Charlotte Briggs still remembers the exact pitch of his voice when he barked, “Can’t you ever do anything right?” over a curtain that was one inch too short. She was 21. He was 41. And she was the junior housemaid at Buckingham Palace who learned, very quickly, that the Duke of York’s polished public smile hid a private temper that could scald hotter than the royal kettles.

In her first full interview in two decades, given exclusively to The Sun and aired in a bombshell ITV documentary last night, the now-47-year-old former palace maid has peeled back the silk curtains on a man she describes as “entitled, petulant, and casually cruel.” And the picture is uglier than even the Epstein headlines prepared the world for.

“He liked to be treated like the king he never was,” Charlotte says, sitting in the modest Yorkshire cottage she bought with the nondisclosure payout she finally broke this week. “It wasn’t just the tantrums about the teddy bears. It was the way he spoke to people who couldn’t answer back.”

The teddy bears, of course, are infamous (twelve on the bed at any given time, arranged by size, with strict laminated instructions left on the dresser). But Charlotte’s stories go deeper, darker, and far more petty.

Every morning at 7:15 sharp, she had to kneel on the carpet to plug in his mobile phone charger because “His Royal Highness does not bend.” If the cable was even slightly twisted, he would flick it across the room and make her start again.
Once, when his breakfast kippers were 30 seconds late, he threw the entire silver tray against the wall and stormed out, leaving her to clean fish scales off the antique wallpaper while footmen pretended not to notice.
He kept a bowl of individually wrapped Werther’s Originals on his desk (only the orange ones allowed). If a maid accidentally restocked with a single butterscotch, he’d tip the whole bowl into the bin and demand she fish the “correct” sweets out of the rubbish with her bare hands.
In 2003, he screamed at her for fifteen minutes because the gap between two curtains in his study let in “a sliver of common daylight.” She was made to stand on a chair, re-hang the 40-pound drapes three times, and apologize for “ruining his morning.”

“He never hit anyone,” Charlotte is careful to say, “but he didn’t need to. The humiliation was the weapon.”

The worst moments, she claims, came when he knew cameras weren’t watching. After a 2001 ski trip to Klosters, Andrew returned furious that paparazzi had caught him looking “puffy.” He summoned every female member of staff who’d been on the trip (maids, protection officers, even a junior press officer) and lined them up in the Palace corridor. One by one he asked, “Do I look fat in those pictures?” When a young maid nervously said, “No, sir, you look very regal,” he snapped, “Liar,” and ordered her to write a 500-word apology letter explaining why lying to royalty was a sackable offence. She was 19.

Charlotte’s most chilling memory, however, is quieter. Late one night in 2004, walking past his private sitting room, she heard muffled crying. The door was ajar. Inside, Andrew sat alone on the sofa, head in hands, surrounded by dozens of framed photographs of a young Sarah Ferguson and their daughters. “What have I done?” he reportedly whispered to the empty room. Charlotte froze, unsure whether to enter. Then his head snapped up, eyes red. “Get out,” he hissed, voice suddenly ice. She fled. The next morning he acted as if nothing had happened.

She left palace service in 2005 after a breakdown her GP directly linked to “workplace bullying.” The severance package came with a cast-iron NDA and a payout most people would call generous. Charlotte calls it “blood money for silence.”

Why speak now? “Because the country deserves to know who they protected for decades,” she says. “We were told to smile and bow while he treated us like dirt. I’m done bowing.”

Palace sources, unsurprisingly, branded the claims “categorically untrue” and “the bitter recollections of a disgruntled ex-employee.” Yet insiders whisper that Charlotte is only the first. At least three other former staff members (two still under NDA, one retired) have reportedly approached lawyers in the last 48 hours.

As the ITV credits rolled, one line from Charlotte lingered on living-room screens across Britain:

“I served a man who believed the world owed him perfection, and when it didn’t deliver, he punished the nearest person without a title. I was that person. Thousands of us were.”

Twenty years after she last knelt to plug in a prince’s charger, Charlotte Briggs stood up straight on national television and finally unplugged the myth.

And somewhere behind the high walls of Royal Lodge, a man with a famously fragile temper just felt the temperature drop.