't give us any more that,

because it's the Queen who's
the star of this show.

And I think he became more
became more and more frustrated.

For the Windsors, Charles's frustrations

were about to turn toxic.

An old obsession would return.

And Mountbatten would launch a secret plan

to save the prince.

'The wedding of the decade.'

On the 14th of November 1973,

Britain celebrated a
spectacular royal wedding.

With this ring, I thee wed.

But not the one everyone
had been hoping for.

The 23-year-old Princess Anne

married the cavalry officer Mark Phillips.

'The many thousands outside the palace

'have come from far and wide,
just to see a real princess

'marry her soldier.

Yet one Royal had been less
than happy at the news.

Seven months earlier,

Prince Charles had learnt of
his younger sister's engagement

on his naval ship in the Caribbean.

The vulnerable Charles was
once again questioning himself.

He felt his family was being broken
up, as he wrote to a friend…

"I can see I shall have to find
myself a wife pretty rapidly,"

"otherwise I shall get left
behind and feel very miserable."

By the mid-'70s,

Charles' hunt for a bride was
looking increasingly desperate.

Among his friends,

Charles' behaviour was
starting to raise concerns.

Charles became increasingly cavalier

as far as treating these
young women was concerned.

You know, he simply took
them up and let them down.

What he'd got was a string of arm candy,

people who he really
wasn't that interested in,

and people who he would take out

simply because it made him look good.

Unluckily for the Windsors,

the Prince of Wales's
search for love came just as

press interest in royal
private lives was heating up.

There was this intense
circulation war, you know,

it's sort of life and
death for newspapers.

So, the pressure within
the Sun and the Mirror

to have more and more royal exposes
becomes greater and greater.

Then you get the Mail and
the Express following suit

and it becomes a sort of feeding frenzy.

Yet, in the mid-'70s,

another royal began to take the
media heat away from the Prince.

In 1974, Charles' aunt Princess Margaret

met a Welsh wannabe pop
star, named Roddy Llewellyn.

Though married, she began an affair.

In 1976,

a photographer from the News of the World

smuggled himself onto Margaret's
holiday island of Mustique.

On the 22nd of February 1976,
for the very first time,

the sexual infidelity of a
Windsor hit the front page.

Is your relationship with Princess
Margaret finished or is it intact?

Well, really, I never
talk about my private life

to comparative strangers,

only to my best friends.
I hope you understand.

The scandal marked a new intensity of

press intrusion into the royal family.

Windsors' private lives
were private no longer.

But the heir to the throne

had an even more explosive
secret of his own.

I think he had a closer relationship
to Camilla than practically anybody.

He really, really loved her.

And it was, you know,
they had so much in common,

their brains kind of work in the same way.

I guess he didn't really meet anyone
else who quite matched up to her.

In public, Charles kept
up his dutiful search

for an acceptable wife.

But, now, he had an added problem.

Any pretty woman who was around

wanted to be seen on the arm of the
Prince of Wales but pretty soon,

they came to the realisation of what
it was like to live with a man who

was in love with somebody else.

And Lady Jane Wellesley was
an early example of that,

and everybody looked to her
as the new Princess of Wales,

but she saw very early
on the shadow of Camilla.

On the 18th of June 1978,

the Queen celebrated 25
years since her coronation.

But, behind the scenes,
the royals were in crisis.

The Queen and Prince Philip knew
everything about Prince Charles'

relationship with Camilla.

The Queen said,

"I will not have that
woman in my presence."

Prince Philip had a very
pragmatic view of mistresses.

And he thought it was perfectly OK

as long as it was kept in the background.

The problem with Prince Charles was

you're not supposed to be
in love with your mistress,

you're supposed to have
sex with your mistress.

But Charles had fallen
in love with Camilla

and that really screwed everything.

The Windsors' worst
nightmare was coming true.

The one thing that the royal
family wanted to avoid

was that the Prince of Wales
should become involved

with a woman who was unmarriageable

from the point of view
of the royal family.

