For the past 20 years I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles
to uncover the history of these islands.
But now it's time for a different approach.
I'm going to turn the engine off, and leave the car behind.
Instead, I'm going to walk.
My walks will uncover the richest history from our finest landscapes
in a way that's only possible on foot.
This time, I've come to a quiet corner of the south-east -
the fields, woodland and the Downs of Kent and East Sussex.
But 500 years ago, this most unlikely of areas
echoed with the noise of industry
and dripped with the intrigue of political upheaval.
And the architect of that upheaval was none other than the towering figure
of England's most fascinating monarch, Henry VIII.
This historical quest takes me on a walk through an area
we know as the Weald.
On a sunny day, there can't be many other parts of the country
so enchanting.
My four-day walk starts in Kent with the great estates of
Penshurst and Hever,
both central to the bloody game of Tudor politics.
Deeper into the Weald,
and day two reveals the remains of a Tudor Industrial Revolution.
Into Sussex, and Ashdown Forest,
spectacular walking territory now, but once a playground
for a sporting king.
Finally, over the South Downs to Lewes, and the orgy of destruction
that defined the final years of Henry's reign.
But here in Penshurst village, just ten miles south of the M25,
I'm starting with a seismic change
that began in the early years of Henry's reign.
The young Henry came to the throne in the year 1509,
and immediately he married Catherine of Aragon,
which is what his dad Henry VII wanted
because it helped cement a European alliance.
So, in a way, you could say that that marriage was a hangover
from the old order, an order that Henry was about to turn on its head.
He may have been famous for his fearsome rage
and many marriages but, more importantly,
he transformed English society, especially the make-up
of the royal court.
It was a brutal and bitter process, and it began right here
at Penshurst Place some ten years into Henry's reign.
So I've arranged to meet my friend,
top historical novelist Philippa Gregory,
to find out what happened to Henry's first high-profile victim.
Hi, how lovely to see you!
Well, I'm so glad you've come here,
it's one of the great show houses of Kent
and it's one of the places where, in a sense, there's a turning point
for the whole of Henry's reign, and it happens right here.
By Henry's reign, Penshurst was in the hands of Edward Stafford,
better known as the Duke of Buckingham, a top aristocrat
with a pedigree stretching back centuries.
And, in 1519, Henry arrived here at Penshurst,
honoured guest at one of the events of the age.
Wow!
That is some roof, isn't it?
Isn't it fabulous?
You could throw a bit of a party in here, couldn't you?
Well, they did throw an amazing party in here in 1519.
The Duke of Buckingham put on the biggest,
most expensive party, probably, that Henry had ever seen.
It cost £1 million in today's money and it lasted for ten days.
So what did he want out of Henry?
I think he wanted to demonstrate his luxury and his extent
of his wealth, and it was really a terrible, terrible mistake.
Because?
Because what Henry saw was how many retainers he had,
how much power he had, how grand he was - as grand as a king.
This hall is not unlike Westminster Palace and immediately
Henry's paranoia about his subjects
just really became too strong for him.
So what happened to Buckingham?
Well, the worst thing.
Henry had him accused of conspiring for the king's death
and prophesying the king's death, and those are both treasons.
So he was tried before a jury of his peers the very next year
after this party.
And?
The year after that he was executed.
Buckingham was the first to fall foul of Henry's ability
to find treason in his own court.
His execution was a demonstration of how things would now be,
because by 1520, the confident young king was becoming a suspicious,
brutal monarch.
In my opinion, Henry goes from this point to a real paranoid anxiety
about the aristocracy, about the old order that had links to the royal family,
that had these huge retainers,
that had enormous wealth, and that he felt might challenge him.
So what's Henry's role in bringing about a new order?
Well, he deliberately attacks the aristocrats.
He cuts down the numbers of armies they can have standing,
and what he does is he really identifies himself with the new men,
so he promotes people from not just the middle classes,
but quite lowly people, he picks out...
He talent-spots people, people like Thomas Cromwell,
people like Cardinal Wolsey,
people like Thomas Boleyn from Hever Castle.
Hever Castle and the Boleyn family, two names for ever linked with
the Tudor age.
They're also next on my historic route
through the Kentish countryside.
But why have Hever's owners become synonymous
with Henry's new social order?
