The Crown Imperial was commissioned by Henry VII
to celebrate the arrival of the new Tudor dynasty.
But by the last years of his reign, Henry had debased both crown
and monarchy with his avarice and, many thought, his tyranny.
On 24th June 1509, Henry VII's son, Henry VIII,
was crowned in front of the high altar at Westminster Abbey.
His personality - sunny and romantic,
was the opposite of his father's and it promised a fresh start.
But no-one then could have guessed how radical,
even revolutionary, it would prove to be.
Above all, he was no miser.
Shortly after his accession, a contemporary wrote,
"Our new King doesn't want gold and silver like his miserly old father.
"Instead, he aims and thirsts for nobler goals -
"virtue, glory, immortality."
He was right. And Henry's reign turned into a quest
for fame as obsessive as any modern celebrity's.
It took many different forms and it led Henry into territory
where no English King had dared venture before.
And, above all, it threatened to upset the traditional balance
between freedom and authority and to turn English kingship
into an untrammelled despotism that claimed power over men's souls
as well as their bodies.
At the time of Henry's birth in 1491, the Tudors were
a new, not very secure, dynasty.
His father had failed to reconcile the defeated Yorkist nobility,
was about to embark on an unsuccessful war in France,
and would steadily reduce the role of the crown
to that of a greedy landlord.
This dubious inheritance, however,
was not destined for Henry but for his elder brother Arthur,
Prince of Wales and heir to the throne.
Henry, as the second son, wasn't expected to be king and as a result,
he received a rather modern, un-kingly kind of upbringing.
Instead of having the rigorous demands of kingship knocked into him
by male tutors and role models, he was brought up here
at Eltham Palace by his mother and with his sisters who idolised him.
This early experience of women's love made Henry a romantic
and paved the way to the great passions
and crimes of his adult life.
Henry's mother also made sure that his education was of the best
and a succession of distinguished tutors gave him a thorough grounding
in the latest Latin Scholarship.
Even the super-learned Erasmus was impressed and when he met Henry,
aged only eight, in this very great hall, he was bowled over
by the boy's confidence, precocious learning and star quality.
But when he was only 11, Henry's life was struck by family tragedy.
His brother, Arthur, died suddenly of a fever,
followed soon after by his beloved mother.
Henry was now the sole heir to the Tudor dynasty.
For the boy, his new status was a double-edged sword.
He might be the Prince of Wales,
but the carefree life he'd known was gone forever.
There wasn't much love lost either
between Prince Henry and his father, King Henry VII.
Henry was growing up fast and he was already taller
and broader than his father.
But the King, aware that the whole future of the Tudor dynasty depended
on the life of his only surviving son, was fiercely protective.
The conflict came over participation in extreme sports.
Henry wanted to take part
in the manly, aristocratic sport of jousting.
But because it was so dangerous, his father allowed him to ride
only in unarmed training exercises.
When, in contrast, the real thing took place, Henry had to sit it out
chafing on the sidelines whilst his friends slugged it out like men.
The result was a clash, not only of arms but of values
between father and son about what it meant to be a King.
On 21st April 1509, Henry VII died.
and the 17-year-old Henry was proclaimed King
amidst wild scenes of popular rejoicing.
The most impressive tribute came from Thomas More,
the great scholar and lawyer,
whose life and death were to be inextricably linked with Henry's.
"This day," More wrote, "is the end of our slavery,
"the fount of liberty, the end of sadness, the beginning of joy."
Fired with the idealism of youth,
Henry had strong ideas about kingship.
He'd been brought up on the myths of King Arthur
and the exploits of his ancestor Henry V and, like them,
he believed in the traditional idea
that a great king should be a great warlord.
This is the round table of King Arthur at Winchester,
then believed to have been Arthur's capital.
Henry had first seen the table
as an impressionable 14-year-old and now that he was King,
he seems to have decided to take Arthur as his model of kingship.
Like Arthur, he would be a great jouster,
he would have a brilliant court and, above all, he would
follow in the footsteps of the once and future King and conquer France.
To this end,
one of Henry's first acts as King was to marry his brother's widow,
the Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon,
who was six years his senior.
