• 2 months ago
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.

Simon Schama sets out to explain how Britain stopped being a Catholic country in just three generations. Henry VIII's passion for Anne Boleyn set in motion a tidal wave of religious upheaval that would claim the lives of thousands. Although Henry himself remained a Catholic all his life, his son Edward VI, a Protestant by conviction, made sure there would be no going back, despite Bloody Mary's last ditch attempt to hold back the Reformation.

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00:00There are ghosts in this place. You don't notice them right away. At first glance,
00:26Benampriori in Norfolk looks much like any other English country church.
00:31Plain and simple, limestone, limewash, nothing fancy really.
00:37But then you look around and realise something else is going on here.
00:42That grandiose timber vaulted roof, those multi-storey arcades, aren't they all just
00:48a bit too big for a parish church? And then you start to fill in the gaps, and bit by bit,
00:55a lost world remakes itself. A world of monks and masses, of colour and plainsong,
01:04a world of brilliant images, the world of Catholic England.
01:13For centuries, this didn't sound strained. Catholic England was just another way of
01:18saying Christian England, really. And then, in a generation,
01:22it stopped being a truism and started being treason.
01:32Images of the Virgin, the Apostles and the Saints,
01:35once cherished and glorified, were now mocked and vandalised.
01:39Here at Benham, the Saints on the rood screen were expunged,
01:42painted over with verses from an English Bible.
01:54Today, they're restored, but the world over which they once presided is dead and gone.
02:01We can't bring back the lost world of Benham's painted Saints, whole and alive again.
02:07But just because the death of that world was so shocking, so utterly improbable,
02:13and because the Reformation and the wars of religion it triggered
02:17cut so deep a mark on the body of our country, we need to try and reassemble
02:22the world of Benham's painted Saints, so that we can bring it back to life.
02:30The fragments of that world, as best we can.
02:34Only then can we hope to answer one of the most poignant questions in our history.
02:40Whatever did happen to Catholic England?
03:00So
03:12so
03:27We all grew up, even a nice Jewish boy like me, with the idea that the English Reformation was
03:33a historic inevitability. The culling of an obsolete, unpopular, fundamentally un-English
03:40faith. But on the very eve of the Reformation, Catholicism in England was vibrant, popular and
03:46very much alive. This is Walsingham in Norfolk, once the home of the miracle working shrine
04:00of Our Lady of Walsingham. Along with the Becket Shrine at Canterbury,
04:08Walsingham was the must-see place for all serious 16th century pilgrims.
04:13A tradition revived this century by high church Anglicans.
04:25Today you get only the faintest echoes of what Walsingham once was. A gaudy, rowdy mix of
04:32hucksterism and holiness, piety and plaster saints. The kind of place you'd expect to find,
04:38say, in Naples or Seville, not in the depths of sober East Anglia.
04:46But even then, as today, not everybody approved. Erasmus, the Catholic scholar superstar of the
04:52age, came here on a mock pilgrimage and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk and chapels air
05:00mailed in from the Holy Land. But his was the minority intellectual view, safely expressed in
05:06Latin and tolerated, though not necessarily endorsed, by members of the ruling Tudor dynasty.
05:20The Tudors were regular and devout pilgrims. Henry VIII, early in his reign, walked barefoot
05:26to the shrine, offering a necklace of rubies and dedicating a giant candle in thanks for the birth
05:32of his son, Henry, in 1511. Prince Henry died within weeks, but the king's candle continued
05:40to burn at the shrine for many years to come.
05:44What a strange world this Catholic England was. The urge for renewal and reform side by side with
05:50the ancient, the hallowed and the occasionally fraudulent. But it seems that all apparent
05:55contradictions could be accommodated under the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church.
06:03The Tudors were a group of people who lived in the heart of the Catholic Church,
06:08and what a mother she was.
06:21Come to Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford in Suffolk and you'll see just what I mean.
06:30This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money,
06:34however what you see today are just the bare bones of what it was supposed to be.
06:43But we know what Long Melford in its splendour was really like, thanks to an account left by
06:48Roger Martin, who'd been a church warden here in the reign of England's last Catholic ruler,
06:53Queen Mary. Writing in the very different times of Queen Elizabeth,
07:01Roger Martin, with a mixture of pride and regret, set out to tell future generations
07:08exactly what they were missing.
07:13At the back of the high altar there was a goodly mount carved very artificially with the story of
07:20Christ's Passion, all being fair, guilt and lively and beautifully set forth. And at the north end
07:28of the same altar there was a goodly guilt tabernacle reaching up to the roof of the chancel,
07:35in which there was one fair large guilt image of the Holy Trinity, besides other fine images.
07:59But Martin's church was more than just a building, he describes a living world
08:19of processions and festivals, ceremonies and rituals involving a whole community.
08:29Above all this presided the management, without whom none of it made sense,
08:41the priests, guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Christian belief.
08:50Every time the priest celebrated communion, Christ crucified would be there in flesh and blood.
08:59The priest was the indispensable man and there was no getting to heaven but through his hands.
