1 00:00:18,120 --> 00:00:20,640 There are ghosts in this place. 2 00:00:22,120 --> 00:00:24,680 You don't notice them right away. 3 00:00:24,680 --> 00:00:31,640 At first glance, Binham Priory in Norfolk looks like a typical English country church - plain and simple. 4 00:00:31,640 --> 00:00:34,360 Limestone, limewash, nothing fancy. 5 00:00:34,360 --> 00:00:39,960 But then you look around and realise something else IS going on here. 6 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:46,160 That grandiose, timber-vaulted roof, those multi-storey arcades, 7 00:00:46,160 --> 00:00:50,200 aren't they all just a bit too big for a parish church? 8 00:00:50,200 --> 00:00:57,000 Then you start to fill in the gaps and bit by bit a lost world remakes itself. 9 00:00:58,760 --> 00:01:03,120 A world of monks and masses, of colour and plainsong. 10 00:01:03,120 --> 00:01:05,640 A world of brilliant images. 11 00:01:05,640 --> 00:01:08,200 The world of Catholic England. 12 00:01:10,960 --> 00:01:15,000 For centuries, this didn't sound strained. 13 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:19,920 Catholic England was just another way of saying Christian England, really. 14 00:01:19,920 --> 00:01:26,960 And then, in a generation, it stopped being a truism and started being treason. 15 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:34,240 Images of the Virgin, the apostles and the saints, 16 00:01:34,240 --> 00:01:39,000 once cherished and glorified, were now mocked and vandalised. 17 00:01:40,920 --> 00:01:45,640 Here at Binham, the saints on the rood screen were expunged, 18 00:01:45,640 --> 00:01:49,680 painted over with verses from an English Bible. 19 00:01:55,960 --> 00:02:03,080 Today they're restored, but the world over which they once presided is dead and gone. 20 00:02:07,440 --> 00:02:13,560 We can't bring back the lost world of Binham's painted saints, whole and alive again. 21 00:02:13,560 --> 00:02:18,840 But because the death of that world was so shocking, so improbable, 22 00:02:18,840 --> 00:02:23,680 and because the Reformation and the wars of religion it triggered 23 00:02:23,680 --> 00:02:27,720 cut so deep a mark on the body of our country, 24 00:02:27,720 --> 00:02:32,760 we need to reassemble the fragments of that world as best we can. 25 00:02:32,760 --> 00:02:38,920 Only then can we hope to answer one of the most poignant questions in our history. 26 00:02:38,920 --> 00:02:43,000 Whatever did happen to Catholic England? 27 00:03:24,480 --> 00:03:29,000 We all grew up, even a nice Jewish boy like me, 28 00:03:29,000 --> 00:03:33,880 thinking that the English Reformation was a historic inevitability - 29 00:03:33,880 --> 00:03:40,840 the culling of an obsolete, unpopular, fundamentally un-English faith. 30 00:03:40,840 --> 00:03:47,880 But on the eve of the Reformation, Catholicism in England was vibrant, popular and very much alive. 31 00:03:54,360 --> 00:04:01,600 This is Walsingham in Norfolk, once the home of the miracle-working shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. 32 00:04:03,240 --> 00:04:06,880 Along with the Becket shrine at Canterbury, 33 00:04:06,880 --> 00:04:12,320 Walsingham was the must-see place for serious 16th-century pilgrims - 34 00:04:12,320 --> 00:04:17,360 a tradition revived this century by High-Church Anglicans. 35 00:04:22,920 --> 00:04:28,600 Today you get only the faintest echoes of what Walsingham once was. 36 00:04:28,600 --> 00:04:35,240 A gaudy, rowdy mix of hucksterism and holiness, piety and plaster saints. 37 00:04:35,240 --> 00:04:39,880 The kind of place you'd expect to find, say, in Naples or Seville, 38 00:04:39,880 --> 00:04:42,640 not in the depths of East Anglia. 39 00:04:42,640 --> 00:04:47,000 But even then, as today, not everybody approved. 40 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:54,040 Erasmus, the Catholic scholar superstar of the age, came here on a mock pilgrimage 41 00:04:54,040 --> 00:05:00,920 and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk and chapels airmailed in from the Holy Land. 42 00:05:00,920 --> 00:05:05,600 But his was the minority intellectual view, safely expressed in Latin, 43 00:05:05,600 --> 00:05:12,520 and tolerated, though not necessarily endorsed, by members of the ruling Tudor dynasty. 44 00:05:18,160 --> 00:05:22,200 The Tudors were regular and devout pilgrims. 45 00:05:22,200 --> 00:05:26,840 Henry VIII, early in his reign, walked barefoot to the shrine, 46 00:05:26,840 --> 00:05:31,640 offering a necklace of rubies and dedicating a giant candle 47 00:05:31,640 --> 00:05:36,080 in thanks for the birth of his son, Henry, in 1511. 48 00:05:36,080 --> 00:05:43,520 Prince Henry died within weeks, but the king's candle continued to burn at the shrine for many years to come. 49 00:05:54,040 --> 00:05:58,080 What a strange world this Catholic England was. 50 00:05:58,080 --> 00:06:00,600 The urge for renewal and reform 51 00:06:00,600 --> 00:06:06,640 side by side with the ancient, the hallowed and the occasionally fraudulent. 52 00:06:06,640 --> 00:06:10,680 But all apparent contradictions could be accommodated 53 00:06:10,680 --> 00:06:15,560 under the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church. 54 00:06:15,560 --> 00:06:17,960 And what a mother she was! 55 00:06:19,440 --> 00:06:26,480 Come to Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford in Suffolk and you'll see just what I mean. 56 00:06:27,800 --> 00:06:32,840 This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money. 57 00:06:32,840 --> 00:06:39,360 However, what you see today are just the bare bones of what it was supposed to be. 58 00:06:40,400 --> 00:06:45,280 But we know what Long Melford in its splendour was really like, 59 00:06:45,280 --> 00:06:49,320 thanks to an account left by Roger Martin, 60 00:06:49,320 --> 00:06:55,840 a churchwarden here in the reign of England's last Catholic ruler, Queen Mary. 61 00:06:56,960 --> 00:07:04,240 Writing in the very different times of Queen Elizabeth, Roger Martin, with a mixture of pride and regret, 62 00:07:04,240 --> 00:07:08,800 set out to tell future generations exactly what they were missing. 63 00:07:11,560 --> 00:07:18,080 "At the back of the high altar, there was a goodly mount carved very artificially 64 00:07:18,080 --> 00:07:20,640 "with the story of Christ's Passion, 65 00:07:20,640 --> 00:07:25,560 "all being fair, gilt and lively and beautifully set forth. 66 00:07:25,560 --> 00:07:29,200 "And at the north end of the same altar 67 00:07:29,200 --> 00:07:35,240 "there was a goodly gilt tabernacle reaching up to the roof of the chancel 68 00:07:35,240 --> 00:07:42,200 "in which there was one fair large gilt image of the Holy Trinity, besides other fine images." 69 00:08:12,520 --> 00:08:16,560 But Martin's church was more than just a building. 70 00:08:16,560 --> 00:08:20,880 He describes a living world of processions and festivals, 71 00:08:20,880 --> 00:08:24,920 ceremonies and rituals, involving the whole community. 72 00:08:34,600 --> 00:08:41,520 Above all this presided the "management", without whom none of it made sense - the priests, 73 00:08:41,520 --> 00:08:46,440 guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Christian belief. 74 00:08:48,560 --> 00:08:55,720 Every time the priest celebrated communion, Christ crucified would be there in flesh and blood. 