That's what I hope to find out as I head west,
following the Eden Valley for four miles,
from the old money of Penshurst to the new world of the Boleyn family.
The locals round here call this path the Coach Road,
although, actually, it's from a long time before coaches.
This used to be the main line of communication
between Penshurst and Hever Castle.
My route between these two big estates has hardly changed in 500 years.
It's a bit of a treat for all modern walkers.
Penshurst and Hever are still the area's dominant landowners,
and they've managed to preserve the original Coach Road that
connected them.
All right, this is just a tidgy little path now,
but it was once a major thoroughfare.
They say that this path was eroded by century after century
of people's feet and horses' hooves and pigs' trotters and so on,
but, look at this.
That's solid rock, isn't it?
There must have been some engineering.
It's quite creepy, isn't it?
I'm coming up to the edge of the Hever estate.
500 years ago, this was the way to one of the burgeoning powerhouses
of Tudor England.
And, who knows, maybe Henry himself once rode along this very track?
He certainly would have had a good reason
because while he was still married to Catherine of Aragon,
Hever was the home of his most famous squeeze,
Thomas Boleyn's daughter Anne.
Look at that! It's like something out of a fantasy novel, isn't it?
Got this symmetrical castle with the moat and the drawbridge
and these immaculate lawns. It's even got a flag there.
You can just imagine a handsome young prince riding up,
setting everyone's hearts aflutter
and then riding off with the beautiful girl, can't you?
Well, that's the fairy tale,
but were Henry and Anne really besotted with each other,
or was Anne simply a pawn in her father's efforts to influence
Henry's court?
Helping me find out at Anne's childhood home
is historian Tracy Borman,
a specialist in the role of Tudor women.
What were the Boleyns like?
The Boleyns were really part of the new order.
Thomas Boleyn was hugely popular with Henry VIII.
But he was from trade, he wasn't from the old aristocracy,
and he was, sort of, a relatively new member of the court scene,
but Henry loved him.
And Thomas didn't just have one, he had two secret weapons -
his daughters.
In the early 1520s it was Mary, not Anne,
who first became the king's mistress.
But with Thomas to oversee things, tactics were rather different
once Henry's eye had come to settle on the younger Boleyn daughter.
Do you think Henry actually loved Anne Boleyn?
I think Henry was certainly infatuated by Anne.
I also think there is an element of wanting what he couldn't have.
Anne kept Henry at bay for seven years.
He was a great hunter, it was the thrill of the chase.
She didn't give herself to him during those seven years?
She didn't, she didn't, you know?
It was the mid-1520s when she first really came to his attention,
and for seven long years she held him at bay,
which was quite a feat, you know?
He had many mistresses, he was a great romancer,
he was the King of England, for goodness' sake!
What evidence do we have that he was so besotted by her?
We have this series of fantastic letters that Henry wrote to Anne.
In this first one here he talks of being in great agony,
you know, having been stricken with the dart of love,
and one of the later ones here, clearly something has happened
by this stage between Henry and Anne,
because he talks about wishing himself in his sweetheart's arms,
especially late at night, you know.
"I'm now writing this shorter letter to you at this time
"because of some pain in my head, wishing myself,
"especially at evening, in my sweetheart's arms,
"whose pretty dukkys I trust shortly to kiss."
Indeed.
He didn't mean that kind of duckie, did he?
He certainly didn't!
Henry and Anne's love story has become a romantic classic,
retold and embellished by each and every generation.
But behind his racy writing, Henry had a serious purpose.
He was chasing the male heir
that his first wife Catherine had failed to produce.
Thomas Boleyn knew that and, unlike his neighbour,
the Duke of Buckingham, he managed the fiery-tempered king well
and positioned his younger daughter very well.
Anne Boleyn would never have got where she did
if it hadn't been for one thing - her dad's money.
So the question now is, "Where did that come from?"
My walking quest to reveal the extraordinary transformation
that took place here in the Weald
has already shown me how fast people could rise and fall
in the court of Henry VIII.
But all this politicking, all the machinery of patronage,
would have ground to a halt if hadn't been for one simple thing -
money.
The court around King Henry VIII
was full of rich, showy people,
and if you were an aspiring family who wanted to break into that charmed circle,
you had to splash the cash.
But where were you going to get it from?
