Royal history is at the heart of our national identity.
We think of it as the definitive truth about our past.
Kings and queens,
dates and facts,
all consigned to a past that's unchanging and fixed.
But it's not like that at all.
History is a chorus of voices,
each of them shouting out its own version of the story.
And very often it's the loudest voices that get heard most clearly.
In this series, I'm lifting the lid on three of royal history's
great nation-building stories.
The Spanish Armada.
Elizabeth I's naval triumph is still celebrated
as a founding moment of the British Empire.
But was it really the decisive victory we've been led to believe?
Queen Anne helped create Great Britain.
She's remembered as a disastrous monarch,
but did her liberal enemies destroy her reputation?
And in this episode - Henry VIII's Reformation,
a religious schism that broke England's ties with Europe
and delivered absolute power to the king.
But it's often told as a bawdy royal soap opera.
- Henry VIII, what a guy.
Got on bended knee and declared,
"My darling Anne, I will love you for the rest of...your life."
- LAUGHTER RIPPLES
- Cheeky, cheeky.
- In lots of versions of the story,
the Reformation almost seems like a side product
of Henry's love life, a consequence of his desire for a divorce from
Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.
But has this focus on Henry's love life blinded us to the wider
political impact of the Reformation that's still playing out
on the streets of Brexit Britain today?
- I think the Reformation reinforced the sense that Britain is separate,
and I think that's where your scepticism
has its deep roots in the Reformation.
- So what's the real story of the Reformation -
lust and the obsessive desire for an heir,
or a political earthquake that shapes the nation to this day?
It seems we just can't decide.
And maybe that's because many of the stories told
about the Reformation have been spun from myths, fabrications
and some of royal history's biggest fibs.
The story of the English Reformation begins on Halloween 1517,
when the monk Martin Luther nailed a document to the door of a church
in Wittenberg, north-east Germany, attacking the Roman Catholic Church.
Luther believed that the Catholic Church was corrupt.
He thought that the clergy had tricked people into thinking
they could buy their way into heaven
by paying priests to say masses to wash their sins away.
He believed that faith, not money, was what got you redemption.
Luther's protest in Wittenberg is often seen as THE decisive act
that inspired Henry VIII's break with Rome.
But this founding moment may well be the first fib in the story.
Like all the best stories, it's probably been hammed up a bit
and it's doubtful that this scene with the church door
ever took place.
Luther has left us no fewer than 120 volumes of writing,
about all different aspects of his life,
including a really bad case of constipation,
which he thinks was given to him by the devil.
But nowhere in any of this does he mention
nailing anything to any doors.
However Luther's message was first delivered,
it quickly spread and unleashed a religious and political
revolution across Europe.
But when it came to the attention of Henry VIII,
it left him cold.
Over the centuries, Henry has sometimes been claimed
as one of history's great Protestants.
But when Luther's revolutionary message started to arrive in London,
Henry was dead against it.
After reading Luther's tract, Henry fired off an angry response.
It was called the Defence of the Seven Sacraments.
SHE CHUCKLES And he didn't hold back.
Henry said that Luther was "a venomous serpent",
"a pernicious plague", an "infernal wolf".
He said he had an infected soul, and he also called him
a "detestable trumpeter of pride, calumnies and schism."
So Henry wasn't particularly promising material
as a convert to Protestantism.
And in fact, he never would become a Protestant.
He would remain a Catholic until the day he died.
Henry's attack on Luther so delighted Pope Leo X
that he rewarded Henry with a title - Defender of the Faith.
But Henry's love-in with the Pope wouldn't last long.
Soon, he himself would be branded a heretic.
So what went wrong?
According to the popular version of the story,
it was a seductive 21-year-old
who'd lure Henry away from his Catholic faith.
Anne Boleyn arrived at Henry's court as lady-in-waiting
to Catherine of Aragon in 1522.
By 1527, Anne had completely turned the king's head.
And the story of how Henry dumped his old wife
in favour of the younger, sexier model has formed the plot line
of royal bonk busters ever since.
From the early days of silent cinema to more recent TV dramas,
directors, too, have delighted in casting
the demure and devoutly Catholic Catherine
against the sexy Protestant pin-up, Anne.
16th century artists also portrayed her as a great beauty.
But the truth is, no-one really knows what Anne looked like,
because this small medallion is the only surviving portrait
known to have been made during her lifetime.
And this has meant that Anne's image has become a sort of battle ground.
She shifts shape according to who's telling her story.
Only one thing is absolutely certain,
Anne was much more than just a pretty face.
Anne Boleyn arrived at Henry's court fired up with radical ideas.
She grew up here at Hever Castle in Kent,
the daughter of Lady Elizabeth Howard
and an ambitious diplomat,
Thomas Boleyn.
Thomas secured his younger daughter a coveted position
as maid of honour in the French court.
And it was there that Anne was introduced to the new ideas
that were transforming Europe.
- During those years,
she came in contact with evangelical Protestants,
people who were rethinking old verities,
who were coming up with new ways of approaching everything,
including faith.
- What were these, perhaps, contentious new religious ideas
that Anne was picking up in France?
