All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.06of15.Burning.Convictions.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

There are ghosts in this place.

You don't notice them right away.

At first glance, Binham Priory in Norfolk

looks much like
any other English country church -

plain and simple, limestone, limewash.
Nothing fancy, really.

But then you look around and realise
something else is going on here.

That grandiose, timber-vaulted roof.
Those multi-storey arcades.

Aren't they all just a bit too big
for a parish church?

And then you start to fill in the gaps,

and bit by bit a lost world remakes itself,

a world of monks and masses,
of colour and plainsong.

A world of brilliant images.

The world of Catholic England.

For centuries, this didn't sound strained.

Catholic England was just another way
of saying Christian England, really.

And then, in a generation,

it stopped being a truism

and started being treason.

Images of the Virgin,
the apostles and the saints

once cherished and glorified,
were now mocked and vandalised.

Here at Binham, the saints
on the rood screen were expunged,

painted over with verses
from an English Bible.

Today, they're restored,

but the world over which
they once presided is dead and gone.

We can't bring back the lost world
of Binham's painted saints

whole and alive again.

But just because the death of that world
was so shocking, so utterly improbable,

and because the Reformation
and the wars of religion it triggered

cut so deep a mark
on the body of our country,

we need to try and reassemble
the fragments of that world as best we can.

Only then can we hope to answer one of
the most poignant questions in our history:

Whatever did happen to Catholic England?

We all grew up,
even a nice Jewish boy like me,

with the idea that the English Reformation
was a historic inevitability,

the culling of an obsolete, unpopular,
fundamentally un-English faith.

But on the very eve of the Reformation,

Catholicism in England was vibrant,
popular and very much alive.

This is Walsingham in Norfolk,

once the home
of the miracle working shrine

of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Along with the Becket shrine
at Canterbury,

Walsingham was the must-see place
for all serious 16th-century pilgrims,

a tradition revived this century
by High Church Anglicans.

Today, you get only the faintest echoes
of what Walsingham once was,

a gaudy, rowdy mix
of hucksterism and holiness,

piety and plaster saints;

the kind of place you'd expect to find,
say, in Naples or Seville,

not in the depths of sober East Anglia.

But even then, as today,
not everybody approved.

Erasmus, the Catholic
scholar superstar of the age,

came here on a mock pilgrimage

and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk

and chapels airmailed in
from the Holy Land.

But his was the minority intellectual view,
safely expressed in Latin

and tolerated,
though not necessarily endorsed,

by members of the ruling Tudor dynasty.

The Tudors were regular
and devout pilgrims.

Henry VIII, early in his reign,
walked barefoot to the shrine,

offering a necklace of rubies
and dedicating a giant candle

in thanks for the birth
of his son, Henry, in 1511.

Prince Henry died within weeks,

but the king's candle continued to burn
at the shrine for many years to come.

What a strange world
this Catholic England was.

The urge for renewal and reform

side by side with the ancient, the hallowed
and the occasionally fraudulent.

But it seems
that all apparent contradictions

could be accommodated
under the capacious skirts

of the Catholic Mother Church.

And what a mother she was!

Come to Holy Trinity Church
at Long Melford in Suffolk,

and you'll see just what I mean.

This magnificent building
was paid for with Suffolk wool money.

However, what you see today are just the
bare bones of what it was supposed to be.

But we know what Long Melford
in its splendour was really like

thanks to an account left by Roger Martyn,
who'd been a churchwarden here

in the reign of England's
last Catholic ruler, Queen Mary.

Writing in the very different times
of Queen Elizabeth,

Roger Martyn,
with a mixture of pride and regret,

set out to tell future generations
exactly what they were missing.

At the back of the high altar
there was a goodly mount

carved very artificially
with the story of Christ's Passion,

all being fair, gilt and lively
and beautifully set forth.

And at the north end of the same altar

there was a goodly gilt tabernacle
reaching up to the roof of the chancel,

in which there was one fair, large,
gilt image of the Holy Trinity,

besides other fine images.

But Martyn's church
was more than just a building.

He describes a living world
of processions and festivals,

ceremonies and rituals
involving the whole community.

Above all this presided the "management",
without whom none of it made sense.

The priests, guardians of the mystery,

at the heart of traditional Christian belief.

Every time the priest
celebrated communion,

Christ crucified would be there
in flesh and blood.

The priest was the indispensable man,

and there was no getting to Heaven
but through his hands.

But elsewhere
other hands were hard at work.

