On the morning of August 31, 1997, a chef in London turned on the television and saw a photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales, with two dates printed beneath it. He understood that his employer had died. Darren McGrady had planned a dinner. Diana was due back at Kensington Palace that day, and her sons were returning from their summer holiday at Balmoral to spend a few days with her before school began. The boys had a favorite meal. He had the ingredients for it. He called the palace. All the lines were busy. He drove to the palace anyway and brought the food with him because, as he explained years later, he could not accept that she was gone.
Over the following days, the flowers outside the gates of Kensington Palace rose higher each morning. Inside, Diana's apartments, numbers 8 and 9, were closed to everyone. In the adjoining office, the women who had worked for her sat weeping. There was nothing to cook. McGrady spent that week organizing and disposing of food that no one would eat. No photographer documented any of it. No palace statement mentioned it. This account exists because the man who carried the food decided, many years later, to describe what he saw.
The stories of what royal kitchen staff recorded about the Windsors' worst nights draw on interviews with a chef, cookbooks, a butler's memoir and a criminal trial, a diary kept by the wife of the governor of Windsor Castle on the day it burned, and a reporter who worked as a palace servant to expose its secrets. Each account comes from one of these sources, and all are named. One important point should be noted: no kitchen diary covering these nights has ever been published, and no such diary is presented here.
Before the first night, a simple request. If you are enjoying this story so far, press the like button and subscribe to the channel, because the accounts ahead are more remarkable still. Then leave a comment telling me which country you are watching from. I read the comments, and the first thing I look for is what people who have worked in big kitchens and grand houses have written.
Staff at the Windsor palaces operate under an understanding about silence. The clearest example of what happens when that understanding is broken dates to 1950. Marion Crawford joined the royal family in the early 1930s as governess to two small girls, Elizabeth and Margaret, who called her "Crawfie." She stayed for about 16 years. On her retirement, the King gave her a house on the grounds of Kensington Palace. She then published a memoir of the children's upbringing titled "The Little Princesses." She said she had the Queen Mother's approval to write it. The royal family never spoke to her again. She gave up the house. She bought another in Aberdeen, about 200 yards from the road to Balmoral, and the royal family drove past her home regularly without stopping. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, servants who spoke publicly for money were described for years afterward as "committing a Crawfie."
After Diana's death, a publisher offered Darren McGrady close to one million pounds to write a list of the meals he had prepared for her and her sons, along with other details. D magazine published the offer in 2004, but McGrady refused it. When the magazine met him for dinner that year, he wore a turquoise Hermès tie and said the Princess had given it to him. He had agreed with Diana's butler, Paul Burrell, not to publish such things, and he kept to that for years. The agreement collapsed in 2003 when Burrell published his memoir, "A Royal Duty." Princes William and Harry issued a joint statement before the book appeared, calling it a cold and overt betrayal.
Burrell had spent 21 years in royal service, the last of them as Diana's butler and adviser. A year before the book appeared, he stood trial at the Old Bailey accused of stealing more than 300 items belonging to Diana, Charles and William. Among the items police seized from his home were videotapes of Diana discussing her marriage, which the prosecution agreed not to use. The trial ended in its third week because the Queen recalled a conversation between herself and Burrell.
In the same year Burrell's book was published, Daily Mirror reporter Ryan Parry applied for a job as a servant at Buckingham Palace. He supplied two references, one real and one invented. He got the job. Over the following months, he photographed the Queen's breakfast table, where cereal and porridge were arranged in plastic containers, and the suite in which the American president was about to stay. According to his account, neither he nor his bags were ever searched.
McGrady told D magazine that staff below stairs knew about the problems of the Prince and Princess of Wales long before the public did, and that the kitchens were aware of Diana's private suffering years before she spoke about it herself. Buckingham Palace's kitchens sit so far from the dining rooms that McGrady estimated the distance at a mile and a quarter. Meals there were run as they would be in a hotel, with a charity lunch in one room while a prince hosted in another. The Queen had about 20 chefs, each seeing the family from an angle the family had not chosen.