09:15But elsewhere other hands were hard at work. The miracle working priest was about to be
09:21challenged by the word of God itself, translated into English and printed in black and white.
09:29Handwritten English Bibles have been in circulation since the days of the Lollards,
09:35that Protestant heresy that flourished briefly in the early 1400s. But manuscripts represented
09:43hard labour and cost pounds to buy. A printed New Testament on the other hand
09:49could be mass-produced and sold for a tenth of the price.
09:53The idea of a Bible in English, cheap and freely available to anyone who could read,
09:58put the fear of God into the authorities.
10:04William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous task of translating,
10:10publishing and printing an English version of the New Testament.
10:14Tyndale is a recognisable historical type, austere, steely, unswerving, even a little fanatical,
10:22and disarmingly clear in his own convictions. It was not possible, he wrote, to establish the lay
10:28people in any truth except the scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.
10:36In 1524 Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe, ending up in Worms in Germany, a city which had
10:43recently been made safely Protestant by its allegiance to the new radical doctrines of
10:48Martin Luther. Tyndale's English New Testament was completed there by January 1526 and within weeks
10:56copies were added to the Library of England.
10:59What followed was an English version of the Inquisition.
11:04Denunciations, arrests, book burglars, murders, and pillage were all reported by the English.
11:10What followed was an English version of the Inquisition.
11:28Denunciations, arrests, book burnings, show trials.
11:34Those who recanted were forced to carry before them faggots of wood.
11:40Symbols of the bonfire that would consume them if they ever lapsed again.
11:47And in 1530, symbolism gave way to gruesome reality
11:51when a priest named Thomas Hitton confessed to smuggling in a New Testament.
11:56Condemned as a heretic, he was burned at Maidstone on the 23rd of February.
12:02The Reformation had claimed its first victim.
12:10And cheering all this on from the sidelines was the King, Henry VIII,
12:15dutiful son of the Church, whose candle at Walsingham
12:18had been burning brightly for nearly 20 years.
12:26In the winter of 1530, as the fire was lit under the unfortunate Hitton,
12:30there was no reason to think that anything would ever change.
12:35To understand why it did, you have to understand something about Henry,
12:39the man who, without ever really meaning to,
12:42turned Catholic England into a Protestant nation.
13:10Well, for a start, he was never supposed to be king.
13:14But when his older brother, Arthur, died, Henry, aged 11, became heir apparent.
13:20He also acquired his brother's wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon.
13:25The marriage alliance between Spain and England was just too important to be allowed to lapse.
13:32In 1509, King Henry VII died, and his 17-year-old son came into his own.
13:43The young king was a spectacular sight.
13:46You could practically smell the testosterone.
13:49Any way and anywhere he could flash that burly energy, he did.
13:53In the saddle, on the dance floor, or here on the tennis court,
13:57you could see the besotted courtier, Rose of the King's Skin,
14:01glowing through the fabric of his finely woven shirt.
14:07Then there was the famous breezy charm, dispensed like the English weather,
14:11in sunny periods alternating with cloudy spells and sudden bursts of heavy thunder.
14:17The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, punch-in-the-belly, arm-round-the-shoulders kind,
14:22which, depending on the mood of the month,
14:24could either be a token of sudden promotion or imminent arrest.
14:29Henry wallowed in the praise, droolingly lavished on him by courtiers and ambassadors.
14:35Henry the gallant, Henry the handsome, Henry the clever, Henry the superstar.
14:40The only king to have his own personal band hired to go touring with him,
14:44and featuring young Henry himself as lead singer-songwriter.
14:54Egged on by the Pope, who dangled before him the title of Defender of the Faith,
14:59Henry was determined to make a splashy debut on the European scene.
15:04He tried to get his Spanish father-in-law, King Ferdinand,
15:07to come in on joint ventures against their mutual enemy, King Louis of France.
15:12But when it came to snake-pit politics, Ferdinand was a real pro,
15:17shamelessly exploiting Henry's lust for glory, but failing to deliver on the promised armies.
15:25Henry pushed on without him, and in the summer of 1513,
15:29talked up a skirmish with French knights into a major victory called the Battle of the Spurs.
15:38Meanwhile, back home, Queen Catherine and her counsellors
15:42managed a military victory of major importance at Flodden Field,
15:47which left the King of the Scots, James IV, and a dozen Scottish earls dead on the battlefield.
15:55But behind all this activity at home and abroad,
15:58keeping the armies supplied, negotiating the treaties,
16:02channelling the King's energies,
16:04was one of the greatest organisational brains of the age.
16:08Archbishop of York, soon to be Chancellor of England, Thomas Wolsey.
16:14Let's face it, if we could find one we could all use of Wolsey,
16:18a Jeeves with an attitude, someone who comes to work every day
16:22and says, and what would be your pleasure, Majesty, and then goes off and does it.
16:26Oh, the occasional document will come sliding across the desk for signature,
16:31but nothing really to interrupt a hard day's hunt.
16:34Wolsey was a consummate manager, attentive to detail in both matters and men,
16:40someone who could stroke Parliament when that was necessary,
16:44and who could bang heads together, even very aristocratic heads, when that was called for.