The miracle-working priest was about
to be challenged by the word of God itself,

translated into English
and printed in black and white.

Hand-written English Bibles had been
in circulation since the days of the Lollards,

that Protestant heresy
that flourished briefly in the early 1400s.

But manuscripts represented hard labour
and cost pounds to buy.

A printed New Testament, on the other
hand, could be mass-produced

and sold for a tenth of the price.

The idea of a Bible in English, cheap and
freely available to anyone who could read,

put the fear of God into the authorities.

William Tyndale, an ordained priest,

was the first to take on the dangerous task

of translating, publishing and printing
an English version of the New Testament.

Tyndale is a recognisable historical type.

Austere, steely, unswerving,
even a little fanatical,

and disarmingly clear
in his own convictions.

"It was not possible," he wrote,
"to establish the laypeople in any truth

"except the Scriptures were plainly laid
before their eyes in their mother tongue."

In 1524, Tyndale fled London
for mainland Europe,

ending up in Worms in Germany,

a city which had recently been made
safely Protestant

by its allegiance to
the new radical doctrines of Martin Luther.

Tyndale's English New Testament
was completed there by January 1526,

and within weeks
copies were on sale in London.

What followed was
an English version of the Inquisition.

Denunciations, arrests,
book burnings, show trials.

Those who recanted were forced
to carry before them faggots of wood,

symbols of the bonfire that would consume
them if they ever lapsed again.

And in 1530 symbolism gave way
to gruesome reality

when a priest named Thomas Hitton

confessed to smuggling in
a New Testament.

Condemned as a heretic, he was burned
at Maidstone on the 23rd of February.

The Reformation had claimed
its first victim.

And cheering all this on from the sidelines

was the king, Henry VIII,
dutiful son of the Church,

whose candle at Walsingham had been
burning brightly for nearly 20 years.

In the winter of 1530, as the fire was lit
under the unfortunate Hitton,

there was no reason to think
that anything would ever change.

To understand why it did, you have
to understand something about Henry,

the man who without
ever really meaning to

turned Catholic England
into a Protestant nation.

Well, for a start,
he was never supposed to be king.

But when his older brother Arthur died,

Henry, aged 11, became heir apparent.

He also acquired his brother's wife,
the Spanish Catherine of Aragon.

The marriage alliance
between Spain and England

was just too important
to be allowed to lapse.

In 1509, King Henry VII died,

and his 17-year-old son
came into his own.

The young king was a spectacular sight.

You could practically smell
the testosterone.

Any way and anywhere
he could flash that burly energy, he did,

in the saddle, on the dance floor
or here on the tennis court,

where a besotted courtier
wrote of the king's skin,

"glowing through the fabric
of his finely woven shirt".

Then there was the famous breezy charm,
dispensed like the English weather -

in sunny periods, alternating with cloudy
spells and sudden bursts of heavy thunder.

The charm was
of the rib-poking, back-slapping,

punch-in-the-belly-
arm-around-the-shoulders kind,

which, depending on
the mood of the month,

could betoken either sudden promotion
or imminent arrest.

Henry wallowed in the praise
droolingly lavished on him

by courtiers and ambassadors.

Henry the gallant, Henry the handsome,
Henry the clever, Henry the superstar.

The only king to have his own
personal band hired to go touring with him

and featuring young Henry himself
as lead singer/songwriter.

Egged on by the Pope, who dangled before
him the title of Defender of the Faith,

Henry was determined to make
a splashy debut on the European scene.

He tried to get his Spanish father-in-law,
King Ferdinand,

to come in on joint ventures against
their mutual enemy, King Louis of France.

But when it came to snake-pit politics,
Ferdinand was a real pro,

shamelessly exploiting
Henry's lust for glory,

but failing to deliver
on the promised armies.

Henry pushed on without him

and, in the summer of 1513,
talked up a skirmish with French knights

into a major victory
called the Battle of the Spurs.

Meanwhile, back home,
Queen Catherine and her councillors

managed a military victory
of major importance at Flodden Field,

which left the king of the Scots, James IV,
and a dozen Scottish earls

dead on the battlefield.

But behind all this activity
at home and abroad,

keeping the army supplied, negotiating the
treaties, channelling the king's energies

was one of the greatest
organisational brains of the age -

Archbishop of York, soon to be
Chancellor of England, Thomas Wolsey.

Let's face it, if we could find one,
we could all use a Wolsey,

a Jeeves with an attitude, someone who
comes to work every day and says,

"And what would be your pleasure,
Majesty?" and then goes off and does it.