And this of course had been
what happened with David,

but it seems that with Charles, this
pattern was beginning to reappear.

But there was one royal who had made
it his mission to make sure history

didn't repeat itself.

With Charles risking a
catastrophic scandal,

Mountbatten stepped back into the fray.

Alarmed at Charles' selfish behaviour,

Mountbatten now sent the
Prince a harsh warning.

"I thought you were beginning on the
downward slope which wrecked your"

"uncle David's life and led
to his disgraceful abdication"

"and his futile life ever after."

The following April,

he called Charles' behaviour…

"… unkind and thoughtless."

"Typical of how your uncle David started."

But Mountbatten knew the
crisis needed more than words.

And the great royal matchmaker had
an audacious plan up his sleeve.

The University of Southampton
Special Collections Archive

now houses Mountbatten's private
family photograph albums.

But one special album, never before
filmed for television, reveals

Mountbatten's choice for
the future Queen of England.

His own granddaughter.

His granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull,

was the perfect candidate.

She was the right age.

And the two of them got on really well.

Amanda was Charles' cousin.

These intimate photos were taken on

the Caribbean island of Eleuthera in 1977.

For years, Mountbatten had been
discreetly lining Amanda up

as a future Queen.

He is manoeuvring the prince
away from Camilla, saying,

"If you carry on with her,
you're going to end up like David."

"People will hate you and your
reputation will just disappear."

"So why don't you give her up
and go for my granddaughter?"

In the summer of 1979, Charles and
Amanda were due to holiday together.

Amanda gets on board the
Royal Yacht Britannia,

and they sail off to the Western Isles.

And during that period,
Charles turns to her and says,

"Will you be my wife?"

And she says, "No."

They'd been together a lot
and I think that, actually,

the relationship was too close.

There were like brother and sister.

Charles had tried to do his duty
and follow the advice of his mentor.

It seemed the crisis over his
future couldn't get any worse.

But, just two weeks later,

violence would rip through
the Windsor dynasty.

And leave Charles truly alone.

By the late '70s,

the Northern Irish troubles had
been raging for over a decade.

The IRA and other
nationalist paramilitaries

were locked in a bloody
conflict with the British Army.

For the Nationalists,

the British were an occupying power

and that power's symbolic
head was the House of Windsor.

Yet, despite these risks,

one of the Windsor's
most high-profile figures

still took his holiday in the
Republic of Ireland every year.

Just 12 miles from the
troubled Northern Irish border.

For 20 years, Mountbatten
had spent each August

at Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo.

Lord Mountbatten thought it was
the happiest place on earth.

He enjoyed it, looked forward to it
so much, and so did all the family.

The grandchildren, they loved it.

In a 1969 series about his own life,

Mountbatten had taken the
film crew to Classiebawn.

As the footage shows, he was a
proud and doting grandfather.

Come on. Come on. Come on.

Hold on. Hold on.

Hold Nicholas's hand. That's right.

They would play games.

They would go walking together.

They would go onto the beach.

He loved being in the middle of them.

Mountbatten's greatest delight

was his customised fishing boat, Shadow V.

He always felt safe there.

He never once thought of
anything happening to him.

He always felt safe.

The 27th of August 1979 was a
perfect summer bank holiday.

It was a very hot day,

it was a scorching day,

and the family were out the
day before in Shadow V,

and they put out some lobster pots.

In the quiet village of Mullaghmore,

Lord Mountbatten's family prepared
for their daily fishing trip.

The entire security system
was the two local Garda,

two local policemen in green, who
would hang about the harbour.

That was the entire security.

At just after 11am, on a journey
they had made countless times,

the family boarded Shadow V and
headed out into open water.

It was a quiet moment about 11:30am.

There were glasses on a
tray in the dining room

and the glasses vibrated.

I heard a crack,

which I thought was something
happening at one of the hotels.

I did not in any way
associate it with a bomb.

A hidden IRA explosive had
torn the boat to matchwood.

They were coming into
the harbour with them

and people were there tearing
up sheets for bandages,

and making up stretchers,

trying to get the wounded seen to.