The old way was simply to inherit.
But today I'm exploring an incredible new path to riches
and power in Tudor England.
Having spent the night in Cowden, day two of my walk winds south,
crossing from Kent into East Sussex
to the edge of the great Ashdown Forest.
Back in the open air.
Unbelievably, while Henry was chopping and changing his courtiers,
the whole of this quiet area
resounded to the noise of heavy manufacturing.
Almost three centuries before the Industrial Revolution,
the Weald was the setting for an era-defining transformation -
the rise of a major iron industry.
Hi, Jeremy!
Hi, Tony!
There are few traces of that industry left today,
but I've wandered a mile north of Cowden
as I've been invited to drop in on Crippenden Manor.
It was built just after 1600 with new industrial wealth,
and it's retained a few clues from its past.
This is it?
This is it, yes.
Wow... It's a cannon.
It's a cannon. A 16th century cannon. And what is more it was made locally.
I didn't realise that they made weapons around here?
They did, it was a big industry in Tudor times.
And it's made of...?
Cast iron. And that was one of the new things about it.
It was a new type of gun.
Iron was cheaper than bronze, much easier to get hold of,
and that was the big advantage.
We don't know what it's doing here?
Well, we do know what it's doing here - the gun itself was a reject.
We know because various features on it indicate that.
For example here, you've a sizable blemish on the side of the gun.
Clearly, there was a fault in the casting.
Up at the front here, you've got these holes,
and these rather badly damaged pieces at the front.
It was discarded because of something going wrong in the casting.
Ironically, the Crippenden cannon's failure
means it's still here in the Weald, 450 years after it was cast.
But dozens more like it would have been in use at the many forts
Henry had built to protect the south coast.
The king himself was encouraging the expansion of a new economy.
Why? Why here?
Well, the answer is in my pocket...
That. Which is iron ore.
The sort of iron ore you'd find locally.
It's... Well, feel it.
It's quite distinctly heavy, isn't it?
It is, isn't it?
'Rocks like this were extracted from thin seams of iron ore,
'just below ground level.
'These seams which were laid down millions of years ago
'were soon found right across the Weald.'
In Henry VIII's time, who would have been involved in this industry?
It was a money-making business, really.
Local landowners like Thomas Boleyn and his brother, for example,
they were either lessees or owners of iron works.
And to help me on my way,
Jeremy's giving me a copy of an iron industry map.
An 18th century plan of the site that produced the Crippenden cannon.
Thank you very much. And you can have your iron back.
Thank you.
Cheers, Jeremy. Bye!
Cheerio.
The Boleyn family were quick to invest in the new industry,
but over time the likes of merchants and even clergymen got involved,
producing not just weapons,
but agricultural and domestic iron products, too.
By the end of Henry's reign, the Weald was intensely exploited
with 50 furnaces and forges.
But today you have to look carefully to find the clues in the landscape.
That's quite a sight, isn't it?
Tucked away behind the back of a little lane.
In 1500, there would have been no more than a stream here.
The creation of Cowden Furnace, though,
led to a perfectly straight dam wall being constructed,
still evident at the end of the pond.
It gathered enough water to power the production of 200 tons of iron a year.
This valley would have been an industrial complex,
but today, it's quite a challenge to work out.
Right, it says Furnace Pond.
So that's a bit of a clue, isn't it?
Actually, it should be the other way round,
so if I compare it with Jeremy's map...
Beautiful, isn't it?
So, yeah, that's the flat bit there -
that must be the dam with the furnace behind it,
so it must be over in this direction here somewhere.
Sadly, at the end of Furnace Pond in Cowden,
all the iron industry buildings disappeared over 200 years ago.
What really intrigues me is this quarry.
Because the furnaces were made of stone.
So, it seems to me quite plausible
that they could have got the stone for that furnace from here.
And the other thing is that the slag, the residue,
they just chucked away, and it was left lying all over the place.
So if I poke around for a bit, I hopefully...
Presenters always find it straight away on telly, don't they?
Yay! There you are, got my presenter's badge.
Bit of slag.
The innovation behind this entire economy
was the blast furnace itself.
It allowed iron to be produced on an industrial scale for the first time.
Far from leading the way, though,
England had to import the furnace technology, and the skilled workers,
from across the Channel.