- A key one is the source of authority.
So when you're making decisions about religious matters,
who do you look to as the authority on that matter,
whether it's the Bible, scripture, which is what these evangelicals
were arguing, or whether you turn to the wisdom of the Church?
And followers of Luther said that, actually, the Church was flawed,
that the Pope was fallible.
- Do you think Henry would have taken these ideas about the authority
of the Pope to heart if it hadn't been for Anne?
- I think Anne's pivotal because we know that Henry hates Luther.
Anne obviously had a real hold on his heart and so could introduce
ideas to him that other people couldn't possibly say.
- And is this something that's been downplayed by the people
who see her as just a sexpot?
- I think that comes down to pretty misogynistic ways
of seeing Henry VIII's wives in the past, actually.
And it's much easier if you can, sort of, boil them down
to being a bit of skirt and not really anything more.
And, actually, with Anne we do have something more.
She is somebody who makes a massive difference
in terms of English history.
We could argue that Henry VIII would not have broken
with the Roman Catholic Church if it weren't for Anne's influence.
- At this time, the Protestant scholar William Tyndale was marked out
as a heretic for wanting to translate the Bible into English.
But Anne had one of his books smuggled into England from France,
and she risked putting it right under the king's nose.
It was called The Obedience of a Christian Man,
and Anne went about this in a very clever way.
She marked up a passage in Tyndale's book where he implied that kings
had lost their power to the Church.
"Kings", Tindale says,
"they are but shadows, vain names and things idle,
"having nothing to do in the world
"but when our Holy Father needeth their help."
Tyndale was provoking the monarchs of Christendom
to reject papal authority.
And the idea that he could be king of an autonomous nation
appealed to Henry.
He's supposed to have said,
"Well, this is a book for me and all kings to read."
And this little interaction shows her beginning to persuade him
that maybe not all radical Protestants are bad,
and that maybe breaking with Rome could be good.
Anne was winning Henry round to some Protestant ideas.
And she refused to sleep with the king until
he'd made her his new queen.
But there were many obstacles in her way.
Henry was still married and his wife had many supporters at court.
Chief amongst these was Eustace Chapuys,
the Spanish ambassador to Emperor Charles V,
the standard bearer for Catholicism across Europe.
Eustace Chapuys was devoted to Charles V,
who just happened to be the nephew of Catherine of Aragon.
Chapuys really loved Catherine of Aragon.
It was said that he venerated her like a saint,
and, partly as a result of this, he really hated Anne Boleyn.
In his letters to Charles V,
Chapuys describes Anne as more Lutheran than Luther,
and he slut shamed her.
He called her "the concubine" and "the whore."
And Chapuys really set up this image of Anne
that does survive to this day, as the wicked, evil seductress,
as the original other woman.
Anne's genuine intelligence and sense of political strategy
just don't fit into this soap opera version of the story.
By 1527, the king's desperate desire for a male heir
had become known as The King's Great Matter.
After nine years of marriage, Catherine had produced six children,
but all had died, apart from a daughter - Mary.
Henry wanted a son to continue the Tudor dynasty,
and he was now convinced that Anne Boleyn could deliver.
It was time to come up with some fibs
to help him get rid of Catherine.
In 1527, Henry asked Pope Clement VII
to annul his marriage.
It seems that Henry had suddenly woken up to the fact that Catherine
had previously been married to his older brother, Arthur.
And this, according to the Bible, was a bad thing.
The Book of Leviticus said that
if a man shall marry his brother's wife,
it is an unclean thing.
And Henry now argued that this uncleanliness was the reason
that Catherine had never produced a healthy baby boy.
Their marriage, he now said, had been blighted from the start
in the eyes of God.
But Henry's manipulation of biblical quotations failed to impress.
The Pope refused to annul his marriage
and his wife refused to go quietly.
Henry had hopes that with the offer of a generous settlement,
Catherine would give way gracefully and go off to a nunnery,
but no, she wasn't having that.
We've made vows, she said, they cannot be undone.
As a Roman Catholic himself, Henry would have understood this,
but he was determined to get his divorce.
And thanks to Anne, Henry no longer saw the need to kowtow to the Pope.
And there was somebody else close to Henry
who was manipulating facts to persuade the king
that breaking with Rome could lead to unexpected rewards.
In 1533, Thomas Cromwell became Henry's chief minister.
Unlike Henry, he was a radical Protestant who saw Luther
as a progressive force.
An ally of Anne Boleyn, he saw The King's Great Matter
as an opportunity to advance the Protestant cause.
So Cromwell began to weave some expert political propaganda.
He assured Henry that there was a way to get him his divorce,
improve his finances
and enhance his political power.
It would just take two acts of parliament.
The first was drafted in 1533.
This is the real, actual Act in Restraint of Appeals.
And because this act banned appealing to the Pope
in ecclesiastical matters, it meant that Catherine was now banned
from appealing to the Pope in her and Henry's great matter.
From this point onwards, it would be parliament, not the Pope,
it would be London, not Rome, that would be the final authority
on the constitutional affairs of England.
By this time, Anne had succumbed to Henry's advances
and in January 1533, before the act had even been passed,
Anne discovered she was pregnant.
