Episode 1 Henry VIII: Patron or Plunderer?

No king has painted himself into British history in such vivid colours.

Henry VIII is remembered as much for his many wives

and their bloody history as he is for the establishment of the Church of England.

Henry understood the importance and power of art.

He commissioned magnificent palaces, paintings and tapestries that enriched the Tudor age.

But he was also responsible for the destruction of many of England's priceless religious treasures,

changing the face of British culture forever.

I'm Jonathan Foyle.

I'm an architectural historian and I specialise in buildings of the reign of Henry the VIIth.

I know from studying the king's own art and architecture that it can throw light on the life and thought

of this long-dead monarch.

How much can we discover about the things that Henry created as a cultured king

and what can we find out about the places Henry destroyed?

In the final analysis, was Henry more patron or plunderer?

April 1509.

Henry VII has died.

His 24-year reign had been marked by profound unpopularity, soaring taxes and violent challenges to his rule.

His son and successor needed protection.

He took shelter in the mightiest fortress in the land...

The Tower of London.

This is King Henry VIII of England.

Athletic, bright and handsome.

He was only 17 years old.

In the days immediately following his father's death, Henry sought to secure his public image.

And so he had the two most hated men in the country -

Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, royal debt and tax collectors -

brought here, to the Tower of London, where they were later executed on the grounds of treason.

It shows that Henry had a strong sense of the power of perception.

The message was that England was under new management.

Seven weeks after his father's death,

Henry married his elder brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.

Now she was set to become Queen Catherine of England.

The 23rd of June was the eve of their coronation.

They would set off from here, the ancient seat of the Tower of London,

and make their way through the city streets to their palace at Westminster.

It was an exercise in opulence,

designed to impress the crowds with the majesty and magnificence of the new King of England.

Henry was decked out with jewels - diamonds, emeralds and rubies.

He absolutely sparkled. Set off, as well, with cloth of gold.

Some way further back was Catherine, her long red hair flowing down her back.

Hall, the chronicler, described this as being

more rich, more strange and curious than any other coronation.

We know he passed right here, the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cheapside.

So in the absence of 16th century newsreels or photography, I'm going to imagine that scene. On paper.

It's a bit of a tall order to depict a street in which an event happened

500 years ago, the street itself having been burned down in the Great Fire of London.

All I know is that Cheapside then was about the same width as it is today.

Through that broad street came Henry VIII on horseback followed by Catherine of Aragon in her litter.

There's Henry on horseback leading the parade surrounded by his constables

and guards, his bouncers, with Catherine some way back.

We know that cloth of gold hung from buildings and those little booths that I've shown...

I don't know that they existed... this is my guess - I mean, who knows -

but they are filled with the Mayor, the aldermen, and the heads

of the guilds, the significant characters in the City of London.

Those people who should be given priority to watch this pageant go past them.

And in between them a crowd, all the citizens of London coming in

from the sidestreets just to get a glimpse of this historic moment.

The men of the Mercers Company, the guild of London merchants,

had sponsored a promising young lawyer to compose and deliver a poem celebrating the new King.

He would become one of Henry's most trusted advisors.

His name was Thomas More.

There he is, looking at his best, probably got one of those Tudor berets on.

Must have been filled with nerves.

Takes a gulp on pretty much this spot and makes the speech of his young life.

If ever there was a day, England, if ever there was a time for you

to give thanks to those above, this is that happy day.

For this day consecrates a young man who is the everlasting glory of our time and makes him your King -

the only King who is worthy to rule not merely a single people but the whole world.

Sire, the golden age has returned.

In using the phrase "the golden age", More is self-consciously referring

to the works of the ancient Roman poet Virgil.

That's because More had been schooled in the humanist tradition,

an emerging intellectual movement that looked back to ancient Rome and Greece.

Henry would have understood the reference.

Humanist thinking had been a major influence on his education,

but not the only influence.

His passion had been chivalry, a philosophy of knightly virtues,

stressing courage and honour, essentially using violence to protect the weak.

Those two ideas, the rationalism of ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval romance

of the age of chivalry, would be absorbed by Henry, even as a child.

His schooling had begun in what's now suburban South-East London.

The young prince was kept at a safe distance from the capital's plague-ridden centre.

He lived here, at Eltham Palace, with his sisters and mother.

What we have to remember is that Henry was never meant to be king.

That expectation fell squarely on the rather sickly shoulders of his elder brother Arthur.

Arthur's safety was vital to the future of the Tudor dynasty.

He was kept well away from the capital in a series of isolated castles.

He hardly knew his younger brother Henry.

This terracotta bust, attributed to the Italian Guido Mazzoni,

has been in the Royal Collection for over 500 years.

Some academics believe that this mischievous-looking child

could be Prince Henry, probably about seven years old, from the time he was living here,

at Eltham.

Dr Glenn Richardson from St Mary's University College is one of England's leading Tudor academics.

After his very early education with the ladies of his mother's household and perhaps the Queen,

he comes under the supervision of John Skelton, who is court poet to Henry VII,

and who's a sort of medieval Latinist and a rhetorician

and whose influence on Henry is fairly general.

With Skelton, Henry looks at the chivalric romances, at some poetry, they read poetry together,

perhaps write some poetry together.

