HE SPEAKS ARABIC
We live in an age of religious extremism,
an age of terror and violent slaughter.
We are locked in a bewildering ideological battle
with religious fundamentalism.
It's a battle that's taken most of us by surprise
because religious fundamentalism seems so odd,
so alien to our own easy-going way of life.
But, you know, it's not.
We've been here before - here at home,
here at the very heart of our own civilisation.
Exactly 500 years ago,
a breach within Christianity tore Europe, England,
and the Church apart.
It was the same literalism, the same passionate intensity,
the same apocalyptic violence as now.
It's our very own jihad.
It's called the Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation was also a political and cultural revolution.
It unleashed bloodshed, terror,
and the destruction of religious art -
a combination we recognise all too well.
It began with a provincial German monk,
and it threatened the most powerful institution in the Western world -
the Catholic Church - with destruction.
In England, it led to a hard Brexit, 16th-century style,
as King Henry VIII broke with Rome
and declared himself Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England.
It was a tale of espionage,
enhanced interrogation, and horrific death
as a handful of brave and inspired souls
fought to introduce the new ideas,
and the authorities fought back savagely to stamp out the infection.
So, how did one man's simple act of protest
in the backwoods of Germany spark a violent revolution
that would transform England, Europe and the Western world?
In the early 1500s, the Catholic Church
shaped every aspect of human life.
And here in Rome, its head, the Pope,
ruled a spiritual empire bigger than the Caesars.
It's hard to overestimate the power of the Catholic Church
in the Late Middle Ages.
It was a vastly wealthy, bureaucratic machine,
the very heart of Europe.
It controlled education, media, family law.
It had its own private language in Latin,
and the clergy, whatever their nationality,
swore obedience to the Pope,
whose toe even kings knelt on the ground to kiss.
But its greatest power was over men's minds.
Churches were dominated by a huge painting of the Last Judgment...
..when Jesus' judge sentenced each soul to the joys of heaven...
..or the eternal torments of hell.
It was a terrifying vision.
The Church mitigated its stark horror
by the doctrine of purgatory.
This was an intermediate state between heaven and hell
where the not-too-sinful soul was purged of its offences
and made fit to enter paradise.
You could reduce the amount of time you spent in purgatory
by doing good works, saying prayers,
going on pilgrimages, giving to the poor,
or you could draw on the good works of others -
Jesus, the saints, the Virgin Mary,
whose transcendent goodness had endowed the Church
with a treasury of merit.
The Pope dispensed -
in return for consideration, of course -
this treasury in the form of spiritual IOUs,
known as indulgences.
These were printed bits of paper that,
in return for cold, hard cash, absolved the soul of its offences
and acted as its passport to paradise.
Indulgences were often sold to finance church schemes,
and in 1517, the Pope's pet project
was the rebuilding of St Peter's on a magnificent scale.
Indulgences were sold across Europe.
There was even a catchy advertising jingle.
"As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
"the soul from purgatory springs."
It was as though the Church had forgotten Christ
and become fixated on wealth.
And for one German monk, this was an abomination.
On the 31st of October 1517,
Martin Luther very publicly denounced this scandal.
According to legend, he strode through the town
to the great doors of All Saints' Church...
..and hammered up a document for all to see.
It was his 95 Theses, a mere 95 points of contention
with the Church's teachings on sin and penance.
Were these the brave hammer blows of fate against the old order,
as the traditional story goes,
or was it the equivalent of pinning an agenda
on a university notice board, as revisionists suggest?
Actually, you know, it doesn't much matter,
since nobody disputes the magnitude of the results.
Luther's protest would plunge Europe
into two centuries of religious war...
..unleashing bloodshed and brutality across the continent...
..all in the name of God.
Martin Luther was an unlikely revolutionary.
In 1517, he was a 33-year-old monk and professor of biblical theology
at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony.
Saxony was just one of a jigsaw
of small, German-speaking states
that comprised present-day Germany.
Each had its own ruler,
but all fell under the overlordship
of an elected monarch,
the Holy Roman Emperor,
who was crowned by the Pope,
and all were subject
to papal authority and taxation.