Oh, the occasional document will come
sliding across the desk for signature,

but nothing, really, to interrupt
a hard day's hunt.

Wolsey was a consummate manager,

attentive to detail in both matters and men,

someone who could stroke Parliament
when that was necessary

and who could bang heads together,
even very aristocratic heads,

when that was called for.

He was a master manipulator

of patronage, of honours,
of bribes and of threats.

In other words, he was a psychologist
in a cardinal's hat.

Wolsey also understood the relationship
between display and power.

He used it for his own ends
here at Hampton Court,

but he also used it for the king,

acting as impresario for one
of the greater shows in his career,

the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

The meeting in 1520 between Henry
and the young French king, Francis I,

was supposed to be
a demonstration of heartfelt amity

and a pointed message to the recently
elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V,

that old enemies could,
if needs be, become friends.

But it came to war anyway,
not with weapons,

but something
much more deadly - style.

In the greatest transportation exercise
seen since the campaigns of Edward III,

Wolsey shipped over
the entire ruling class of England.

Earls, bishops,
knights of the shire - 5,000 men,

including, in a display
of unconvincing humility,

the Cardinal himself on muleback
dressed in crimson velvet.

Music played, wine ran red and white
from fountains,

a great deal of heron got eaten.

The two kings spent hours
trying on glamorous outfits

that could be worn only once.

They wrestled, not only with knotty
problems of state, but with each other,

the nimbler Francis at one point
throwing Henry on his back.

No doubt he laughed,
no doubt he hated it.

Somewhere in the middle
of all this overdressed melee

was a young English woman,

a lady-in-waiting to Claude,
the wife of the French king.

This was the woman who would bring
Wolsey's immense house of power

crashing down in ruins

and with it, inconceivably, the power
of the Roman Church in England.

Her name was Anne Boleyn.

So much saccharine drivel has been
written on the subject of Anne Boleyn,

so many Hollywood movies made,

so many bodice-buster
romances produced

that us serious historians
are supposed to avert our gaze

from the tragic soap opera of her life

and concentrate on meaty stuff,

like the social and political origins
of the Reformation

or the Tudor revolution in government.

But try as we might, we keep coming back
time and again to the subject of Anne,

because on close inspection
it turns out that she was, after all,

historical prime cause number one.

At the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold,
Anne would have been a teenager.

She'd been away from England
off and on since the age of 12,

when her well-connected
diplomat father, Thomas,

arranged for her to become maid of honour
to Margaret of Austria

at one of her many courts,

this one here at Mechelen in Flanders.

Margaret was recognised
as the world authority on courtly love,

that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation

around which a whole culture
had grown up.

Desire endlessly deferred, sexual passion
transfigured into pure selfless love,

troubadours, masks,
silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing.

That was the theory anyway.

While underneath
the stage-managed surface,

the old basic instincts seethed away.

Anne returned to England in 1522,

a sophisticated, accomplished, ambitious
young woman with a mind of her own.

Anne Boleyn entered
the glittering, dangerous world

of the Tudor court in her 20s.

Physically she was no raving beauty,
despite the long black hair and dark eyes,

but she knew how to exploit
her natural vivaciousness

to play the game of courtly love
for all it was worth.

One of the first to fall was a man
every bit as sophisticated as she was,

Thomas Wyatt, the epitome
of the Renaissance courtier.

A soldier, a diplomat and, above all, a poet.

His poems are heavy
with the conventional lover's sighs,

but in those apparently inspired by Anne
the sighs come from the heart.

Wyatt, unhappily married,
realised he stood no chance with her,

and in one of his famous poems
compares himself

to a hunter, vainly chasing a deer.

Unable to divorce his wife,

all that Wyatt could offer Anne
was that she should become his mistress,

not good enough
for an ambitious girl on the make.

And beside, there was another reason
why Wyatt would never catch his hind,

as his poem goes on to explain.

"And graven with diamonds
in letters plain

"There is written her fair neck roundabout,
'nole me tangere'

"For Caesar's I am and wild for to hold
though I seem tame."

"Nole me tangere" -do not touch,

for Caesar,
otherwise known as Henry VIII,

had already committed himself
to the chase,

and the king, as we know,
was an inexhaustible hunter.

Henry really had to work hard to get
Anne, harder than at any time in his life.

The man who, as Wolsey could testify,
hated writing letters

wrote umpteen
in his attempts to woo her.

She represented everything
Catherine of Aragon was not.

