0:00:18 > 0:00:20There are ghosts in this place.
0:00:22 > 0:00:24You don't notice them right away.
0:00:24 > 0:00:31At first glance, Binham Priory in Norfolk looks like a typical English country church - plain and simple.
0:00:31 > 0:00:34Limestone, limewash, nothing fancy.
0:00:34 > 0:00:39But then you look around and realise something else IS going on here.
0:00:41 > 0:00:46That grandiose, timber-vaulted roof, those multi-storey arcades,
0:00:46 > 0:00:50aren't they all just a bit too big for a parish church?
0:00:50 > 0:00:57Then you start to fill in the gaps and bit by bit a lost world remakes itself.
0:00:58 > 0:01:03A world of monks and masses, of colour and plainsong.
0:01:03 > 0:01:05A world of brilliant images.
0:01:05 > 0:01:08The world of Catholic England.
0:01:10 > 0:01:15For centuries, this didn't sound strained.
0:01:15 > 0:01:19Catholic England was just another way of saying Christian England, really.
0:01:19 > 0:01:26And then, in a generation, it stopped being a truism and started being treason.
0:01:30 > 0:01:34Images of the Virgin, the apostles and the saints,
0:01:34 > 0:01:39once cherished and glorified, were now mocked and vandalised.
0:01:40 > 0:01:45Here at Binham, the saints on the rood screen were expunged,
0:01:45 > 0:01:49painted over with verses from an English Bible.
0:01:55 > 0:02:03Today they're restored, but the world over which they once presided is dead and gone.
0:02:07 > 0:02:13We can't bring back the lost world of Binham's painted saints, whole and alive again.
0:02:13 > 0:02:18But because the death of that world was so shocking, so improbable,
0:02:18 > 0:02:23and because the Reformation and the wars of religion it triggered
0:02:23 > 0:02:27cut so deep a mark on the body of our country,
0:02:27 > 0:02:32we need to reassemble the fragments of that world as best we can.
0:02:32 > 0:02:38Only then can we hope to answer one of the most poignant questions in our history.
0:02:38 > 0:02:43Whatever did happen to Catholic England?
0:03:24 > 0:03:29We all grew up, even a nice Jewish boy like me,
0:03:29 > 0:03:33thinking that the English Reformation was a historic inevitability -
0:03:33 > 0:03:40the culling of an obsolete, unpopular, fundamentally un-English faith.
0:03:40 > 0:03:47But on the eve of the Reformation, Catholicism in England was vibrant, popular and very much alive.
0:03:54 > 0:04:01This is Walsingham in Norfolk, once the home of the miracle-working shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
0:04:03 > 0:04:06Along with the Becket shrine at Canterbury,
0:04:06 > 0:04:12Walsingham was the must-see place for serious 16th-century pilgrims -
0:04:12 > 0:04:17a tradition revived this century by High-Church Anglicans.
0:04:22 > 0:04:28Today you get only the faintest echoes of what Walsingham once was.
0:04:28 > 0:04:35A gaudy, rowdy mix of hucksterism and holiness, piety and plaster saints.
0:04:35 > 0:04:39The kind of place you'd expect to find, say, in Naples or Seville,
0:04:39 > 0:04:42not in the depths of East Anglia.
0:04:42 > 0:04:47But even then, as today, not everybody approved.
0:04:47 > 0:04:54Erasmus, the Catholic scholar superstar of the age, came here on a mock pilgrimage
0:04:54 > 0:05:00and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk and chapels airmailed in from the Holy Land.
0:05:00 > 0:05:05But his was the minority intellectual view, safely expressed in Latin,
0:05:05 > 0:05:12and tolerated, though not necessarily endorsed, by members of the ruling Tudor dynasty.
0:05:18 > 0:05:22The Tudors were regular and devout pilgrims.
0:05:22 > 0:05:26Henry VIII, early in his reign, walked barefoot to the shrine,
0:05:26 > 0:05:31offering a necklace of rubies and dedicating a giant candle
0:05:31 > 0:05:36in thanks for the birth of his son, Henry, in 1511.
0:05:36 > 0:05:43Prince Henry died within weeks, but the king's candle continued to burn at the shrine for many years to come.