16:50He was a master manipulator of patronage, of honours, of bribes and of threats.
16:56In other words, he was a psychologist in a cardinal's hat.
17:03Wolsey also understood the relationship between display and power.
17:11He used it for his own ends here at Hampton Court, but he also used it for the King.
17:17Acting as impresario for one of the greatest shows in his career,
17:21the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
17:28The meeting in 1520 between Henry and the young French king, Francis I,
17:34was supposed to be a demonstration of heartfelt amity,
17:38and a pointed message to the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V,
17:43that old enemies could, if needs be, become friends.
17:47But it came to war anyway, not with weapons, but something much more deadly, style.
17:58In the greatest transportation exercise seen since the campaigns of Edward III,
18:03Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England,
18:07earls, bishops, knights of the shire, 5,000 men,
18:11including, in a display of unconvincing humility,
18:14the cardinal himself on muleback, dressed in crimson velvet.
18:21Music played, wine ran red and white from fountains, a great deal of heron got eaten.
18:27The two kings spent hours trying on glamorous outfits that could be worn only once.
18:33They wrestled not only with knotty problems of state, but with each other.
18:38The nimbler Francis at one point throwing Henry on his back.
18:42No doubt he laughed, no doubt he hated it.
18:48Somewhere in the middle of all this overdressed melee was a young English woman,
18:53a lady-in-waiting to Claude, the wife of the French king.
18:57This was the woman who would bring Wolsey's immense house of power crashing down in ruins,
19:03and with it, inconceivably, the power of the Roman church in England.
19:09Her name was Anne Boleyn.
19:19So much saccharine drivel has been written on the subject of Anne Boleyn,
19:23so many Hollywood movies made, so many bodice-buster romances produced,
19:28that us serious historians are supposed to avert our gaze from the tragic soap opera of her life
19:35and concentrate on meaty stuff like the social and political origins of the Reformation
19:41or the Tudor revolution in government.
19:44But try as we might, we keep coming back time and again to the subject of Anne
19:49because on close inspection, it turns out that she was, after all,
19:54historical prime cause number one.
19:59At the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Anne would have been a teenager.
20:03She had been away from England off and on since the age of 12,
20:07when her well-connected diplomat father, Thomas,
20:10arranged for her to become maid of honour to Margaret of Austria
20:14at one of her many courts, this one here at Mechelen in Flanders.
20:24Margaret was recognised as the world authority on courtly love,
20:28that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation around which a whole culture had grown up.
20:35Desire endlessly deferred, sexual passion transfigured into pure selfless love,
20:41troubadours, masks, silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing.
20:46That was the theory, anyway.
20:48While underneath the stage-managed surface, the old basic instincts seethed away.
20:58Anne returned to England in 1522, a sophisticated, accomplished,
21:03ambitious young woman with a mind of her own.
21:07Anne Boleyn entered the glittering, dangerous world of the Tudor court in her 20s.
21:13Physically, she was no raving beauty, despite the long black hair and dark eyes.
21:19But she knew how to exploit her natural vivaciousness
21:24to play the game of courtly love for all it was worth.
21:28One of the first of all was a man every bit as sophisticated as she was.
21:33Thomas Wyatt, the epitome of the Renaissance courtier.
21:37A soldier, a diplomat and, above all, a poet.
21:41His poems are heavy with a conventional lover's size.
21:46But in those apparently inspired by Anne, the size can be a bit overwhelming.
21:52Wyatt, unhappily married, realised he stood no chance with her
21:57and, in one of his famous poems, compares himself to a hunter
22:02vainly chasing a deer.
22:08Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne
22:12was that she should become his mistress.
22:15Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne
22:20was that she should become his mistress.
22:22Not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make.
22:26And beside, there was another reason why Wyatt would never catch his hind,
22:31as his poem goes on to explain.
22:45I am old, though I seem tame.
22:48Nolly me tangeray, do not touch,
22:52for Caesar, otherwise known as Henry VIII,
22:55had already committed himself to the chase
22:58and the king, as we know, was an inexhaustible hunter.
23:04Henry really had to work hard to get Anne,
23:07harder than at any time in his life.
23:10The man, who, as Wolsey could testify, hated writing letters,
23:14was 15 in his attempts to woo her.
23:17She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not.
23:21Ten years younger, merry rather than pious,
23:24spirited rather than gravely deferential.
23:27Anne opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness
23:31and, perhaps more important than any of these,
23:34the possibility of a son and heir.
23:40The estrangement between Catherine and Henry
23:43lasted as far as 1511 and the death of their son, Henry,
23:47who, despite the offerings made at Walsingham, lived only a few weeks.
23:52Catherine had gone on to produce a daughter, Mary, born in 1516,
23:57but Henry began to recoil from his queen.
24:00After more than 20 years,
24:02Henry had no legitimate male heir and no prospect of one.
24:08By the time that Anne came on the scene,
24:10Henry was convinced that his marriage to Catherine had been divinely cursed.