75 00:08:55,720 --> 00:09:00,800 Hoc est corpus meum... 76 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:09,000 The priest was the indispensable man and there was no getting to heaven but through his hands. 77 00:09:12,680 --> 00:09:17,240 But elsewhere other hands were hard at work. 78 00:09:17,240 --> 00:09:23,280 The miracle-working priest was about to be challenged by the word of God itself, 79 00:09:23,280 --> 00:09:27,320 translated into English and printed in black and white. 80 00:09:28,320 --> 00:09:34,640 Handwritten English Bibles had been in circulation since the days of the Lollards, 81 00:09:34,640 --> 00:09:39,480 the Protestant heresy that flourished briefly in the early 1400s. 82 00:09:39,480 --> 00:09:44,520 But manuscripts represented hard labour and cost pounds to buy. 83 00:09:44,520 --> 00:09:51,240 However, a printed New Testament could be mass produced and sold for a tenth of the price. 84 00:09:53,520 --> 00:09:56,120 The idea of a Bible in English, 85 00:09:56,120 --> 00:10:03,160 cheap and freely available to anyone who could read, put the fear of God into the authorities. 86 00:10:03,800 --> 00:10:10,160 William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous task 87 00:10:10,160 --> 00:10:16,760 of translating, publishing and printing an English version of the New Testament. 88 00:10:16,760 --> 00:10:20,600 Tyndale is a recognisable historical type. 89 00:10:20,600 --> 00:10:27,640 Austere, steely, unswerving, even a little fanatical, and disarmingly clear in his own convictions. 90 00:10:27,640 --> 00:10:33,080 "It was not possible," he wrote, "to establish the lay people in any truth 91 00:10:33,080 --> 00:10:39,120 "except the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue." 92 00:10:42,080 --> 00:10:46,120 In 1524, Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe, 93 00:10:46,120 --> 00:10:52,960 ending up in Worms in Germany, a city which had recently been made safely Protestant 94 00:10:52,960 --> 00:10:57,800 by its allegiance to the new radical doctrines of Martin Luther. 95 00:10:57,800 --> 00:11:02,800 Tyndale's English New Testament was completed there by January 1526. 96 00:11:02,800 --> 00:11:07,040 Within weeks, copies were on sale in London. 97 00:11:12,240 --> 00:11:16,760 What followed was an English version of the Inquisition. 98 00:11:28,880 --> 00:11:33,720 Denunciations, arrests, book burnings, show trials. 99 00:11:35,200 --> 00:11:40,000 Those who recanted were forced to carry before them faggots of wood, 100 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:46,640 symbols of the bonfire that would consume them if they ever lapsed again. 101 00:11:46,640 --> 00:11:51,160 And in 1530, symbolism gave way to gruesome reality 102 00:11:51,160 --> 00:11:57,240 when a priest named Thomas Hitton confessed to smuggling in a New Testament. 103 00:11:57,240 --> 00:12:02,080 Condemned as a heretic, he was burned at Maidstone on 23rd February. 104 00:12:02,080 --> 00:12:06,120 The Reformation had claimed its first victim. 105 00:12:09,240 --> 00:12:16,280 And cheering all this on from the sidelines was the king, Henry VIII, dutiful son of the Church 106 00:12:16,280 --> 00:12:22,800 whose candle at Walsingham had been burning brightly for nearly 20 years. 107 00:12:24,800 --> 00:12:29,840 In the winter of 1530, as the fire was lit under the unfortunate Hitton, 108 00:12:29,840 --> 00:12:34,880 there was no reason to think that anything would ever change. 109 00:12:34,880 --> 00:12:39,880 To understand why it did, you have to understand something about Henry, 110 00:12:39,880 --> 00:12:46,880 the man who, without really meaning to, turned Catholic England into a Protestant nation. 111 00:13:08,280 --> 00:13:12,800 Well, for a start, he was never supposed to be king. 112 00:13:12,800 --> 00:13:19,320 But when his older brother Arthur died, Henry, aged eleven, became heir apparent. 113 00:13:19,320 --> 00:13:24,760 He also acquired his brother's wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon. 114 00:13:24,760 --> 00:13:31,280 The marriage alliance between Spain and England was just too important to be allowed to lapse. 115 00:13:31,280 --> 00:13:38,320 In 1509, King Henry VII died and his 17-year-old son came into his own. 116 00:13:39,960 --> 00:13:43,800 The young king was a spectacular sight. 117 00:13:43,800 --> 00:13:47,840 You could practically smell the testosterone. 118 00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:52,680 Any way and anywhere he could flash that burly energy, he did. 119 00:13:52,680 --> 00:13:56,720 In the saddle, on the dance floor, or on the tennis court, 120 00:13:56,720 --> 00:14:03,880 where a besotted courtier wrote of the king's skin, "Glowing through the fabric of his finely woven shirt." 121 00:14:03,880 --> 00:14:08,920 His famous breezy charm was dispensed like the English weather - 122 00:14:08,920 --> 00:14:15,600 in sunny periods, alternating with cloudy spells and sudden bursts of thunder. 123 00:14:15,600 --> 00:14:21,640 The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, punch-in-the-belly, arm-round-the-shoulders kind, 124 00:14:21,640 --> 00:14:27,680 which, depending on his mood, could betoken either sudden promotion or imminent arrest. 125 00:14:27,680 --> 00:14:34,120 Henry wallowed in the praise lavished on him by courtiers and ambassadors. 126 00:14:34,120 --> 00:14:38,560 Henry the gallant, Henry the handsome, Henry the superstar, 127 00:14:38,560 --> 00:14:43,320 the only king to have his own band hired to go touring with him 128 00:14:43,320 --> 00:14:47,960 and featuring young Henry himself as lead singer-songwriter. 129 00:14:52,080 --> 00:14:58,720 Egged on by the Pope, who dangled before him the title of Defender of the Faith, 130 00:14:58,720 --> 00:15:03,560 Henry was determined to make a splashy debut on the European scene. 131 00:15:03,560 --> 00:15:09,600 He tried to get his Spanish father-in-law, King Ferdinand, to come in on joint ventures 132 00:15:09,600 --> 00:15:12,160 against King Louis of France. 133 00:15:12,160 --> 00:15:16,800 But when it came to snake-pit politics Ferdinand was a real pro, 134 00:15:16,800 --> 00:15:23,840 shamelessly exploiting Henry's lust for glory but failing to deliver on the promised armies. 135 00:15:23,840 --> 00:15:26,400 Henry pushed on without him 136 00:15:26,400 --> 00:15:31,280 and in the summer of 1513 talked up a skirmish with French knights 137 00:15:31,280 --> 00:15:35,720 into a major victory called the Battle of the Spurs. 138 00:15:36,800 --> 00:15:41,320 Meanwhile, back home, Queen Catherine and her councillors 139 00:15:41,320 --> 00:15:46,120 managed a military victory of major importance at Flodden Field, 140 00:15:46,120 --> 00:15:52,960 which left the King of the Scots, James IV, and a dozen Scottish earls, dead on the battlefield. 141 00:15:52,960 --> 00:15:56,800 Behind all this activity at home and abroad, 142 00:15:56,800 --> 00:16:03,640 keeping the army supplied, negotiating the treaties, channelling the king's energies 143 00:16:03,640 --> 00:16:08,240 was one of the greatest organisational brains of the age... 144 00:16:08,240 --> 00:16:13,080 Archbishop of York, soon to be Chancellor of England, Thomas Wolsey. 