And they look at chronicles of both ancient history and more recent history.

So from the age of about six or seven onwards he, like a lot of schoolboys of that age, would

spend some part of his day, perhaps the mornings, with Skelton giving his lessons,

the afternoons might be given up over to his lessons in horse-riding.

In all the kind of chivalric arts that a young boy growing up needs to master.

So, PE is on the curriculum but what about the ologies?

What about the emerging classical education that a Renaissance prince might absorb?

He is given the grounding in his Latin, French and other languages by Skelton, but at about the age

that he is eight, he begins to have a slightly wider orbit of people who are interested in his education.

His parents, of course, continue to be.

His grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, is also a great patron of

this emerging... what is sometimes called the new learning.

The interest in classical languages, in particular, Latin and Greek.

And it's really through her influence and the influence of another person,

William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who's a bit older than Henry but he is regarded

as a sort of mentor, really.

An educational mentor to the young prince.

He's very interested in this new emerging curriculum called the studia humanitatis.

You know,

from where we broadly get the humanities.

But it's a five-fold curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, poetry,

ethics, or moral philosophy, and of course history.

Looking back to my earliest exposure to literature, I can draw on Buster

and Monster Fun annual 1974.

What kind of literature would Henry have had as a boy?

I guess he would have been exposed, initially, to the histories.

Either histories of classical literature or more particularly

the histories of his own monarchy, his own dynasty.

I guess if we walked into Henry's bedroom and looked around the walls,

the posters on the walls wouldn't of course Ronaldo or Beckham, but would be Henry V,

the great hero of Agincourt,

or Edward the Black Prince, the terroriser of the French in the 100 Years' War,

the men who really brought the power of English monarchy against the ancient enemy, France.

So if someone were to ask you what is a young prince supposed to

be like in the early 16th century, it is it a great chivalric warrior,

or is it a learned Renaissance prince who treats his deportment and learning before all else?

-Or is it both?

-I think for most authorities it's both.

A young prince who models himself on a chivalric hero

and a Roman emperor, let's say, a jousting Julius Caesar, is not

a split personality. This is actually a well-rounded individual.

The two don't necessarily sit at odds and ideally, they are combined together.

On the fourth of April 1502, Henry would have been here in the quiet

solitude of Eltham, when he heard the news of his elder brother's death,

making Henry heir to the throne.

The next year, the eleven-year-old Prince Henry was promised in marriage

to Catherine of Aragon, his late brother's widow.

On Henry's shoulders, or more precisely within his loins,

lay the future of the still insecure Tudor dynasty.

Jousting was out for now - it was too dangerous.

Henry needed to refine his education, so in came the best tutors to teach a future king.

Cambridge and Oxford were England's two major centres of learning.

But Cambridge was royally favoured,

funded and governed by Henry's grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.

A deeply pious woman, of immense learning and outstanding

character, she turned Cambridge into an intellectual powerhouse.

She brought this man, Erasmus of Rotterdam, to England.

He was widely considered to be amongst the greatest thinkers of his day.

We know he visited Henry at Eltham.

The Tudor claim to the throne came directly from Margaret Beaufort

and she would teach Henry all about promoting the history and strength of their family.

So enamoured was Margaret of learning that just before she died

in 1509, her will made provision for two Cambridge colleges.

Christ's and St John's. That's St John's.

She transformed it from a run-down hospital into something that looks more like a palace.

And on the principle that first impressions count, it's what's over the gate arch that matters.

It's a colossal Beaufort family crest. The display of Lady Margaret's symbol, the portcullis,

left the people of Cambridge in no doubt about who was behind these illustrious institutions.

The young Prince Henry applied Margaret's teachings in his earliest buildings.

This is King's College Chapel and it tells a story.

It's a journey from the stark piety of his ancestors to the lavish propaganda of a young Tudor king.

King's College Chapel Cambridge was begun in the 1440s by the pious Lancastrian King Henry VI.

He wanted a simple monument, bereft of costly and busy mouldings and details.

Henry VII took responsibility for paying for the completion of King's College Chapel,

and he turned what was a monument of piety into a great box full of the sculpture of Tudor propaganda.

CHOIR SINGS

The dragon spoke of their Welsh roots, the greyhound, a Beaufort best,

was a symbol of the loyalty Henry VII demanded.

The Tudor rose was a reminder of his victory in the Wars of the Roses.

Yet Henry VII wouldn't live to see the chapel completed.

It was under the watch of the young Henry VIII that this building,

begun in simplicity as an act of piety, was transformed through sculpture and glass

into one of the great architectural wonders of the world.

This was truly the work of kings.

Henry continued in the style of his father.

What's remarkable is not so much the abundance of Tudor iconography,

but the absence of Christian iconography.

From his earliest days, this use of art suggests that Henry believed his family

had a right of presence equal to God.

Henry had been schooled in the culture of the Renaissance,

but certainly retained his passion for the art of chivalry.

That combination would be a feature of his reign.

On the 23rd of June 1509, Henry and Catherine had headed a procession through the streets of London.

The next day, they were crowned King and Queen of England.