Among the major events, the accounts include smaller scenes. A young chef is pulled onto a dance floor by a princess. Two batches of potatoes are cooked differently so that a mother and her sons believe they are eating the same dish. The Queen sends a handwritten note about a dessert no one could identify. These scenes come first because they show who the chefs and servants were when the cameras were elsewhere, which lets the listener weigh what those same people said about the nights that followed.
Three nights form the core of what those corners recorded. The first was Friday, November 20, 1992. Late in the morning, a spotlight illuminated a curtain in the Queen's private chapel at Windsor Castle. By the time the fire was out, about 15 hours later, more than 100 rooms had been damaged. Lady Palmer, wife of the castle's governor, wrote in her diary that day of a chain of people passing books from the Royal Library hand to hand. It included a dean, an electrician, the elderly wife of a military knight, a Gurkha soldier, a painter, and a girl who worked in the castle shop.
The fire broke out on the Queen's 45th wedding anniversary. Four days later, she gave a speech that introduced the phrase "annus horribilis" into the language. Less than three weeks after the fire, the Prime Minister stood in the House of Commons and announced the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Then came the night with which this account began. It started in a tunnel in Paris and reached Balmoral and Kensington Palace within hours. One place held two boys who would hear the news at dawn, the other a chef with a dinner already prepared.
Later that Sunday morning, the family drove to Crathie Church for the usual service, and the minister mentioned the Prince of Wales and the children in his prayers. The last of the three nights was September 8, 2022. A former royal chef, then living in Dallas, noticed that the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace had been canceled that morning. He later wrote that it felt like a series of signals. Three days later, gamekeepers carried the Queen's coffin from the castle's ballroom to a hearse.
Courtiers, ministers and biographers have described the three nights in detail. The people who served the tea and laid the tables mostly appear in those descriptions as background. Few chose to speak, and their accounts are short and sometimes differ in small details. They also contain details that no courtier thought worth recording.
McGrady's own path toward those details began with a letter. After the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, a young sauce chef at the Savoy Hotel decided he wanted to cook for the royal family, so he wrote to the Queen. Two weeks later, he was interviewed. On the night before that wedding, McGrady and his mother camped on The Mall to watch the procession. When Diana's carriage reached them, she turned and waved to the crowd on the other side of the road. He told D magazine that was his first sight of his future employer.
He got the job in 1982 and moved into the Buckingham Palace kitchens. Two weeks later, the kitchen sent him north to Balmoral for the summer. One day he heard a commotion in the pastry kitchen, and Diana walked in. A fellow chef named Robert introduced them. McGrady blushed, and from then on, by his account, she deliberately embarrassed him whenever she saw him. Over the years, Diana became a familiar figure in the kitchens. Once she handed him baby Harry to hold while she ate a bowl of cereal, and he told her he had never held a baby in his life. Another day, a note appeared on his desk asking him to bring pizza for the boys' dinner. The note was signed by the nanny, but according to McGrady, the handwriting belonged to seven-year-old Harry. The boys got chicken. He was afraid of the nanny.
The Ghillies Ball is held at the end of the Balmoral season. The Queen throws it to thank staff for weeks of hard work. McGrady stood against the back wall watching members of the royal family dance in tiaras and kilts, until Diana crossed the ballroom and insisted he join her in a St. Bernard's waltz. The dance carried him past Princess Margaret and Prince Andrew, and at the far end, Diana spun him directly toward the Queen. They nearly collided with her.
He met the Queen herself by accident. While walking beside the river at Balmoral, he bumped into her and her corgis, and the dogs chased him. He turned and ran while she laughed out loud. Many years passed before the two exchanged a word. After a weekend of entertaining at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, she came into the kitchen and thanked him for it.