145 00:16:13,080 --> 00:16:17,960 Let's face it, if we could find one, we could all use a Wolsey, 146 00:16:17,960 --> 00:16:25,400 someone who comes to work every day and says, "And what would be your pleasure, Majesty?" and then does it. 147 00:16:25,400 --> 00:16:30,240 The occasional document will slide across the desk for signature, 148 00:16:30,240 --> 00:16:34,480 but nothing really to interrupt a hard day's hunt. 149 00:16:34,480 --> 00:16:40,520 Wolsey was a consummate manager. Attentive to detail in both matters and men. 150 00:16:40,520 --> 00:16:44,560 Someone who could stroke Parliament when necessary, 151 00:16:44,560 --> 00:16:49,400 or bang even very aristocratic heads together when that was called for. 152 00:16:49,400 --> 00:16:55,840 He was a master manipulator of patronage, of honours, of bribes and of threats. 153 00:16:55,840 --> 00:17:00,360 In other words, he was a psychologist in a cardinal's hat. 154 00:17:01,800 --> 00:17:08,320 Wolsey also understood the relationship between display and power. 155 00:17:10,040 --> 00:17:16,600 He used it for his own ends here at Hampton Court, but he also used it for the king, 156 00:17:16,600 --> 00:17:24,200 acting as impresario for one of the greatest shows in his career, the Field of the Cloth of Gold. 157 00:17:28,000 --> 00:17:33,040 The meeting in 1520 between Henry and the young French king, Francis I, 158 00:17:33,040 --> 00:17:37,280 was supposed to be a demonstration of heartfelt amity, 159 00:17:37,280 --> 00:17:41,920 and a message to the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, 160 00:17:41,920 --> 00:17:46,360 that old enemies could, if needs be, become friends. 161 00:17:46,360 --> 00:17:53,200 But it came to war, anyway, not with weapons, but something much more deadly - style. 162 00:17:56,800 --> 00:18:02,840 In the greatest transportation exercise seen since the campaigns of Edward III, 163 00:18:02,840 --> 00:18:07,120 Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England - 164 00:18:07,120 --> 00:18:09,760 earls, bishops, knights of the shire, 165 00:18:09,760 --> 00:18:16,560 5,000 men, including, in a display of unconvincing humility, the Cardinal on muleback, 166 00:18:16,560 --> 00:18:19,120 dressed in crimson velvet. 167 00:18:20,320 --> 00:18:27,120 Music played, wine ran red and white from fountains, a great deal of heron got eaten. 168 00:18:27,120 --> 00:18:33,640 The two kings spent hours trying on glamorous outfits that could be worn only once. 169 00:18:33,640 --> 00:18:38,400 They wrestled with knotty problems of state, and with each other, 170 00:18:38,400 --> 00:18:45,480 the nimbler Francis at one point throwing Henry on his back. No doubt he laughed. No doubt he hated it. 171 00:18:46,480 --> 00:18:51,640 Somewhere in the middle of all this melee was a young Englishwoman, 172 00:18:51,640 --> 00:18:56,160 a lady-in-waiting to Claude, the wife of the French king. 173 00:18:56,160 --> 00:19:03,000 This was the woman who would bring Wolsey's immense house of power crashing down in ruins 174 00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:07,880 and with it, inconceivably, the power of the Roman Church in England. 175 00:19:07,880 --> 00:19:10,440 Her name was Anne Boleyn. 176 00:19:16,960 --> 00:19:23,000 So much saccharine drivel has been written on the subject of Anne Boleyn, 177 00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:27,960 so many Hollywood movies made, so many bodice-buster romances produced, 178 00:19:27,960 --> 00:19:35,000 but us serious historians are supposed to avert our gaze from the tragic soap opera of her life 179 00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:37,520 and concentrate on meaty stuff, 180 00:19:37,520 --> 00:19:44,200 like the social and political origins of the Reformation or the Tudor revolution in government. 181 00:19:44,200 --> 00:19:50,240 But try as we might, we keep coming back time and again to the subject of Anne, 182 00:19:50,240 --> 00:19:57,160 because on close inspection it turns out that she was, after all, historical prime cause number one. 183 00:19:57,160 --> 00:20:03,200 At the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Anne would have been a teenager. 184 00:20:03,200 --> 00:20:07,760 She had been away from England off and on since the age of twelve, 185 00:20:07,760 --> 00:20:13,920 when her diplomat father, Thomas, arranged for her to become maid-of-honour to Margaret of Austria 186 00:20:13,920 --> 00:20:19,280 at one of her many courts, this one here at Mecklin in Flanders. 187 00:20:23,800 --> 00:20:28,360 Margaret was recognised as the world authority on courtly love, 188 00:20:28,360 --> 00:20:35,000 that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation around which a whole culture had grown up. 189 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:41,600 Desire, endlessly deferred, sexual passion transfigured into pure, selfless love, 190 00:20:41,600 --> 00:20:48,120 troubadours, masks, silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing. That was the theory, anyway. 191 00:20:48,120 --> 00:20:53,200 Underneath the stage-managed surface, the old basic instincts seethed away. 192 00:20:56,480 --> 00:20:59,040 Anne returned to England in 1522, 193 00:20:59,040 --> 00:21:05,960 a sophisticated, accomplished, ambitious young woman with a mind of her own. 194 00:21:11,840 --> 00:21:18,360 Anne Boleyn entered the glittering, dangerous world of the Tudor court in her twenties. 195 00:21:18,360 --> 00:21:24,400 Physically she was no raving beauty, despite the long, black hair and dark eyes, 196 00:21:24,400 --> 00:21:28,760 but she knew how to exploit her natural vivaciousness 197 00:21:28,760 --> 00:21:33,160 to play the game of courtly love for all it was worth. 198 00:21:35,160 --> 00:21:42,200 One of the first to fall was a man every bit as sophisticated as she was - Thomas Wyatt. 199 00:21:42,200 --> 00:21:49,080 The epitome of the Renaissance courtier. A soldier, a diplomat and above all a poet. 200 00:21:49,080 --> 00:21:53,480 His poems are heavy with the conventional lover's sighs. 201 00:21:53,480 --> 00:21:58,560 But in those apparently inspired by Anne, the sighs come from the heart. 202 00:21:58,560 --> 00:22:03,720 Wyatt, unhappily married, realised that he stood no chance with her 203 00:22:03,720 --> 00:22:10,760 and in one of his famous poems compares himself to a hunter, vainly chasing a deer. 204 00:22:14,520 --> 00:22:21,560 Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne was that she should become his mistress - 205 00:22:21,560 --> 00:22:25,600 not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make. 206 00:22:25,600 --> 00:22:32,640 Besides, there was another reason why Wyatt would never catch his hind, as his poem goes on to explain. 207 00:22:32,640 --> 00:22:36,680 "And graven with diamonds in letters plain, 208 00:22:36,680 --> 00:22:40,640 "there is written her fair neck round about, 'Noli me tangere 209 00:22:40,640 --> 00:22:46,320 "'For Caesar's I am and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'" 210 00:22:47,520 --> 00:22:50,080 Noli me tangere - do not touch. 211 00:22:50,080 --> 00:22:56,920 For Caesar, otherwise known as Henry VIII, had already committed himself to the chase. 212 00:22:56,920 --> 00:23:01,720 And the king, as we know, was an inexhaustible hunter. 