To make sure a potential baby boy was legitimate,
they quickly got married.
Henry, who was still married to Catherine, was now a bigamist.
The Pope expelled him from the Catholic Church.
This guaranteed that Henry would burn in hell for eternity.
But Henry didn't seem to mind too much
because, with Cromwell busy drafting his revolutionary acts,
Henry seemed to feel that his powers were limitless.
A year later, Cromwell produced a second bill -
The Act of Supremacy.
This made Henry the supreme head of a new Church of England,
and severed all ties with Rome.
But how could he possibly justify this massive break with Rome?
Well, the first clue comes in the very first line
of The Act in Restraint of Appeals,
where we begin to see Cromwell emerging
as one of history's biggest fibbers.
It says, "By diverse and sundry old authentic
"histories and chronicles,
"it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm
"of England is an Empire...
"..governed by one Supreme Head
"and King having the dignity and royal estate
"of the imperial Crown."
What he's saying here is that Henry rules an empire.
He is an emperor, as kings of England have been for centuries,
and emperors are beholden to nobody, certainly not to the Pope.
But where did this whole idea of empire come from?
Who was Cromwell kidding?
The truth is that Henry had no empire beyond the British Isles,
apart from a precarious foothold in Calais,
that was increasingly expensive to defend from the French.
But Cromwell wasn't about to let facts like these
get in the way of his master plan.
To justify the passage of power from Rome to London,
he manipulated English history.
This is the 12th century book that Cromwell used as his source
and his justification.
It's The History of the Kings of Britain
by a Welsh monk called Geoffrey of Monmouth.
And in it he takes the story of the kings of Britain right back
to one of Britain's best loved legends,
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
But this is really pseudo history.
It's more like a collection of fairy stories.
But these fairy stories were the diverse and sundry
old authentic histories and chronicles Cromwell was relying upon
for his claim that England really was an empire.
The idea that the Reformation could bolster his image as an emperor,
descended from the mighty King Arthur,
was especially appealing to Henry.
Henry had always fancied himself as a 16th century King Arthur.
So he was quite happy to go along with a bit of colourful
myth-making from back in the mists of time,
especially if it got him what he wanted.
Henry had an extraordinary gift for believing most sincerely
in things which just happened to be to his advantage.
Cromwell's revolutionary acts gave Henry the power he craved,
but they also left him isolated.
Rejecting Rome wasn't only a religious matter.
The Pope also had diplomatic and economic powers.
He even had approval on international trade deals.
And, by rejecting the Lutheran cause,
Henry was also driving a wedge between England
and the rest of Protestant Europe.
Adrian, do you think there's a connection between
people today talking negatively about Europe
and those acts that Henry and Cromwell set up
saying, "England is exceptional, it stands alone.
"It's an empire entirely self-contained"?
- Oh, undoubtedly. I think this idea that when you're an island,
you are naturally disconnected from the Continent and you are,
you know, very special and your fate and destiny lie elsewhere.
Clearly, that is what, you know, the Reformation and I think,
you know, people having this sort of discourse today have in common.
Really, I think, what those two acts do is they essentially say
there's only one source of legitimacy,
and that is now the nation represented by the monarch.
And that really changes the relationship hugely
to other countries, to the papacy, to institutions, you know,
across the world, because you're essentially saying
the individual has rights, you know, his or her individual rights,
plus the state essentially guarantees them
and nothing mediates that relationship any more.
- By 1536, Henry had absolute power over both nation and the Church.
But, after three years of marriage to Anne,
Henry still had no male heir, only a daughter - Elizabeth.
So Henry now ordered his fixer, Thomas Cromwell, to find a solution.
Operating in Henry's court was notoriously a dangerous affair.
You had to stay a step ahead of your enemies
and keep your allies close.
But although Anne was super smart, her strong character
and radical views hadn't endeared her to everybody.
And it would be her former ally, Thomas Cromwell, who produced
the damaging evidence that would eventually bring her down.
In May 1536, Anne was brought to the Tower of London
to be tried on charges of adultery, incest
and conspiracy to kill the king.
Cromwell had witnesses tortured to help create a dodgy dossier
against her, which would seal her reputation as a wanton woman.
- We have from Anne's trial the indictment,
and there's a list of five men with whom she's accused of adultery.
She's also accused of incest
because one of those five men is her brother.
And, crucially, she's accused of conspiring the king's death.
- Do you think that Anne did anything, anything wrong,
anything that we can blame for her downfall?
- Well, I don't think that she committed the adultery
and the incest that she was accused of.
But I do think she did the conspiring the king's death,
if we understand that to be talking about the king's death.
Because there's a moment with a man called Henry Norris,
who's one of the king's best friends, where she said to him,
"You look for dead men's shoes, for if aught came to the king but good
"you would look to have me."
In other words, she's saying,
you want to marry me when my husband's dead, don't you?
And under the 1534 Treasons Act,
if you think of the king's death in words,
you are committing treason.
- Suzie, why do you think that Cromwell,
who used to be Anne's ally and supporter, turned against her
and produced his dossier of evidence?