The Queen's schedule, as McGrady described it, changed with the map. In London, her days ran with military precision, he said. At Balmoral, she rode to the hills carrying picnic sandwiches in a plastic box. Menus were sent up to her for approval, and once he wrote a Scandinavian dessert whose name translates as "veiled farm girls." A handwritten note came back asking what it was or who they were. McGrady considers it the only time he annoyed her. He says that when the Queen ate alone, she chose grilled fish or grilled chicken, and she was happiest when food came from the garden.
State banquets required rich menus, as guests expect, and McGrady cooked for five American presidents during his years at the palace. Sandringham was the home he loved most. Windsor Castle was so large that a chef rarely saw the family, but Sandringham is a house, not a castle, and its kitchen sits close to the dining room. He said he could hear Diana laughing in the dining room opposite. Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Margaret and the Queen visited the kitchen during holidays, days into a stay. Every Christmas, the Queen gave him a gift and wished him a happy year, with Philip standing beside her, so that McGrady shook his hand as well.
A house of that size holds an enormous amount of information in the hands of people trained not to repeat it. The Queen's staff knew the schedule, the moods, the guests who came and the guests who stopped coming. For decades, almost nothing left the house. Ryan Parry's 2003 stunt exposed gaps in the palace's hiring procedures. The Mirror published his story at the start of the American president's state visit under the headline "The Intruder." Parry said he left the night before he was due to serve breakfast to the Foreign Secretary and the National Security Adviser. Home Secretary David Blunkett said the failure to fully check Parry's background was a gap that had to be closed. The Queen's lawyers went to court to stop the newspaper publishing more photographs. Parry won a journalism award for his story the following year, and a head of security was appointed to tighten vetting of palace staff. Later, other tabloid journalists were arrested for supplying false information to the palace.
The habit of silence among staff has proved hard to break. The Daily Mail reported in December 2022 that departing palace employees sign what staff call a "secrecy clause," and that some former aides had pressed the palace to release them from it after the Netflix series about Prince Harry and Meghan. The case of Marion Crawford shows how the habit was enforced. Her contract for "The Little Princesses" contained a loosely worded clause allowing publication without royal approval and under her own name. She wrote the book in the summer of 1949 with the help of a ghostwriter. When the manuscript was shown to the King's wife, later known as the Queen Mother, she was horrified and said the governess had lost her mind. American publishers, who found the account friendly, hid Crawford's reaction, and the book was published anyway. Crawford left her home in the autumn of 1950, shunned and close to collapse. The Scotsman later described her as an outcast from her colleagues from the top of the pyramid to the bottom. She died in 1988.
McGrady gave his own account of 1992 to D magazine in 2004. He told the magazine that Andrew Morton's book about Diana was published in June of that year, and that the royal family asked her whether she had spoken to him, and she said she had not. In his account, her doctor advised her that recording her story was better than staying silent. McGrady called that advice appalling and said she was surrounded by a great deal of bad advice. He said the book was the spark that led to the collapse of the marriage. In any case, the pressure had become public by the autumn. The Duke and Duchess of York announced their separation in March, and Princess Anne's divorce was finalized in April. In August, newspapers published photographs of the Duchess of York with her friend and financial adviser John Bryan, and days later, the text of an intimate phone call between Diana and James Gilbey. The Queen was preparing to mark 40 years on the throne, and her family dominated the front pages.
On the morning of Friday, November 20, the Queen was at Buckingham Palace. At Windsor Castle, rewiring work was under way in the northeast wing, and a number of paintings and pieces of furniture had already been moved to make the electricians' work easier. A spotlight used in the renovation work was placed near a curtain beside the altar in the Queen's private chapel. The curtain caught fire at about a quarter past eleven, or half past, depending on the account. The joint fire investigation team later concluded that the spotlight had been placed too close to the altar curtain, or touched it, and that the curtain had degraded from the heat and ignited. The chapel was being used to store paintings during the renovation.