In the introduction to his Theses,
Luther wrote of his wish to stir up debate.
A new invention allowed him to succeed beyond his wildest dreams.
Just over 70 years earlier,
Johannes Gutenberg had developed his printing press.
This piece of technology would transform Luther
from a little-known monk and academic
into Europe's most published author...
..and a wanted man.
Luther originally wrote the 95 Theses in Latin,
the language of academic and theological discourse.
But even within the Latin of the Theses,
Luther showed himself aware of that wider audience
outside the universities,
and nine of the Theses list the sharp arguments
that the laity were using against indulgences.
"And how," Luther asked,
"are we going to answer those arguments
"if the Church doesn't reform itself?"
Well, of course, the Church showed no sign of reforming itself,
so what Luther did was to write a tract.
He called it a Sermon On Indulgences And Grace,
and he wrote it in German and he had it printed.
Experts still marvel at the extraordinary impact
of Luther's sermon.
This was the work which propelled Luther
to the front ranks of European thought and theology.
Until that point, he had been writing in Latin,
but when he did this,
and published these 20 short propositions in German...
Just one second. So, the form in German
very closely echoes the 95 Theses.
These are numbered points.
They are numbered points, but they're reduced.
So, we have 20 instead of 95.
We have short paragraphs. He's learned how to lecture.
I've always said to my students,
"Can you imagine the lecturer concluding, "And 95thly..."?"
THEY LAUGH
Well, I think he's learned how to write, as well,
because this is a work of instinctive brilliance.
I mean, he calls it a sermon, but it's nothing like a sermon.
Sermons are meant to be endurance tests
of repetition and reiteration,
and they last for hours. And Biblical citations.
And this can be read aloud in ten minutes.
It's 20 short, snappy points. A tabloid sermon.
Well, you could say.
And it's published in Wurttemberg, but unlike the 95 Theses,
which was circulated only in the intellectual community,
this went viral immediately.
It was reprinted in Leipzig, in Nuremberg, in Augsburg,
and then in Strasbourg, as well.
And so, by the end of 1518,
there were at least 14 editions of this circulating.
And by 1520, Luther had written something like 60 original works.
Collectively, they had sold several hundred thousand copies,
and Luther was now the most published author
in the history of printing,
and that is an extraordinary transformation
for someone who, five years before, had written precisely nothing.
Luther's enemies would liken the spread of his ideas
to a virus or contagion...
..and the carrier was the printed word.
We, too, are living through a media revolution,
with the rise and rise of social media.
So, think of Luther and the printing press
as the ultimate Twitter storm
with Luther himself pungent, pithy, fearless,
often downright vulgar and rude,
cutting the self-styled great and good down to size,
winning the largest number of followers
and taking on allcomers.
In what? An Arab Spring? A Velvet Revolution?
A jihad?
In Rome, the Pope, Leo X, was made aware of Luther's attack...
..but he dismissed it as a...
Rome was a vast, slow-moving legal bureaucracy...
..but Luther's ideas moved fast.
They were getting everywhere...
..and England was next.
In March 1518,
just five months after Luther's protest in Wurttemberg,
a ship approached the south-east coast
of Catholic England.
On board was a courier bearing a letter.
The letter was from the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus,
and it was addressed to his friend and fellow scholar Thomas More,
who'd just joined the inner circle of the government of Henry VIII.
Enclosed in the letter was a copy of the 95 Theses.
As far as we know, it's the first time that they'd reached England.
But Erasmus pays them no particular attention.
After all, both he and More, as scholars and freethinkers,
had written equally scathing satire
on the corruptions of church and state.
But they'd kept their satire safely in Latin.
Presumably, they thought that Luther would do the same.
But Luther didn't respect polite academic convention.
He was spreading his ideas in German.
A stream of Lutheran publications in German,
increasingly radical and in ever-increasing numbers,
made it to England across the trade routes of the North Sea.
And, as they did so, Thomas More abandoned
his earlier cultivated, ironical detachment, and took sides.