- Well, ultimately, Cromwell is doing what Henry tells him to do.
And Henry has told him,
look, there are these charges against Anne, look into them.
And Cromwell finds the dirt.
- Anne was found guilty on all charges.
But, as the case against her was based on fibs,
her guilt seems both morally and legally dubious.
This has given Anne her lasting appeal as a martyr.
And she still has a starring role in the tours of the Tower of London.
- The year was 1536.
Swordsman walked towards the Queen of England.
He called out, "Boy, bring me my sword."
That got the queen's attention enough to look up.
The neck was there for the taking.
In one motion, the swordsman bent down, picked up the sword,
and the head was off.
- Barely 24 hours had passed before Henry became engaged
to his third wife, Jane Seymour.
A year later, she gave birth to his long awaited son - Edward.
Henry now had a male heir to secure the Tudor dynasty
and this helped build England's autonomy as a nation state.
But by this time, Henry was in financial trouble.
He'd frittered away his father's inheritance on grand palaces
and luxuries, and he'd spent huge sums on battles with France.
The king was broke, but Cromwell had a way of helping him
to fill his coffers.
Cromwell said that the Church owned nearly a third
of all the land in England, and this was true.
Cromwell said that the Church was richer than the king was,
and this was true, too.
But Cromwell claimed that the clergy were syphoning off these huge sums
of money to Rome, where the Pope was spending them
on all kinds of excesses, and this was less true.
This was Cromwell spinning his story in order to get his own way.
Once again, Cromwell was using Henry's personal problems
to further his own Protestant agenda.
History remembers the next stage of the Reformation
as just an act of religious vandalism.
In fact, it was also a far-reaching political reform.
Henry's fixer had the monasteries in his sights.
Cromwell hated these Catholic institutions.
He felt they were centres of homosexuality, of depravity,
of superstition and corruption.
This would be a radical transfer of wealth and power
from church to state.
Cromwell was setting out to destroy the web of religious communities
across England that provided work, education
and welfare for local people.
He now sent the king's men all over the country,
knocking on the doors of monasteries and nunneries to find evidence
to blacken their reputation.
This process was politely known
as the visitation of the monasteries.
Actually, it involved interrogation and terror.
The findings were placed before parliament
in the Compendium Competorum,
which means the compendium of true facts.
And in this we discover the nuns at Grace Dieu
were accused of superstition, of holding in reverence
the girdle and parts of the tunic of St Francis,
which was thought to be helpful to women in labour.
Then at the monastery of Garendon,
whoa, this is bad, they had discovered five sodomites.
But, given Cornwell's economic agenda for the dissolution
of the monasteries, how much of this compendium of true facts
is reliable and how much is fiction?
Is there any evidence for actual financial wrongdoing
on behalf of the monasteries?
Were they really sending all this cash to Rome?
- Well, I suppose like any institution,
there's some mismanagement.
There's some abbots and priors who aren't behaving
as they're entirely supposed to be.
But the idea that the monasteries are sending huge sums
of money to Rome is absolutely a fantasy.
Erm...
as after the Reformation,
the English Crown takes much more money out of the Church
than the popes were ever able to do.
- Now, these people examining the monasteries,
they seem very keen on superstition, that excites them.
They like a good bit of superstition to catch.
What does that mean exactly?
- I think this is an area where the monasteries are vulnerable.
Many of them have large collections of relics.
And of course, kind of by definition, these relics,
which have been there for a very long time, are difficult to verify
or prove that they genuinely are the bone of this or that saint.
But the visitor's clearly have a brief to try and make
these things sound like forms of fraud.
- And what about this emphasis on the sex lives of the clergy?
It's like Mary Whitehouse. It's very prurient, isn't it?
- It is, and I suppose it works as propaganda
because it fits with some of the cliches.
You know, the lecherous monk or friar
is a well-known literary type in the Middle Ages.
One of the things that the compendium produces
is very long lists of sodomites. - Yes.
- That seems to be the kind of headline sin
that is being highlighted.
But in fact, when one drills down into that a little bit,
many of these so-called sodomites, it appears,
are sodomites per voluntarias polluciones,
a rather, sort of, roundabout Latin phrase,
"through voluntary pollution". In other words, masturbation.
- Sodomy's a very large catchall term.
- Sodomy is a very large catchall term.
And, in fact, it's not nearly as endemic or widespread
as the Compendium Compertorum is trying to pretend, or to spin
the material in such a way that it looks as if the monasteries
are these kind of cesspits of vice.
- Using this dubious evidence,
Cromwell unleashed a four-year campaign of destruction.
By 1540, 800 religious houses had been dissolved,
along with their hospitals, schools and provision for poor people.
Some were sold off to wealthy landowners who supported the king.
Others, like Tintern Abbey, were deliberately left in ruins
as a reminder that the Church was being cleaned up
and absorbed into the state.
Now, if you were to read your standard Victorian history textbook,
it would suggest that the Reformation was a good thing
in very basic terms.
But would you say something was lost here, something important?
- The great promise was to liberate the individual
from a corrupt Catholic Church,
you know, from a sort of overbearing papacy that would tell
you how to live your life and control your every movement,
to essentially a more personal relation between the individual
and God, no longer mediated by the Church.