213 00:23:01,720 --> 00:23:08,480 Henry really had to work hard to get Anne, harder than at any time in his life. 214 00:23:08,480 --> 00:23:15,720 The man who, as Wolsey could testify, hated writing letters, wrote umpteen in his attempts to woo her. 215 00:23:15,720 --> 00:23:20,160 She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not. 216 00:23:20,160 --> 00:23:26,760 Ten years younger, merry rather than pious, spirited rather than gravely deferential, 217 00:23:26,760 --> 00:23:33,800 Anne opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness and perhaps most important than any of these, 218 00:23:33,800 --> 00:23:36,360 the possibility of a son and heir. 219 00:23:38,440 --> 00:23:43,480 The estrangement between Catherine and Henry went back as far as 1511 220 00:23:43,480 --> 00:23:50,680 and the death of their son Henry, who despite the offerings made at Walsingham, lived only a few weeks. 221 00:23:50,680 --> 00:23:55,640 Catherine had gone on to produce a daughter, Mary, born in 1516, 222 00:23:55,640 --> 00:23:59,680 but Henry began to recoil from his queen. 223 00:23:59,680 --> 00:24:06,200 After more than 20 years, Henry had no legitimate male heir and no prospect of one. 224 00:24:06,200 --> 00:24:09,040 By the time Anne came on the scene, 225 00:24:09,040 --> 00:24:14,080 Henry was convinced that his marriage to Catherine was divinely cursed. 226 00:24:14,080 --> 00:24:17,760 The king was an assiduous reader of Scripture. 227 00:24:17,760 --> 00:24:24,600 There must have been a sharp intake of breath when he read Leviticus 20, verse 21, in which God tells Moses, 228 00:24:34,120 --> 00:24:39,200 Driven by his fear of dynastic extinction and his passion for Anne, 229 00:24:39,200 --> 00:24:42,840 who as usual refused to become his mistress, 230 00:24:42,840 --> 00:24:47,480 Henry seized on divorce as the answer to all of his problems. 231 00:24:48,480 --> 00:24:53,320 Henry wanted a papal annulment of the marriage on grounds of incest, 232 00:24:53,320 --> 00:24:55,840 but the Pope couldn't oblige, 233 00:24:55,840 --> 00:25:03,120 for in May 1527, the armies of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and made Pope Clement a virtual prisoner. 234 00:25:03,120 --> 00:25:09,760 Charles, Queen Catherine's nephew, wouldn't allow an annulment while he was in control. 235 00:25:09,760 --> 00:25:14,280 Wolsey was the first to be dragged under by this crisis. 236 00:25:14,280 --> 00:25:18,520 Henry had no use for a Mr Fixit who couldn't fix it 237 00:25:18,520 --> 00:25:23,440 and Wolsey was quickly got rid off, ostensibly for fraud and corruption. 238 00:25:23,440 --> 00:25:30,000 Within a year he was dead, charges of high treason still hanging over his head. 239 00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:38,000 It was Anne herself who at some point in 1530 steered the whole problem in a radically new direction. 240 00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:44,200 She put into Henry's hands a little book that to her seemed not only fundamentally true, 241 00:25:44,200 --> 00:25:48,720 but also, given present circumstances, extremely useful. 242 00:25:48,720 --> 00:25:51,280 It was by William Tyndale 243 00:25:51,280 --> 00:25:58,240 and it was called On The Obedience Of A Christian Man And How Christian Rulers Ought To Govern. 244 00:25:58,240 --> 00:26:02,720 Like all Tyndale's work, it was a pungent read. 245 00:26:02,720 --> 00:26:08,320 "One king, one law is God's ordinance in every realm," he wrote. 246 00:26:08,320 --> 00:26:14,840 In other words, the writ of the Bishop of Rome did not run in England. 247 00:26:14,840 --> 00:26:17,520 But Anne wasn't finished yet. 248 00:26:17,520 --> 00:26:21,360 With a mixture of conviction and self-interest, 249 00:26:21,360 --> 00:26:25,800 she got a think tank of theologians, including Thomas Cranmer, 250 00:26:25,800 --> 00:26:32,320 to come up with documents from the history of the early Church, proving royal supremacy. 251 00:26:32,320 --> 00:26:37,320 The more he learned about his supreme power, the better Henry liked it. 252 00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:41,560 It may have begun as a tactic in political intimidation, 253 00:26:41,560 --> 00:26:47,120 but now the royal supremacy seemed on its own merits a self-evident truth. 254 00:26:47,120 --> 00:26:54,440 You can almost hear him exclaiming, "How could I have been so dull as to have missed this?" 255 00:26:58,120 --> 00:27:02,160 Not surprisingly, around the summer of 1530, 256 00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:08,400 the telling word, "imperial" begins to show up regularly in Henry's remarks. 257 00:27:08,400 --> 00:27:12,600 Emperors, of course, acknowledge no superior on earth. 258 00:27:13,760 --> 00:27:21,280 Henry's ego, never exactly a modest part of his personality, now began to balloon to imperial proportions. 259 00:27:21,280 --> 00:27:27,320 And he'd got the palaces to house it - 50 of them before his reign was done. 260 00:27:27,320 --> 00:27:32,120 Some of the grandest had been Wolsey's, most notably Hampton Court, 261 00:27:32,120 --> 00:27:36,960 which now became the stage for the swaggering theatre of court life. 262 00:27:41,880 --> 00:27:49,480 Nothing measures the imperial scale of Henry's court better than the size of the space needed to feed its gut. 263 00:27:49,480 --> 00:27:54,320 Here at the kitchens at Hampton Court, 230 people were employed 264 00:27:54,320 --> 00:28:00,800 servicing another 1,000 who every day were entitled to eat at the king's expense. 265 00:28:00,800 --> 00:28:04,840 Three vast larders for the meat alone. 266 00:28:04,840 --> 00:28:12,640 A specially designed wet larder for holding fish, supplied by water drawn from the fountains outside. 267 00:28:12,640 --> 00:28:16,360 Spicearies, fruitaries, six immense fireplaces, 268 00:28:16,360 --> 00:28:21,520 three gargantuan cellars capable of holding the 300 casks of wine 269 00:28:21,520 --> 00:28:26,560 and the 600,000 gallons of ale downed each year by this court. 270 00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:33,600 And at the centre of it all, though carefully protected in the privy chamber from undue exhibition, 271 00:28:33,600 --> 00:28:39,000 was England's new Caesar, the king, at 40, colossal, autocratic, 272 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:46,040 bestriding the realm with all the god-like power and authority of the Roman Caesars. 273 00:28:48,840 --> 00:28:56,640 Now, inevitably, the Church, with its allegiance to Rome, found itself on the wrong side of a nasty argument. 274 00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:01,640 They must have shivered at the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace 275 00:29:01,640 --> 00:29:08,960 when Henry said of his bishops, "They be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects." 276 00:29:12,960 --> 00:29:17,240 The threat was clear and the capitulation inevitable. 277 00:29:17,240 --> 00:29:22,880 It came in spring, 1532, with the so-called Submission Of The Clergy 278 00:29:22,880 --> 00:29:25,440 which conceded all Henry's demands. 279 00:29:25,440 --> 00:29:31,480 From now on, the laws of the Church will be governed by the will of the king 280 00:29:31,480 --> 00:29:33,960 and the king's will was clear. 281 00:29:33,960 --> 00:29:40,040 Divorce from Catherine, marriage to Anne, Princess Mary to be declared a bastard, 282 00:29:40,040 --> 00:29:47,080 recognition for the unborn child that by the spring of 1533 was already swelling Anne's belly. 283 00:29:47,080 --> 00:29:53,600 Anne was duly crowned at Westminster Abbey in May by a new Archbishop of Canterbury, 284 00:29:53,600 --> 00:29:56,160 the obliging Thomas Cranmer. 