The coronation took place exactly here on this grand cosmological pavement where every one of Henry's

divinely appointed predecessors as monarchs had been crowned for the last two and a half centuries.

That same year, the Abbey's splendid Lady Chapel was approaching completion.

Henry VII had commissioned it six years earlier as the family mausoleum.

Henry VIII had retained his father's surveyor, the court architect William Bolton.

And it was Bolton who sent for the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano...

a Florentine genius.

This is the greatest artistic commission in England of its date.

And the fact that William Bolton had not only management of a great Italian artist

like Pietro Torrigiano,

but also a contact book where he could draw artists from abroad to ornament the Tudor court,

meant that this was a man of unusual reach and artistic prowess.

To my mind, he was the great genius of Tudor art and architecture.

The form of the tomb is traditional.

Henry ignored his father's request to be depicted kneeling in prayer above the monument.

His parents are set in a recumbent pose like every English monarch before them.

Its styling reflected the new thinking of the Renaissance.

Contemporaries would have been amazed by the vigorous, expressive cherubs or "putti"

and the Roman lettering, classical pilasters and the use of Italian marble.

It's a hugely successful, and significant, marriage

of the Italian Renaissance with the native Tudor rose.

Henry left Westminster Abbey on Midsummer's Day 1509 as the crowned king of all England.

But for the most part, his world was London and the Home Counties.

He was a man of the metropolis.

In 1509, Henry inherited six major palaces within the London Transport map.

But even as he took to the throne, the definition of what constituted a royal residence was changing.

The palaces of the medieval English kings were often mighty castles, defended by a moat and portcullis.

Or perhaps a hunting lodge in the forest.

But by the time of Henry's coronation, European monarchs

were building palaces designed to convey harmony, the new learning and their conspicuous wealth.

Henry built and extended many palaces, but none survive exactly as he would have known them.

He would, however, recognise this, Hampton Court.

Later in his life Henry would own it, but Hampton Court was built by Cardinal Wolsey,

the most powerful churchman in England.

At this point I'd better declare an interest.

I was the buildings curator at Hampton Court for the best part of eight years.

In that time, during archaeological digs,

I'd watch the remains of the early palace emerge from the ground,

go to the archives and see recorded the names of the people who built it

and painted it and adorned it 500 years ago.

It's a place that remains very special to me.

Thomas Wolsey commenced the building in January 1515.

His administrative ability had made him indispensable at Henry's court and he rocketed through the ranks.

He became Henry's Lord Chancellor, his chief advisor

and then, as Cardinal Wolsey, the Head of the Roman Church in England.

Taking charge of construction was Henry's man, the surveyor Prior William Bolton.

This building, with its grand, symmetrical, balanced facade, would be his masterpiece.

Hampton Court would be the most important building of Henry's reign.

But Bolton's Renaissance-infused genius is only part of the equation.

Wolsey evidently had a guidebook, a template explaining how to build the perfect home for a Cardinal.

It was written by the Papal secretary Paolo Cortese and published in 1510.

And its pages give a fascinating insight into

the processes that helped to shape Hampton Court.

From the vestibule, an entrance leads into the courtyard, which should be arranged like a forum.

It should be square in plan.

In the courtyard, where all can see it, should be the deeds performed by emperors in a Christian manner.

The palace is a fusion of native style,

Cortese's Catholic iconography and the Renaissance ornamentation

imported by William Bolton

and incorporated into Wolsey's coat of arms.

Cardinal Wolsey's Hampton Court

had to speak to a variety of different audiences.

Within one year of him starting building work here,

he invited Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon

to come and see work in progress. He must have been very excited.

But Hampton Court was a place which would see foreign ambassadors

and papal emissaries arriving. He had to talk to them, too.

And so Cortese's work on how a Cardinal

is expected to build a palace also played its part.

Hampton Court had to say a lot of different things

to many different people.

Locked away within the palace is a real treasure trove -

the terracotta decoration from Wolsey's pioneering Long Gallery.

It's a very important building for England

because it's the first Long Gallery in England,

which set the pattern for the later Tudor age.

A place to promenade indoors and show off your artworks.

But Wolsey's gallery was distinctive,

because it used terracotta and some of that terracotta

was very precise evocations of ancient Roman work,

like this so-called egg-and-dart molding,

which must have fitted as a cornice under a roof somewhere.

And then this beauty is a piece of very precisely molded

classical column base.

Obviously architecture integral to the structure of that building.

And this piece, I remember this coming out of the ground.

It's a laurel wreath in the centre of a double arch,

a thing called a spandrel.

Now, all of this is purely architectural.

Along with these fine decorative moldings, called grotesque work,

which had been learned from the Golden House of Nero,

which seemed to be cavernous, like Italian grotti or caves.

When people saw it at the end of the 15th century

and then spread its decorative language

through pattern books across Europe.

As Wolsey was the person who picked all of this up in England,

it really makes its mark as a place of European ambition.

Wolsey was out to impress.

And not just in terracotta, but also in tapestries.

For Wolsey and Henry,

these represented the principal form of Tudor visual culture in palaces.

They told stories and dispensed moral guidance.

'Thomas Campbell, Director of New York's Metropolitan Museum,

'is the world's foremost authority on Renaissance tapestries.'