24:15The king was an assiduous reader of scripture
24:18and there must have been a sharp intake of breath
24:21every time he read Leviticus 20, verse 21,
24:24in which God himself tells Moses,
24:27if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing.
24:31They shall be childless.
24:34Driven by his fear of dynastic extinction and his passion for Anne,
24:38who, as usual, refused to become his mistress,
24:41Henry seized on divorce as the answer to all of his problems.
24:47Henry wanted a papal annulment of the marriage on grounds of incest,
24:52but the Pope couldn't oblige, for in May 1527,
24:56the armies of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome
24:59and made Pope Clement a virtual prisoner.
25:02And Charles, who was Queen Catherine's nephew,
25:05wouldn't allow an annulment while he was in control.
25:10Wolsey was the first to be dragged under by this crisis.
25:13Henry had no use for a Mr Fixit who couldn't fix it
25:16and Wolsey was quickly got rid of, ostensibly for fraud and corruption.
25:21Within a year, he was dead,
25:23charges of high treason still hanging over his head.
25:27It was Anne herself who, at some point in 1530,
25:30steered the whole problem in a radically new direction.
25:34She put literally into Henry's hands a little book
25:37that to her seemed not only fundamentally true,
25:40but also, given present circumstances, extremely useful.
25:45It was by that arch-propagandist William Tyndale
25:48and it was called On the Obedience of a Christian Man,
25:52Like all Tyndale's work, it was a pungent read.
25:55One king, one law, is God's ordinance in every realm, he wrote.
26:00In other words, the writ of the Bishop of Rome did not run in England.
26:08But Anne wasn't finished yet.
26:10With a typical mixture of conviction and self-interest,
26:13she got a third book published,
26:15and it was called On the Obedience of a Christian Man,
26:19With a typical mixture of conviction and self-interest,
26:22she got a think tank of theologians, including Thomas Cramer,
26:26to come up with documents from the history of the early church
26:29proving royal supremacy.
26:34The more he learned about his supreme power,
26:37the better Henry liked it.
26:39It may have begun as a tactic in political intimidation,
26:43but now the royal supremacy seemed, on its own merits,
26:46a self-evident truth.
26:48You can almost hear him clapping his hand to his head and exclaiming,
26:51How could I have been so dull as to have missed this?
26:59Not surprisingly, then, around the summer of 1530,
27:03the telling word imperial begins to show up regularly
27:07in Henry's own remarks.
27:09Emperors, of course, acknowledge no superior on earth.
27:14Henry's ego, never exactly a modest part of his personality,
27:18now began to balloon to imperial proportions,
27:22and it got the palaces to house it too,
27:2450 of them, before his reign was done.
27:27Some of the greatest and grandest have been Wolses,
27:30most notably Hampton Court,
27:33which now became the stage for the swaggering theatre of court life.
27:39Nothing measures the imperial scale of Henry's court
27:43better than the size of the space needed to feed its gut.
27:48Here at the kitchens at Hampton Court,
27:50230 people were employed, servicing another 1,000
27:54who, every day, were entitled to eat at the king's expense.
27:59Three vast larders for the meat alone,
28:02a specially designed wet larder
28:05for holding fish,
28:06supplied by water drawn from the fountains outside.
28:10Spiceries, fruteries, six immense fireplaces,
28:14three gargantuan cellars capable of holding
28:17the 300 casks of wine
28:19and the 600,000 gallons of ale
28:22downed each year by this court.
28:25And at the centre of it all,
28:27though carefully protected in the privy chamber
28:29from undue exhibition,
28:31was England's new Caesar,
28:33the king, at 40, colossal, autocratic,
28:38bestriding the realm with all the godlike power
28:41and authority of the Roman Caesars.
28:47And now, inevitably, the Church,
28:49with its allegiance to Rome,
28:51found itself on the wrong side of a nasty argument.
28:55How they must have shivered
28:57at the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace
28:59in Lambeth when they heard Henry say of his bishops,
29:02they be but half our subjects,
29:05yea, and scarce our subjects.
29:12The threat was clear and the capitulation inevitable.
29:16It came in the spring of 1532
29:18with the so-called submission of the clergy,
29:21which conceded all of Henry's demands.
29:24From now on, the laws of the Church
29:27From now on, the laws of the Church
29:29would be governed by the will of the king,
29:31and the king's will was clear.
29:34Divorce from Catherine, marriage to Anne,
29:36Princess Mary to be declared a bastard,
29:39recognition for the unborn child
29:42that by the spring of 1533
29:44was already swelling Anne's belly.
29:49Anne was duly crowned at Westminster Abbey in May
29:52by a new Archbishop of Canterbury,
29:54the obliging Thomas Cranmer.
30:05So, a reformation of sorts,
30:07but not yet the Protestant Reformation.
30:10The English Church may have broken from Rome,
30:12but no core doctrines had been touched.
30:15The real presence of Christ in the Mass was preserved,
30:18priests were still expected to be celibate,
30:21prayers in the Bible were still in Latin.
30:23The beautiful stained glass at Fairford Church in Gloucester
30:27offended no official doctrines.
30:31And so things might have remained, but they didn't.