The Lutheran heresy, he decided,
threatened the unity of the Catholic faith,
imperilled souls, and must be stamped out,
or at least it must be stopped from infecting England.
In Wurttemberg, Luther's attack on indulgences
was evolving into fundamental doctrines.
The key one - raising the power of personal faith
above the remedies offered by the hierarchy of the Church.
Mankind was saved not by prayer or fasting or indulgences,
but only by faith -
by faith in Christ, as told in the New Testament.
Anything else was a corruption, an obstacle - and that included Rome.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the papal condemnation of Luther
was reaching its stately climax.
On the 15th of June 1520, after four all-day meetings,
the Pope and his council issued the formal decree known as a bull,
and entitled, after its opening words,
Exsurge Domine - Arise, O Lord.
Learning a little from Luther himself,
the bull employed the strongest and most violent language,
and, printed in pamphlet form, like this,
it, too, became an instant bestseller.
Luther was given 60 days to recant or be excommunicated,
which meant expulsion from the Church
and condemnation to the eternal fires of hell.
His works were ordered to be burned.
Far from backing down,
Luther seemed energised - liberated, even -
and, in a matter of a few mere weeks,
produced three crucial works that,
between them, amounted to a manifesto
for a political and religious revolution.
The most important of them was addressed to
the Christian nobility of the German nation.
Writing in German,
Luther called on the German princes unilaterally
to reform the German Church and rescue it from the clutches of Rome
that was bleeding Germany dry.
Brilliantly targeted, seething with hatred of Italians and Jews,
here was the rampant, uninhibited voice
of German nationalism,
and it sold like hot cakes.
But Luther went further.
On the 10th of December 1520, he publicly burned the papal bull.
There could be no going back.
In January 1521,
Martin Luther was formally excommunicated
from the Catholic Church.
Two months later, he was charged with heresy
and summoned to a hearing in front of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
and representatives of the Church.
The Imperial Diet, as it was known,
was to be held in the German city of Worms.
While Luther remained in Wurttemberg, he was safe.
But a journey to Worms would take him
through less-friendly German states,
risking kidnap, torture, execution.
Luther's survival had, to date,
been ensured by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony.
Frederick now secured a promise of safe passage,
and Luther set out.
If the Catholic Church was hoping to destroy Luther at Worms,
it had badly miscalculated the popular mood.
Everywhere he went, he was hailed as a hero.
100 horsemen rode through the city gates to escort him inside,
and as he descended his carriage,
a monk reached out to touch the hem of his robe.
By taking on the power of the Church,
Luther had become a local legend,
a figurehead for a populist, antiestablishment movement
that was spreading across the German-speaking states
as resentment about taxes and foreign interference grew.
The Pope's ambassador at Worms was horrified
as he reported back to Rome.
"The whole of Germany is in full revolt," he wrote.
"Nine-tenths raise the war cry "Luther!"
"whilst the watchword of the other tenth,
"who are indifferent to Luther, is, "Death to the Roman Curia!""
Summoned before the Diet,
Luther was ordered to renounce his heretical writings.
He refused.
"Here I stand," he is supposed to have declared.
"I can do no other."
Whilst the Emperor Charles V
and the Diet were debating Luther's fate,
Luther's safe conduct was honoured and he was allowed to leave Worms.
As Luther and his two companions were riding through thick forest...
..suddenly, they were ambushed
by a posse of armed and masked highwaymen.
Luther's companions were overpowered at the point of the sword,
Luther ordered down from his wagon
and flung on the back of a horse and spirited away.
No-one knew where or by whom.
Back in England, the figure of Martin Luther,
this curious German monk,
was beginning to register with the authorities.
Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor,
had a palace here in Whitehall at the time.
He had eyes and ears everywhere,
and one of them, Cuthbert Tunstall, had been dispatched to Worms.
Cuthbert Tunstall was an outstanding figure
of the Early Renaissance in England.
Educated in different countries, multilingual and a polymath,
he was scholar, lawyer and theologian.
Wolsey talent-spotted Tunstall early,
and in 1520, he was given the plum post of ambassador
to the young Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
As such, he accompanied the emperor to the Diet of Worms,
from which he sent an extraordinary series of dispatches,
mostly in cipher.