But being close to the Continent, close to London,
and with plenty of iron ore, the Weald was ideally positioned.
By the late 16th century,
iron was a multi-million pound business in modern terms,
making its leaders new fortunes, and showing that under Henry,
the national economy was about more than just farming.
Leaving Cowden, I'm also leaving Kent,
as this valley marks the point where I cross over into East Sussex.
And I'm entering a place where industrial history
is definitely not the attraction.
Look at this path now.
Beautifully clear across this field.
Well maintained. Not a nettle in sight, used regularly.
Welcome to the world of Winnie the Pooh!
My path is passing close to Cotchford Farm,
once the home of AA Milne.
He was born in London and spent years working as a playwright,
but a move to the country in 1925
inspired the magical world of Pooh Bear and his friends.
Milne wrote the stories for his young son Christopher Robin,
but the inspiration and ideas for Pooh's adventures came from this,
their local landscape.
Including the ever popular Pooh Bridge.
And anyone with an affection for the Pooh stories
will know that a simple accident with a fir cone
led to the discovery of a much-loved game.
"That's funny," said Pooh.
"I dropped it on the other side... and it came out on this side!
"I wonder if it would do it again?"
It did. It kept on doing it.
And that was the beginning of the game called Poohsticks,
which Pooh invented,
and which he and his friends used to play on the edge of the forest.
Right, c'mon. Other side.
Let's see him come out.
My money's on the big one.
Yay. There's one! Yes!
But you see that water there, how it's reddy-brown?
That's a clear indication there's iron in the underlying rocks there.
Even here, on the edge of Pooh's magical Hundred Acre Wood,
there are signs of the area's real past.
Believe it or not, the home of Poohsticks was once a Tudor forge!
All over here would have been flooded, all that field,
right down probably as far as the digger.
And the water would have been held back by a dam that was here.
You can see a bit of it now, and all the rest is eroded.
And there would have been a forge here.
I can't imagine that Winnie the Pooh
would have been particularly pleased by the noise of a hammer
slamming down on red hot iron.
Eeyore would have been furious.
It's time for me to leave Pooh, his friends,
and the iron-masters behind me.
It's strange to think of the Weald as an industrial powerhouse,
and to be fair, it was a short-lived role for the area.
Iron was found elsewhere, cheap coal too.
And just 200 years after it had arrived,
the industry that changed the face of the south east disappeared.
For me tomorrow, it's on to the great Ashdown Forest,
and the Tudor sport of kings.
It's day three of my walk through the Weald.
Having spent the night in the village of Hartfield,
I'm heading for a cup of tea in the tiny hamlet of Colemans Hatch.
Yesterday I was uncovering the traces of the incredible
iron industry that made such an impact here 500 years ago.
Today I'm going to leave the sweat and noise of the furnaces behind
to take a look at another one of Henry VIII's legacies.
This is the Ashdown Forest, which has remained pretty much
untouched for the last thousand years.
And all this area here, as we've seen, was completely
turned on its head by the Tudor iron industry.
But here has remained virtually pristine. I want to find out why.
Ashdown today remains the biggest public space in south-east England.
It sits across a sandy ridge at the top of the High Weald.
Reaching 200 metres high in places,
the forest makes for some great walking.
That's pretty nice, isn't it?
I sometimes forget how spectacular
some of the views in southern England are.
That's Kent there, where I've come from, and over there's Surrey.
You see the ridge of the North Downs?
All very nice.
Morning!
But Ashdown doesn't seem like much of a forest,
at least not in the modern, densely wooded sense.
Ashdown though is as true a forest as you could hope to find.
It was the Normans who first introduced the concept.
For them, a forest wasn't defined by what grew in it,
but by a strict set of rules governing what went on in it,
be it woodland, heath or grass.
Applied to vast tracts of land,
these rules were designed above all
to support a very important activity - hunting.
And if there's one thing we know about Henry VIII,
it's that he loved hunting almost as much as he loved women.
So I'm heading to one of the forest's landmarks,
and one of its finest viewpoints,
because to this day, it's got a distinct connection
with the Tudor king.
Hi, Chris.
Hello, Tony. How are you?
All right. This is King's Standing, isn't it?
It is, yes.
I've read that this was the site of Henry VIII's hunting lodge.
Is that right?