Tom, why were tapestries so important to the Tudor court?

Tapestry had been

one of the main components of decoration and magnificence

at the European courts really for a couple of hundred years.

It dates back to the time when many of the courts were peripatetic,

tapestries were highly portable -

they could be rolled up, chucked on the back of a wagon

and carted off to wherever the Court was going.

And in the time it took to hang them up you would transform

a cold, damp interior into a richly, brightly-coloured setting.

So they were practical,

but beyond that, tapestries provided an enormous canvas

on which the rulers of the day

could depict the ideas that they wanted to be associated with.

What about cost? Where did these come

in terms of the expense of works of art?

Cost is crucial.

You have a cost of the raw materials, you have the cost of the labour,

of making the tapestries and of course of the design.

Although, of those, the cost of the design is really the smallest.

Even a fairly simple tapestry set say six or seven tapestries,

each measuring five yards long by four yards high,

we find tapestry sets like that trading for sums

between one or two or a couple of hundred pounds,

at a time when a Holbein painting might have cost five pounds.

By the time you start adding in silk and gold thread

in the more complex and rich are tapestries,

you find the cost of materials increasing by a factor of up to 20.

Where tapestry purchases are documented,

we find the sums really quite staggering.

The David Tapestries of Echelon can be identified

with a set of tapestries that Henry acquired,

for which he paid, in October 1528, a sum of £1,500.

You know, that is comparable to the cost of a fully rigged battleship.

And of course, you know, not every tapestry set is costing that amount

but the really rich, really impressive sets,

we are in that kind of sphere.

Would there have been many sets made from one design

for many patrons to own a similar set to each other?

Tapestries were copied from full-scale designs called cartoons.

Once the cartoon had been created,

it generally remained in the possession of the tapestry merchant.

So he could then have it woven again.

In the case of this particular set of designs

of The Triumphs Of Petrarch,

we know of at least five other weavings of this design.

But what you find over the years is that sometimes designs get adapted.

This set of tapestries dates from about 1515.

There is a slightly later weaving of this design series,

of which part survives at the Victoria And Albert Museum,

and the central tapestry in the series depicts the Triumph Of Fame.

In this case,

the chariot of Fame is surrounded by famous figures from history.

So here we have Julius Caesar right in the foreground.

In the weaving of this design at the Victoria And Albert Museum,

in the sea of faces behind, there are two faces that don't appear here.

One, right in the centre of the tapestry,

is a bearded face looking straight out at you with piercing blue eyes.

It's Henry.

Immediately above him, you have a jowly figure

with a Cardinal's biretta, it's Wolsey.

So, that design has clearly been customised for, I suspect, Wolsey.

It is a tongue-in-cheek celebration

of Wolsey and Henry in this grand Renaissance scheme.

They join the greats of history, between them.

Inside and out, Wolsey had built a palace fit for a King.

Henry's existing palaces had been eclipsed

by the ambition of his Cardinal.

A man who might even have surpassed Henry by becoming Pope.

By building Hampton Court, Wolsey set the standard

for Tudor palace architecture for the rest of the 16th century.

Contemporary witnesses said that Wolsey behaved

as if he were the King himself,

but should Henry take exception to Wolsey's vast level of patronage,

Wolsey's response was that he was building it on behalf of the King.

This was an ornament to his realm.

Still, Henry had lost Westminster,

the ancient seat of the English Medieval Kings,

in a fire in 1512. Where did that leave him?

Within a year of Hampton Court beginning,

Henry would assemble the dream team,

headed by the surveyor William Bolton,

to build his own version of Hampton Court Palace in Essex.

BELLS TOLL

This is New Hall school, built on the site of that palace.

Nothing you see above ground today is of Henry's date.

That long range is an Elizabethan replacement of his state apartments.

What he knew was something altogether more spectacular.

This is New Hall as Henry would have known it.

William Bolton designed it for the King while Catherine was pregnant.

As construction began, the Queen gave birth to Princess Mary.

She would be their only child to survive infancy.

There's no doubt that this was intended for a family.

New Hall and Hampton Court

were designed for two very different masters.

Hampton Court was laid out for Cardinal Wolsey as a single man

who had to show off his European political credentials,

hence terracotta and other novelties.

Henry VIII was the patron of New Hall and he was a family man.

A King who had to show you the strength of his ancestry

and his hope in dynasty.

And that concern was printed over the front door.

This sculpted panel was once set above the arch

in the main gatehouse at New Hall.

It's a beautiful example of Medieval heraldry

and proof that Henry wasn't abandoning his chivalric past.

This is a world away from the classical pilasters

and the Italianate cherubs that Wolsey had used at Hampton Court.

Instead, Henry is looking back to his experience at Cambridge

what his grandmother had shown him about how to reinforce

the status of the dynasty

by advertising them in a language that everyone would understand.

What it shows is on the left the Tudor rose of Henry,

now an established symbol.

Flanking it is the pomegranate of Catherine of Aragon.

Her family symbol, the pomegranate,

was packed full of seeds, symbols in themselves of fecundity,

the promise of issue, and that, as far as Henry was concerned,

was Catherine's job.

There is a clear message, though, in this panel

that this palace was all about children,

all about a safe haven for Henry's offspring.