The marriage would sow the seeds of upheaval and revolutionary change
in the English monarchy.
At the time, however, it was much simpler.
Henry loved Catherine, but the marriage was also
cementing England's alliance with Spain against France.
Henry was re-arming England,
and in 1511, he got the council's agreement for war.
On 28 June 1513, the English army crossed the Channel to France.
For the first time in almost a century,
Parliament had proved willing to vote serious war taxation.
The result was the largest and best organised English army
since Agincourt.
Henry, like his great hero, Henry V, led the English army in person.
He even came under fire occasionally.
He defeated the French in the Battle of the Spurs,
so called because the French knights ran away so quickly,
captured important prisoners
and took two French cities after set-piece sieges.
Henry hadn't conquered all of France, of course,
but otherwise he'd done everything he'd set out to do.
He'd restored the reputation of English arms.
He'd made England once more one of the big three European powers
alongside France and the Hapsburg empire.
Above all, he'd covered himself in glory.
At the same time, however, Henry, or rather Catherine - since it was
always the woman who was blamed - had failed to produce an heir.
She gave birth to a short-lived son in 1511,
but then followed miscarriage after miscarriage.
Henry was surprisingly understanding.
But how long could he wait for a son?
King Henry VIII had triumphed in France,
and had covered himself in glory, but he hadn't done it alone.
The architect of his victories was Thomas Wolsey.
A butcher's son from Ipswich,
Wolsey had risen from nothing through his intelligence, drive and ambition.
Though nominally only a royal chaplain, it was he who'd organised
the whole French campaign.
His rewards were to be commensurate - in quick succession he became Bishop,
Archbishop and Cardinal.
As Papal Legate, he was the Pope's personal representative in England,
and as Lord Chancellor he was the King's indispensable
friend and counsellor.
Wolsey was now supreme in Church and State, but as much as his power,
contemporaries were impressed by his overweening flamboyant character,
by his taste, his magnificence and his sense of display
whose supreme monument is his great palace here at Hampton Court.
But we should not let this outward display deceive us
about the reality of Wolsey's power.
Wolsey had risen only because he was able to deliver what
Henry yearned for - glory and war, and he would survive only if he were
able to continue to deliver what Henry wanted, whatever it might be.
But Wolsey and Henry had a problem.
The gains of the French war proved fleeting, and by 1519 Henry was
no longer the teenage star of Europe.
There was a new, young, warlike King of France, Francis I, and a new, even
younger Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, Queen Catherine's nephew, who ruled
in his own right Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and most of Italy.
Both commanded much larger resources than Henry,
which meant that glory in war was no longer a realistic option.
But for the moment, England seemed to hold the balance of power
between Francis and Charles, and was courted by both sides.
Wolsey, dextrous and inventive as usual turned the situation to
England's advantage by organising the Field of Cloth of Gold, which took
place in a dusty, windswept plain in the north-east of France.
It centred on a personal meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I.
In another first for Wolsey,
it was one of the earliest modern summit conferences.
But the jamboree was much more than that.
It was also an Olympic Games with an international jousting competition
and an Expo-cum-Euro Disney with competitive displays
of lavish cloth of gold tents and
fantastic pavilions which the English were generally reckoned to have won.
It was also fantastically expensive, but still it was cheaper than war,
and it re-enforced the image of Henry and Wolsey as the arbiters of Europe.
But the image, like the Field of Cloth of Gold itself,
proved to be a mirage.
England's role as arbiter of Europe,
depended on the continuing balance of power.
But sooner or later Francis and Charles would fight,
and one of them would win.
What would Wolsey and Henry do then?
The moment came in 1525, when Charles V's forces crushed the French armies
and captured Francis I himself.
But instead of trying to maintain the balance of power,
Henry reverted to his early, warlike,
dreams of conquest, and proposed a partition of France with Charles.
Charles called Henry's bluff - if Henry wanted his share of France,
he must conquer it for himself.
But that required money.
Parliament wouldn't have voted for taxation, instead Wolsey suggested
an extra parliamentary levy, to which, as spin doctor in chief,
he gave the emollient name of "Amicable Grant".