And the dispatches finished up here,
in what was then Wolsey's great town palace in Westminster.
Tunstall was the first Englishman fully to understand
the threat presented by Martin Luther,
and he gave Wolsey a stark warning.
This dispatch was written on the 29th of January 1521 -
around the time of the opening of the Diet of Worms.
In it, and with extraordinary prescience,
Tunstall explains how Luther's shift of language from Latin into German
had turned him into a mortal enemy of the Church.
And then he goes on to recommend what had to be done
to stop the threat spreading to England.
Wolsey must, he says,
"Call before him the printers and book-sellers
"and give them a straight charge
"that they bring none of Luther's books into England,
"nor that they translate none of them into English..."
Tunstall's hair-raising dispatch from Worms
galvanised Wolsey into action.
He ordered a ceremonial burning of Luther's books.
It was to be one of many book burnings all over Europe
in response to the Pope's condemnation of Luther...
..and it was one of the most spectacular.
It took place here in the precinct of Old St Paul's Cathedral
on the 12th of May 1521.
As books were tossed onto the bonfire before a vast crowd,
John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester,
preached a two-hour sermon against Luther and his perilous heresy.
Fisher's sermon was in English,
but the books burned whilst he spoke were in Latin or German.
This meant that, for the time being, at least,
in England, Lutheranism was someone else's problem,
and the book burning itself was aimed largely at a foreign audience.
Also aimed at a foreign audience was the book that Wolsey brandished
in his hand throughout the ceremony.
It was the unfinished draft
of a Latin treatise against Martin Luther,
and it was being written, Wolsey and Fisher loudly proclaimed,
by none other than King Henry VIII himself.
Two months after the book burning at St Paul's,
Henry's manuscript was printed by the King's printer.
It was entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum -
Defence Of The Seven Sacraments.
It was a strike against Luther's biblical fundamentalism
and dedicated to Pope Leo X himself.
It was also, thanks to Tunstall's reports from Worms,
bang up to the minute.
In his key dispatch of the 29th of January,
Tunstall had informed Henry and Wolsey that Luther's latest book
committed the ultimate heresy
of reducing the traditional seven Catholic sacraments to only three.
Henry's book called the Defence Of The Seven Sacraments
was a powerful reassertion of the traditional number and doctrine.
Richard, we're looking here at a first edition of Henry's book.
Explain to me, seven sacraments - what actually is a sacrament?
Well, the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church are
held to be the guaranteed means, really,
by which the benefits of Christ's saving work
are communicated to the faithful.
In other words, the sacrament is
part of the soul's progress to salvation?
That's right. The merits, as they would say in the Late Middle Ages.
The merits of the Passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ
are communicated, first of all, in baptism,
and then at various stages of life.
For example, through the Eucharist -
through the ritual meal of bread and wine,
or the body and blood of Christ -
confession, because it was expected that everybody should make
a full and proper confession of their sins
before receiving the Eucharist.
And then there were the sacraments that marked,
for the most part, stages of life - confirmation, marriage, of course,
and then, at the end of life, Extreme Unction,
as it was known then - the final anointing,
which would prepare the body and soul for the separation of death.
So, why is it, then, that Luther feels so passionately,
first of all, that the number has to be reduced,
and questions, in some ways,
the fundamental doctrine of a sacrament itself?
Luther and the other Protestant theologians after him
are concerned that with any sacrament
that should deserve the name,
Christ himself should be shown to have instituted it.
And it is with baptism and the Eucharist that they are happy.
The other sacraments are, as it were,
not instituted by Christ.
So, our Assertio - what is the impact of it?
I mean, there weren't many books by kings, were there?
There were very few in Latin.
Its impact was substantial for a few years,
I think not least because of its royal authorship.
Between 1522 and 1524,
there were eight or nine editions of this text
in places as far apart as Cologne and Rome.
He's almost getting up there with Luther, isn't he?
Well, he's a fair way short of Luther,
it has to be said. But, still...
But he's ahead of most of Luther's Catholic opponents at this point.