Well, apparently so.
We don't know that Henry VIII ever came here.
Oh!
It's a great shame, isn't it?
But we're pretty certain
that there was something here at least from the 14th century onwards.
What do you mean, there was something here?
Well, the name Standing is a good clue.
We think that standings in relation to a forest where
they are hunting deer would have been somewhere where they came and
the hunters, their followers, they would have been here perhaps under a
shelter and they'd have watched the deer being driven past and shot at.
You can imagine being a king,
standing here looking at all the deer below you.
Absolutely, it would have been a fantastic spectacle.
It's a great view.
Absolutely.
Here, just a day's ride from London, the great and the good of the Tudor
world had 14,000 acres to hunt in. A day with Henry and his entourage
would have been the greatest networking opportunity of the age.
But for the king himself, hunting was pure escapism,
away from the prying eyes of court life.
So it's no surprise that hunting trips often became thinly veiled
excuses to court a chosen lady.
For the seven years of their courtship
it's believed that Anne Boleyn rode out alongside Henry
on several occasions.
And even when she wasn't there,
we know Henry was still thinking of her.
"To cause you yet oftener to remember me,
"I send you, by the bearer of this, a buck killed late last night
"by my own hand,
"hoping that when you eat of it you may think of the hunter."
Is it true you get snakes up here?
It is indeed. You get adders.
What, the little diamond-backed ones?
That's right and occasionally some black adders.
You're winding me up!
No, when we were out here earlier on we did actually see
a black adder.
The rules of the forest allowed locals
limited rights to gather wood and graze their animals,
which helped maintain the sporting terrain.
It was a low-key form of land management
that had worked very well for generations.
But for the first time under Henry,
there was now real pressure on the land of the forest.
The iron industry was all around
and looking enviously at the undeveloped Ashdown.
Here was land where more iron ore could be found.
And to keep the furnaces burning?
Well, the forest had tons and tons of timber.
It's up here somewhere, I promise.
So Chris is leading me to the western edge of Ashdown,
to show me the decisive action Henry took to ensure the forest's future.
OK, Tony, this is what I've brought you to see.
Strewth! You don't often see something like this
sticking out of a forest, do you?
No. This is the pale.
This originally surrounded all of Ashdown Forest.
What's a pale?
It comes from the word palisade and it means the bank and ditch
and the fence that surrounded the forest.
Its main function was to keep deer in and poachers out.
How long has there been something like this here?
Well, the original pale was built by the Normans.
So we're going back to perhaps the 13th century.
This pale was probably built by Henry VIII.
We have a record in 1521 where he commands
that the pale around Ashdown is rebuilt.
The whole thing is about 26 miles.
So you might have had a bank up to say about here
and then sticks all the way around.
Yes.
Why do you think Henry saw the need to do this?
Maybe he liked hunting, and I think the most important thing,
it's a status symbol.
So here, in the face of modern industry,
the modernising king was keen to preserve one of the old traditions.
If he hadn't acted to save his hunting land,
the forest we still enjoy today might have been overrun
centuries ago.
As I leave the wild heathland of the forest,
I'm heading south-west through delightful Sussex villages
like Fairwarp and Buxted.
The landscape becomes cosier, more gentle,
and there's a noticeable return to the world of agriculture.
Look at those. Aren't they fantastic?
Anyone who's been to this part of England
will be familiar with that sight - oast houses!
They were used to dry the hops when they'd just been harvested.
They're an icon of East Sussex and Kent. Elegant, unmistakable.
Love them!
But oast houses are more than just cute little objects
that you stick on the front of a tourist brochure.
They're symbols of another revolution
that took place in Henry's time.
Not an industrial revolution or a political one -
a beer revolution!
It's well known that Henry and his friends enjoyed a good drink.
It's less known that the traditional hops of Kent
and East Sussex are nothing of the sort.
In fact, they're a foreign import brought in from the Netherlands
with the foreigners now working in the booming local economy.
But to really understand the drinking revolution
that resulted, I'm dropping in on a brewing expert
at a 600-year-old inn, here in the village of Blackboys.
It's called the Blackboys. Is that a slavery thing?
No. Well, I hope not.
We think it's derived from the Tudor iron industry,
where the charcoal burners would have come in for a drink
with rather sooted black faces and it got the nickname from that.