In the top right corner just under the crown is a pomegranate.

It's not normal, though. It's not packed full of seeds

as was the Aragonese model.

This one has a little Tudor rose

slipping out of the split in the fruit.

There could be no clearer demonstration

of the function of the Queen in Henry's eyes.

Henry's building reinforced the importance of family

and of his regal dynasty.

Wolsey's building projected his personal magnificence and learning.

The two men shared a love of art, display and opulence and in 1520,

they united for the most outrageous,

the most ambitious commission of Henry's monarchy.

England and France, committed ancient enemies,

had signed an uneasy peace treaty.

To celebrate this, the entire English Court travelled to France.

The Royal family and Cardinal Wolsey

would be housed in a vast temporary palace.

It was meant to be something of a parade of mutual appreciation

but perhaps inevitably it turned into something different -

A battle of ostentation and magnificence.

It was known ever after as The Field Of Cloth Of Gold.

It had precious little to do with peace.

It was an invasion force. Cultural warfare on a monumental scale.

Wolsey had been planning this for a year and a half.

52 cartloads of the King's wardrobe were on their way across the channel

to the giant English flat-pack palace

now being completed by hundreds of workmen.

Should you ever make the journey,

don't expect a visitor centre or even a signpost.

This unremarkable cafe, The Drap D'or, or Cloth Of Gold,

is a rare clue that you are on the right track.

Just up the road, the events of 1520 are commemorated.

In a lay-by.

Well, you could miss that.

So here's the Field Of Cloth Of Gold, lots of field

but not much gold, just what clings to those little letters

you hardly notice from the road.

But for that slab of granite, you might never know

that 6,000 of England's nobility

would have met the French Court here at all.

There's only one Tudor depiction of the Field Of Cloth Of Gold

and it hangs at Hampton Court.

its quite a large and wonderfully detailed painting.

It shows the English palace,

but there's something seriously wrong with it.

Contemporaries describe the size of the English palace

as being 328 feet on each side and about 30 feet high.

But as it's shown,

it looks about 60 feet long, about a fifth of its original size.

I want to show it's actual scale,

to get an understanding of just how this temporary palace

would have dominated the skyline for miles around.

I'm mapping it out with the kind of perspective and eye level

that a visitor would have, just approaching it slightly at the angle

to get a sense of its depth and size.

It's an amazing scale, it really brings it home to you

how much money was invested in temporary things.

And what is out of sight is out of mind to us

when we appreciate the Tudor age.

As I build it up, I should get a sense of the ornamentation

that Henry's ministers chose to invest in this building

to convey messages about his standing in the world

and how England might square up to France.

The pre-fabricated structure was made of imported timber

set on an eight foot brick plinth.

The walls were of canvas and so was the roof, painted as tiles.

The surveyor, once again, was that man William Bolton.

His building housed Henry's state rooms, his fine tapestries

and a mighty chapel for the Cardinal.

It is an immense and impressive piece of work.

And such a thing to be built as a temporary palace is astonishing.

It seems to me this building uses a very sophisticated repertoire

of Italian Renaissance ornament

to show Henry VIII's allegiance to the Pope.

It doesn't surprise me that one Venetian witness

recalled the greatest of the Italian artists when he said

that Leonardo couldn't have done it as well.

The peace treaty with France didn't last two years,

but the ambition and scale of the temporary English palace

left an indelible reputation

and an architectural legacy that survives even today.

Returning to England,

Henry's noblemen were keen to emulate their King.

Lord Henry Marney came back from the Field Of Cloth Of Gold

and began building this place in North East Essex -

Layer Marney, his family house.

And what a house.

It's an eight storey Tudor skyscraper of a gatehouse,

one range only of a courtyard which was never built.

But Sir Henry Marney managed to build enough

to leave not only a legacy to his son, John,

but a permanent marker of the ambition

and the fantastical architecture

of the early years of Henry VIII's reign.

The gatehouse looks backward in time

to the mighty castles of the feudal era.

An indicator of strength.

But Marney also employed fashionable Renaissance styling,

notably the terracotta egg-and-dart patterns used at Hampton Court.

That looked forward and indicated vitality and learning.

The styles of William Bolton, the Royal surveyor,

were spreading across England

as noblemen adopted a Court architecture.

And just as in Henry's court,

houses like Layer Marney would have played host to Tudor revels -

elaborate parties,

a fusion of highly significant visual imagery and music.

King Henry was an enthusiast reveller -

music was central to the pageantry of his Royal Court

and we know that Henry composed and played some of his own songs.

Harry Christophers is founder and conductor of The Sixteen,

a choir specialising in early music.

Harry, I've long heard that Henry VIII was a great composer

who wrote Greensleeves and much else, but what do we really know?

I personally think, you know, I think at best he was a competent musician.

It's quite clear, you know, he had a phenomenal collection of instruments,

so he was probably more of a practising musician.

Having said that, think of the works that have come down to us.

It is clear that the better ones are instrumental pieces

and he was less good with voices.

Of the compositions he did write, actually,

most of them really are based on French chansons.

There is one particular one, Gentil Prince De Renom,

which has come down to us as this is by Henry VIII,

but actually the three-part chanson survives in a manuscript of 1501,

printed in Venice and Henry was only ten years old

so there is no way it was by Henry.