0:05:54 > 0:05:58What a strange world this Catholic England was.
0:05:58 > 0:06:00The urge for renewal and reform
0:06:00 > 0:06:06side by side with the ancient, the hallowed and the occasionally fraudulent.
0:06:06 > 0:06:10But all apparent contradictions could be accommodated
0:06:10 > 0:06:15under the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church.
0:06:15 > 0:06:17And what a mother she was!
0:06:19 > 0:06:26Come to Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford in Suffolk and you'll see just what I mean.
0:06:27 > 0:06:32This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money.
0:06:32 > 0:06:39However, what you see today are just the bare bones of what it was supposed to be.
0:06:40 > 0:06:45But we know what Long Melford in its splendour was really like,
0:06:45 > 0:06:49thanks to an account left by Roger Martin,
0:06:49 > 0:06:55a churchwarden here in the reign of England's last Catholic ruler, Queen Mary.
0:06:56 > 0:07:04Writing in the very different times of Queen Elizabeth, Roger Martin, with a mixture of pride and regret,
0:07:04 > 0:07:08set out to tell future generations exactly what they were missing.
0:07:11 > 0:07:18"At the back of the high altar, there was a goodly mount carved very artificially
0:07:18 > 0:07:20"with the story of Christ's Passion,
0:07:20 > 0:07:25"all being fair, gilt and lively and beautifully set forth.
0:07:25 > 0:07:29"And at the north end of the same altar
0:07:29 > 0:07:35"there was a goodly gilt tabernacle reaching up to the roof of the chancel
0:07:35 > 0:07:42"in which there was one fair large gilt image of the Holy Trinity, besides other fine images."
0:08:12 > 0:08:16But Martin's church was more than just a building.
0:08:16 > 0:08:20He describes a living world of processions and festivals,
0:08:20 > 0:08:24ceremonies and rituals, involving the whole community.
0:08:34 > 0:08:41Above all this presided the "management", without whom none of it made sense - the priests,
0:08:41 > 0:08:46guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Christian belief.
0:08:48 > 0:08:55Every time the priest celebrated communion, Christ crucified would be there in flesh and blood.
0:08:55 > 0:09:00Hoc est corpus meum...
0:09:01 > 0:09:09The priest was the indispensable man and there was no getting to heaven but through his hands.
0:09:12 > 0:09:17But elsewhere other hands were hard at work.
0:09:17 > 0:09:23The miracle-working priest was about to be challenged by the word of God itself,
0:09:23 > 0:09:27translated into English and printed in black and white.
0:09:28 > 0:09:34Handwritten English Bibles had been in circulation since the days of the Lollards,
0:09:34 > 0:09:39the Protestant heresy that flourished briefly in the early 1400s.
0:09:39 > 0:09:44But manuscripts represented hard labour and cost pounds to buy.
0:09:44 > 0:09:51However, a printed New Testament could be mass produced and sold for a tenth of the price.
0:09:53 > 0:09:56The idea of a Bible in English,
0:09:56 > 0:10:03cheap and freely available to anyone who could read, put the fear of God into the authorities.
0:10:03 > 0:10:10William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous task
0:10:10 > 0:10:16of translating, publishing and printing an English version of the New Testament.
0:10:16 > 0:10:20Tyndale is a recognisable historical type.
0:10:20 > 0:10:27Austere, steely, unswerving, even a little fanatical, and disarmingly clear in his own convictions.
0:10:27 > 0:10:33"It was not possible," he wrote, "to establish the lay people in any truth
0:10:33 > 0:10:39"except the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue."
0:10:42 > 0:10:46In 1524, Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe,
0:10:46 > 0:10:52ending up in Worms in Germany, a city which had recently been made safely Protestant
0:10:52 > 0:10:57by its allegiance to the new radical doctrines of Martin Luther.
0:10:57 > 0:11:02Tyndale's English New Testament was completed there by January 1526.
0:11:02 > 0:11:07Within weeks, copies were on sale in London.
0:11:12 > 0:11:16What followed was an English version of the Inquisition.
0:11:28 > 0:11:33Denunciations, arrests, book burnings, show trials.