I think in reality what happened is that the Reformation
really subordinated the individual to the national state
and also increasingly to the economy.
That is to say, Henry really concentrated wealth in the hands
of the landed gentry, and he centralised power.
And that meant that the individual was actually stripped
of all sorts of support.
The monasteries were a huge source of support for individuals,
and when they were dissolved by Henry, it basically meant that
all sorts of things like education,
what we would now call social services,
essentially, you know, were no longer there
to support people where they lived.
So power moved to London, wealth moved to the landed gentry,
and lots of individuals were basically without support.
- Protestant propagandists would have us believe
that the Reformation was widely welcomed.
But the destruction of the monasteries was met with resistance,
especially in the north of England.
Thousands marched on London in angry protest
against Cromwell's radical reforms,
that were overturning centuries of belief and a whole way of life.
Though it's not surprising that Cromwell's legacy
as a progressive Protestant hero
has taken quite a battering over the years.
Some historians have described him as a brute, a thug
responsible for this, for ruins.
One of the great acts of vandalism in the story of our nation.
But is this really fair?
Diarmaid, where has this idea of Cromwell the terrible thug
come from? Is it Catholic propaganda?
- Well, it certainly is Catholic propaganda,
because they were part of an old world,
and his Reformation was determined to destroy that old world.
He is actually carrying out the king's policy
of breaking with the Pope, breaking with Rome,
but was also doing things off his own bat.
He had his own policies, which weren't quite King Henry VIII's.
- Now, this is intriguing.
What was Cromwell's real agenda then?
- A very radical Protestant Reformation,
more radical than that of Martin Luther in Germany.
He wanted to do something with what Henry had done,
which was break with Rome, push the Protestant Reformation.
He pushed an English Bible when the king didn't want it.
He's an impressive man.
This is someone who has got a very determined agenda
to change and reform this country, to make it better.
- You're on his side. - I'm on his side because I think he had a sense
of social justice, reform.
I can see that he's also, in many ways, a thug.
But anyone in politics at the time was a thug.
Alongside that, though, there is this idealism,
this determination to get things done.
- As part of his national reforms, Cromwell tabled the Vagabond Act.
This required every community to fund a system
of state poor relief, to replace the Church's charity.
- The Vagabond Act was an attempt to start
the very first national system of relieving the poor.
Now, in Thomas Cromwell's eyes,
the Church wasn't the organisation to do it, it was the king.
It was this new independent kingdom of England,
the Church of England under the king.
And so, this is an attempt to solve a problem
by parliamentary legislation.
- I suppose, that's a new and exciting and radical thing to do.
But I find there's something quite scary about Cromwell.
He appears to be a zealot, and a very clever and successful,
and almost frighteningly efficient zealot.
- I'm sure you're right.
But someone's got to think about these things.
His king didn't have the time or the inclination
to sort problems out.
Cromwell was there to sort things out, and he did.
- We often think of Henry and Cromwell as a reforming team.
But, while Cromwell was a true believer,
Henry was still resisting any move towards Luther's ideas.
So what exactly were his people supposed to believe?
How should they pray? How should they live?
Henry attempted to clarify things with another Act of Parliament.
This is the Act of the Six Articles of 1539,
also known as an Act for the Abolishing of Diversity in Opinions,
which sounds rather like the thought police.
In this one, Henry sets out his own, rather singular, version
of Anglo-Catholic doctrine.
The things listed here include a belief in celibacy for the clergy,
a belief in confession and in communion.
And, actually, people were left feeling even more confused
because these things were really ancient Roman Catholic rituals
and beliefs, and very far distant from the radical, new
Protestant direction of Henry's closest advisers.
The gulf between Cromwell's belief in the Lutheran revolution
and Henry's Anglo-Catholicism
kept on growing.
Finally, Henry turned on his fixer.
In June 1540, Thomas Cromwell was taken to the Tower
charged with heresy and treason.
The story usually goes that Cromwell fell
because of his role in Henry's disastrous fourth marriage
to Anne of Cleves, the one he didn't fancy,
and therefore divorced.
But there's more to it than that.
Cromwell's trial records show that he was also in trouble
for failing to enforce Henry's Six Articles.
For years, Cromwell had managed Henry,
but finally, in his enthusiasm for religious reform, he'd gone too far.
And Henry could be ruthless if you questioned his authority.
Cromwell was executed without trial.
He was buried alongside the Protestant ally he'd betrayed -
Anne Boleyn.
As Protestant ideas continued to spread across England,
Henry's Anglo-Catholicism became more entrenched.
His last will and testament stipulated that twice daily masses
be said by his tomb in perpetuity.
Henry VIII, always remembered as the great reformer,
would remain Catholic for eternity.
But his surviving children -
zealous Edward,
who was raised entirely in the Protestant faith,
Roman Catholic Mary,
and Anglo-Catholic Elizabeth
were all named by Henry as his heirs.
The truth is that Henry's hedging of all of his bets
would plunge England into turmoil after his death.