It made no difference.
All taxes are unpopular.
This one caused riots, and the worst one of all took place here
in Lavenham in Suffolk, which was then a prosperous wool weaving town.
On 4th May, 4,000 protesters poured through the streets, the church bells
rang the alarm and the rioters swore that they would die in their quarrel.
Other smaller protests took place throughout the South East.
In Lavenham, the rioters pleaded poverty.
But in London, sophisticated constitutional objections were raised
to a tax which hadn't been voted in Parliament.
In the face of the protest, the government abandoned
the Amicable Grant and with it Henry's projected invasion of France.
Both Wolsey and Henry put a brave face on the climb-down.
But it was a terrible humiliation.
Henry had failed in both peace and war,
and his dreams of glory were dashed.
But there was a ray of sunshine - Henry had fallen in love again.
He'd also begun seriously to fall
out of love with his wife, Catherine of Aragon.
He'd had mistresses, even an acknowledged son by one of them.
The real problem, instead, came from Catherine's own situation.
The age difference between Henry and Catherine
is now really beginning to tell, as this pair of miniatures also shows.
Henry himself here, then aged 34, has kept his youthful looks
but Catherine, already 40, is wearing badly.
As the massive neck and shoulders in the portrait show,
her once trim figure is fat, whilst her face,
which used to be so pretty is now round
and blotched and bloated.
Catherine had been more or less continuously pregnant in the first
ten years of her marriage and it had played havoc with her figure.
If they'd had been sons, none of this would have mattered, but of
all those pregnancies only a single child had survived, a daughter, Mary.
And a woman who'd lost her looks, was past child bearing age
and hadn't produced an heir was vulnerable indeed.
Henry and Catherine's marriage wasn't the first royal union
to get into difficulties.
The man who's responsibility it was
to sort out such problems was the Pope in Rome,
head of the Catholic Church to which England,
like all the rest of western Europe, belonged.
But at just this moment,
the Pope's position was under greater threat than ever before.
The attack was led by a young German academic, Martin Luther, who in 1517
launched a furious assault on the corruption of the Roman church,
which began the Protestant Reformation.
Henry and his minister Cardinal Wolsey were united in their horror
at Luther's heretical attack on the Church.
In May 1521, Wolsey condemned Luther's works
in a great book burning at St Paul's Cathedral
whilst Henry wrote a reply to Luther called
the "Assertio Septum Sacramentorum" or "Defence of the Seven Sacraments".
It's the first book to be written by an
English King since Alfred the Great.
It's written in Latin and set in the latest roman type for
circulation to a sophisticated, select European audience.
But above all, Henry's book
was loud in its defence of the papal monarchy over the church.
So much so that Thomas More, then Henry's friend and intimate
counsellor warned the King that since his present good relations with Rome
might change in the course of time,
he should "leave that point out or else touch it more slenderly".
But Henry was adamant in his championship of Rome and his reward
was the title of "Defender of the Faith" from a grateful Pope.
Henry never wavered in his detestation of Luther
and all his works.
But his attitude to Rome, just as Thomas More predicted,
underwent a revolution.
The reasons were Henry's need for a son and heir,
and love.
And the woman he'd fallen in love with was Anne Boleyn,
sister of one of his former mistresses.
Sexy rather than beautiful, Anne behaved as no mistress had
dared to before,
and with consequences that no-one could have imagined.
By the mid 1520s, Henry's reign had hit the buffers.
He'd failed in his quest for glory in both peace and war.
He'd failed to father a son and heir.
He'd even failed to persuade Anne to sleep with him.
For Anne, supremely confident in her hold over Henry,
refused him sexual relations unless he agreed to marry her.
The difficulty, of course, was that Henry
was already married to Catherine, who would never agree to a divorce.
So Henry and Anne tried to find legal grounds
for dissolving Henry's marriage.
Their best hope lay in the Bible,
where the Book of Leviticus forbade a man
to marry his dead brother's widow, on pain of childlessness.
It was for this reason that Henry had received
a special dispensation from Rome to permit him to marry Catherine.