The Gentle Prince Of Renown might have sounded appropriate for him.

Yes. In his library, there would have been lots of these

well-known ballads and short chansons sung.

We are going to sing the first six bars of the three-part chanson

before Henry tampered with it.

And then we are going to show you the fourth part that Henry added.

THEY SING THE ORIGINAL

THEY SING HENRY'S ADDITION

It is not brilliant.

And as you heard there is no text to Simon singing that fourth part,

which makes me think it was probably conceived

as an instrumental piece. He gets an idea and he tries to work it

one too many times and it doesn't quite work.

So how come then, we are left with Henry's reputation

as King and composer?

Quite frankly there is a simple answer really,

who is going to criticise him?

Henry didn't have an impact on the music countrywide,

but he did have an impact on what was happening at Court.

As a manuscript that has come down to us,

it's called Music From The Court Of King Henry VIII

and it contains lots of fantastic works.

I think that is the treasure he has given as his heritage.

So he is a great patron rather than a creator?

I think that's a better description.

MUSIC: "Green Groweth The Holly" by Henry VIII

Henry Marney had begun to build a great house

that would have outstripped the ambitions of the King,

who's palace at New Hall was just 17 miles away.

The patronage of art was a delicate matter amongst Henry's noblemen.

Emulating the King's architecture,

copying his sense of spectacle, were actions designed to curry favour.

But there was a risk of overstepping the mark.

Of being considered an upstart, a rival, or even a threat.

That's exactly what the owner of this stately pile in Gloucestershire

was regarded as. A threat.

Thornbury Castle was the seat of the Third Duke of Buckingham.

Like Marney, he was building.

He was transforming his family pile into something of a fortress,

capable of housing a private army of retainers,

a right still enjoyed by the old, feudal aristocracy.

Buckingham would never finish his fortress.

Today his magnificent apartments have become a hotel.

In 1521, Buckingham was the richest nobleman in England,

with a claim to the throne at least as strong as Henry's.

Some thought he wanted to be King.

Beyond his military might, his royal blood and building his new seat on a lavish palatial scale,

Buckingham was ultimately found guilty of a fashion faux pas.

Wolsey and the King's agents found that he'd bought hundreds of pounds worth of cloth of gold and silver

and silks with which to bribe the King's guard.

This was the stuff you could buy people with.

It was also the stuff of treason.

Henry had Buckingham beheaded on Tower Hill.

When the Duke of Buckingham was executed in 1521, his building work simply froze.

Henry took over his property including Penshurst in Kent and Thornbury, here in Gloucestershire.

He wasn't interested in finishing Thornbury.

What you see here is the shell of the outer courtyard, with those

square putlog holes where the scaffolding was just left in place.

For Henry, getting rid of a threat was the most important thing, and then liquidating

Buckingham's assets, which he did, but he did take a very fine set of tapestries from Thornbury.

Later in life when he fell out with his daughter, Princess Mary, he gave her one of the tapestries,

with the implicit message that "Here's a gift via a murdered man, from your father.

"Maybe you'd better watch yourself."

12 years earlier, Thomas More had welcomed Henry's accession as a golden age.

More had become Henry's trusted counsellor, and together they would write a theological treatise

defending the established Church of Rome against Martin Luther's Protestant reformation.

For most of his early reign Henry had been witnessing courtiers,

in particular churchmen, importing renaissance art into England.

They set the artistic standards.

But there was one form of art that Henry himself could export to Rome.

It was the art of debate.

Henry's intention wasn't entirely selfless.

Through the ages, popes had granted impressive-sounding titles to monarchs across Europe.

Henry wanted to be seen as a man of letters, but he also wanted a title from the current pope, Leo X.

The King's book, The Defence Of The Seven Sacraments, tackled Martin Luther head on.

Although banned, Luther's writings were circulating widely.

Henry's book aimed to crush what he described as Luther's "serious and spreading heresy".

Pope Leo granted the English King a new title - Defender of the Faith.

Reading the book now, it's an extraordinary and ironic display of loyalty

to the Church of Rome by a Catholic English monarch.

'Ever since the world was at peace, all the different Christians

'in the world have been obedient to the Roman Church.

'It is agreed by all nations that it is forbidden to move things

'which have been immovable for a long time.'

Around five years after the publication of this book, Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn.

Her age is disputed, but she was at least 15 years younger than Catherine.

Henry's Queen had given birth six times but only once did the child survive.

Her last pregnancy had been eight years earlier in 1518.

Henry knew that Catherine was not going to give him a male heir.

He would need the Pope's permission to divorce her.

This would become known as Henry's "Great Matter".

It would dominate the next ten years of his life and change England forever.

Those techniques of rhetoric and debate that he used in defence of the Vatican,

he now put to use to prove that his marriage to Katherine, his elder brother's widow, was illegal.

Andrea Clarke is the British Library's resident expert on the papers of Henry VIII.

Andrea, Henry VIII's divorce is one of the most famous episodes in history.

What evidence is there in the British Library's books for what happened?

One of the earliest pieces of evidence we have can be found in a 16th-century Book of Hours

and this gives an insight into the very early stages

of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII's romance.