The alarm sounded in the castle's control room, where the head of the castle fire brigade pressed a button to alert fire crews in Reading and trigger the public alarm. That brigade had 20 men, only six of them full-time. Construction workers in an adjoining room tried to put out the flames with hand extinguishers. The castle crew arrived at about 12:40, followed three minutes later by local fire brigades. The void above the chapel ceiling connected with the ceiling voids of neighboring rooms, and Adam Nicolson, author of the 1997 book "Restoration" describing the fire, wrote that it spread in all directions at once. By 12:20, the fire had reached St. George's Hall, the largest of the state apartments. That was when castle staff began moving furniture.
Prince Andrew and the castle's manager, Major Jim Eastwood, led the salvage effort, joined by about 370 employees and contractors, including roughly 100 military personnel. Furniture, paintings, clocks, carpets and porcelain came out through the doors and piled up in the courtyard. Among them were 18th-century French furniture, paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens and Gainsborough, a 150-foot table, and a 120-foot carpet from the Waterloo Chamber. Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, director of the Royal Collection, watched one rescuer wrap his arms around a huge bust, lift it, and step into the corridor before falling to the ground under its weight. Nicolson later recorded that almost nothing was broken and nothing was lost. The Royal Library and the Print Room were emptied in an hour, starting with the most precious drawings by Holbein and Leonardo da Vinci. The library itself survived the flames thanks to a fire wall at the far end of St. George's Hall.
Lady Palmer, wife of the castle's constable and governor, Sir Charles Palmer, kept a daily diary, and her entries shaped the account of the human chain. She wrote that people passed books three or four at a time. The chain stretched from the castle dean to an electrician, then to the elderly wife of a military knight, then to a guard brought in from the Great Park, then to a Gurkha soldier, a civil clerk, a painter, another military knight, a minor canon, and one of the girls who worked in the castle shop.
Firefighters worked until about eleven that night before the main fire was extinguished. At the height of the blaze, 36 pumps were pushing a million and a half gallons of water into the building, and more than 200 firefighters from seven counties were on site. The floor of the Brunswick Tower collapsed at 3:30, forcing crews to pull back as flames rose 50 feet above it. When the count was made, nine principal rooms of the castle, along with more than a hundred others, had been damaged across nearly 7,000 square meters, and the roof of St. George's Hall had fallen in. No deaths were recorded, and only two works of art were lost: a painting by Beechey and a sideboard described below. Six people were treated for minor injuries, while Christopher Lloyd, the Queen's picture surveyor, suffered a suspected heart attack.
The state dining room was cleared for renovation, except for two pieces too large to move, which were boxed in place: a huge painting of King George III on horseback by Sir William Beechey, and a wide sideboard designed by Pugin. Prince Andrew volunteered to remove the Beechey painting from its frame himself, but it was too late. The Queen was at Buckingham Palace preparing for a quiet weekend at Windsor. Prince Philip was in Argentina on a trip for the World Wildlife Fund, and the ruby anniversary celebrations were to be held after his return on Sunday evening. The Queen came down in the afternoon to inspect the damage, and Prince Andrew told reporters she was in a state of shock and great sadness. Photographers captured her the next day in a raincoat and tall rubber boots, walking through the ruins. Prince Charles arrived on the evening of the fire.
The fire broke out on the Queen's 45th wedding anniversary, and her biographer Hugo Vickers noted that the coincidence seemed to symbolize the problems of the House of Windsor and the separations of its younger members. The kitchen appears only in passing in this story. McGrady was cooking for the Queen in 1992, and he described his time at Windsor before the fire as enjoyable. Chefs called the place "Windsor wonders." The interviews used here do not place him inside the castle that day. What he describes is the household that followed the fire. A family that moved between Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral through the year now had one of its homes damaged, with nearly a fifth of its space affected.