But now Henry's lawyers argued that,
since the marriage broke Biblical law,
Rome had exceeded its powers and the marriage was invalid.
The case was submitted for decision to the man who was both the Pope's
personal representative in England and Henry's own chief minister,
Cardinal Wolsey.
Here in the subterranean bowels of the Ministry of Defence building
in Whitehall in London, amidst the ducting, the central heating pipes,
and the spooks, there is an extraordinary survivor
of the Tudor world, and here it is.
It's the wine cellar of the town palace of Cardinal Wolsey,
known as York Place, that once stood on this site.
And actually, above where I'm standing here, on the first floor,
there was the principal reception room of the palace,
known as the great chamber.
It was, almost certainly, in this great chamber on 17th May 1527
that there opened the first trial of the marriage of Henry VIII.
It's known as the secret trial, since Catherine was told nothing.
Henry was confident that Wolsey would rule his marriage invalid.
Instead, to enormous surprise, on 31st May, Wolsey adjourned
the court indefinitely, on grounds of the difficulty of the case.
Why did Wolsey, who owed everything to Henry, defy the King's wishes?
Was it because of the reluctance of his fellow judge?
Did Wolsey fear Anne Boleyn's power as Queen?
Were his legal doubts genuine?
Or was it, above all, because he felt that in a matter of such moment
the Pope himself must be involved?
Whatever his reasons, the delay was crucial.
For, at exactly the same moment,
events were unfolding in Rome which would make it impossible
for the Pope, even if he'd wished, to come down on Henry's side.
Two days after Wolsey adjourned the court,
news reached England that the troops of Emperor Charles V had taken Rome,
sacked and pillaged the city, and driven the Pope to take refuge
in the Castel Sant'Angelo here.
The Pope was now in the power of Catherine's nephew,
and he would remain so for the foreseeable future.
This meant that Henry's hopes of a quickie divorce were at an end.
Henry and Anne had thought to be married in months.
Instead, the months stretched into years as the Pope strung out Henry
with legal manoeuvres and diplomatic subtleties.
But, with the failure of the second divorce trial in 1529,
Henry's patience was at an end.
So, just as importantly, was Anne's.
Wolsey knew his power and his life were at stake.
Desperate to find his way back into Henry's favour, he wrote the King
a long letter, setting out the case for his own approach to the divorce.
He sat down at his desk at four in the morning,
"never" his valet noted, "rising once to piss, nor yet to eat
"any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hand."
But not even Wolsey could change the reality of European power politics.
Faced with the brute fact of Charles V's power,
Wolsey, for all his cleverness and confidence, was unable
to persuade the Pope to disavow his predecessor's dispensation.
This failure cost him his job as the King's minister,
and it would have cost him his head, if he'd lived longer.
Wolsey died cursing Anne for causing his downfall,
and predicting the ruin of the Church of England.
So, blocked in Rome, Anne Boleyn, who was a Lutheran sympathiser,
encouraged Henry to turn to Rome's English opponents,
who were concentrated in Cambridge.
It's not what you know but who you know, we're told.
In the case of Thomas Cranmer it was both.
When the divorce crisis began, Cranmer was an obscure theology don
at Cambridge where, along with his colleagues in the faculty,
he probably preached from this very pulpit here in St Edward's Church.
But, in the summer of 1529, a chance meeting with two Cambridge
acquaintances brought Cranmer to the notice of Henry and Anne.
The consequences transformed Cranmer, his world and ours.
For Henry, Cranmer said, had been going about the divorce
in the wrong way.
He'd been treating it as a legal matter.
But it wasn't - it was moral.
And in morals, the Bible supplied absolute answers of what was right
and what was wrong.
And there were experts who knew which was which.
They were university theologians, like Cranmer himself.
Only therefore, let Henry consult the universities
and he would have a clear, unambiguous verdict in favour
of the divorce which even Rome and the Pope would have to recognise.
The argument was music to Henry's ears, and the canvass
of university opinion began, starting in Cambridge itself.
This courtyard was the centre of the medieval University of Cambridge.
Up there, on the first floor, is the room where the Regent House,
then the governing body of the University,
debated its verdict on Henry's divorce.