30:34And to understand why, we need now to look at
30:37one of the most extraordinary working partnerships
30:39in all of British history.
30:41Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell,
30:44Wolsey's former enforcer and now Secretary of State.
30:50So here they are then, the Tudor-Odd couple,
30:53on the frontispiece of an English Bible.
30:58You take away any one of them and the Reformation wouldn't have happened,
31:01or at least it wouldn't have happened in the way it did,
31:04because they were like two pillars, theological on the left
31:08and the political on the right,
31:10with a king triumphant in the middle.
31:13Their agenda was always more radical than the king's.
31:17Cromwell's Protestantism was the product of the kind of
31:20anti-establishment killer instinct you might expect
31:23from the Putney clever dick out to make a name for himself.
31:27Cranmer's convictions were more profound and thoughtful,
31:31but he too had strong personal reasons to side with the reformers.
31:35Shortly before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
31:38Cranmer had secretly married a German woman, Margaretha,
31:42thereby committing himself to one of Luther's most important
31:46to one of Luther's most shocking innovations.
31:51Cranmer, like Cromwell, was devoted to the Renaissance idea
31:55of a strong prince in a strong Christian state.
31:59The people were going to be given their Bible from on high,
32:03authorised, and no other version was going to be tolerated.
32:07This picture of an orderly, even authoritarian, Church of England
32:12is exactly what you see on the frontispiece of this great Bible,
32:16officially commissioned by Thomas Cromwell and published in 1539.
32:26Thomas Cromwell is probably the least sentimental Englishman
32:30ever to run the country.
32:32He understood with the clarity that Henry could never quite manage
32:36that it would not be enough for the break with Rome to be proclaimed
32:40and then expect everyone to fall into line.
32:43He was anticipating a fight and he was prepared to fight hard.
32:50Cromwell knew that sooner or later the Pope would throw his big gun
32:54into the battle, excommunication, and if the king was to win the war,
32:59he'd better fight back with something more or less novel
33:02in the language of politics, namely patriotism.
33:06The country had to be aroused to a new sense of its sovereignty,
33:09its potency, demonise Rome as the foreigner, the alien, the enemy.
33:19To this engine of chauvinist propaganda,
33:22Cromwell added the necessary machinery of coercion.
33:26An oath had to be sworn, recognising the royal supremacy,
33:30the legitimacy of the heirs of the king and Queen Anne,
33:33and the bastardisation of the Lady Mary.
33:38Insulting the new queen was treason,
33:40calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason.
33:44For the first time in English law, it was a crime just to say things.
33:52Cromwell managed to turn England into a frightened,
33:55snivelling, jumpy place where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty
34:01and, of course, petty little scores got settled by people
34:04who were protesting that they were just doing the right thing.
34:15Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime did his shock troops
34:19seem to enjoy their work more thoroughly
34:21than in the visitations to the monasteries,
34:24done with lightning speed during the course of 1535 and early 1536.
34:31The uprooting of nearly 10,000 monks and nuns,
34:35the destruction of an entire ancient way of life,
34:38had little to do with reforming zeal.
34:45When you look at Cromwell's flying squads up close and in action,
34:49you don't really get the impression of a bunch of men
34:52who thought of themselves as renovators.
34:54Wreckers, more likely.
34:56For one thing, they seemed to enjoy their work a bit too much.
35:00I laid unto him concealment of treason,
35:03wrote one of Cromwell's hitmen to his chief,
35:06about a prior he had at his mercy.
35:09I called him heinous traitor in the worst terms I could devise,
35:14and him all the time kneeling and making intercession unto me,
35:19not to utter to you the premises of his undoing.
35:23Such were the pleasures of reform.
35:27The property bonanza that followed the dissolution of the monasteries
35:31was on a scale no other English revolution ever approached.
35:35Abbeys like this one at Laycock were offered at bargain basement prices
35:40and loyalty to the new order secured with bricks and mortar.
35:45The former residents were soon forgotten
35:48or reduced to delectable family legends
35:51of headless nuns and spectral monks.
35:56THUNDER
36:01THUNDER
36:06THUNDER
36:11THUNDER
36:13Let's call the next chapter of the story Circa Regna Tonat.
36:19Around the throne, the thunder roars.
36:22THUNDER
36:25Thomas Wyatt used the line in a poem written in a cell in the Tower of London
36:30after he'd just witnessed the execution of five innocent men.
36:34A few days later, an innocent woman would also die.
36:38As you probably know, she was Anne Boleyn,
36:41and as you can probably guess,
36:43the author of this bloody drama was Thomas Cromwell.
36:48It wasn't the birth in 1533 of a baby girl, Elizabeth, that did for Anne.
36:55Henry was disappointed, but he didn't turn against his new wife.
37:00No, he laid his hand on the baby's head,
37:03recognising her as his legitimate daughter
37:06and hoped for better luck next time.
37:0918 months later, Anne was pregnant again.
37:13At the beginning of January 1536, more good news.
37:17Catherine of Aragon was dead.
37:20Henry was relieved.
37:22God be praised, he said, that we are free from all suspicion of war.