This is the moment the story of the Reformation starts to be told
and retold to suit the needs of each successive
Protestant and Catholic monarch.
Henry had set the stage for centuries of confusion and lies.
In 1547, Henry was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward,
and a new hard line Protestant Reformation began.
All of Henry's Catholic concessions,
including his Six Articles, were scrapped.
The Latin Mass was replaced by the English Book of Common Prayer,
celibate priests by married clergy.
But Edward died after just five years on the throne.
The crown now passed to his Roman Catholic half-sister, Mary,
who immediately reversed all of Edward's Protestant reforms.
Latin masses were reinstated and the Pope was declared
head of England's Roman Catholic church once more.
Mary also restored medieval heresy laws.
Protestants who refused to recant were burnt alive at the stake.
Between 1555 and '57,
17 men and women from the Protestant stronghold of Lewes
in southeast England were put to death in this way.
The first of them was a Flemish immigrant called Derek Carver,
he was a brewer.
He was arrested at his house because he'd been holding
an illegal session of reading the Bible in English.
He was tortured for eight months.
He eventually signed a confession to heresy.
And then, when he came to be punished,
in a really nasty nod to his profession,
they put him inside a barrel of beer
before burning him alive.
Within three years, over 300 men and women died at the stake
across England.
Around 800 Protestants fled to Germany and Switzerland.
And these exiles began to wage a propaganda war against Queen Mary.
They would seal her reputation as a bloody tyrant.
A historian called John Foxe was the most influential of all.
This book is John Foxe's Actes and Monuments,
usually known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
It tells what happened to the people who were persecuted
under Mary I's counter-reformation.
It's really detailed and vivid as well.
He compiled it from trial records and from eyewitness accounts.
And after Mary died in 1558,
this would become a key piece of pro-Elizabethan propaganda.
The reason that a lot of people to this day
think of Mary I as Bloody Mary
is essentially this book.
Foxe's graphic account of Bloody Mary
helped strengthen support for the Reformation in England.
And for the Protestants who still commemorate the Lewes Martyrs,
Foxe's book is nearly as important as the Bible.
Since 1605, crowds have regularly descended on Lewes to take part
in the town's notorious Bonfire Night on November 5th.
It marks the day when the Catholic rebel Guy Fawkes was foiled
in his attempts to blow up Parliament.
But its roots lie in the anti-Catholic period
that immediately followed Mary's death.
As you can see, it's quite a riotous affair.
There's something of the medieval carnival about it,
and the local authorities have tried lots of times to get this stopped.
I think that's because, on one level, it is about intolerance.
You worry what might happen to any Catholics who might be brave enough
to show their faces here.
It's true to say that the spirit of John Foxe is alive and well
on the streets of Lewes.
The 17 Lewes Martyrs commemorated in Foxe's book
are represented by 17 burning crosses
proudly held by the Bonfire Boys, as they call themselves.
They still believe that Catholic Mary had far more blood on her hands
than her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.
When Mary died childless in 1558,
Elizabeth took the throne just as Henry had wished.
Like her father, she initially pursued a middle way
with her state religion,
and allowed some Catholic rituals to remain in place.
But, in 1570, this tolerance suddenly stopped.
The Pope was encouraging Catholic Spain to invade England
and replace Elizabeth with her Catholic cousin,
Mary, Queen of Scots.
- 1570 is a massive game changer.
Pope Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth I.
So, he declares her a heretic, he says she's illegitimate
and he says she's a usurper, a monster-like usurper.
- A monster-like usurper? That's a brilliant phase. - I know.
And he orders her subjects, her Catholic subjects, to disobey her.
So what Elizabeth's Privy Council come up with
is something that is known as the Bloody Question. - Sounds sinister.
- It is, it is sinister and it's a bloody difficult question as well.
I mean, effectively it is,
if the Pope backs an invasion of England
to restore the Catholic faith to England,
who are you going to support?
Are you going to support the Pope or are you going to support the Queen?
It's very tough for the Catholics because now they've suddenly got,
really, the choice of two betrayals.
You know, you can betray the Pope and condemn your souls to damnation
forever, or you can betray the Queen
and subject your body to all sorts of temporal punishment.
- In the 1580s, the conflict with Catholic Europe intensified.
England was now at war with Spain.
Every Catholic priest was seen as a potential traitor,
secretly plotting to kill the queen.
It was the start of a dark, but often forgotten, chapter
in Tudor history.
- For 1585, if you're a priest and you've been ordained abroad
and you even set foot on English soil,
then you will be automatically deemed a traitor
and you will be hanged, drawn and quartered.
And the ordinary Catholic who puts him up in his house,
they too will swing for it.
So some very grim things happen in Elizabeth's reign.
This is not a golden age for the Catholics.
- Who was driving this witch-hunt, if you like,
against the Jesuit priests?
- There's a guy called Richard Topcliffe,
who is a priest hunter.
He's also a torturer and a sadist, almost certainly a rapist.
I mean, he really loved his job.
And he would go after priests,
and he would harangue them at the gallows.
And there are even documents, there are lists that he had
with priests' names on them,
and he would draw a little gallows sketch
by the names of the ones he wants executed.