Cranmer had thought that it would be high-minded and straight forward.
In fact, both sides played dirty and used every device
of the academic politician - rigged committees,
selective terms of reference,
and straightforward bullying and bribing.
But after two days toing and froing, the university delivered
the verdict that Henry wanted.
Cambridge would be on the side of the winners in Tudor England.
And now, Henry's envoys set out for the continent
to pit the arguments of the king of England
against the authority of the Pope.
In universities across Europe they bribed, cajoled
and threatened theologians to give a verdict in Henry's favour.
Over the next few years, the whole power of the Tudor state
was to be thrown against Rome and Catherine.
But Catherine wasn't without her defendants.
One of the boldest was her chaplain, Thomas Abell,
who combined the very different roles of scholar and man of action.
In the winter of 1528, Henry sent Abell on a mission
to Catherine's nephew, the Emperor Charles V, in Spain,
where Abell played the desperately dangerous game of double agent.
Outwardly, he was working for Henry.
Secretly, he was undermining the king's whole strategy
on Catherine's behalf.
Mission accomplished, Abell returned to England where he quickly emerged
as Catherine's most effective and outspoken scholarly propagandist,
as this book shows.
Abell called it, with magnificent defiance, Invicta Veritas -
Truth Unconquered And Unconquerable.
In it he attacked the verdict of the universities
which provided the whole intellectual basis of Henry's case.
The attack went home as the King's infuriated scribbles
throughout the book show.
Here, Henry's irritation actually overcomes his scholarship
and he scribbles in the margin in mere English,
"It is false."
But by the time he'd finished,
Henry's composure had recovered sufficiently
for him to deliver his damning verdict on the book
in portentous Latin, here on the title page.
"The whole basis of this book is false.
"Therefore the papal authority is empty save in its own seat."
Not even that magisterial royal rebuke was enough to shut Abell up.
Instead, it took the full weight of the law.
He was twice imprisoned in the Tower
where he carved his name and bell symbol on the wall of his cell,
and eventually executed as a traitor in 1540.
But even Abell's courage proved fruitless.
As learned opinion swung in his direction, Henry became bolder.
He now asserted that, by virtue of his God-given office,
the king of England was an "Emperor".
As such, he was subject to no authority on earth,
especially that of the Pope.
Once Henry had been the stoutest defender of papal authority
but that had changed with the problem of his divorce.
Now, the achievement of his most fervent hopes for Anne
and for an heir depended on the idea
that religious truth was to be found not in Rome but in the Bible.
Rome instead was the obstacle that had delayed his divorce
for five long years.
It was the enemy that stood between him and Anne.
But what of the Pope?
Here again, the Bible spoke.
For there were no popes in scripture, but there were kings.
And it was kings, Cranmer and his radical colleagues argued,
who were God's anointed, ordained by Him to rule His church on Earth.
The idea appealed to Henry's thirst for glory.
It offered a means to cut the Gordian knot of the divorce
and it even promised to make Henry, not the Pope, heir to the power
and status of the ancient Roman emperors.
It was intoxicating.
Henry now stood on the threshold of a decision
that would transform the monarchy and England utterly, and forever.
On 19th January 1531, Convocation, the parliament of
the English Church, met here in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey.
They faced an unprecedented demand - to acknowledge that the King was
the only protector and supreme head of the English Church.
Over the next two weeks they fought that demand
word by word and letter by letter.
Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed Henry
should be accepted as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England,
as far as the law of Christ allows.
His announcement was greeted with a stunned silence,
which the Archbishop ingeniously took to mean consent.
The weasel words, "as far as the law of Christ allows", meant what
anybody wanted them to mean and the next year they were dropped.
Henry was now Supreme Head without qualification.
He'd also, by his actions, broken Magna Carta
and the first clause of his own coronation oath,
by which he'd sworn that the Church in England should be free.
And he'd become a bigamist as well.
In October 1532, Anne finally gave in and slept with Henry.
By Christmas she was pregnant.
In January 1533, in strictest secrecy, Henry married Anne,
despite the fact that Catherine was still legally his wife.