That is itself something really astonishing, isn't it?
It is quite, actually. So, England really is,
and England's king, is seen, and sees himself,
as Martin Luther's principal opponent.
Yes, he's taking this, and himself, very seriously.
King David confronting, you know...
The German Goliath. ..the German Goliath.
The Pope's own copy was magnificent.
Illuminated manuscript, bound in cloth of gold,
and with verses chosen by Wolsey, inscribed in the King's own hand.
The manuscript, as Wolsey foretold,
was laid up amongst the treasures of the Vatican Library,
where it still remains.
And Henry was given the papal title of Defender of the Faith,
which Queen Elizabeth II still proudly holds.
Henry had established his credentials
as the Pope's most loyal ally.
But where was Luther?
Luther's mysterious disappearance on the way home from Worms
occasioned his followers much anguish.
But it wasn't a kidnapping or an assassination
by the stooges of the Pope or the Emperor.
It was a rescue by the agents of Luther's protector,
the Elector Frederick the Wise,
charged with bringing him to a place of safety.
And they brought him here,
to the isolated, almost impregnable Wartburg,
high on its towering peak.
Here in Wartburg Castle,
Luther went undercover.
He grew his hair and beard,
and became Junker Jorg, or Squire George.
Confined to his room,
Luther embarked on the next stage of his religious revolution.
The medieval church used Saint Jerome's
fourth-century Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.
Known as the Vulgate,
it was treated as the sole authoritative text,
and crucial Catholic doctrines
depended on its particular choice of words.
All Luther's religion was rooted in the Bible.
He believed in sola scriptura -
that the Bible was the sole infallible guide
to faith and practice.
So, Luther decided to use his time in the Wartburg
to start afresh and to make his own new translation of the Bible
from the original Greek into German.
But it was to be HIS German - pungent, pithy,
and comprehensible by all Germans, north and south.
And, above all, it was to be his - Luther's - reading of the Bible.
The thing that strikes an English reader
is how much there is of Luther in it.
HE CHUCKLES He, at times,
as far as I can see,
doctors the translation to make it clearer.
Luther does, at certain points,
introduce new answers into his translation
to reflect his theological beliefs.
The most famous is, of course, when he translates,
"A man is justified by faith alone."
"Alone" is nowhere to be found in the Greek original,
but Luther is convinced it has to be faith alone
because that's the way...
That's what Luther thinks it means.
That's the way the Greek must be translated in German.
But, of course, Luther was on a mission
when he translated his New Testament. Of course.
It was fundamental for him to deliver the unabridged,
in his view, gospel to the Germans.
Setting aside its religious impact,
what is its impact on the German language?
As I understand it - and I'm no German expert at all -
it really is one of the fundamental texts of modern German.
Yes, it is. It's very influential for modern German
because it was so widespread and it received...
It was read by so many people.
Luther didn't invent modern German,
but he was quick to embrace certain changes in syntax and grammar
that had already been around in his time,
and he adopted a sort of German
that could be understood by many people.
He says of himself he doesn't speak any particular German dialect,
but speaks, or writes, in a German
that can be understood as well by the...
By a Bavarian as well as a Prussian. Exactly.
As a Bavarian or a Low German speaker.
Published in September 1522,
Luther's Bible began to fix a standardised modern German language.
It forged a growing sense of nationhood and national identity
amongst the German states...
..and that helped turn Luther's religious revolution
into a political revolution, as well.
Luther's revolution now threatened to carry all before it.
The princes were attracted
by the political and economic power it gave them,
and the common people by the freedom and the autonomy
that it seemed to promise them.
The term Protestant was coined in 1529.
And in 1531, the Lutheran cities and principalities
united themselves into a defensive alliance
known as the Schmalkaldic League.
In little more than a decade,
half of Germany had gone Protestant,
gone Lutheran.
As Europe began to fracture along religious lines,
it would be engulfed by apocalyptic violence...
..waves of holy war, terror and iconoclasm
of the kind we are all too familiar with today.
In England, Luther's revolution was being held at bay
by Henry VIII's Catholic government.
But in the mid-1520s, one man would challenge that.