Four days after the fire, on November 24, the Queen gave a speech to a crowd at Guildhall in London marking 40 years on the throne. She said she would look back on 1992 with a certain amount of bitterness, borrowing a phrase from a sympathetic reporter: "annus horribilis." That reporter was Sir Edward Ford, a former courtier, who later said in a television documentary that he should have written "horrible year." Then came the bill for the fire. Prime Minister John Major suggested that Parliament pay the cost of repairs, which stirred widespread public resentment. He then announced in the House of Commons that he had accepted an offer from the Queen to pay taxes on her private income. Buckingham Palace opened its state rooms to visitors for an admission fee, and the proceeds went to Windsor. Historical press estimates put its share at about 70 percent of the bill, while the Queen added two million pounds of her own money. The restoration took five years and cost 36.5 million pounds. The work added a new room to the castle, the Lantern Lobby, where the private chapel had stood, and a new roof for St. George's Hall, built of English oak using traditional tools. On December 9, John Major stood in the House of Commons and confirmed the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
In 1993, Darren McGrady left the Queen's kitchens. He had spent 11 years there, and Diana had known him since a summer at Balmoral. Now she was living apart from her husband at Kensington Palace with her two sons and a staff. McGrady assumed he would never see her again. Then he received a call asking whether he was interested in becoming her chef. The invitation came from Diana herself, and once she learned of his interest, she insisted he come. On his first night at Kensington Palace, she burst into the room, told him she hoped he would be happy there, and gave him a small gift.
He had cooked for the Queen for 11 years. Now he was responsible for the meals of a princess and two schoolboys, working from a kitchen on the second floor of the palace. The formality of Buckingham Palace fell away. Diana avoided long banquet tables and preferred a round table seating ten so she could talk to everyone. When she ate lunch alone, she ate at the kitchen table. He remembers her in a dressing gown, her hair up in a towel, without makeup. In the afternoon, she would come in and ask about dinner. Once, when he answered with lobster thermidor, she said she would rather have chicken, and the menu was changed to chicken. He says there was no need to prepare anything in advance.
By then, McGrady says, she was working out at the gym three days a week and eating carefully. She asked him to watch the fat, and said she would handle the carbohydrates at the gym. She wanted fresh juices before juicing became fashionable, and one day she asked for a concentrated beetroot juice. He warned her to dilute it. A few hours later, she came down to the kitchen and said he had poisoned her because her face was covered in blotches. This happened shortly before a color presentation. She hid the problem with fake tan and heavy foundation.
The boys ate differently, and McGrady solved the difference with a trick he described to D magazine. William and Harry wanted roast potatoes in hot oil, which their mother disapproved of. So he cooked the potatoes two ways, while Diana's were dipped in egg white and baked. Whenever she sat with her sons, the two dishes looked the same. Her own taste was simple. McGrady says she was content with a baked potato and salad, and that her favorite dishes included foie gras slices, eggs Suzette, steamed trout, veal liver, and fresh pasta. Guests also visited the palace, among them Elton John and George Michael.
McGrady noticed something else about the two boys. At their father's home, they had learned formal dinner manners, down to the type of fork used. At Kensington Palace, McGrady said, "putting a tub of ice cream in front of the television was normal. Diana wanted them to have it." When the princes sneaked into McDonald's with their bodyguards, Diana explained to him that they were after the toys in the Happy Meals.
Some details from those years are tied to a specific date. Diana's title changed in 1996 when she divorced her husband and lost the style of Her Royal Highness. McGrady told D magazine that it upset her deeply, yet he continued to address her as Your Royal Highness. On her birthday, July 1, the doorbell rang constantly with bouquets from charities and friends, and he says he went up and down the stairs again and again, which made it the hardest workout he got in that kitchen. Diana gave her staff handwritten greeting cards on work anniversaries and other important occasions, and he still keeps one. Diana used to tell him they needed to move to America, and he could never tell whether she was joking.
In those years, one night belonged to the household as much as to the family. On November 5, 1995, a BBC Panorama team entered Diana's sitting room at Kensington Palace with a camera and recording equipment. The equipment was brought in on the pretext of installing a new sound system. Journalist Martin Bashir, producer Mike Robinson and cameraman Tony Poole spent the day with her. McGrady had been in his job as her chef for two years. The program was kept secret with great care. The broadcast tape remained under constant guard, and security officers were present during editing. It aired on November 20, the anniversary of the Queen's wedding and exactly three years after the Windsor fire. Nearly 23 million people in Britain watched, and the National Grid recorded a 1,000-megawatt surge in demand after it ended.