37:29Maybe it was at this point
37:31that the cogs and wheels of Cromwell's mind started to whirl.
37:36For Cromwell had decided to engineer a reconciliation between Henry
37:40and the Emperor Charles V.
37:42With the Emperor's aunt Catherine now safely dead,
37:45the timing was perfect, except for one thing, Anne.
37:50For the price of peace would doubtless include
37:53the re-legitimising of Lady Mary,
37:56and to this Anne would never agree.
37:59Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned, Anne must go.
38:05On the 29th of January,
38:08On the 29th of January, Anne miscarried.
38:12Had the baby lived, it would have been a boy.
38:15The disaster seems to have reawakened Henry's darkest fears.
38:20I see now that God will never give me a male heir, he told Anne.
38:25To one of his intimates, he hinted that Anne had seduced him through witchcraft.
38:31Anne was defenceless.
38:33Cromwell moved against her with breathtaking speed and ferocity.
38:37From the decision to act, taken around Easter time, 1536,
38:41to the first arrests took just two weeks.
38:45Anne was doomed.
38:51What Cromwell now cooked up was a thing of pure devilry.
38:55A finely measured brew, one part paranoia, one part pornography.
39:00Moments of dalliance, nothing really untoward in a Renaissance court.
39:05A handkerchief dropped at a May Day tilt, not belonging to the king.
39:09A dance taken with a young man, also not the king.
39:13A blow and kiss, a giggle.
39:15All these were twisted by Cromwell into a carnival of unholy, traitorous sex.
39:24The Queen, it seems, had had sex with just about everyone.
39:28She'd had sex with her court musician.
39:31She'd had sex with the groom of the stool,
39:33the most important courtier in the privy chamber.
39:36She'd had sex with the king's tennis partner, presumably between sets.
39:40She'd even had sex with her own brother.
39:43She had presided, like some possessed Messalina,
39:47over this diabolical orgy of treason,
39:50even perhaps conspiring to pass off the poison fruit
39:54of all this copulation as the royal heir.
40:00It was the confession of her musician, Mark Smeaton,
40:03extracted under torture,
40:05that supplied the fig leaf of legality for Cromwell's judicial murders.
40:11It was enough to send all five of Anne's so-called lovers to the block.
40:15Thomas Wyatt, swept up in a wave of arrests
40:18but spared prosecution, saw them die,
40:21peering through a grating of his cell in the bell tower.
40:27The bell tower showed me such a sight,
40:30that in my head sticks day and night,
40:33that did I learn out the great, for all favour, glory or might,
40:38that yet circa regna tonat.
40:42Two days later, it was Anne's turn.
40:46A special privilege and expert swordsman
40:49had been brought over from France to do the job.
40:52I heard say, the executioner is very good,
40:55Anne told the constable of the tower,
40:58and I have a little neck.
41:00And then she put her hands round her throat and burst out laughing.
41:05When news of Anne's execution reached Dover,
41:08it was said that candles in the town's church spontaneously ignited.
41:15For the vast majority of the country,
41:17which decided to burn down the tower,
41:19it was the first time that a candle had been lit.
41:22It was the first time that a candle had been lit.
41:25It was the first time that a candle had been lit.
41:28It was the first time that a candle had been lit.
41:31For the vast majority of the country,
41:33which, despite the break with Rome, still regarded itself as Catholic,
41:38her death seemed like a long-overdue judgement
41:41on those they called heretics and Tuppany bookmen.
41:53Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up his assault on the old religion
41:57with a series of fierce injunctions,
41:59enforcing royal supremacy and crushing the cult of saints and shrines.
42:07The Becket Shrine in Canterbury, the richest in the land,
42:10was vandalised and ransacked.
42:14The following year, 1537, Henry, with a new wife, Jane Seymour,
42:19celebrated the longed-for arrival of a son, Edward.
42:24But 12 days later, mourned the death of his new queen.
42:31At Walsingham, the Statue of the Virgin was burned.
42:35Henry's account book for that year contains the following bold statement.
42:40Payment for the king's great candle at Walsingham.
42:43Salary for the abbot, nil.
42:46Nil.
42:50But then a remarkable thing happened.
42:53The king decided enough was enough
42:56and tried to put the genie back in its bottle.
42:59An instinctive conservative, he'd been angered and alarmed
43:03by the passions that religious controversy had aroused
43:06and he blamed the English Bible.
43:09Instead of being read quietly with silence,
43:12the Bible was now being bandied about in acrimonious disputes
43:16that raged in ale houses and taverns,
43:19the exact opposite of the respectful scenes
43:22promised in Cromwell's great Bible.
43:26In 1543, a law was introduced restricting the reading of the Bible in English
43:31to churchmen, noblemen and gentry.
43:34For those ordinary people who got used to the idea of an English-speaking God,
43:39this was a real deprivation.
43:42You get an inkling of that in a brief inscription
43:45written that year by an Oxfordshire shepherd
43:48on the flyleaf of a small religious tract.
43:51It reads,
43:52I bought this book when the testament was abrogated
43:56that shepherds might not read it.