William Tyndale was a Gloucestershire man
through and through. He studied at Oxford
before returning to his native county as a chaplain and tutor
to a rich and well-connected family here at Little Sodbury.
Tyndale was a natural linguist.
He also had a powerful religious conviction
and he combined the two in his life's work -
to translate the Bible from the original languages into English.
Tyndale was risking his life by confronting the Church authorities.
"They only banned translations of the Bible," he said...
And he was resolute his work would change that.
In 1524, Tyndale slipped out of the country
and took refuge in Germany.
There, he found the support and protection needed
to undertake his subversive work.
The following year, in 1525, his translation was complete.
German presses began printing his English translation of the Bible.
Even in Germany, this was a dangerous enterprise.
Catholic spies were everywhere.
The printing of Tyndale's English New Testament
began secretly in Cologne.
An edition of 3,000 copies was well underway
when it was accidentally uncovered by a fierce opponent
of Martin Luther called Johann Cochlaeus.
The presses were stopped.
Tyndale fled with the printed sheets,
and Cochlaeus informed Wolsey and Henry
of what had happened, in bloodcurdling terms.
"There was an underground plot," he wrote.
"And the heretics had sworn..."
Inspired by Luther's attack on the Catholic Church,
and fiercely resenting papal taxes,
German peasants were rising up to win greater freedoms.
Reports of the peasants' revolt made Henry's court extra jumpy.
They were terrified the insurrection might spread to English soil.
The King and Cardinal Wolsey
relaunched the campaign against Luther and his followers in England.
The dirty work was left to Sir Thomas More.
On the 26th of January 1526,
More lead an armed raid on the Steelyard,
the Thames-side London depot
of the German merchants of the Hanseatic League.
Twilight was falling,
and the merchants were about to sit down to their supper
when More and his men burst into their hall.
The doors were locked and guarded and More harangued the merchants,
accusing them of possessing and importing Lutheran heretical books.
Three of them were arrested on the spot
and others the following morning
when More returned to the Steelyard to conduct a room-by-room search.
Those found in possession of heretical works were interrogated,
some by Wolsey himself.
Overawed, they confessed and recanted.
On the 11th of February,
another book burning was staged at St Paul's...
..and the contrite Lutherans were subject to public humiliation.
SHOUTING, FIRE CRACKLES
They were paraded three times round the fire,
bearing faggots of wood kindling...
..which, at the end of their ordeal, they cast into the flames
as an awful warning of what would happen to their bodies
if they offended again.
But, despite the warning,
heretical books were still being smuggled into England...
..including, for the first time,
Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English.
Karen, we're looking at one of the world's most important,
rarest books - the first New Testament in English,
translated by William Tyndale, first complete version of it,
and I'm struck by...
It's really rather a handsome, dignified book.
It is indeed. It's actually very beautifully printed.
Have we any idea at all of how long this would have taken to do?
There was a first edition,
a printing of the New Testament translated by Tyndale in Cologne,
printed by Peter Quentel, which, as you know, was then interrupted.
The printed process was then interrupted.
They grabbed the sheets and ran to Worms,
where this edition was produced.
And it's thought that first copies of this particular 1526 edition
were already sold here in England in February 1526.
So it must have been probably even produced at the end of 1525,
beginning of 1526. It is weeks. It is weeks. It is weeks.
Do we have an idea of quantities?
Three surviving. Yeah. Is there any guess
as to what the size of the first edition might have been?
The first edition in Cologne was about 3,000.
The 1526, this one, was supposed to be about between 3,000 and 6,000.
So, quite a large number. It's a lot. It is a lot.
I mean, there was a market for it in England.
It couldn't be produced there, but they knew they could sell it
if they could get the copies over to England.
People treasure it, clearly, as a source of revelation.
Absolutely. We have accounts, don't we, of people...?
In a sense, they know the Bible exists, they hear it,
but, suddenly, in their own language.
Yeah, and it's not interpreted for them by the priests,
which is obviously the great revelation.
And it's a very, very accessible language.
He uses a lot of verbs.
So, he makes the language come alive,
and the Word of God come alive to people.