In the interview, Diana said her marriage had three people in it and was a bit crowded, and that she wanted to be a queen in people's hearts. She confirmed her relationship with James Hewitt. She also said she believed the royal family saw her as a threat of some kind. On December 20, Buckingham Palace announced that the Queen had written to Charles and Diana advising them to divorce.
The royal family returned to this story 25 years later, in 2020. The BBC's director-general apologized to Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, over forged bank statements Bashir used to win his trust, and through him hers. The forged documents falsely showed payments to people close to the family, including Alan Waller, the earl's head of security; Patrick Jephson, Diana's private secretary; and Richard Aylard, Prince Charles's private secretary. Former judge Lord Dyson concluded in 2021 that Bashir had acted deceptively to arrange the meeting that led to the interview. He added that Diana would probably have agreed to the interview anyway, and a note she wrote in December 1995 indicates that Bashir had not shown her any documents. William said the lies fed his mother's fear, suspicion and isolation. The BBC later apologized to Jephson and paid him a substantial sum, reported to be around 100,000 pounds. It also paid Waller 60,000 pounds. In the High Court, the corporation told Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who had been nanny to William and Harry, that allegations made against her were baseless.
In the summer of 1997, Diana was traveling, and the princes were at Balmoral with their father. Before she left, she told McGrady her plan for returning. She would meet the boys in the VIP lounge at Heathrow Airport, and they would spend a few happy days together at Kensington Palace before William and Harry went back to Ludgrove School. She had not seen them since they left for Balmoral, and McGrady knew she would spoil them. He planned their favorite meal and bought the food.
Diana died in the early hours of Sunday, August 31, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris after a crash in the Alma tunnel. Dodi Fayed and the driver, Henri Paul, were killed in the crash. Her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived. These facts appear in all accounts.
On the morning after, Diana's life was divided between two homes, one in Scotland and one in London, and staff were present at both. At Kensington Palace, McGrady says, "the day passed very slowly. The gardens filled with people standing and holding flowers." He found it strange that thousands gathered without making any noise. His morning at home began when he called his wife Wendy upstairs and told her the news channels were saying her boss had died. At Balmoral, Prince Charles was told during the night that Diana had been seriously injured, and later that she had died. He let his sons sleep and told them in the morning. Harry described that moment in his memoir "Spare." He waited for his father to say his mother was all right, but his father did not. Harry wrote that everything seemed to stop.
Christopher Andersen's biography of Charles, titled "The King," adds details about life at the castle. The Express summarized the account in September 2026. According to Andersen, when news of Diana's death reached Charles, he cried out so loudly that people elsewhere in the castle heard him, and staff rushed to his room and found him sitting in an armchair weeping. The biography says some staff struggled to hold back tears. This account comes from a biographer and cannot be checked against a staff member's testimony, so it should be treated accordingly.
McGrady's account is similar in substance: staff learned the news as everyone else in the country did, then went to work anyway. The family went to church at Crathie Kirk as they do every Sunday. Three cars left the castle at about 11:30. Prince Andrew and the Queen Mother rode in the first. Prince Charles rode in the second with a son on each side of him. The Queen and Prince Philip followed in the third. One reporter who watched them pass later recalled that William looked worn out from crying. The Herald in Scotland noted that no one mentioned Diana by name in the service, though the prayers referred to the tragedy. Robert Sloan, minister at Crathie, later said the congregation prayed specifically for the Prince of Wales and the children. In 2022, William told the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that he had found refuge in that prayer.
McGrady kept going to Kensington Palace throughout that week, even though there was nothing to cook. Each member of Diana's staff was given time alone with her in the royal chapel, and he took his turn. Paul Burrell's task was different. He helped prepare Diana's body for burial and was the only person outside her immediate family to attend the burial on her family's estate. The Associated Press later noted that he was widely praised in those months for refraining from making money from his connection to her or revealing private information.