The next month Cranmer was made
Archbishop of Canterbury, with the mission to implement
Henry's royal supremacy over the Church of England.
Cranmer's first and most momentous step came a few weeks later when
he declared Henry's marriage to Catherine unlawful,
and Anne instead to be his true wife.
After seven years Henry had the woman and Queen he wanted.
The London crowds grumbled.
Charles V was furious and the Pope excommunicated the King.
But Henry and Anne defied them all.
Henry's second marriage and the royal supremacy,
its intellectual foundation, were profoundly divisive.
Some opposed them viscerally
because they hated Anne or loved the old church.
Others were more nuanced.
And subtlest of all, as befits the man who'd warned Henry about
exaggerating the Pope's powers when the King wrote the Assertio,
was Henry's old friend and counsellor Sir Thomas More.
But opponents were whipped into line by laws which required them to swear
a double oath - to accept the King's second marriage
and to reject the papal supremacy.
To refuse the oath was treason and death.
More refused the oath and was imprisoned,
in steadily worsening conditions, in this cell
inthe Tower for over a year.
But, when on 1st July 1535 he was removed from here for
his trial at Westminster Hall, it looked as though he might escape.
More now did what hitherto
he'd steadfastly refused to do and spoke his mind.
He said he couldn't be guilty, because the English Parliament
couldn't make Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church.
For the common consent of Christendom, of which
England was only a tiny part, gave that title to the Pope
and had done for over 1,000 years.
Consternation in Court.
But the Lord Chief Justice recovered the situation with a characteristic
piece of English legal positivism.
English law was what the English parliament said it was, he asserted.
More was condemned and beheaded on 6th July.
Working with parliament rather than against it
Henry had hugely outdone his father.
He'd invested the so-called Imperial Crown
with a truly Imperial authority over church and state.
He'd even get his hands on more land and money than the miserly
Henry VII could have dreamt of.
He got it by plundering the wealth of the church.
There were about 500 monasteries scattered over England.
Some were desperately poor.
But many were rich and well run,
andmaintained a 1,000-year-old tradition
of prayer, work and learning.
But a change of intellectual fashion away from monasticism
made them vulnerable,
and their collective wealth made them tempting.
So, in 1536 the process of dissolving the monasteries began.
At first the objective was presented as reform.
But it soon turned to outright abolition.
By 1540 the last abbey had gone.
The monks were pensioned off and their land, buildings
and treasures confiscated.
A few were retained as Parish churches
or cathedrals, but most were not.
They were stripped of the lead on their roofs, the gold and jewels
on their shrines, and left to rot.
It was desecration and sacrilege on the grandest scale.
It provoked shock, outrage and open revolt.
The result was that, in the autumn of 1536, Henry faced the worst
crisis of his reign - the rebellion known as "The Pilgrimage of Grace".
The first uprising was in Lincolnshire and spread
quickly across the North of England.
Under their banner of the Five Wounds of Christ,
noblemen and peasants joined together, demanding
the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old religion.
Some monks and priests played a leading part in
the revolt - preaching incendiary sermons and even wearing armour.
Adam Sedbar, Abbot at Jervaulx Abbey here, wasn't one of them.
Instead, when the rebel hoards turned up
at the gates of his monastery, he fled to the surrounding moor land.
But the threat to burn down his monastery forced him to return,
however reluctantly, and join the revolt.
Secure in their control of the north,
the well disciplined rebel army marched south.
By the time they reached Doncaster only the King's much smaller forces
stood between them and London and, perhaps, Henry's throne.
This area is known as Scawsby Leys.
This tract in a field was once the line of the Great North Road,
where it crosses the broad plain on the northern bank of the river Don.
It was all around here, at dawn on the morning of 26th October,
that the rebels called a general muster of their troops.
All the flower of the north was there.
When the final count was taken they numbered 30,000 men
with another 12,000 in reserve at Pontefract.
It was the largest army that England
had seen since the Wars of the Roses, and it wasn't the King's.
But, even though the rebels faced only 8,000 of Henry's forces,
they chose to negotiate.
They persuaded themselves that the attack on the church was the work,
not of the King, but of his wicked advisors like Cranmer.