- This is Harvington Hall in Warwickshire.
Buried within its walls lie hidden clues that reveal
just how bloody Queen Elizabeth herself could be.
Harvington was home to the Pakington family.
To the outside world, they appeared to be respectable Protestants.
But Humphrey Pakington,
who remodelled medieval Harvington in the 1580s,
was in fact a closet Catholic.
This wasn't all that unusual.
Lots of Catholic families went on worshipping the old way
behind the closed doors of their private chapels,
despite the risk of persecution and execution.
As the death toll rose, though,
Pakington had to come up with more and more ingenious ways
of keeping his secret, and of protecting the lives
of the Catholic priests who were now being hunted down
by Elizabeth's henchmen.
To help him provide sanctuary for these persecuted men,
Humphrey Pakington employed a lay Jesuit brother,
a master carpenter, Nicholas Owen.
Owen clearly had one of those brains that works in 3D,
a bit like a computer-modelling programme,
and he set about devising secret hiding places for priests
all over what's already a really baffling house.
Everything you see is designed to trick you, to deceive the eye.
This really is a Tudor house of fibs.
Like this, for example. Looks like an ordinary bedroom,
looks like an ordinary fireplace. Clearly it's being used,
it's covered in soot.
Aha! Until you look closely,
and you realise that this soot of ages is in fact black paint.
And up here there are a couple of little footholds
so that the chimney can be used as an escape route to the roof.
Owen always worked alone
and each priest hole he devised was different, so it provided
no clues about the mechanisms or the positions of the others.
And here in the library is the best priest hole of all.
It's so well-hidden, it was only rediscovered in the 19th century.
You think, mm, books, more book shelves up here,
here's a ladder for getting the books.
But there's something odd about these beams.
There's one beam.
It's on a swivel!
I think you'd suffer from claustrophobia
if you had to spend any amount of time in here.
Conditions inside these hiding places were truly grim,
but countless lives were saved thanks to Owen.
He himself wasn't so lucky.
- Nicholas Owen was eventually caught in a raid,
in a house not far from Harvington,
and he was taken to the Tower of London,
and he was tortured, and he died in his cell.
But what is certain is that he never gave up the secrets of his hides.
- Do you think that Elizabeth knew what these sometimes
sadistic priest hunters were up to in her name?
- Yes, yes.
I mean, she doesn't want to be seen to be torturing, of course,
and it's officially illegal,
so that's why someone like Topcliffe is very useful to her.
And there are, sort of, letters where she unofficially
lets some of these priest hunters know that she is pleased
with their good services.
- You're making her sound quite cruel.
And of course, everybody knows that it was Mary, her half-sister,
who was the bloody one.
How would you compare the two of them?
- If we're looking at the, sort of, bloody balance sheet,
about 300 people are burnt in Mary's reign
in a short period of time, a few years.
And Elizabeth's reign, it's almost 200 people for religious reasons,
but over a much longer time span.
- It's quite close in numbers, though, isn't it?
- Well, it is quite close in numbers.
And also, you know, what's worse, being burnt at the stake
or being strung up, cut down while you're still alive,
have your intestines pulled out in front of you, burnt in front of you,
and then have your head chopped off?
You know, possibly with being tortured beforehand.
So it's, you know... It's pretty macabre, neither is pleasant.
- And yet, she has this whole image, doesn't she, as Good Queen Bess?
Where does that come from?
Who's doing her propaganda for her?
- Well, she had some very good playwrights,
she had some good dramatists,
she had some excellent writers in her reign.
And I think we have to acknowledge
that the winners write the national story.
- This Protestant propaganda was met
with some Catholic counter-propaganda
by a priest called Nicholas Sander.
He'd escaped the heretic state of Elizabethan England
to find sanctuary in Rome.
This book is The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism
by Nicholas Sander.
It was the first widely distributed Catholic account of the Reformation.
It's a lurid retelling of the story of the break with Rome,
full of pride and lust and perversion.
In it, Elizabeth becomes an evil thing,
the bastard child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,
whose unlawful coupling has opened the floodgates
to all of this Reformation heresy.
And in Sander's version of the story,
things are even worse than that for Elizabeth,
because she is the product of incest.
Anne Boleyn is not only Henry VIII's wife,
she is also his daughter, according to Sander.
And in support of his argument
he produces the evidence of what she looks like,
which is clearly, weirdly, incestuously monstrous.
In Sander's hands, her olive-skinned complexion becomes sallow,
as if troubled with jaundice.
A projecting tooth under her upper lip distorts the shape of her mouth.
On her right hand, a vestigial fingernail growth
becomes a whole extra finger,
and a slight swelling on her neck becomes a large wen,
or goitre, whose ugliness, Sander claims,
she tried to hide by wearing a high dress covering her throat.
The fact that Anne didn't wear high-necked dresses,
she was much too elegant for that, didn't seem to bother Sander.
He was effectively describing her as if she were a witch.
By the time he was publishing in 1585, Anne Boleyn was long dead,
so clearly his target was Anne's daughter, Elizabeth.
With a mother like that, what must the daughter be like?
Sander's book was another attempt to incite a coup against Elizabeth.