285 00:30:04,360 --> 00:30:08,400 This was not yet a Protestant Reformation. 286 00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:14,440 The English Church had broken from Rome, but no core doctrines had been touched. 287 00:30:14,440 --> 00:30:21,480 The real presence of Christ in the mass was preserved, priests were expected to be celibate, 288 00:30:21,480 --> 00:30:23,720 prayers and the Bible were in Latin. 289 00:30:23,720 --> 00:30:30,560 The beautiful stained glass at Fairford Church in Gloucester offended no official doctrines. 290 00:30:30,560 --> 00:30:34,560 And so things might have remained, but they didn't. 291 00:30:34,560 --> 00:30:41,400 To understand why, we must look at one of the most extraordinary working partnerships in British history... 292 00:30:41,400 --> 00:30:48,680 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey's former enforcer and now secretary of state. 293 00:30:50,880 --> 00:30:56,040 Here are the Tudor odd couple, on the frontispiece of an English Bible. 294 00:30:57,600 --> 00:31:02,160 Take away any one of them and the Reformation wouldn't have happened, 295 00:31:02,160 --> 00:31:06,720 or at least not in the way it did, because they were like two pillars. 296 00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:13,400 Theological on the left, political on the right, with the king triumphant in the middle. 297 00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:17,440 Their agenda was more radical than the king's. 298 00:31:17,440 --> 00:31:23,800 Cromwell's Protestantism came from the kind of anti-establishment killer instinct you might expect 299 00:31:23,800 --> 00:31:27,840 from the Putney clever dick out to make a name for himself. 300 00:31:27,840 --> 00:31:32,120 Cranmer's convictions were more profound and thoughtful, 301 00:31:32,120 --> 00:31:36,640 but he too had strong personal reasons to side with the Reformers. 302 00:31:36,640 --> 00:31:40,680 Shortly before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, 303 00:31:40,680 --> 00:31:45,120 Cranmer had secretly married a German woman, Margaretta, 304 00:31:45,120 --> 00:31:50,160 thereby committing himself to one of Luther's most shocking innovations. 305 00:31:52,320 --> 00:31:58,840 Cranmer, like Cromwell, was devoted to the Renaissance idea of a strong prince in a strong Christian state. 306 00:31:58,840 --> 00:32:06,240 The people would be given their Bible from on high, authorised, and no other version would be tolerated. 307 00:32:06,240 --> 00:32:12,640 This picture of an orderly, even authoritarian Church of England is what you see... 308 00:32:12,640 --> 00:32:19,680 on the frontispiece of this great Bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell and published in 1539. 309 00:32:24,960 --> 00:32:31,600 Thomas Cromwell is probably the least sentimental Englishman ever to run the country. 310 00:32:31,600 --> 00:32:36,440 He understood with the clarity that Henry could never quite manage 311 00:32:36,440 --> 00:32:43,000 that it would not be enough to proclaim the break with Rome, then expect everyone to fall into line. 312 00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:47,680 He was anticipating a fight and he was prepared to fight hard. 313 00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:56,320 Cromwell knew that sooner or later the Pope would throw his big gun into the battle - excommunication. 314 00:32:56,320 --> 00:33:04,040 And if the king was to win the war, he'd better fight back with something quite novel in politics - patriotism. 315 00:33:04,040 --> 00:33:10,080 The country had to be aroused to a new sense of its sovereignty, its potency. 316 00:33:10,080 --> 00:33:14,360 Demonise Rome as the foreigner, the alien, the enemy. 317 00:33:17,680 --> 00:33:24,400 To this engine of chauvinist propaganda, Cromwell added the necessary machinery of coercion. 318 00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:28,640 An oath had to be sworn, recognising the royal supremacy, 319 00:33:28,640 --> 00:33:35,680 the legitimacy of the heirs of the King and Queen Anne and the bastardisation of the Lady Mary. 320 00:33:35,680 --> 00:33:38,480 Insulting the new queen was treason. 321 00:33:38,480 --> 00:33:43,000 Calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason. 322 00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:48,040 For the first time in English law, it was a crime just to say things. 323 00:33:50,320 --> 00:33:55,560 Cromwell turned England into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place 324 00:33:55,560 --> 00:33:59,600 where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty 325 00:33:59,600 --> 00:34:07,040 and countless petty scores got settled by people who protested that they were just doing the right thing. 326 00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:19,920 Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime did his shock troops seem to enjoy their work more thoroughly 327 00:34:19,920 --> 00:34:24,160 than in the visitations to the monasteries, 328 00:34:24,160 --> 00:34:29,200 done with lightning speed, during the course of 1535 and early 1536. 329 00:34:29,200 --> 00:34:33,040 The uprooting of nearly 10,000 monks and nuns, 330 00:34:33,040 --> 00:34:37,520 the destruction of an entire ancient way of life, 331 00:34:37,520 --> 00:34:40,080 had little to do with reforming zeal. 332 00:34:43,800 --> 00:34:48,760 When you look at Cromwell's flying squads up close and in action, 333 00:34:48,760 --> 00:34:55,280 you don't get the impression that they thought of themselves as renovators. Wreckers, more likely. 334 00:34:55,280 --> 00:34:59,320 They seemed to enjoy their work a bit too much. 335 00:34:59,320 --> 00:35:05,840 "I laid unto him a concealment of treason," wrote one of Cromwell's hit men to his chief, 336 00:35:05,840 --> 00:35:08,400 about a prior he had at his mercy. 337 00:35:08,400 --> 00:35:13,080 "I called him heinous traitor in the worst terms I could devise, 338 00:35:13,080 --> 00:35:15,640 "and him all the time kneeling 339 00:35:15,640 --> 00:35:22,160 "and making intercession unto me not to utter to you the premises of his undoing." 340 00:35:22,160 --> 00:35:24,720 Such were the pleasures of reform. 341 00:35:24,720 --> 00:35:29,760 The property bonanza that followed the dissolution of the monasteries 342 00:35:29,760 --> 00:35:34,280 was on a scale no other English revolution ever approached. 343 00:35:34,280 --> 00:35:39,280 Abbeys like this one at Laycock were offered at bargain basement prices 344 00:35:39,280 --> 00:35:44,080 and loyalty to the new order secured with bricks and mortar. 345 00:35:44,080 --> 00:35:47,600 The former residents were soon forgotten 346 00:35:47,600 --> 00:35:54,120 or reduced to delectable family legends of headless nuns and spectral monks. 347 00:36:13,280 --> 00:36:18,280 Let's call the next chapter of the story Circa Regna Tonat. 348 00:36:18,280 --> 00:36:21,320 "Around the throne the thunder roars." 349 00:36:21,320 --> 00:36:23,480 CRASH OF THUNDER 350 00:36:23,480 --> 00:36:30,040 Thomas Wyatt used the line in a poem written in a cell in the Tower of London 351 00:36:30,040 --> 00:36:34,080 after he'd witnessed the execution of five innocent men. 352 00:36:34,080 --> 00:36:40,600 A few days later, an innocent woman would also die. As you probably know, she was Anne Boleyn, 353 00:36:40,600 --> 00:36:47,240 and as you can probably guess, the author of this bloody drama was Thomas Cromwell. 