43:58I pray God, amend that blindness.
44:01Written by Robert Williams, keeping sheep upon Stbury Hill.
44:12By the time Williams wrote his prayer on his hillside,
44:15the course of reform in England had suffered major setbacks.
44:20In 1540, Cromwell had fallen,
44:23tossed to the executioner
44:25after his schemes for an alliance with Europe's Lutheran princes collapsed.
44:31Unfortunately for Cromwell,
44:33the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves,
44:36the mail-order bride he'd arranged for Henry,
44:39had turned out to be nowhere near as cute as Hans Holbein had painted her.
44:48By then, Parliament had enacted the Six Articles,
44:51which, under pain of death, outlawed marriage for priests
44:55and reaffirmed the sanctity of the mass.
45:00To the dismay of the reformers,
45:02these core Catholic beliefs turned out to be Henry's too.
45:10So Henry's final position on matters of religion was this.
45:14A national church, divorced from Rome,
45:17but remarried to the English crown.
45:20Stripped of cults and shows, but still, in essence, Catholic.
45:24All things considered,
45:26Henry was pretty satisfied with the middle way he thought he'd found,
45:30which is what we see in this massive picture from the studio of Hans Holbein.
45:35King Henry, all-powerful, all-knowing,
45:38the guardian and ruler of the temporal and the spiritual realm.
45:47The munchkins grovelling at his feet are the Guild of Barber Surgeons.
45:52They hail the king as the healer and the great physician,
45:55which is just how Henry liked to see himself in his final years.
45:59The Tudor medicine man,
46:01who had laid the body of England on the operating table
46:04and cut out the cancers of potpourri and superstition.
46:08The patient was now fully recovered, the nation duly grateful,
46:12the operation a complete success.
46:18Except, of course, it wasn't,
46:20because after Henry would come Henry's children,
46:23each with their own idea of what was best for the country's health.
46:27Edward, the heir apparent, and his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth,
46:32both of whom were restored to the succession
46:35a few weeks before their father's death.
46:38Between them, they covered the religious spectrum
46:41from hardline Protestant to fanatical Catholic.
46:44And the road the country took after Henry,
46:47back to a Catholic past or forwards into a Protestant future,
46:51would depend, like never before,
46:53on the lottery of births, deaths and marriages.
46:58When Henry died in 1547,
47:01he left £600 to pay for two priests
47:04to say prayers for his soul forever.
47:09You have to wonder how he apparently failed to notice
47:12that Edward had been educated by fervent Protestants,
47:15who obviously had no time for such superstitious nonsense.
47:22Led by Thomas Cranmer, they saw the birth of a new generation
47:26and led by Thomas Cranmer,
47:28they saw the nine-year-old boy king as a new Josiah,
47:32the biblical king who had taken it as his mission
47:35to destroy idolatry.
47:40Now, this would be the real reformation.
47:43For just look what happened in the six years of Edward's reign.
47:47All the customs and ceremonies of the old church,
47:50the blessing of candles at Candlemas
47:53and palms on Palm Sunday were banned.
47:55Away went the religious guilds and fraternities.
47:59The cults of saints that had survived Cromwell's attacks,
48:03along with their relics and their pilgrimages, were forbidden.
48:07And images, statues, stained-glass paintings
48:11were attacked with chisels and lime wash.
48:15A new Book of Common Prayer, required in all parishes
48:19for the first time,
48:21brought English into the heart of the church service.
48:25To get a measure of the cultural revolution that took place,
48:29you need only come here, to Hales Church in Gloucestershire.
48:38Three years of study,
48:41three years of state-sponsored iconoclasm,
48:45had produced this.
48:47No more stone altar, just a user-friendly communion table.
48:57This whole arrangement is designed to abolish the distance
49:01between the priest and his flock.
49:03The screen which had been a barrier
49:06protecting the mystery of the Mass
49:08is now just a way in to the communion,
49:11a gathering of the faithful along with their priest.
49:17As if all this wasn't shocking enough,
49:20imagine that Sunday in 1550,
49:23when, for the first time,
49:25the priest invited the congregation to partake of communion,
49:29using those English words never before heard in church,
49:35Dearly Beloved.
49:37The familiarity of this must have made many of them squirm,
49:41rather like these days hearing a trendy vicar insist,
49:45Call me Bob.
49:48This radical transformation wouldn't have been possible
49:52without the active support of Edward.
49:54While Edward led the Protestant state,
49:57resistance came close to home, as he recalls in his diary.
50:03The Lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster,
50:07where, after salutations,
50:08she was called of my council into a chamber,
50:11where it was declared how long I had suffered her Mass.
50:15She answered that her soul was God's
50:17and her faith she would not change,
50:19nor would she dissemble her opinion with contrary doings.
50:24Edward's chronicle records one of several run-ins
50:27that he and his counsellors had with Mary.
50:30The Mass had been outlawed since the Act of Uniformity in 1549,
50:35but Mary ignored the ban.
50:37Indeed, she increased her attendance to two,
50:40even three times a day.