Somebody does something or says something, rather than,
"It is done," or, "It is being done." We've got it here!
"Eat, drink and be merry." Exactly. Just that point - three verbs.
And three verbs we still use today in everyday language,
where people probably don't necessarily realise
where it comes from.
A stream of heretical works followed Tyndale's New Testament to England,
all in multiple printed copies, and all in English.
The appearance of heretical printed books in English
was a game-changer.
Back in 1521,
when he'd been an appalled observer at the Diet of Worms,
Cuthbert Tunstall had realised that the key to Martin Luther's success
was the fact that...
Now William Tyndale's books were in English,
and, likewise, in the hands of every man that can read.
But it would be in the hands of a woman
that Tyndale's books would wreak destruction
on the Catholic Church in England.
Hever Castle in Kent was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn,
Henry VIII's mistress and eventual second queen.
She was also the femme fatale of the English Reformation.
Anne seems to have been a bright girl,
and her father, an ambitious Tudor courtier,
decided to capitalise on the fact by giving her an excellent education.
So, at the age of about ten, Anne was sent to the Continent
to learn French and to perfect herself
in the art of get your man, known as courtly love.
Anne's father had married a duke's daughter.
Anne, thanks to her excellent training,
would do even better.
Early in the 1520s, Anne returned to England
and became lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon.
It wasn't long before she caught the King's eye.
Catherine was vulnerable.
Five years older than Henry, she was approaching 40...
..and she'd only given him a daughter
instead of the longed-for son and heir.
Henry and Anne spent the Christmas of 1526 apart -
Henry at court, and Anne in seclusion here at Hever.
But, around New Year's Day 1527,
in an exchange of letters, they agreed to marry.
First, however, there was the little matter of divorcing Catherine.
Probably, Henry assumed that it would be straightforward.
He thought that he had an unimpeachable moral case
based on the Bible itself.
Catherine was the widow of Henry's elder brother Arthur,
who had died in 1502.
But the Bible, in the Book of Leviticus, declared...
What could be clearer?
Henry fixated on this verse and clung to it like a lifeline.
Henry also thought, understandably,
in view of his defence of the Church against Luther,
that he was in good standing in Rome.
What could possibly go wrong?
Henry ordered Wolsey to get the Pope
to divorce him from Catherine of Aragon.
But in May 1527,
the mutinous troops of Catherine's nephew,
Charles V, sacked Rome...
..and the Pope became little better than his prisoner
in the Castel Sant'Angelo.
Henry's services to Rome were nothing
against this brutal turn of events.
But Henry and Wolsey blinded themselves to the facts
for the next two years,
which led Henry to the greatest humiliation of his whole reign,
when, in 1529, the public trial of his marriage to Catherine
was aborted on the direct orders of Pope Clement VII himself.
Wolsey fell as Henry's struggle for divorce
destroyed yet another opponent of Martin Luther,
and Henry himself was left looking for a new policy.
Anne Boleyn, meanwhile, had not been idle.
She proved more clear-sighted than Henry,
and far more willing to take risks.
Anne had been introduced to advanced religious opinions in France,
and she continued and deepened her interest in them in England,
so much so that the Spanish ambassador,
who was a bitter enemy,
called her more Lutheran than Luther.
There's no doubt that Anne was sincere in all of this,
but her self-advancement was involved, as well.
In 1529, Anne took a gamble and set out to turn Henry.
She showed him a copy of an heretical book
by the Lutheran William Tyndale.
It was called The Obedience Of A Christian Man.
Anne even marked up passages for Henry's special attention.
Passages like this, no doubt...
According to Christ's own teaching, Tyndale argued,
everybody - churchmen and laymen alike -
was under the absolute power of the king.
In contrast, the authority of the Pope,
and his presumption in daring to judge kings,
was a shameful and irreligious usurpation.
For Henry and Anne, it was a eureka moment.
"This is a book for me and all kings to read," Henry said.
Henry had found a theological justification
for dethroning the Pope.
England was on the road to its Tudor Brexit.
Ten years previously, Henry had written a book to defend the papacy.