354 00:36:50,680 --> 00:36:55,960 It wasn't the birth in 1533 of a baby girl, Elizabeth, that did for Anne. 355 00:36:55,960 --> 00:37:00,760 Henry WAS disappointed, but he didn't turn against his new wife. 356 00:37:00,760 --> 00:37:07,320 No, he laid his hand on the baby's head, recognising her as his legitimate daughter 357 00:37:07,320 --> 00:37:09,880 and hoped for better luck next time. 358 00:37:09,880 --> 00:37:13,880 Eighteen months later, Anne was pregnant again. 359 00:37:13,880 --> 00:37:18,320 At the beginning of January, 1536, more good news. 360 00:37:18,320 --> 00:37:20,920 Catherine of Aragon was dead. 361 00:37:20,920 --> 00:37:23,360 Henry was relieved. 362 00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:28,440 "God be praised," he said, "that we are free from all suspicion of war." 363 00:37:30,400 --> 00:37:37,520 Maybe it was at this point that the cogs and wheels of Cromwell's mind started to whirl. 364 00:37:37,520 --> 00:37:44,560 For Cromwell had decided to engineer a reconciliation between Henry and the Emperor Charles V. 365 00:37:44,560 --> 00:37:52,080 With the Emperor's Aunt Catherine now safely dead, the timing was perfect, except for one thing... 366 00:37:52,080 --> 00:37:53,920 Anne. 367 00:37:53,920 --> 00:38:01,160 The price of peace would include the re-legitimatising of Lady Mary and to this Anne would never agree. 368 00:38:01,160 --> 00:38:05,200 Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned, Anne must go. 369 00:38:08,280 --> 00:38:10,840 On 29th January, Anne miscarried. 370 00:38:10,840 --> 00:38:14,480 Had the baby lived, it would have been a boy. 371 00:38:14,480 --> 00:38:19,120 The disaster seems to have reawakened Henry's darkest fears. 372 00:38:19,120 --> 00:38:23,960 "I see now that God will never give me a male heir," he told Anne. 373 00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:30,000 To one of his intimates, he hinted that Anne had seduced him through witchcraft. 374 00:38:30,000 --> 00:38:36,640 Anne was defenceless. Cromwell moved against her with breathtaking speed and ferocity. 375 00:38:36,640 --> 00:38:43,600 From the decision to act, taken around Easter, 1536, to the first arrests took just two weeks. 376 00:38:43,600 --> 00:38:46,200 Anne was doomed. 377 00:38:49,520 --> 00:38:54,040 What Cromwell now cooked up was a thing of pure devilry - 378 00:38:54,040 --> 00:38:59,080 a finely measured brew, one part paranoia, one part pornography. 379 00:38:59,080 --> 00:39:04,120 Moments of dalliance, nothing really untoward in a Renaissance court, 380 00:39:04,120 --> 00:39:09,120 a handkerchief drooped at a May Day tilt, not belonging to the king, 381 00:39:09,120 --> 00:39:14,520 a dance taken with a young man, also not the king, a blown kiss, a giggle, 382 00:39:14,520 --> 00:39:21,520 all these were twisted by Cromwell into a carnival of unholy traitorous sex. 383 00:39:22,600 --> 00:39:27,000 The queen, it seems, had had sex with just about everyone. 384 00:39:27,000 --> 00:39:29,560 She'd had sex with her court musician 385 00:39:29,560 --> 00:39:35,800 and with the groom of the stool, the most important courtier in the privy chamber, 386 00:39:35,800 --> 00:39:40,120 she'd had sex with the king's tennis partner, presumably between sets. 387 00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:42,680 She'd even had sex with her brother. 388 00:39:42,680 --> 00:39:49,720 She had presided like some possessed Messalina over this diabolical orgy of treason, 389 00:39:49,720 --> 00:39:57,360 even perhaps conspiring to pass off the poisoned fruit of all this copulation as the royal heir. 390 00:39:58,840 --> 00:40:04,880 The confession of her musician, Mark Smeaton, extracted under torture, 391 00:40:04,880 --> 00:40:10,440 supplied the fig leaf of legality for Cromwell's judicial murders. 392 00:40:10,440 --> 00:40:14,480 All five of Anne's so-called lovers were sent to the block. 393 00:40:14,480 --> 00:40:21,000 Thomas Wyatt, swept up in a wave of arrests, but spared prosecution, saw them die, 394 00:40:21,000 --> 00:40:25,200 peering through a grating of his cell in the bell tower. 395 00:40:26,200 --> 00:40:32,240 "The bell tower showed me such a sight that in my head sticks day and night 396 00:40:32,240 --> 00:40:34,720 "There did I learn out the grate, 397 00:40:34,720 --> 00:40:37,760 "For all favour, glory or might 398 00:40:37,760 --> 00:40:41,400 "That yet circa regna tonat." 399 00:40:47,520 --> 00:40:50,040 Two days later, it was Anne's turn. 400 00:40:50,040 --> 00:40:56,680 As a special privilege, an expert swordsman had been brought over from France to do the job. 401 00:40:56,680 --> 00:41:04,200 "I heard say the executioner is very good," Anne told the constable of the Tower, "and I have a little neck." 402 00:41:04,200 --> 00:41:09,040 And then she put her hands round her throat and burst out laughing. 403 00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:23,640 When news of Anne's execution reached Dover, 404 00:41:23,640 --> 00:41:28,480 it was said the candles in the town's church spontaneously ignited. 405 00:41:30,440 --> 00:41:32,960 For the vast majority of the country, 406 00:41:32,960 --> 00:41:37,960 which despite the break with Rome still regarded itself as Catholic, 407 00:41:37,960 --> 00:41:45,720 her death seemed like a long-overdue judgement on those they called heretics and twopenny bookmen. 408 00:41:51,720 --> 00:41:58,760 Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up his assault on the old religion with a series of fierce injunctions, 409 00:41:58,760 --> 00:42:05,160 enforcing royal supremacy and crushing the cult of saints and shrines. 410 00:42:05,160 --> 00:42:12,200 The Becket shrine in Canterbury, the richest in the land, was vandalised and ransacked. 411 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:16,520 The following year, 1537, 412 00:42:16,520 --> 00:42:23,560 Henry, with a new wife, Jane Seymour, celebrated the longed-for arrival of a son, Edward, 413 00:42:23,560 --> 00:42:28,400 but twelve days later, mourned the death of his new queen. 414 00:42:30,720 --> 00:42:35,280 At Walsingham, the statue of the Virgin was burned. 415 00:42:35,280 --> 00:42:41,320 Henry's account book for that year contains the following bald statement... 416 00:42:41,320 --> 00:42:48,360 "Payment for the king's great candle at Walsingham, salary for the abbot - nil." 417 00:42:50,160 --> 00:42:52,720 But then a remarkable thing happened. 418 00:42:52,720 --> 00:42:57,760 The king had had enough and tried to put the genie back in its bottle. 419 00:42:57,760 --> 00:43:02,400 An instinctive conservative, he'd been angered and alarmed 420 00:43:02,400 --> 00:43:08,600 by the passions that religious controversy had aroused and he blamed the English Bible. 421 00:43:08,600 --> 00:43:12,240 Instead of being read quietly with silence, 422 00:43:12,240 --> 00:43:18,920 the Bible was now being bandied about in acrimonious disputes that raged in alehouses and taverns - 423 00:43:18,920 --> 00:43:25,440 the exact opposite of the respectful scenes promised in Cromwell's Great Bible. 424 00:43:25,440 --> 00:43:27,840 In 1543, a law was introduced 425 00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:34,360 restricting the reading of the Bible in English to churchmen, noblemen and gentry. 