50:43She may have had a martyr complex a mile wide,
50:46but Catholic Mary knew her challenge was simply to bide her time,
50:51to wait for Edward to die, preferably childless.
50:55And sure enough, in 1553, this is just what happened.
51:06And so England's first female ruler since Queen Matilda
51:10ascended the throne with just two aims in mind,
51:13to return England to its obedience to Rome
51:16and to produce a Catholic male heir who would keep it that way.
51:21Mary's first aim was achieved with amazingly little resistance
51:25after it was made clear that all those rolling acres
51:28and all that real estate sold off during the dissolution of the monasteries
51:32would not be restored to the Church.
51:36In 1554, both Houses of Parliament,
51:39contrite as naughty children, knelt
51:42and asked forgiveness from the Pope's legate, Cardinal Poole,
51:46for all the anti-papal legislation passed since the 1530s.
51:52Orders went out for the repainting of churches,
51:55the carving of roods, the restoration of the Latin Mass.
52:00Heretical England had been received back into the fold,
52:04had been forgiven by Mother Rome.
52:11But all this would be, literally, fruitless
52:14if Mary was unable to produce a good Roman Catholic heir.
52:19Her choice of husband was Philip II of Spain.
52:23To Mary, of course, this union had special personal meaning,
52:27the vindication of her long-dead Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon.
52:32If a Spanish-Catholic marriage had been right for England then,
52:35then it should be right for England now.
52:39But that was 50 years ago.
52:41Much had been done that could not now be undone.
52:50A Catholic marriage now was not something that could be taken for granted.
52:57It now seemed a bad match, it seemed a foreign idea.
53:01The Queen is a Spaniard at heart, it was said,
53:04and loves another realm better than this.
53:08When Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer,
53:12led an army to the gates of London, he cast himself as a patriot,
53:16pledged, as he said, to the avoidance of strangers.
53:22Xenophobia was not enough to dethrone Queen Mary.
53:25Wyatt's army melted away.
53:38Ecstatic that for the first time in her lonely life
53:41she had someone she could rely on, a Spanish consort,
53:45Mary set about the zealous work of cleansing her realm
53:49of the Protestant heresy,
53:51undoing Edward's reformation as completely as she could.
53:55By fire, if that's what it took to do the job properly, and it did.
54:01In three years, 220 men and 60 women were burned on Mary's bonfires.
54:09Some, like Archbishop Cranmer, were high-profile victims,
54:13but most were ordinary people, cloth workers and cutlers.
54:20And it wasn't just the literate who died.
54:23Rawlins White, a fisherman, paid for his son to go to school
54:28and learn to read so the boy could then read the Bible to him
54:32each night after supper.
54:34Joan Waste of Derby, a poor blind woman,
54:37saved up for a New Testament and then paid people to read it to her.
54:47But all this was in vain, for Mary, like Edward, died childless,
54:52suffering frantically through two false pregnancies,
54:56the second a cancer of the womb.
54:59The resurrection of Catholic England was doomed.
55:03Anne Boleyn had triumphed from the grave over Catherine of Aragon,
55:07as her daughter Elizabeth would outlast Mary
55:11and undo all her pious hopes.
55:20Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,
55:23someone who would bring the violent pendulum swings
55:26of the religious war back to a calm and steady centre,
55:30a middle way between the courses chosen by her half-brother
55:34and her half-sister.
55:41She outlawed the Mass and brought back the Book of Common Prayer,
55:45but she allowed and encouraged priests to remain celibate,
55:49and she was certainly in no hurry
55:51to abolish the Catholic calendar of Saints' Days.
55:57But if Elizabeth put out the fires of religious fanaticism,
56:01she lit them in the breasts of patriotic Englishmen and women.
56:06For as cautious as she was,
56:08Elizabeth couldn't help her reign being seen by many
56:11as the reinstatement of a truly English way.
56:17Under Elizabeth, Englishness was discovered,
56:20celebrated, shouted from the rooftops,
56:23and it was, above all, a Protestant Englishness.
56:27With hindsight, God must have meant this to happen all along.
56:34Now, Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same,
56:38and the history you've just seen,
56:40which at the outset had nothing to do with national identity,
56:44at the end became obsessed with it.
56:47And when the Pope offered to bless anyone
56:50who would assassinate Elizabeth, that bond only became stronger.
56:54Now Catholics would be forced to choose
56:57between their church and their queen.
57:03English Catholic priests trained in foreign seminaries
57:06would be smuggled into the country
57:08and end up either dead or in hiding with Catholic families
57:12who were rich and powerful enough to protect them.
57:18So if we ask ourselves the question
57:21that we asked at the beginning of the programme,
57:24whatever happened to Catholic England?
57:27The answer is that it ended up down here in a priest hole
57:32like this one at Sauston Hall outside Cambridge,
57:36the splendour of Longmelford reduced to a cloak-and-dagger church.
57:43For the Catholics of Elizabeth England,
57:46the retreat of the priesthood to the country house
57:49would be a final disaster.
57:52What was once the national church would become a faith on the run.
58:12CHOIR SINGS LATIN
58:42CHOIR FADES

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