It's odd, this thing about beer, because I had always assumed
that beer was the quintessential English drink.
In those days they would have been drinking ale.
So what's the difference?
Ale is an alcoholic beverage produced from barley
without the use of hops,
whereas beer, from the Flemish "bier", is an alcoholic beverage
brewed from barley with the use of hops.
We first saw beer in 1400, imported from Europe.
But we were actually growing hops in 1520 in this country.
Do we have any idea what the ale that they would have been
drinking around here before Tudor times would have been like?
Well, we do. This is actually produced without hops.
It has in it a herb called sweet gale or bog myrtle.
And this really is the nearest thing you'll get to the sort of ale
that was being drunk in the Middle Ages.
Cheers!
Your good health.
Right, this is the old ale...
Mmm...
It's like one of those rather sweet
bottled beers that you used to drink when I started drinking in the '60s.
Yes, very sweet and without that characteristic hop.
Yeah.
And as for the beer brewed here since Tudor times, well, you
only have to walk into any pub in the land to sample that.
Hopped beer has hardly changed in 500 years.
Well, I'll certainly be eternally grateful to our Tudor forebears
and their little bit of Flemish magic.
Certainly had a profound influence on me over the years.
But as I seem by some eerie coincidence - cheers! -
to have found myself in a bar,
I think we'll knock today's walk on the head.
One more day. Tomorrow, it's the South Downs
and the greatest of all of Henry's legacies.
I've been discovering
that events here around the landscape of the Weald
changed our history in the time of Henry VIII.
But after three days walking from Kent into East Sussex,
I'm on the home stretch.
My route from Blackboys to Lewes
heads south-west across the marshy Sussex levels,
before reaching the sizeable bulk of the South Downs
and my final destination of the county town.
Of all the changes that took place in Henry's reign,
there's one that sticks out and that is the Reformation.
There can't be many moments in English history
that had such a profound impact.
And I'm off to the town of Lewes,
because that was such an important centre
for this dramatic and often violent transformation.
The Reformation was the great religious schism
that saw England part company with the Catholic faith,
establishing itself as a Protestant kingdom.
Henry forced this change through during the 1530s,
the most tumultuous decade of his reign.
It was a period when religion, politics
and the king's personal life all collided.
Seven miles out from Lewes,
I'm crossing the broad floodplains of the Laughton Levels
to find a remarkable snapshot of English life
on the eve of the Reformation,
because it was here at the start of the 1530s
that the royal courtier Sir William Pelham
chose to build himself the finest Tudor home in the area.
Hello.
Welcome to Laughton Place.
Thank you very much.
Very nice to see you.
What you have to imagine on this site,
roughly bounded by the hedges today, would have been a great house,
pretty much on the scale of Hever Castle, in fact.
Wow!
And this is all that remains of it.
Apart from its size, what's so particular about the architecture?
Well, there's the brickwork, which was a newly discovered technology
and still very expensive,
but the real glory is the fantastic terracotta decoration on the tower
as you can see here on this window.
And this was the latest fashion in the Tudor court in the 1530s,
very Italianate.
I suppose this is the time when Henry VIII
is seeing himself very much as a sort of Renaissance prince
and wants to be surrounded by this kind of thing.
Absolutely. So for Sir William Pelham
deep in the Sussex countryside,
he's really bringing the latest London fashions
down to his house and going for it!
But it wasn't a fashion that lasted, was it?
No, it didn't, because in the 1530s, of course, Henry VIII
decides to break away from the Roman Catholic Church
and from that point onwards
anything remotely Italianate becomes slightly suspicious.
So just as this fashion statement was completed,
it was overtaken by national events.
After seven years of waiting, Henry got his wish in 1533
and married Anne Boleyn.
The Boleyn family had reached the very top.
But in declaring his first marriage invalid,
Henry was wilfully ignoring the Pope's orders,
for which he was excommunicated.
As I head into the final stage of my walk,
England was heading for a religious and political revolution.
It's only when you stop that you get the reward
of the fantastic views up here on the South Downs.
Over there's the High Weald and Ashdown Forest, where I was.
And over there...is the Levels that I've just come from.
Very nice.
The South Downs, which stretch from Eastbourne to Winchester,
look out towards Europe
and the Catholic powerbase from which England was soon to break.