Now he set up a kind of think tank to destroy its power.
The Royal Library was augmented with scores of weighty tomes,
all carefully catalogued and cross-referenced.
And a team of scholars working closely with the King himself
combed them to find historical evidence
that the kings of England had been, in practice,
as well as in Tyndale's theory, free from papal jurisdiction.
And - to Henry's satisfaction, at least - they found it.
In 1533, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals,
which repudiated the authority of Rome
and declared England to be an empire...
Protected by the act, Thomas Cranmer,
the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
declared Henry's marriage to Catherine invalid,
and his marriage to Anne good.
A week later came the moment that Henry and Anne had been waiting for.
On Whitsunday, the 1st of June, Cranmer crowned Anne queen
in a magnificent ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
After six long years,
Henry had got his divorce at last.
The great anti-Lutheran defender of Rome was now its bitter enemy.
It was Henry's turn to be threatened with excommunication
and the eternal flames of hell.
Henry's reply was devastating.
He had himself styled Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England,
only under Christ, by an Act of Parliament.
To all intents and purposes,
Henry had made himself Pope in England.
The tables were now turned,
and with the divorce and the break with Rome,
victims and victors exchanged roles almost overnight.
Lutheran heretics became government agents,
others were even made bishops,
whilst their erstwhile Catholic persecutors found themselves -
if they remained loyal to Rome - facing imprisonment or death.
Henry's most prominent victim was Sir Thomas More.
More had succeeded Wolsey as Lord Chancellor,
and intensified the campaign against the Lutheran heresy.
When the clergy were bullied into recognising Henry
as supreme head of the Church, More resigned.
Thereafter, he was a marked man.
More was tried for treason
for refusing to recognise Henry as supreme head of the Church.
Despite the doubtful evidence against him,
the jury took only 15 minutes to find More guilty.
More then dropped his guard and spoke his mind.
"Parliament could not make the King
"Supreme Head of the Church," he said,
"since England, being but a small part of the Church,
"could not make a particular law disagreeable
"to the general law of the Church."
It's Remainer versus Brexiteer,
and the chief justice, in dismissing More's arguments,
came down firmly on the side of national parliamentary sovereignty.
Thomas More was beheaded in 1535...
..and the forces of Roman Catholicism in England
found themselves in headlong retreat.
Between 1536 and 1540, Henry laid waste to the monasteries,
plundering their riches and executing those
who refused to renounce the papal supremacy.
Dotted all over England, these cold, bare, ruined choirs,
as Shakespeare called them, are the most visible monuments
of Henry VIII's brutal triumph
over the wealth and power of the Catholic Church.
But, though Henry broke with Rome, he never joined with Luther.
Instead, he steered a careful middle way
between Wittenberg and Rome.
So, Crypto-Lutherans, like Cranmer, became powerful councillors,
providing they kept their faith under wraps.
And Crypto-Papists like Tunstall remained in high favour, too,
providing they acknowledged the royal supremacy.
But step out of line in either direction
and a horrible death loomed,
as in 1540 when, to vindicate his middle way,
Henry burned three Lutherans and disembowelled three Catholics
all on the same day.
Luther's Reformation was fuelled by religious fundamentalism
and political opportunism.
Henry's was triggered by lust and a hunger for dynastic power.
Henry's middle way would subject England
to a long, hard Brexit.
It unleashed decades of religious schism,
terror and political violence,
as Catholics and Protestants vied for supremacy.
It would drive a wedge between Britain and the rest of Europe
that shapes our politics and culture to this day.
It would also be the defining moment of Tudor England.
Henry's Reformation was as much about England and Englishness
as Luther's was about Germany and German-ness.
But Henry did more than print propaganda.
He also built real physical defences,
like this castle at Deal in Kent,
to protect an heretical England against invasion
from a hostile Catholic Europe.
Most importantly, Henry fostered the idea of empire.
Under Henry, empire meant national self-government under the king.
But under Elizabeth - Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn -
and her successors, empire came to mean the government of others
by a rampantly self-assertive nation,
confident through its reformed religion
of its God-given right to rule the whole world.