They were also double-crossed by the King's representative.
He promised them pardon and, believing him,
the huge rebel army disbursed.
But, a few months later, a new minor revolt in the north gave Henry
the excuse he wanted to break his promises and exact revenge.
The leaders of the revolt were arrested
and sent to London for trial.
Henry was especially severe on clerics who'd been involved,
even when, like Abbot Sedbar of Jervaulx,
they'd been coerced into joining the revolt.
Sedbar was arrested with the rest and sent to the tower.
Then he was tried, condemned and saw Jervaulx confiscated.
The aristocratic leaders of the revolt were beheaded.
The rest, including Sedbar himself, suffered the full horrors
of hanging, drawing and quartering.
Henry's supreme headship of the church, which had begun in the name
of freeing England from the papal yoke,
was turning into a new royal tyranny, to be enforced in blood.
And no-one was exempt.
In May 1536, after only three years of marriage, Anne was executed
on trumped up charges of adultery, incest and sexual perversion.
But her real crimes were less exotic.
She'd failed to adjust from the dominant role of mistress
to the submissive one of wife.
And, above all, like Catherine before her,
she'dfailed to give Henry a son.
Within 24 hours of Anne's execution Henry was betrothed again.
On 30th May he married his third wife - Jane Seymour.
Demure and submissive,
conservative in religion, Jane was everything that Anne was not.
And in October 1537 she did what Anne and Catherine had
both failed to do - gave birth to a healthy son and heir, Edward.
Jane died a few days later.
But the boy lived and became Henry's pride and joy.
All of the problems which had led to the break
with Rome, the King's first two disputed marriages,
his lack of a male heir, were now solved.
With the occasions of the dispute out of the way, why didn't
the naturally conservative Henry return
to the bosom of the Roman Church?
The answer lies in this painting here.
The original, of which it's a copy, was sited
in the King's private apartments and takes us into his very mind.
The date, 1537, is the year of Prince Edward's birth.
In the foreground is the proud father Henry VIII,
together with the recently deceased mother Jane Seymour.
Behind are Henry's own parents - Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
While, in the middle, there are inscribed Latin verses
which explain the meaning of the painting.
"Which is the greater?", the verses ask, "the father or the son".
"Henry VII was great", they reply,
"for he brought to an end the Wars of the Roses."
But Henry VIII was greater, indeed the greatest.
For while he was King true religion was restored and the power of Popes
trodden under foot. This then is why Henry refused to return to Rome.
The supremacy may have begun as a mere convenient device to facilitate
his marriage to Anne Boleyn.
But it had quickly taken on a life of its own as Henry had persuaded
himself that it was his birthright.
His raison d'etre and above all his passport to fame, not only
vis-a-vis his father, but in the eyes of posterity as well.
Henry had got what he wanted.
But to do so he'd had to use ideas like Luther's
biblically based approach to religion, which he detested.
The symbol of these compromises
was the new English translation of the Bible.
The title page shows how literally Henry took his new grand title
of "Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England".
At the top of the page, of course, appears Christ as God the Son.
But he's very small.
Instead, the composition is dominated by the huge
fleshly presence of Henry the VIII.
As King come Supreme Head, he sits enthroned in the centre
with on the left, the bishops representing the clergy and church,
and on the right, the privy council representing
the laity and the state.
Below there are the people, who all join together
in the grateful, obedient cry of
"Vivat, vivat Rex" - "Long live the King",
God Save the King.
The title page of the great Bible represents,
in microcosm, the extraordinary achievement of Henry's reign.
He'd broken the power of the Pope, dissolved the monasteries,
defeated rebellion, beheaded traitors
and made himself supreme over Church and state.
All the powers and all the passions of a ferocious
nationalism were contained in his person and at his command.
But the royal supremacy also contained the seeds
of its own destruction.
For, in employing the new biblically based theology,
Henry had allowed into England those very subversive religious ideas
he'd once tried so hard to suppress.
The genie of Protestantism was out of the bottle.
And it was Protestantism,
which only 100 years later, would first challenge the powers
of the monarchy,
and finally dethrone and behead a King of England.
Subtitling by BBC Broadcast