With Henry and the Pope now at loggerheads
and with a Protestant mood for reform sweeping the nation,
there was strong support
for the King becoming supreme head of an independent Church of England.
Henry was the figurehead of the English Reformation,
but its chief strategist was his new right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell.
By 1534, the King's chief minister had become a policy maker,
spin doctor and enforcer rolled into one.
As the lowly son of a Putney brewer,
Cromwell was the archetypal new man of Henry's court.
And the final destination of my walk
is the perfect place to see Cromwell's work.
In 1536, just three years into her marriage,
Cromwell orchestrated the execution of the flirtatious Anne Boleyn,
who'd failed to produce a male heir.
But Cromwell's place in history
comes as architect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
The South Downs around Lewes
would have once belonged to the priory of St Pancras.
The priory was the richest religious house in Sussex
and for 450 years it was the beating heart of the town.
Cromwell's vision was to remove the Catholic threat of the monasteries
and under the banner of religious reform
bring about the greatest re-ordering of wealth and power since 1066.
The Dissolution would allow Henry
to complete his overhaul of Tudor society
by reallocating land and property among his new court.
But here in Lewes, things were rather personal for Cromwell.
This was where he wanted
to establish his own seat in the country.
So, wherever possible, he'd preserve the priory's assets.
But for the consecrated heart of the site it was a different story.
It's really romantic to see all these ruins,
but what would it have looked like originally?
Well, you've got to imagine here a massive monastic complex.
You would have had the great church of St Pancras lying just over there,
something the size of Chichester Cathedral.
Really?! So absolutely massive!
Enormous. Yes.
It would have been 100 metres long, 21 metres wide,
with five bells in one of the bell towers
and five chapels around the east end,
all the other buildings that you see here associated with it.
In November 1537, the last prior here
voluntarily signed a document
surrendering Lewes Priory to the government.
Resisting Cromwell would have been tantamount to treason.
The actual demolition itself must have been an enormous job.
Yes. Thomas Cromwell's agent, Giovanni Portinari,
and 17 men brought the whole of the monastic buildings down
within eight to ten days!
That's phenomenally quick!
It is. You can see clearly here the way the walls
have been undermined and brought down on themselves.
Did Cromwell himself benefit from all this mayhem?
Initially, of course, I think he did.
He acquired large amounts of monastic property
and he was at the height of his power.
He had just arranged the marriage of Henry to Anne of Cleves,
but the marriage was a disaster.
His enemies gathered against him.
Cromwell was charged with heresy
and Henry had him executed in July 1540.
It was Henry's fourth wife who really did for Cromwell.
He'd successfully orchestrated the King's divorce
from Catherine of Aragon, the downfall of Anne Boleyn
and the marriage to the ill-fated Jane Seymour,
but then it was the disastrous union with Anne of Cleves.
Four wives and now a very unhappy king.
In the febrile court of the paranoid Henry
that was all the ammunition Cromwell's enemies needed.
And here in Lewes there's a fabulous little twist.
Cromwell's last act before his execution
was to reluctantly support the King's divorce from Anne of Cleves.
The divorce settlement awarded the German noblewoman this house,
as well as the priory lodgings
which Cromwell had snatched for himself
straight after the Dissolution.
Anne got no fewer than nine grand houses in Sussex.
And guess what she got in Kent? Both Hever Castle
and the Duke of Buckingham's old pad,
the starting point of my journey, Penshurst Place.
And she survived and lived to enjoy them
long after Henry and Thomas Cromwell were in their graves.
On this walk I've come across a host of Tudor players,
and whether they were old money or new,
they all shared the challenge
of keeping on the right side of the king.
Remarkably, Anne of Cleves never did fall out with Henry
and she ended as one of the most unlikely winners
in the course of a tumultuous 38-year reign.
Henry died some eight years after
his seismic Dissolution of the Monasteries had taken place,
by which time the royal court had been transformed.
As had the economy, society, even the landscape.
And by breaking with Rome,
he'd severed the relationship between England and Europe.
Henry brought hundreds of years of medieval life
to a decisive and often disruptive end
and ushered in a new, very modern era.
And 500 years ago, this little corner of England
was at the heart of it all.
If you want to follow in my footsteps,
you can download a guide to my walk from -