The Dark Story of Britain's Most Haunted Royal Apartment: Kensington Palace

On the morning of 25 October 1760, King George II of Great Britain rose at six in his apartments at Kensington Palace, drank a cup of chocolate, dismissed his page, and walked alone into a small wood-panelled water closet to relieve himself. His German valet, Schroder, heard a noise like a chair falling. When the door was opened, the king was dead on the floor of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, his head wounded where it had struck a mahogany cabinet on the way down. He was the fifth monarch in sixty-six years to die inside the walls of Kensington Palace. He was not the strangest death those rooms had absorbed, nor the loneliest, nor the cruellest. This is the dark history of the royal apartment the official guidebook has been quietly editing for three hundred years - of the asthmatic Dutch king who bought a merchant's house for twenty thousand pounds because Whitehall could no longer let him breathe, of the queen who dismissed her own household so they would not catch the smallpox that was killing her, of the seventeen failed pregnancies of Queen Anne, of the German Elector whose corpse rolled home in a sealed lead coffin, of the feral child in a brass collar, of the princess raised under the Kensington System who became Victoria, of the Luftwaffe bomb that turned the State Bed of James the Second into burnt silk and splinters in October 1940, of Margaret behind the green baize door of Apartment 1A, and of Diana, whose gates were banked head-high with cellophane lilies for two weeks in the September of 1997. Five monarchs died here. Two future queens were born here. One marriage ended here in everything but law. And one of the most photographed women in the world walked out of these gates and never came back. Behind every one of those royal lives stood servants whose names the official guidebook does not record, and this film is built around three of them. Caroline Murray, daughter of a Glasgow shoemaker, was nineteen years old when she was hired in the autumn of 1819 as nursery maid to the eight-month-old Princess Victoria. For the next eighteen years, under the Kensington System designed by Sir John Conroy to break the child's will, Caroline Murray slept on a truckle bed within five feet of the princess and carried the candle on the nights the child cried and was not permitted to be comforted by her mother. Joseph Wright, a Wandsworth man and an Eighth Army veteran of North Africa, was taken on in the autumn of 1947 as footman to Princess Margaret in the newly assigned Apartment 1A, and he stood in the corner of that drawing room through every party, every quarrel and every reconciliation of the Snowdon marriage from 1947 to his retirement on 11 March 1968. Lily Burns, a chambermaid from Tredegar in South Wales, folded the nightdresses, drew the baths and turned down the bed of the Princess of Wales in Apartment 8 from 1990 until eight o'clock on the morning of 6 September 1997, when the household manager met her in the staff corridor the morning after the funeral and told her that her services were no longer required. On this channel, we tell the story of every great English house through the names the official guidebook forgot. Kensington is the cheerful palace, the one with the duck pond and the pram-pushers and the gift shop selling tea towels printed with corgis. It is also the palace of five royal deathbeds, one bomb crater, a brass collar still on display in the Cupola Room behind glass with no real name on the label, and three servants whose dated and documented loyalties shaped four reigns from behind a green baize door. This is the version the walls remember. Subscribe for more deep investigations into the hidden histories of Britain's great royal residences and estates. Leave a comment below telling us which place we should investigate next. British Manors. The hidden history of the buildings that shaped England. Sources 1. Worsley, Lucy. Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. 2. Worsley, Lucy. Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018. 3. Rappaport, Helen. Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy. London: Hutchinson, 2011. 4. Rappaport, Helen. Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003. 5. Hibbert, Christopher. Queen Victoria: A Personal History. London: HarperCollins, 2000. 6. Hibbert, Christopher. George III: A Personal History. London: Viking, 1998. 7. Wilson, A. N. Victoria: A Life. London: Atlantic Books, 2014. 8. Wilson, A. N. The Victorians. London: Hutchinson, 2002. 9. Somerset, Anne. Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion. London: Harper Press, 2012. 10. Somerset, Anne. Ladies-in-Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984. 11. Roberts, Andrew. George III: The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch. London: Allen Lane, 2021.