We think that it was possibly passed clandestinely between the two of them as they sat in mass

and we have a note entered on this page by Anne Boleyn, perhaps quite enticingly beneath

an image of the Annunciation, and Anne writes to Henry,

"Be daily proved you shall me find to be to you both loving and kind,"

and Henry in return has replied to Anne,

presents himself as the lovesick King, writing his message beneath

an image of the man of sorrows and he writes in medieval French,

"If you remember me according to my love in your prayers,

"I shall scarcely be far away, for I am your Henry forever."

-Lovely imagery, pulling out his quill during mass!

-Yes!

-What are the next stages, then? Here is a couple in love, but Henry still married to Catherine of Aragon.

-Yes.

How does he reconcile his...

Well, call it what you will, mid-life crisis?

In 1527 he announces his scruple of conscience,

his doubts about the validity of his marriage, which are based on a verse in Leviticus in the Old Testament.

It's Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 16, and it says that "No man shall marry his brother's widow,"

and the penalty for which is childlessness,

and Henry has highlighted it here with a pointing hand, a very characteristic way

of highlighting passages that were of interest to him in his books and manuscripts.

-Pointy hand, quite cute really, isn't it?

-Yes!

-Despite the gravity of the subject.

-Yes.

-So that would be a pretty direct piece of evidence to present to the Pope.

-Yes.

But it's at this point that Henry turns and says that he believes that his marriage to Catherine

is contrary to the divine law and that the pope, Julius II,

exceeded his authority in condoning the marriage.

So Henry must be marshalling as much evidence as he can to give full weight to his argument.

What other sources does he look at?

Well, this is an inventory.

You can see at the top here, "Tabula Librorum".

It would have been drawn up by one of Henry's research team,

who were charged with scouring monastic libraries

all across the country in search of evidence to support Henry's case for a divorce

and we can see that at some stage it was returned to Henry, who has marked up with crosses

the books that he wanted to be sent to the Royal Library, and it provides us with evidence in fact

that Henry was very much involved in the search for evidence

and overseeing the whole research process, and I think it really demonstrates

his intellectual capabilities, his intellectual prowess

and how he drew upon the excellent education that he received.

Henry was one of the most widely read and best educated Renaissance monarchs.

-Now, another manuscript.

-Yes.

-A bit more informal, this one?

-Yes, yes.

-This is the Collectanea Satis Copiosa.

-I thought it might be(!)

-What does that mean?

-It translates as something like

"the sufficiently...satisfying collection", or "the collection that says it all",

and it really represents the end result of the research process.

It's an arsenal or a compilation of research material, which has been

collected from a wide range of sources, and we can see again that Henry's hand is all over it.

We've got his writing, his pointing hand highlighting passages of interest and once again

demonstrating just how involved Henry was with the whole compiling of evidence.

-So it's fair to say this is the best bits of the evidence all in one volume.

-Yes.

So a really charged manuscript.

This is just before the divorce happens. What's this, 1530?

It was presented to Henry in the summer of 1530, and again it demonstrates

the intellectual foundations of the English Reformation, the break with Rome.

So actually the future, the early modern age,

the shift from Catholicism toward Protestantism,

his break with Catherine of Aragon to the second in a string of Queens...

-this book is absolutely crucial.

-It's the intellectual foundation stone.

A remarkable document.

I've come here to Ecouen, north of Paris, because it houses another very significant insight

to Henry's state of mind during his Great Matter.

He bought these tapestries in 1528.

They tell the Old Testament story of King David, a poet-cum-warrior

who had long fascinated and inspired Henry.

God had punished the sins of David by killing his only son.

Henry and Katherine had failed to produce a healthy son.

Henry felt that he too was being punished by God, for the sin of his marriage to his brother's widow.

David had long been used as a model of Biblical kingship.

There was nothing new in that. But it's perhaps surprising that when he bought these tapestries in 1528,

just after he'd met Anne Boleyn,

these weren't specially commissioned. They were bought ready made.

Henry didn't buy them so much for the Bible story, but for their reinforcement of his position,

that the Pope should agree to his divorce from Catherine.

The King was weaving in his own personal significance.

And the tapestries here at Ecouen are important for another reason.

This is David. He looks real.

The artist has a modern sense of perspective and light.

Compare that depiction with this David, from 40 years earlier.

It's a different world.

The tapestries Henry bought in 1528 show the influence of realism in the visual arts.

And this man, who would paint the most enduring and convincing

image of England's king, was on his way to London.

Hans Holbein arrived here in Chelsea in 1526.

He had already made a name for himself with this magnificent portrait of Erasmus,

the Flemish intellectual and humanist.

Erasmus arranged for Holbein to stay with Thomas More, just a few hundred yards from here,

off Chelsea's King's Road.

Immediately, Holbein was hot property, his skill in demand by London's nobility.

He painted Thomas More's family,

a piece that was considered revolutionary in its day.

He also gained a modest position at Henry's court -

a court with a borrowed grand palace.

Wolsey had failed to secure Henry's divorce.

Fallen from favour, he presented Hampton Court to his King in 1528.

By 1530, Wolsey would be dead,

probably killed by a heart attack on the way to a certain execution.