Ten years younger,
merry rather than pious,

spirited rather than gravely deferential,

Anne opened the way to sexual bliss,
domestic happiness

and, perhaps more important than any
of these, the possibility of a son and heir.

The estrangement between Catherine
and Henry went back as far as 1511

and the death of their son Henry,

who despite the offerings made
at Walsingham lived only a few weeks.

Catherine had gone on to produce
a daughter, Mary, born in 1516.

But Henry began to recoil from his queen.

After more than 20 years,

Henry had no legitimate male heir
and no prospect of one.

By the time that Anne came on the scene,

Henry was convinced that his marriage
to Catherine had been divinely cursed.

The king was
an assiduous reader of Scripture,

and there must have been
a sharp intake of breath

every time he read Leviticus
chapter 20, verse 21,

in which God himself tells Moses,

"If a man shall take his brother's wife,
it is an unclean thing...

"...they shall be childless."

Driven by his fear of dynastic extinction
and his passion for Anne,

who, as usual, refused
to become his mistress,

Henry seized on divorce
as the answer to all of his problems.

Henry wanted a papal annulment
of the marriage on grounds of incest.

But the Pope couldn't oblige,

for in May 1527 the armies
of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome,

and made Pope Clement a virtual prisoner.

And Charles,
who was Queen Catherine's nephew,

wouldn't allow an annulment
while he was in control.

Wolsey was the first to be dragged under
by this crisis.

Henry had no use
for a Mr Fixit who couldn't fix it,

and Wolsey was quickly got rid of,
ostensibly for fraud and corruption.

Within a year, he was dead, charges
of high treason still hanging over his head.

It was Anne herself who,
at some point in 1530,

steered the whole problem
in a radically new direction.

She put literally into Henry's hands

a little book that to her seemed
not only fundamentally true,

but also, given present circumstances,
extremely useful.

It was by that arch-propagandist
William Tyndale, and it was called

"The obedience of a Christian man
and how Christian rulers ought to govern".

Like all Tyndale's work
it was a pungent read.

"One king, one law, is God's ordnance
in every realm," he wrote.

In other words, the writ of the Bishop
of Rome did not run in England.

But Anne wasn't finished yet.

With a typical mixture of conviction
and self-interest,

she got a think tank of theologians,
including Thomas Cranmer,

to come up with documents
from the history of the early Church

proving royal supremacy.

The more he learnt about his supreme
power, the better Henry liked it.

It may have begun as a tactic
in political intimidation,

but now the royal supremacy seemed,
on its own merits, a self-evident truth.

You can almost hear him clapping his hand
to his head and exclaiming,

"How could I have been so dull
as to have missed this?"

Not surprisingly, then,
around the summer of 1530,

the telling word "imperial" begins to
show up regularly in Henry's own remarks.

Emperors, of course,
acknowledge no superior on earth.

Henry's ego, never exactly
a modest part of his personality,

now began to bloom
to imperial proportions.

And he got the palaces to house it, too,
50 of them before his reign was done.

Some of the greatest and grandest
had been Wolsey's,

most notably Hampton Court,

which now became the stage
for the swaggering theatre of court life.

Nothing measures the imperial scale
of Henry's court better

than the size of the space needed
to feed its gut.

Here at the kitchens at Hampton Court,
230 people were employed,

servicing another 1,000 who every day
were entitled to eat at the king's expense.

Three vast larders for the meat alone.

A specially designed wet larder
for holding fish,

supplied by water
drawn from the fountains outside.

Spiceries, fruiteries,
six immense fireplaces.

Three gargantuan cellars capable
of holding the 300 casks of wine

and the 600,000 gallons of ale
downed each year by this court.

And at the centre of it all,

though carefully protected
in the privy chamber from undue exhibition,

was England's new Caesar -

the king, at 40, colossal, autocratic,

bestriding the realm
with all the god-like power and authority

of the Roman Caesars.

And now inevitably, the Church,
with its allegiance to Rome,

found itself on the wrong side
of a nasty argument.

How they must have shivered at the
Archbishop of Canterbury's palace in Lambeth

when they heard Henry say of his bishops,

"They be but half our subjects,
yea, and scarce our subjects."

The threat was clear
and the capitulation inevitable.

It came in the spring of 1532 with
the so-called Submission of the Clergy,

which conceded all of Henry's demands.

From now on, the laws of the Church
would be governed by the will of the king,

and the king's will was clear:

Divorce from Catherine, marriage to Anne,
Princess Mary to be declared a bastard,

recognition for the unborn child
that by the spring of 1533

was already swelling Anne's belly.