0:11:35 > 0:11:40Those who recanted were forced to carry before them faggots of wood,
0:11:40 > 0:11:46symbols of the bonfire that would consume them if they ever lapsed again.
0:11:46 > 0:11:51And in 1530, symbolism gave way to gruesome reality
0:11:51 > 0:11:57when a priest named Thomas Hitton confessed to smuggling in a New Testament.
0:11:57 > 0:12:02Condemned as a heretic, he was burned at Maidstone on 23rd February.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06The Reformation had claimed its first victim.
0:12:09 > 0:12:16And cheering all this on from the sidelines was the king, Henry VIII, dutiful son of the Church
0:12:16 > 0:12:22whose candle at Walsingham had been burning brightly for nearly 20 years.
0:12:24 > 0:12:29In the winter of 1530, as the fire was lit under the unfortunate Hitton,
0:12:29 > 0:12:34there was no reason to think that anything would ever change.
0:12:34 > 0:12:39To understand why it did, you have to understand something about Henry,
0:12:39 > 0:12:46the man who, without really meaning to, turned Catholic England into a Protestant nation.
0:13:08 > 0:13:12Well, for a start, he was never supposed to be king.
0:13:12 > 0:13:19But when his older brother Arthur died, Henry, aged eleven, became heir apparent.
0:13:19 > 0:13:24He also acquired his brother's wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon.
0:13:24 > 0:13:31The marriage alliance between Spain and England was just too important to be allowed to lapse.
0:13:31 > 0:13:38In 1509, King Henry VII died and his 17-year-old son came into his own.
0:13:39 > 0:13:43The young king was a spectacular sight.
0:13:43 > 0:13:47You could practically smell the testosterone.
0:13:47 > 0:13:52Any way and anywhere he could flash that burly energy, he did.
0:13:52 > 0:13:56In the saddle, on the dance floor, or on the tennis court,
0:13:56 > 0:14:03where a besotted courtier wrote of the king's skin, "Glowing through the fabric of his finely woven shirt."
0:14:03 > 0:14:08His famous breezy charm was dispensed like the English weather -
0:14:08 > 0:14:15in sunny periods, alternating with cloudy spells and sudden bursts of thunder.
0:14:15 > 0:14:21The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, punch-in-the-belly, arm-round-the-shoulders kind,
0:14:21 > 0:14:27which, depending on his mood, could betoken either sudden promotion or imminent arrest.
0:14:27 > 0:14:34Henry wallowed in the praise lavished on him by courtiers and ambassadors.
0:14:34 > 0:14:38Henry the gallant, Henry the handsome, Henry the superstar,
0:14:38 > 0:14:43the only king to have his own band hired to go touring with him
0:14:43 > 0:14:47and featuring young Henry himself as lead singer-songwriter.
0:14:52 > 0:14:58Egged on by the Pope, who dangled before him the title of Defender of the Faith,
0:14:58 > 0:15:03Henry was determined to make a splashy debut on the European scene.
0:15:03 > 0:15:09He tried to get his Spanish father-in-law, King Ferdinand, to come in on joint ventures
0:15:09 > 0:15:12against King Louis of France.
0:15:12 > 0:15:16But when it came to snake-pit politics Ferdinand was a real pro,
0:15:16 > 0:15:23shamelessly exploiting Henry's lust for glory but failing to deliver on the promised armies.
0:15:23 > 0:15:26Henry pushed on without him
0:15:26 > 0:15:31and in the summer of 1513 talked up a skirmish with French knights
0:15:31 > 0:15:35into a major victory called the Battle of the Spurs.
0:15:36 > 0:15:41Meanwhile, back home, Queen Catherine and her councillors
0:15:41 > 0:15:46managed a military victory of major importance at Flodden Field,
0:15:46 > 0:15:52which left the King of the Scots, James IV, and a dozen Scottish earls, dead on the battlefield.
0:15:52 > 0:15:56Behind all this activity at home and abroad,
0:15:56 > 0:16:03keeping the army supplied, negotiating the treaties, channelling the king's energies
0:16:03 > 0:16:08was one of the greatest organisational brains of the age...