On the day of the funeral, September 6, Diana's personal staff lined up at the front door of Kensington Palace as the coffin left. Then they went to Westminster Abbey. McGrady has said the sight of the two boys walking behind the gun carriage should never have happened. He says Diana would have been horrified. He sees no justification for a 12-year-old walking behind his mother's coffin while people wept along the route.
The restoration of Windsor Castle was completed the same year, in time for the Queen's Golden Jubilee on November 20, exactly five years after the fire. In the months that followed, McGrady considered his options. He had lost the job he had held for four years. The alternative was returning to being one of 20 chefs at Buckingham Palace, which he did not want. He has said he never believes in going backward. He sent out his résumé and received an offer to cook privately for a family in Dallas. Diana had talked about America. He traveled there without her in 1998.
Paul Burrell's path into royal service began with a decision he made as a schoolboy. The son of a truck driver in Derbyshire, people assumed he would work in the local coal mine. At age eight, after a trip to London and watching the changing of the guard, he decided he wanted to work at Buckingham Palace. He trained in hotel management and joined royal service at 18 as a footman. In 1987, he joined the household of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and later moved to Diana's staff at Kensington Palace. He served the royal family for 21 years.
In the months after Diana's death, he went to see the Queen. Burrell described a long, frank conversation between them in her sitting room, where no one else was present. He said he told her he had taken it upon himself to keep some things the Princess had given him, and that he had made sure to protect them. He also says the Queen warned him to be careful, telling him there were hidden forces at work in the country that no one knew about. Buckingham Palace declined to comment when that account was published in 2002. Years later, under oath at the inquest into Diana's death, Burrell said he could not determine whether she meant the press, the establishment, or the security services. No one else was in the room, so the warning rests on his word alone.
Then, in January 2001, police arrested him on suspicion of theft and searched his home near Chester. Among the items they seized were videotapes Diana had made with her voice coach, Peter Settelen, at Kensington Palace in 1992 and 1993. In August 2001, Burrell was charged with three counts of theft, and the indictment listed hundreds of items. Some were ordinary, such as a pepper mill. Police described one as an Indiana Jones-style whip.
The trial began at the Old Bailey in October 2002. Burrell remained in the dock for about three weeks while the prosecution presented its case. The prosecutor, Mr. Boyce, later said the case had been brought on the basis that Burrell had told no one he was keeping the items. It became clear only after the trial began that he had told the Queen. On October 25, according to journalist Andrew Morton, the Queen was on her way to a memorial for the victims of the Bali bombings with Prince Philip and Prince Charles. As the three discussed the case, the Queen remembered a long meeting with Burrell five years earlier, during which he mentioned he was keeping some of Diana's papers in a safe place. The Queen had not seen it as relevant because the papers were a small part of what he was accused of taking. She was questioned by Charles's new private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, and confirmed that Burrell had said he would take care of Diana's papers. The prosecution was informed.
On November 1, a Friday, Judge Rafferty heard arguments from both sides and ordered Burrell acquitted of all three charges. The jury was dismissed in her absence. Morton recorded Burrell telling the crowd outside that the Queen had supported him. The videotapes never reached the courtroom because prosecutors agreed not to use them. Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, disputed ownership of them, and after a legal battle, they were returned to Settelen in 2004. NBC later broadcast excerpts. In March of that year, the American network had already aired a separate set of recordings: audiotapes Diana made secretly in 1991 through an intermediary for Andrew Morton's book.