It became a bestseller in Catholic Spain and France
and it encouraged these countries to invade and liberate England
from Protestant rule.
But in 1588, Elizabeth cemented her reputation
as the warrior Virgin Queen,
by defending England against the Spanish Armada.
Sander's demonization of Anne Boleyn was harder to shake,
and it still colours the contradictory ways
we view Anne today.
- # Listen up, let me tell you a story... #
- But now a 21st century spin on the story of Henry and his six wives
is recasting Anne as a post-feminist pin up.
- # What about the glories and the disgraces? #
- In the West End musical Six,
Henry's wives compete in a talent show
to prove who suffered most at his hands.
In the end, they decide not to define themselves
as someone's wife.
So they go from being the six wives of Henry VIII
to the girl band Six.
- # Ex-wives
# We're Six Whoa, whoa. #
- Here we are in the stalls at Six, the musical.
Tell me, which wife do you find that the audience who come here
are most interested in?
- I think Anne Boleyn. She's the one that everybody knows about, really.
So in the show, before her number, have a kind of pre-number,
about like introducing her as the one you've been waiting for.
- # But then I met the king
# And soon my daddy said, you should try and get ahead. #
- The thing that everybody knows about Anne Boleyn is kind of
the myth surrounding her, like her being the other woman.
This kind of calculating, manipulative person.
There was a sort of sense of her pre-planning and plotting
to kind of steal Henry and kind of break the Church apart
and all that kind of stuff.
And we kind of wanted to fly in the face of that kind of hysteria.
So she is a kind of cheeky, fun-loving
sort of party girl, really,
who just likes to have a good time, doesn't worry too much
about the consequences of her actions.
And then when they do kind of backfire, sort of shrugs it off
and says, "Oh, well!"
"Sorry, not sorry" is kind of her refrain.
So, yeah, our version is very different
to the historical narrative that everyone knows.
- You're making a joke against historians, aren't you?
- Yeah. Oh, completely. - It strikes me this is quite sophisticated.
You've got to know a bit about Tudor history in order to get the jokes.
Do you think you're sending away a new, more educated generation
of young historians?
- Well, I mean, I hope so.
You obviously need to know a little bit of context, but actually,
I think, what I kind of hope people go away from the show with
is not just a sense of them knowing more about these specific women,
but also understanding the way in which we've been taught history
and understood history has been very patriarchal for a long time.
I guess, it's about how kind of women...women's actions get
misconstrued or analysed in a different way to men's.
So, for example, Anne Boleyn being like calculating and manipulative,
if those qualities were in a man, they'd potentially be
kind of being savvy, and political and charismatic, I guess.
- Anne Boleyn's reputation will no doubt continue to be rewritten,
and the story of Henry VIII and his six wives
will go on pulling in the crowds.
But it shouldn't blind us to the wider political legacy
of the Reformation, because Henry's break with Rome
caused a lasting schism.
And now Britain is breaking away from Europe all over again.
Adrian, what parallels do you see between the Reformation and Brexit?
- The most striking parallel, I think,
is this idea that we are better off on our own,
we're better off out,
and essentially national sovereignty and the will of the people
should prevail over anything else.
So, at the time of the Reformation, it was about the Catholic Church
being corrupt, being decadent, being over centralised
and not really, sort of, being to our benefit.
And now it's about the EU being undemocratic,
potentially authoritarian and, sort of, riding roughshod
over what people really need and want.
The Reformation reinforced the sense that Britain is separate
rather than actually seeing Britain as part
of a wider European continent.
And I think that's where EU scepticism has its deep roots
in the Reformation.
- So it all happened in the 1530s.
That's when a lot of these seeds were planted
that are still shooting up to the sky today.
- If you're looking for the origins of Brexit,
look no further than Henry VIII.
- Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell used a dodgy reading of history
to spin a story about a proud and independent nation.
One that was separate from the Catholic world
and separate, too, from the Protestant nations of Europe.
And this is still a powerful vision of history,
one that sees Britain flourishing without interference
from its European neighbours.
That view has informed
the way we've done business with Europe ever since.
From Churchill's post-war insistence
that we were with Europe but not of it,
to Margaret Thatcher's rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in 1990.
- No. No. No.
- And for many, the idea of Britain as an exceptional island nation
is as strong as ever.
For them, Henry's Reformation was the making of this country
and can be again.
- I think, outside, we will do incredibly well.
It's like another Reformation.
It will be the same explosion of talent and opportunity.
- Right, Mr Duncan Smith... - It's a new Reformation.
- The story of Henry VIII's break with Rome
so he could get his divorce and marry Anne Boleyn
has been entertaining us for centuries
and that's because it's a fabulous royal soap opera.
- Brexit! - When do we want it? - Now!
- But now, that issue of breaking so decisively with Europe
is once again taking centre stage,
and it's partly because of those myths that Henry and Cromwell
started spinning in the 16th century.
They are still splitting the country to this day.
Next time -
Elizabeth I and her navy defeat an invincible Spanish Armada.
A valiant Virgin Queen rallies her troops
and puts England on the map.
But how much of this ripping yarn is true?