Anne was duly crowned
at Westminster Abbey in May

by a new Archbishop of Canterbury,

the obliging Thomas Cranmer.

So, a reformation of sorts,
but not yet a Protestant reformation.

The English Church
may have broken from Rome,

but no core doctrines had been touched.

The real presence of Christ
in the mass was preserved.

Priests were still expected to be celibate.

Prayers in the Bible were still in Latin.

The beautiful stained glass
at Fairford Church in Gloucester

offended no official doctrines.

And so things might have remained,
but they didn't.

To understand why, we need now

to look at one of the most extraordinary
working partnerships in British history,

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer
and Thomas Cromwell,

Wolsey's former enforcer
and now Secretary of State.

Here they are, then, the Tudor odd couple,

on the frontispiece of an English Bible.

You take away one, and the Reformation
wouldn't have happened,

at least not the way it did.

Because they were like two pillars,
theological on the left

and the political on the right,
with the king, triumphant, in the middle.

Their agenda was always
more radical than the king's.

Cromwell's Protestantism

was the product of the kind
of anti-establishment killer instinct

you might expect from a Putney
clever Dick out to make a name for himself.

Cranmer's convictions
were more profound and thoughtful,

but he too had strong personal reasons
to side with the Reformers.

Shortly before he was appointed
Archbishop of Canterbury,

Cranmer had secretly married
a German woman, Margareta,

thereby committing himself to one
of Luther's most shocking innovations.

Cranmer, like Cromwell, was devoted
to the Renaissance idea

of a strong prince
in a strong Christian state.

The people were going to be given
their Bible from on high,

authorised, and no other version
was going to be tolerated.

This picture of an orderly,
even authoritarian Church of England

is exactly what you see
on the frontispiece of this Great Bible,

officially commissioned by Thomas
Cromwell and published in 1539.

Thomas Cromwell is probably
the least sentimental Englishman

ever to run the country.

He understood with a clarity
that Henry could never quite manage

that it would not be enough for the break
with Rome to be proclaimed

and then expect everyone to fall into line.

He was anticipating a fight,
and he was prepared to fight hard.

Cromwell knew that sooner or later

the Pope would throw
his big gun into the battle -

excommunication.
And if the king was to win the war,

he'd better fight back with something more
or less novel in the language of politics,

namely patriotism.

The country had to be aroused to a new
sense of its sovereignty, its potency.

Demonise Rome as the foreigner,
the alien, the enemy.

To this engine of chauvinist propaganda,

Cromwell added the necessary
machinery of coercion.

An oath had to be sworn
recognising the royal supremacy,

the legitimacy of the heirs
of the king and Queen Anne,

and the bastardisation of the Lady Mary.

Insulting the new queen was treason,

calling the king a schismatic
or a heretic was treason.

For the first time in English law,
it was a crime just to say things.

Cromwell managed to turn England
into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place

where denunciation
was a sanctimonious duty

and countless petty little scores got settled
by people who were protesting

that they were just doing "the right thing".

Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime

did his shock troops seem to enjoy
their work more thoroughly

than in the visitations to the monasteries,

done with lightning speed during
the course of 1535 and early 1536.

The uprooting of nearly
10,000 monks and nuns,

the destruction
of an entire ancient way of life

had little to do with reforming zeal.

When you look at Cromwell's flying squads
up close and in action,

you don't really get the impression
of a bunch of men

who thought of themselves as renovators.
Wreckers, more likely.

For one thing, they seemed to enjoy
their work a bit too much.

"I laid unto him a concealment of treason,"

wrote one of Cromwell's hit men to his chief
about a prior he had at his mercy.

"I called him heinous traitor
in the worst terms I could devise,

"and him all the time kneeling
and making intercession unto me

"not to utter to you
the premises of his undoing."

Such were the pleasures of reform.

The property bonanza that followed
the dissolution of the monasteries

was on a scale no other English revolution
ever approached.

Abbeys like this one at Laycock
were offered at bargain basement prices,

and loyalty to the new order
secured with bricks and mortar.

The former residents were soon forgotten

or reduced to delectable family legends
of headless nuns and spectral monks.

Let's call the next chapter of the story,
"circa regna tonat" -

around the throne the thunder roars.

Thomas Wyatt used the line in a poem
written in a cell in the Tower of London

after he'd just witnessed
the execution of five innocent men.

A few days later,
an innocent woman would also die.

As you probably know,
she was Anne Boleyn,

and as you can probably guess,
the author of this bloody drama

was Thomas Cromwell.