In October 2003, Burrell published "A Royal Duty." William and Harry had issued a joint statement calling it a cold and overt betrayal. Burrell responded in a BBC interview that the boys were being manipulated by the palace and by influential men, the same people who had done it to their mother. The book sold millions of copies. McGrady's response came a few months later. He told D magazine he was upset that Burrell had published information for the public, because the two of them had sworn not to write such things. He said that if Burrell cared about Diana's interests, he would have destroyed the tapes. He added that Burrell had also collected personal letters that should have been burned. Then came the March broadcast. McGrady felt suspicion and strangeness when he heard his former boss say those things. He thought about how young she was in the early years of her marriage, and how young William and Harry were then. McGrady had worked with Burrell for 15 years, and he said he felt frightened to hear such things from a man he knew well and who had two young, vulnerable sons.
McGrady did not write the book for which the publisher offered him close to one million pounds. In the same 2004 interview, he said he was working on a cookbook combining recipes and memories, banquets he had prepared for foreign heads of government, William and Harry's favorite dishes, and some of Diana's healthy recipes. The video appeared under the title "Royal Dining," with the subtitle "Recipes and memories from the palace kitchen." It is the closest thing to the kitchen memoir mentioned in the title, and its subtitle points to its contents.
Twenty-five years passed. McGrady founded a catering company in Dallas and wrote cookbooks. He also posted, on the anniversary of Diana's death each year, a short line about the dinner he had prepared for her and her sons. On the 19th anniversary, he wrote that she did not come home, and attached a photograph she had signed for him.
On September 8, 2022, he was in his kitchen in Dallas. He heard talk of the Queen's illness and wondered why she was at Balmoral. Then he learned that the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace had been canceled that morning. He later wrote that it felt like a series of signals. A few days earlier, he had posted that he was glad the Queen was at Balmoral, that it was her happy place, that her smile was wider there, and that she would want to be there to face what could not be avoided. The palace had issued a statement earlier that day saying doctors were concerned for her health and that family members were traveling to Scotland. In London, hundreds of people stood in the rain outside Buckingham Palace, and a rainbow appeared over the building. That evening, the announcement came that the Queen had died peacefully at Balmoral. She was 96.
McGrady spoke to CNN within hours. He said he felt a pain in his stomach, as if he had lost someone close, and that he believed the whole nation felt the same. He remembered the corgis that chased him beside the river on the day he first met her, and the years of Christmas gifts and dancing at Balmoral. On social media, he thanked her for allowing him to cook for her for 11 years. He also said he had seen her at her best, in quiet moments behind the scenes, when a bright smile spread across her face.
Those who carried her coffin from Balmoral were the people who worked there. On Sunday, September 11, gamekeepers from the estate lifted the oak coffin from the castle ballroom and placed it in a hearse. The wreath on top was made of dahlias, sweet peas, phlox, white heather and pine branches, all gathered from Balmoral. Her daughter, Princess Anne, and her son-in-law, Sir Timothy Laurence, accompanied the funeral procession. The hearse left the gates, passing piles of flowers left by the public, and people lined the streets of Ballater as it passed. The journey to Edinburgh took about six hours. Between the moment of death and the departure from the castle, the coffin lay in the Balmoral ballroom under the Royal Standard of Scotland so that estate workers could say goodbye. The association that supports the gamekeepers wrote at the time that the keepers kept watch over her there. At Balmoral, minister David Barr rang the bells of Glenmuick Church 70 times after the announcement, and told the Associated Press that local residents regarded the royal family as neighbors. These are the same estate staff the Queen thanked every summer with a dance. Once, a young chef spent an evening at that ball, where a princess spun her across the floor toward her and nearly hit her by a few inches.
The title of this account promised a forbidden diary. The only actual diary in these stories is the one Lady Palmer kept on the day Windsor burned, and used to record a line of people passing books hand to hand. A dean, an electrician, a Gurkha soldier, a girl from the shop. Everything else here was said aloud in interviews, in a courtroom, and in cookbooks by people who worked under an expectation of silence and decided, for their own reasons, to speak. Burrell wrote his book, and the princes called it betrayal. McGrady turned down a fortune from a publisher and turned instead to writing about recipes. Marion Crawford died in 1988 in Aberdeen. The royal family drove past her home for years, and the phrase describing what she did outlived her.