It was just…

…pandemonium.

Mountbatten's 14-year-old grandson

and a 15-year-old local Irish
boat boy were both dead.

The bomb had exploded
below Mountbatten's feet,

killing him instantly.

His body was found floating
face down in the water.

Earl Mountbatten of Burma,
final Viceroy of India,

was wrapped in a sheet
and carried up the beach.

I was back in Ireland when it happened

and just ten miles away,

and he'd been with us on the
Thursday before the bomb.

That was our last day together.

When he left…

…he shook hands and said goodbye.

And…

…and "Look after yourself, old boy."

And that was it.

Mountbatten's funeral on the 5th of
September 1979 was the biggest since

the death of Winston Churchill.

While the Windsors mourned, the
blow fell hardest on one man.

Lord Mountbatten died at a
critical moment for Charles.

Mountbatten had scooped him up,

he'd started to give him

some feeling of self-worth which
he had not got from his own family.

And when he was blown up,

Charles was just, you know,

I think he felt he'd lost everything.

He was absolutely devastated.

The night of the murder,
Charles wrote in his diary…

"I have lost someone
infinitely special in my life."

"In some extraordinary way,
he combined grandfather,"

"great uncle, father, brother and friend."

"I only hope I can live up to
the expectations he had of me,"

"and be able to do something to
honour the name of Mountbatten."

For Charles, the way to honour Mountbatten

was to find an innocent girl, as
his mentor had wanted all along.

Yet the desperate Charles
had no-one in sight.

But then, less than a
year after the murder,

Charles was at Petworth House in Sussex.

There, he began chatting to a
young woman named Diana Spencer.

What did they talk about?

They talked about Lord Mountbatten,

and Diana told Charles how sorry she was,

how sad he seemed, how he seemed
to have had no-one to turn to.

And she must then, Diana
the nursery nurse,

have seemed like a figure
of comfort and support.

She had huge empathy.

She was very, very clever at knowing

what to say to people at the right time,

particularly people who were
vulnerable or who were hurting.

She got him, you know, she just
really… She touched him…

…in a way that I don't think
anyone else perhaps could have done.

Charles was a desperate man.

There was huge downward pressure
on him from Prince Philip

and from the Queen and the whole
court to sort out his life,

to stop running round and
try and find someone.

With Mountbatten dead, Prince Philip
now wrote Charles a fateful letter.

Prince Philip effectively urged
his son to get on with it.

To either propose to
Diana, or to back off.

He needed paternal
advice, counsel, sympathy.

All he got was a jogging
letter from his father…

"Get on with it, decide,
make up your mind."

In private, Charles had wrenching doubts

over whether Diana was the right woman.

- He told a friend…
- "I'm terrified sometimes of making a promise

"and then perhaps living to regret it."

For the second time in
the Windsors' existence,

the future of the dynasty faced a
desperate struggle over his duty.

Here are two men, they both
have a duty to the nation.

David didn't really want anything
apart from the woman that he loved.

Charles did have a great sense
of responsibility and, yes,

of course he wants the woman
that he loves, Camilla,

but he realises that he
must do something else.

On the 29th of July 1981,
Charles did his duty.

Three quarters of a billion
people worldwide watched

as the heir to the throne
became a married man.

It was way too soon.

Charles and Diana scarcely knew one
another when he proposed to her.

He only had one decision
to take in his life,

of real importance at that stage,
which was to marry the right wife.

And he chose absolutely the wrong person.

It was one of the great
paradoxes of royal history.

Prince Charles, desperate
to do the right thing,

gets married to Diana,
and only precipitates

the greatest catastrophe that

has occurred to the House of
Windsor since the abdication.

What Charles is trying to do

is to avoid the mistake
made by Uncle David.

What Charles actually is doing

is lighting the fuse which is going

to end in the most almighty explosion.

Next time, Prince Charles's marriage
is engulfed in a wave of scandal.

And Diana threatens the
survival of the dynasty itself.