426 00:43:34,360 --> 00:43:41,400 For ordinary people who'd got used to the idea of an English-speaking God, this was a real deprivation. 427 00:43:41,400 --> 00:43:47,520 We get an inkling of that in a brief inscription written that year by an Oxfordshire shepherd 428 00:43:47,520 --> 00:43:50,080 on the flyleaf of a religious tract. 429 00:43:50,080 --> 00:43:57,560 It reads, "I bought this book when the Testament was abrogated that shepherds might not read it. 430 00:43:57,560 --> 00:44:04,600 "I pray God amend that blindness. Written by Robert Williams, keeping sheep upon Saintbury hill." 431 00:44:09,600 --> 00:44:14,040 By the time Williams wrote his prayer on his hillside, 432 00:44:14,040 --> 00:44:18,640 the course of reform in England had suffered major setbacks. 433 00:44:19,640 --> 00:44:22,200 In 1540, Cromwell had fallen, 434 00:44:22,200 --> 00:44:29,360 tossed to the executioner after his schemes for an alliance with Europe's Lutheran princes collapsed. 435 00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:32,720 Unfortunately for Cromwell, 436 00:44:32,720 --> 00:44:39,240 the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves, the mail-order bride he'd arranged for Henry, 437 00:44:39,240 --> 00:44:44,280 had turned out to be nowhere near as cute as Hans Holbein had painted her. 438 00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:50,560 By then, Parliament had enacted the Six Articles 439 00:44:50,560 --> 00:44:57,960 which, under pain of death, outlawed marriage for priests and reaffirmed the sanctity of the mass. 440 00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:06,400 To the dismay of the reformers, these core Catholic beliefs turned out to be Henry's, too. 441 00:45:09,040 --> 00:45:14,040 So Henry's final position on matters of religion was this - 442 00:45:14,040 --> 00:45:19,120 a national Church, divorced from Rome but remarried to the English crown, 443 00:45:19,120 --> 00:45:24,160 stripped of cults and shows, but still in essence Catholic. 444 00:45:24,160 --> 00:45:30,760 All things considered, Henry was pretty satisfied with the middle way he thought he'd found. 445 00:45:30,760 --> 00:45:37,360 Which is what we see in this massive picture by Hans Holbein - 446 00:45:37,360 --> 00:45:44,440 King Henry all-powerful, all-knowing, the guardian and ruler of the temporal AND the spiritual realm. 447 00:45:44,440 --> 00:45:49,480 The munchkins grovelling at his feet are the Guild of Barber Surgeons. 448 00:45:50,920 --> 00:45:57,880 They hail the king as a healer, a great physician, just how Henry liked to see himself in his final years - 449 00:45:57,880 --> 00:46:03,920 the Tudor medicine man who had laid the body of England on the operating table 450 00:46:03,920 --> 00:46:07,920 and cut out the cancers of popery and superstition. 451 00:46:07,920 --> 00:46:14,120 The patient was now fully recovered, the nation duly grateful, the operation a complete success. 452 00:46:17,360 --> 00:46:22,320 Except of course it wasn't. Because after Henry came Henry's children - 453 00:46:22,320 --> 00:46:26,320 with their own ideas of what was best for the country's health. 454 00:46:26,320 --> 00:46:31,840 Edward, the heir apparent and his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth - 455 00:46:31,840 --> 00:46:36,880 both restored to the succession a few weeks before their father's death. 456 00:46:36,880 --> 00:46:43,360 Between them, they covered the spectrum from hard-line Protestant to fanatical Catholic. 457 00:46:43,360 --> 00:46:50,400 And the road the country took after Henry - back to a Catholic past, or forwards into a Protestant future - 458 00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:56,240 depended as never before on the lottery of births, deaths and marriages. 459 00:47:00,560 --> 00:47:08,080 When Henry died in 1547, he left 600 pounds to pay for two priests to say prayers for his soul for ever. 460 00:47:08,080 --> 00:47:15,120 You have to wonder how he apparently failed to notice that Edward had been educated by fervent Protestants 461 00:47:15,120 --> 00:47:20,160 who obviously had no time for such superstitious nonsense. 462 00:47:24,040 --> 00:47:30,120 Led by Thomas Cranmer, they saw the nine-year-old boy king as the new Josiah - 463 00:47:30,120 --> 00:47:35,160 the biblical king who had taken it as his mission to destroy idolatry. 464 00:47:37,720 --> 00:47:45,360 This would be the real Reformation. For just look what happened in the six years of Edward's reign. 465 00:47:45,360 --> 00:47:49,200 All the customs and ceremonies of the old church - 466 00:47:49,200 --> 00:47:53,760 the blessing of candles at Candlemass and palms on Palm Sunday were banned. 467 00:47:55,080 --> 00:47:59,080 Away went the religious guilds and fraternities. 468 00:47:59,080 --> 00:48:05,560 The cults of saints that survived Cromwell's attacks, with their relics and pilgrimages, were forbidden. 469 00:48:05,560 --> 00:48:13,760 And images, statues, stained glass, paintings were attacked with chisels and limewash. 470 00:48:21,040 --> 00:48:28,560 A new book of Common Prayer, now required in all parishes, brought English into the church service. 471 00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:37,720 To get a measure of that cultural revolution, you need only come to Hailes church in Gloucestershire. 472 00:48:42,400 --> 00:48:47,320 Three years of state-sponsored iconoclasm have produced this. 473 00:48:47,320 --> 00:48:52,960 No more stone altar, just a user-friendly communion table. 474 00:48:58,000 --> 00:49:04,080 This whole arrangement is designed to abolish the distance between the priest and his flock. 475 00:49:04,080 --> 00:49:11,160 The screen which had been a barrier, protecting the mystery of the mass, is now just a way into the communion, 476 00:49:11,160 --> 00:49:15,480 a gathering of the faithful along with their priest. 477 00:49:16,800 --> 00:49:23,400 As if all this wasn't shocking enough, imagine that Sunday in 1550 478 00:49:23,400 --> 00:49:29,520 when, for the first time, the priest invited the congregation to partake of communion 479 00:49:29,520 --> 00:49:35,880 using those English words never before heard in church - "dearly beloved". 480 00:49:35,880 --> 00:49:40,880 The familiarity of this must have made many of them squirm, 481 00:49:40,880 --> 00:49:45,960 rather like these days hearing a trendy vicar insist, "Call me Bob!" 482 00:49:45,960 --> 00:49:53,200 This radical transformation wouldn't have been possible without the active support of Edward. 483 00:49:53,200 --> 00:50:01,000 While Edward led the Protestant state, resistance came close to home, as he recalls in his diary - 484 00:50:01,000 --> 00:50:05,680 The lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster, 485 00:50:05,680 --> 00:50:10,760 where, after salutations, she was called of my council into a chamber, 486 00:50:10,760 --> 00:50:15,520 where it was declared how long I had suffered her mass. 487 00:50:15,520 --> 00:50:20,560 She answered that her soul was God's and her faith she would not change, 488 00:50:20,560 --> 00:50:24,680 nor would she dissemble her opinion with contrary doings. 489 00:50:24,680 --> 00:50:31,160 Edward's chronicle records one of several run-ins that he and his councillors had with Mary. 490 00:50:31,160 --> 00:50:37,480 The mass had been outlawed since the Act of Uniformity in 1549, but Mary ignored the ban - 491 00:50:37,480 --> 00:50:42,560 indeed, she increased her attendance to two, even three times a day. 492 00:50:42,560 --> 00:50:47,360 She may have had a martyr complex a mile wide, 493 00:50:47,360 --> 00:50:54,400 but Catholic Mary knew her challenge was simply to bide her time until Edward died, preferably childless. 