0:16:08 > 0:16:13Archbishop of York, soon to be Chancellor of England, Thomas Wolsey.
0:16:13 > 0:16:17Let's face it, if we could find one, we could all use a Wolsey,
0:16:17 > 0:16:25someone who comes to work every day and says, "And what would be your pleasure, Majesty?" and then does it.
0:16:25 > 0:16:30The occasional document will slide across the desk for signature,
0:16:30 > 0:16:34but nothing really to interrupt a hard day's hunt.
0:16:34 > 0:16:40Wolsey was a consummate manager. Attentive to detail in both matters and men.
0:16:40 > 0:16:44Someone who could stroke Parliament when necessary,
0:16:44 > 0:16:49or bang even very aristocratic heads together when that was called for.
0:16:49 > 0:16:55He was a master manipulator of patronage, of honours, of bribes and of threats.
0:16:55 > 0:17:00In other words, he was a psychologist in a cardinal's hat.
0:17:01 > 0:17:08Wolsey also understood the relationship between display and power.
0:17:10 > 0:17:16He used it for his own ends here at Hampton Court, but he also used it for the king,
0:17:16 > 0:17:24acting as impresario for one of the greatest shows in his career, the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
0:17:28 > 0:17:33The meeting in 1520 between Henry and the young French king, Francis I,
0:17:33 > 0:17:37was supposed to be a demonstration of heartfelt amity,
0:17:37 > 0:17:41and a message to the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V,
0:17:41 > 0:17:46that old enemies could, if needs be, become friends.
0:17:46 > 0:17:53But it came to war, anyway, not with weapons, but something much more deadly - style.
0:17:56 > 0:18:02In the greatest transportation exercise seen since the campaigns of Edward III,
0:18:02 > 0:18:07Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England -
0:18:07 > 0:18:09earls, bishops, knights of the shire,
0:18:09 > 0:18:165,000 men, including, in a display of unconvincing humility, the Cardinal on muleback,
0:18:16 > 0:18:19dressed in crimson velvet.
0:18:20 > 0:18:27Music played, wine ran red and white from fountains, a great deal of heron got eaten.
0:18:27 > 0:18:33The two kings spent hours trying on glamorous outfits that could be worn only once.
0:18:33 > 0:18:38They wrestled with knotty problems of state, and with each other,
0:18:38 > 0:18:45the nimbler Francis at one point throwing Henry on his back. No doubt he laughed. No doubt he hated it.
0:18:46 > 0:18:51Somewhere in the middle of all this melee was a young Englishwoman,
0:18:51 > 0:18:56a lady-in-waiting to Claude, the wife of the French king.
0:18:56 > 0:19:03This was the woman who would bring Wolsey's immense house of power crashing down in ruins
0:19:03 > 0:19:07and with it, inconceivably, the power of the Roman Church in England.
0:19:07 > 0:19:10Her name was Anne Boleyn.
0:19:16 > 0:19:23So much saccharine drivel has been written on the subject of Anne Boleyn,
0:19:23 > 0:19:27so many Hollywood movies made, so many bodice-buster romances produced,
0:19:27 > 0:19:35but us serious historians are supposed to avert our gaze from the tragic soap opera of her life
0:19:35 > 0:19:37and concentrate on meaty stuff,
0:19:37 > 0:19:44like the social and political origins of the Reformation or the Tudor revolution in government.
0:19:44 > 0:19:50But try as we might, we keep coming back time and again to the subject of Anne,
0:19:50 > 0:19:57because on close inspection it turns out that she was, after all, historical prime cause number one.
0:19:57 > 0:20:03At the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Anne would have been a teenager.
0:20:03 > 0:20:07She had been away from England off and on since the age of twelve,
0:20:07 > 0:20:13when her diplomat father, Thomas, arranged for her to become maid-of-honour to Margaret of Austria
0:20:13 > 0:20:19at one of her many courts, this one here at Mecklin in Flanders.
0:20:23 > 0:20:28Margaret was recognised as the world authority on courtly love,
0:20:28 > 0:20:35that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation around which a whole culture had grown up.