Henry rebuilt Wolsey's Great Hall at Hampton Court.

The finest room in all his palaces, this would have been the kind of

courtly setting where Holbein secured his first royal commissions.

Susan Foister is the world's leading authority on Holbein and his work.

Once he'd ingratiated himself in More's household, how did

Holbein's work find its way into Henry's court?

Well, Holbein had a great opportunity in 1527 because

Henry VIII was going to welcome a French Embassy to Greenwich Palace.

There were going to be revels, and somehow or other Holbein got a foot into the court,

perhaps through Thomas More, perhaps through one of the other contacts that Erasmus had provided him with.

And in January 1527, he started work at Greenwich and he was going to provide some great pieces of work

and the king was really going to set up and take notice.

-So what were these pieces?

-Well, there were two pieces of work.

One was on the triumphal arch that was the main feature of the Banqueting House.

And when the French arrived in May 1527, they were welcomed into the Banqueting House at Greenwich.

Obviously had a great feast there.

And then after they'd eaten, Henry took them out through the arch.

But as he passed through the arch with them,

he made them turn around and look up at the back of the arch, which they hadn't seen while they were dining.

And there was a very, very large painting of the French being defeated

at the Battle of Therouanne, the Battle of the Spurs,

in 1513.

It was clearly Henry's idea of a joke.

It must have been very discomfiting for the French

to see themselves being defeated by the English but one can imagine Henry roaring with laughter at this.

And being very very pleased with what this new painter, Holbein, had provided - this spectacular painting.

So it sounds like Holbein is everything from a panel painter to a stage designer and painter.

-Is that the kind of range that would have been expected of an artist of that period?

-Absolutely.

Court painters had to turn their hands to all kinds of things.

They might be called upon simply to decorate or redecorate something very simple like a window frame in a room.

Or they might be called upon to provide designs for...

paintings that covered yards and yards of wall in a palace.

From those humble origins, Holbein would go on to define the way

history remembers Henry in the most famous royal portrait of them all.

The Whitehall mural.

The original was destroyed by fire in 1698.

This is a copy, by a Dutch artist.

Holbein himself also made copies,

placing his depiction of Henry into striking individual portraits.

Here, Henry stands on an expensive Turkey-work carpet with a backdrop of rich damask

of the sort imported from Italy.

The oversize codpiece catches the attention,

perhaps a symbol of his renewed paternal optimism.

The stance is assertive.

But it all focuses on the eyes,

with which Henry fixes the viewer.

It's a masterpiece of confidence.

Holbein was one of the greatest portrait painters ever.

And Henry must have considered himself very fortunate indeed to have secured his services.

And I think what he does with Henry's image is to produce something that is

entirely credible as a portrait of a man.

A stern face but you can see somebody thinking.

He turns that into an icon by the way that he places that figure in a very elaborate background.

And he is a huge, huge man.

And Holbein, I think, does allow himself to exaggerate, to distort, for the purpose of impressing people,

in this case. And so Henry does appear as a magnificent, powerful man in these images.

And I think it is that that really defines our image of Henry even today.

Holbein's new realistic, illusionistic style seems to have

mirrored a new reality in Henry's kingdom.

In 1533, England's Parliament allowed Henry's divorce.

Fully seven years after first falling in love, he married Anne Boleyn. His subjects despised her,

the harlot who had usurped their beloved Catherine.

On the first day of June 1533, Henry and his new wife

began the traditional parade from the Tower of London.

Anne Boleyn's coronation procession was a very different creature to

Catherine of Aragon's almost two and a half decades earlier.

Anne was deeply unpopular, resented especially by women,

and she was known by some as a goggle-eyed whore.

At the last coronation, Thomas More had dedicated a poem to the teenage King Henry.

He'd called him, "The everlasting glory of our time".

But the glory hadn't lasted.

The deeply pious More rebelled against Henry's split from Rome.

This was the end of the golden age that he'd heralded in 1509.

In fact, he never even turned up.

In 1554, Parliament passed the Act of Succession.

Henry, not the Pope, now controlled the English Church.

More was asked to swear his allegiance to the Act. He refused.

In 1535 he was found guilty of treason and executed.

His head was left to rot on London Bridge.

Henry had made a habit of rejecting - sometimes even murdering -

his closest advisors.

That belligerence carried a heavy price.

As he began the second era of his reign, the king was left more isolated than ever.

Henry VIII's early reign had promised the vigour of youth, but he was rooted in tradition.

A religious boy, his first loves were jousting and the tournament, and music,

whilst it was his advisers, in particular those surrounding Wolsey, who pushed the artistic agenda.

His new palace at New Hall spoke of dynasty, and his defence of the seven sacraments

defended a thousand-year-long tradition of Catholicism.

But maybe his conservatism was his trump card.

People knew what to expect from a king, and from his boyhood,

he knew how a hero was supposed to look and behave.

But Henry could also be ruthless,

capable of using any intellectual, political, even military force he chose,

to defend his crown,

and also secure his freedom from Catherine of Aragon,

who herself had failed to secure the dynasty.

Now with an unpopular new Queen, Henry had to showcase his identity as the patron of a brave new age.

His future depended on it.

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