494 00:50:54,400 --> 00:50:59,560 And sure enough, in 1553, this is just what happened. 495 00:51:05,200 --> 00:51:12,320 And so England's first female ruler since Queen Matilda ascended the throne with just two aims in mind - 496 00:51:12,320 --> 00:51:20,200 to return England to its obedience to Rome and to produce a Catholic male heir who would keep it that way. 497 00:51:20,200 --> 00:51:25,240 Mary's first aim was achieved with amazingly little resistance, 498 00:51:25,240 --> 00:51:32,280 after it was made clear that all that real estate sold off during the dissolution of the monasteries 499 00:51:32,280 --> 00:51:34,760 would not be restored to the Church. 500 00:51:34,760 --> 00:51:39,840 In 1554, both Houses of Parliament, contrite as naughty children, 501 00:51:39,840 --> 00:51:44,880 knelt and asked forgiveness from the Pope's legate, Cardinal Paul, 502 00:51:44,880 --> 00:51:49,920 for all the anti-papal legislation passed since the 1530s. 503 00:51:49,920 --> 00:51:57,520 Orders went out for the repainting of churches, the carving of roods, the restoration of the Latin mass. 504 00:52:00,960 --> 00:52:07,000 Heretical England had been received back into the fold, forgiven by Mother Rome. 505 00:52:10,160 --> 00:52:13,720 But all this would be literally fruitless 506 00:52:13,720 --> 00:52:19,000 if Mary was unable to produce a good Roman Catholic heir. 507 00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:26,360 Her choice of husband was Philip II of Spain, a union which had, for Mary, a special personal meaning - 508 00:52:26,360 --> 00:52:31,400 the vindication of her long-dead Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon. 509 00:52:31,400 --> 00:52:38,440 If a Spanish Catholic marriage had been right for England THEN, then it should be right for England now. 510 00:52:38,440 --> 00:52:44,520 But that was 50 years ago. Much had been done that could not now be undone. 511 00:52:48,520 --> 00:52:55,520 A Catholic marriage NOW was not something that could be taken for granted. 512 00:52:55,520 --> 00:53:00,560 It now seemed a BAD match. It seemed a "foreign idea". 513 00:53:00,560 --> 00:53:06,960 "The Queen is a Spaniard at heart," it was said, "and loves another realm better than this." 514 00:53:06,960 --> 00:53:14,000 When Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer, led an army to the gates of London, 515 00:53:14,000 --> 00:53:21,320 he cast himself as a patriot pledged, he said, "to the avoidance of strangers." 516 00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:25,720 Xenophobia was not enough to dethrone Queen Mary. 517 00:53:25,720 --> 00:53:28,400 Wyatt's army melted away. 518 00:53:37,280 --> 00:53:44,960 Ecstatic that for the first time in her lonely life, she had someone she could rely on, a Spanish consort, 519 00:53:44,960 --> 00:53:52,960 Mary set about the zealous work of cleansing her realm of the Protestant heresy, 520 00:53:52,960 --> 00:54:00,880 undoing Edward's Reformation as completely as she could - by fire, if that's what it took. And it did. 521 00:54:02,720 --> 00:54:09,120 In three years, 220 men and 60 women were burned on Mary's bonfires. 522 00:54:09,120 --> 00:54:14,480 Some, like Archbishop Cranmer, were high-profile victims. 523 00:54:14,480 --> 00:54:19,520 But most were ordinary people - cloth-workers and cutlers. 524 00:54:19,520 --> 00:54:23,560 And it wasn't just the literate who died. 525 00:54:23,560 --> 00:54:30,560 Morlands White, a fisherman, paid for his son to go to school and learn to read 526 00:54:30,560 --> 00:54:35,600 so the boy could read the Bible to him each night after supper. 527 00:54:35,600 --> 00:54:42,880 Joan Waist of Darby, a poor blind woman, saved up for a New Testament, and paid people to read it to her. 528 00:54:46,880 --> 00:54:52,000 But all this was in vain - for Mary, like Edward, died childless, 529 00:54:52,000 --> 00:54:59,280 suffering frantically through two false pregnancies - the second a cancer of the womb. 530 00:54:59,280 --> 00:55:03,600 The resurrection of Catholic England was doomed. 531 00:55:03,600 --> 00:55:08,640 Anne Boleyn had triumphed from the grave over Catherine of Aragon, 532 00:55:08,640 --> 00:55:15,000 as HER daughter, Elizabeth, would outlast Mary and undo all her pious hopes. 533 00:55:19,480 --> 00:55:22,120 Elizabeth cast herself as the healer, 534 00:55:22,120 --> 00:55:29,240 someone who would bring the violent pendulum swings of the religious war back to a calm and steady centre - 535 00:55:29,240 --> 00:55:36,040 a middle way between the courses chosen by her half-brother and her half-sister. 536 00:55:39,640 --> 00:55:42,120 She outlawed the mass 537 00:55:42,120 --> 00:55:46,000 and brought back the Book of Common Prayer, 538 00:55:46,000 --> 00:55:49,600 but allowed and encouraged priests to remain celibate, 539 00:55:49,600 --> 00:55:54,520 and was in no hurry to abolish the Catholic calendar of saint's days. 540 00:55:54,520 --> 00:55:59,400 But if Elizabeth put out the fires of religious fanaticism, 541 00:55:59,400 --> 00:56:04,400 she lit them in the breasts of patriotic Englishmen and women. 542 00:56:04,400 --> 00:56:06,880 For as cautious as she was, 543 00:56:06,880 --> 00:56:13,920 Elizabeth couldn't help her reign being seen by many as the reinstatement of a truly English way. 544 00:56:16,760 --> 00:56:23,600 Under Elizabeth, Englishness was discovered, celebrated, shouted from the rooftops - 545 00:56:23,600 --> 00:56:27,640 and it was, above all, a PROTESTANT Englishness. 546 00:56:27,640 --> 00:56:32,680 With hindsight, God MUST have meant this to happen all along. 547 00:56:32,680 --> 00:56:37,880 Now Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same. 548 00:56:37,880 --> 00:56:44,200 And the history you've just seen, which, at the outset had nothing to do with national identity, 549 00:56:44,200 --> 00:56:46,680 at the end, became obsessed with it. 550 00:56:46,680 --> 00:56:53,240 When the Pope offered to bless anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth, that bond only strengthened. 551 00:56:53,240 --> 00:56:59,280 Now Catholics would be forced to choose between their church and their queen. 552 00:57:01,280 --> 00:57:08,600 English Catholic priests, trained in foreign seminaries, would be smuggled into the country 553 00:57:08,600 --> 00:57:16,120 and end up either dead or in hiding with Catholic families who were rich and powerful enough to protect them. 554 00:57:20,160 --> 00:57:25,280 So if we ask the question we asked at the beginning of the programme - 555 00:57:25,280 --> 00:57:29,320 whatever happened to Catholic England? 556 00:57:29,320 --> 00:57:37,040 The answer is that it ended up down here in a priest hole like this one at Sawston Hall outside Cambridge - 557 00:57:37,040 --> 00:57:42,760 the splendour of Long Melford reduced to a cloak-and-dagger church. 558 00:57:47,440 --> 00:57:50,920 For the Catholics of Elizabeth's England 559 00:57:50,920 --> 00:57:56,960 the retreat of the priesthood to the country house would be a final disaster. 560 00:57:56,960 --> 00:58:02,000 What was once the national church would become a faith on the run.