It wasn't the birth in 1533 of a baby girl,
Elizabeth, that did for Anne.

Henry was disappointed,
but he didn't turn against his new wife.

No, he laid his hand on the baby's head,

recognising her as his legitimate daughter

and hoped for better luck next time.

18 months later, Anne was pregnant again.

At the beginning of January 1536,
more good news.

Catherine of Aragon was dead.

Henry was relieved.
"God be praised," he said,

"that we are free
from all suspicion of war."

Maybe it was at this point that the cogs
and wheels of Cromwell's mind

started to whirl.

For Cromwell had decided
to engineer a reconciliation

between Henry
and the Emperor Charles V.

With the Emperor's Aunt Catherine
now safely dead,

the timing was perfect
except for one thing - Anne.

For the price of peace would doubtless
include the relegitimising of Lady Mary,

and to this Anne would never agree.

Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned,
Anne must go.

On the 29th of January,
Anne miscarried.

Had the baby lived,
it would have been a boy.

The disaster seems to have reawakened
Henry's darkest fears.

"I see now that God will never
give me a male heir," he told Anne.

To one of his intimates he hinted that
Anne had seduced him through witchcraft.

Anne was defenceless.

Cromwell moved against her
with breathtaking speed and ferocity.

From the decision to act,
taken around Easter time 1536,

to the first arrests,
took just two weeks.

Anne was doomed.

What Cromwell now cooked up
was a thing of pure devilry,

a finely measured brew,
one part paranoia, one part pornography.

Moments of dalliance, nothing really
untoward in a Renaissance court.

A handkerchief dropped at a May Day tilt,
not belonging to the king.

A dance taken with a young man,
also not the king.

A blown kiss, a giggle.

All these were twisted by Cromwell
into a carnival of unholy, traitorous sex.

The Queen, it seems,
had had sex with just about everyone.

She'd had sex with her court musician,
she'd had sex with the Groom of the Stool,

the most important courtier
in the privy chamber.

She'd had sex with the king's tennis
partner, presumably between sets.

She'd even had sex
with her own brother.

She had presided
like some possessed Messalina

over this diabolical orgy of treason,

even perhaps conspiring to pass off
the poisoned fruit of all this copulation

as the royal heir.

It was the confession of her musician,
Mark Smeaton, extracted under torture,

that supplied the fig leaf of legality
for Cromwell's judicial murders.

It was enough to send all five of Anne's
so-called lovers to the block.

Thomas Wyatt, swept up in a wave
of arrests, but spared prosecution,

saw them die, peering through
a grating of his cell in the bell tower.

"The bell tower showed me such a sight
that in my head sticks day and night,

"that did I learn out the grate,
for all favour, glory or might,

"that yet circa regna tonat."

Two days later, it was Anne's turn.

As a special privilege,

an expert swordsman had been brought
over from France to do the job.

"I heard say the executioner is very good,"
Anne told the constable at the Tower.

"And I have a little neck."

And then she put her hands around
her throat and burst out laughing.

When news of Anne's execution
reached Dover,

it was said the candles
in the town's church spontaneously ignited.

For the vast majority of the country,

which despite the break with Rome
still regarded itself as Catholic,

her death seemed
like a long overdue judgement

on those they called heretics
and twopenny bookmen.

Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up
his assault on the old religion

with a series of fierce injunctions,
enforcing royal supremacy

and crushing the cult
of saints and shrines.

The Becket shrine in Canterbury,
the richest in the land,

was vandalised and ransacked.

The following year, 1537, Henry,
with a new wife, Jane Seymour,

celebrated the longed for arrival
of a son, Edward.

But twelve days later,
mourned the death of his new queen.

At Walsingham,
the statue of the Virgin was burned.

Henry's account book for that year
contains the following bald statement:

"Payment for the king's great candle
at Walsingham.

"Salary for the abbot - nil."

But then, a remarkable thing happened.

The king decided enough was enough
and tried to put the genie back in its bottle.

An instinctive conservative, he'd been
angered and alarmed by the passions

that religious controversy had aroused.

And he blamed the English Bible.

Instead of being read quietly with silence,

the Bible was now being bandied about
in acrimonious disputes

that raged in ale houses and taverns,

the exact opposite
of the respectful scenes

promised in Cromwell's Great Bible.

In 1543, a law was introduced restricting
the reading of the Bible in English

to churchmen, noblemen and gentry.

For ordinary people who'd got used
to the idea of an English-speaking God,

this was a real deprivation.

We get an inkling of that
in a brief inscription

written that year
by an Oxfordshire shepherd

on the flyleaf of a small religious tract.

It reads, "I bought this book
when the Testament was abrogated

"that shepherds might not read it.

"I pray God amend that blindness.

"Written by Robert Williams,
keeping sheep upon Saintbury Hill."

By the time Williams wrote his prayer
on his hillside,

the course of reform in England
had suffered major setbacks.

In 1540, Cromwell had fallen,
tossed to the executioner

after his schemes for an alliance
with Europe's Lutheran princes collapsed.

Unfortunately for Cromwell,
the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves,

the mail-order bride
he'd arranged for Henry,

had turned out to be nowhere near as cute
as Hans Holbein had painted her.

By then, Parliament had enacted
the six articles

which under pain of death
outlawed marriage for priests

and reaffirmed the sanctity of the mass.

To the dismay of the reformers,

these core Catholic beliefs
turned out to be Henry's, too.

So Henry's final position
on matters of religion was this:

A national Church divorced from Rome,
but remarried to the English crown,

stripped of cults and shows,
but still in essence Catholic.

All things considered,

Henry was pretty satisfied
with the middle way he thought he'd found.

Which is what we see in this massive
picture from the studio of Hans Holbein.

King Henry, all-powerful, all-knowing,

the guardian and ruler of the temporal
AND the spiritual realm.

The munchkins grovelling at his feet
are the Guild of Barber-Surgeons.

They hail the king as the healer
and a great physician,

which is just how Henry liked
to see himself in his final years -

the Tudor medicine man who had laid
the body of England on the operating table

and cut out the cancers
of popery and superstition.

The patient was now fully recovered,
the nation duly grateful,

the operation a complete success.

Except, of course, it wasn't, because
after Henry would come Henry's children,

each with their own idea
of what was best for the country's health -

Edward, the heir apparent,
and his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth,

both of whom were restored
to the succession

a few weeks before their father's death.

Between them
they covered the religious spectrum

from hard-line Protestant
to fanatical Catholic.

And the road the country took after Henry,

back to a Catholic past
or forwards into a Protestant future,

would depend, like never before, on
the lottery of births, deaths and marriages.

When Henry died in 1547,

he left �600 to pay for two priests
to say prayers for his soul forever.

You have to wonder
how he apparently failed to notice

that Edward had been educated
by fervent Protestants

who obviously had no time
for such superstitious nonsense.

Led by Thomas Cranmer,
they saw the nine-year-old boy king

as a new Josiah,

the biblical king who had taken it
as his mission to destroy idolatry.

Now this would be the real Reformation.

For just look what happened
in the six years of Edward's reign.

All the customs and ceremonies
of the old Church,

the blessing of candles at Candlemas
and palms on Palm Sunday were banned.

Away went the religious guilds
and fraternities.

The cults of saints
that had survived Cromwell's attacks,

along with their relics
and their pilgrimages, were forbidden.

And images, statues,
stained-glass, paintings,

were attacked
with chisels and limewash.

A new Book of Common Prayer
required in all parishes for the first time

brought English into the heart
of the church service.

To get a measure of the cultural revolution
that took place,

you need only come here
to Hailes Church in Gloucestershire.

Three years of state-sponsored
iconoclasm have produced this.

No more stone altar,
just a user-friendly communion table.

This whole arrangement is designed
to abolish the distance

between the priest and his flock.

The screen which had been a barrier
protecting the mystery of the mass

is now just a way in to the communion,

a gathering of the faithful
along with their priest.

As if all this wasn't shocking enough,

imagine that some day in 1550,

when, for the first time, the priest invited
the congregation to partake of communion,

using those English words
never before heard in church,

"dearly beloved".

The familiarity of this
must have made many of them squirm,

rather like these days hearing
a trendy vicar insist, "Call me Bob."

This radical transformation
wouldn't have been possible

without the active support of Edward.

While Edward led the Protestant state,
resistance came close to home,

as he recalls in his diary.

The Lady Mary, my sister,
came to me at Westminster,

where after salutations she was called
of my council into a chamber

where it was declared how long
I had suffered her mass.

She answered that her soul was God's,
and her faith she would not change.

Nor would she dissemble her opinion
with contrary doings.

Edward's chronicle
records one of several run-ins

he and his councillors had with Mary.

The mass had been outlawed
since the Act of Uniformity in 1549,

but Mary ignored the ban.

Indeed, she increased her attendance
to two, even three times a day.

She may have had
a martyr complex a mile wide,

but Catholic Mary knew her challenge
was simply to bide her time,

to wait for Edward to die,
preferably childless.

And sure enough, in 1553,
this is just what happened.

And so England's first female ruler
since Queen Matilda

ascended the throne
with just two aims in mind:

To return England
to its obedience to Rome,

and to produce a Catholic male heir
who would keep it that way.

Mary's first aim was achieved
with amazingly little resistance

after it was made clear
all those rolling acres

and all real estate sold off
during the dissolution of the monasteries

would not be restored to the Church.

In 1554, both Houses of Parliament,
contrite as naughty children,

knelt and asked forgiveness
from the Pope's legate, Cardinal Poole,

for all the anti-papal legislation passed
since the 1530s.

Orders went out for the repainting
of churches, the carving of roods,

the restoration of the Latin mass.

Heretical England had been received
back into the fold,

had been forgiven by Mother Rome.

But all this would be literally fruitless

if Mary was unable to produce
a good Roman Catholic heir.

Her choice of husband
was Philip II of Spain.

To Mary, of course, this union
had special personal meaning,

the vindication of a long dead Spanish
mother, Catherine of Aragon.

If a Spanish Catholic marriage
had been right for England then,

then it should be right for England now.

But that was 50 years ago.

Much had been done
that could not now be undone.

A Catholic marriage now was not
something that could be taken for granted.

It now seemed a bad match.
It seemed a foreign idea.

The Queen is a Spaniard at heart,
it was said,

and loves another realm better than this.

When Thomas Wyatt, the son
of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer,

led an army to the gates of London,
he cast himself as a patriot,

pledged, as he said,
"to the avoidance of strangers".

Xenophobia was not enough
to dethrone Queen Mary.

Wyatt's army melted away.

Ecstatic that for the first time
in her lonely life

she had someone she could rely on,
a Spanish consort,

Mary set about the zealous work of cleansing
her realm of the Protestant heresy,

undoing Edward's reformation
as completely as she could.

By fire, if that's what it took
to do the job properly, and it did.

In three years, 220 men and 60 women
were burned on Mary's bonfires.

Some, like Archbishop Cranmer,
were high-profile victims,

but most were ordinary people,
cloth workers and cutlers.

And it wasn't just the literate who died.

Rawlings White, a fisherman, paid for
his son to go to school and learn to read,

so the boy could then read the Bible to him
each night after supper.

Joan Waist of Derby,
a poor blind woman,

saved up for a New Testament
and then paid people to read it to her.

But all this was in vain,
for Mary, like Edward, died childless,

suffering frantically
through two false pregnancies,

the second a cancer of the womb.

The resurrection of Catholic England
was doomed.

Anne Boleyn had triumphed from the grave
over Catherine of Aragon,

as her daughter, Elizabeth, would outlast
Mary and undo all her pious hopes.

Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,

someone who would bring the violent
pendulum swings of the religious war

back to a calm and steady centre,

a middle way between the courses chosen
by her half-brother and her half-sister.

She outlawed the mass and brought back
the Book of Common Prayer,

but she allowed and encouraged priests
to remain celibate

and was certainly in no hurry to abolish
the Catholic calendar of saint's days.

But if Elizabeth put out the fires
of religious fanaticism,

she lit them in the breasts
of patriotic Englishmen and women.

For as cautions as she was, Elizabeth
couldn't help her reign being seen by many

as the reinstatement of a truly English way.

Under Elizabeth,
Englishness was discovered,

celebrated, shouted from the roof tops,

and it was, above all,
a Protestant Englishness.

With hindsight, God must
have meant this to happen all along.

Now, Protestantism and patriotism
were one and the same,

and the history you've just seen,

which at the outset had nothing to do
with national identity,

at the end became obsessed with it.

And when the Pope offered to bless
anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth,

that bond only became stronger.

Now Catholics would be forced to choose
between their Church and their Queen.

English Catholic priests
trained in foreign seminaries

would be smuggled into the country
and end up either dead

or in hiding with Catholic families who were
rich and powerful enough to protect them.

So if we ask ourselves the question we
asked at the beginning of the programme,

"Whatever happened
to Catholic England?"

The answer is that it ended up down here,

in a priest-hole, like this one
at Sawston Hall outside Cambridge.

The splendour of Long Melford reduced
to a cloak-and-dagger church.

For the Catholics of Elizabeth's England

the retreat of the priesthood
to the country house

would be a final disaster.

What was once the national Church
would become a faith on the run.