0:20:35 > 0:20:41Desire, endlessly deferred, sexual passion transfigured into pure, selfless love,
0:20:41 > 0:20:48troubadours, masks, silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing. That was the theory, anyway.
0:20:48 > 0:20:53Underneath the stage-managed surface, the old basic instincts seethed away.
0:20:56 > 0:20:59Anne returned to England in 1522,
0:20:59 > 0:21:05a sophisticated, accomplished, ambitious young woman with a mind of her own.
0:21:11 > 0:21:18Anne Boleyn entered the glittering, dangerous world of the Tudor court in her twenties.
0:21:18 > 0:21:24Physically she was no raving beauty, despite the long, black hair and dark eyes,
0:21:24 > 0:21:28but she knew how to exploit her natural vivaciousness
0:21:28 > 0:21:33to play the game of courtly love for all it was worth.
0:21:35 > 0:21:42One of the first to fall was a man every bit as sophisticated as she was - Thomas Wyatt.
0:21:42 > 0:21:49The epitome of the Renaissance courtier. A soldier, a diplomat and above all a poet.
0:21:49 > 0:21:53His poems are heavy with the conventional lover's sighs.
0:21:53 > 0:21:58But in those apparently inspired by Anne, the sighs come from the heart.
0:21:58 > 0:22:03Wyatt, unhappily married, realised that he stood no chance with her
0:22:03 > 0:22:10and in one of his famous poems compares himself to a hunter, vainly chasing a deer.
0:22:14 > 0:22:21Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne was that she should become his mistress -
0:22:21 > 0:22:25not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make.
0:22:25 > 0:22:32Besides, there was another reason why Wyatt would never catch his hind, as his poem goes on to explain.
0:22:32 > 0:22:36"And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
0:22:36 > 0:22:40"there is written her fair neck round about, 'Noli me tangere
0:22:40 > 0:22:46"'For Caesar's I am and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'"
0:22:47 > 0:22:50Noli me tangere - do not touch.
0:22:50 > 0:22:56For Caesar, otherwise known as Henry VIII, had already committed himself to the chase.
0:22:56 > 0:23:01And the king, as we know, was an inexhaustible hunter.
0:23:01 > 0:23:08Henry really had to work hard to get Anne, harder than at any time in his life.
0:23:08 > 0:23:15The man who, as Wolsey could testify, hated writing letters, wrote umpteen in his attempts to woo her.
0:23:15 > 0:23:20She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not.
0:23:20 > 0:23:26Ten years younger, merry rather than pious, spirited rather than gravely deferential,
0:23:26 > 0:23:33Anne opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness and perhaps most important than any of these,
0:23:33 > 0:23:36the possibility of a son and heir.
0:23:38 > 0:23:43The estrangement between Catherine and Henry went back as far as 1511
0:23:43 > 0:23:50and the death of their son Henry, who despite the offerings made at Walsingham, lived only a few weeks.
0:23:50 > 0:23:55Catherine had gone on to produce a daughter, Mary, born in 1516,
0:23:55 > 0:23:59but Henry began to recoil from his queen.
0:23:59 > 0:24:06After more than 20 years, Henry had no legitimate male heir and no prospect of one.
0:24:06 > 0:24:09By the time Anne came on the scene,
0:24:09 > 0:24:14Henry was convinced that his marriage to Catherine was divinely cursed.
0:24:14 > 0:24:17The king was an assiduous reader of Scripture.
0:24:17 > 0:24:24There must have been a sharp intake of breath when he read Leviticus 20, verse 21, in which God tells Moses,
0:24:34 > 0:24:39Driven by his fear of dynastic extinction and his passion for Anne,
0:24:39 > 0:24:42who as usual refused to become his mistress,
0:24:42 > 0:24:47Henry seized on divorce as the answer to all of his problems.
0:24:48 > 0:24:53Henry wanted a papal annulment of the marriage on grounds of incest,
0:24:53 > 0:24:55but the Pope couldn't oblige,
0:24:55 > 0:25:03for in May 1527, the armies of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and made Pope Clement a virtual prisoner.
0:25:03 > 0:25:09Charles, Queen Catherine's nephew, wouldn't allow an annulment while he was in control.
0:25:09 > 0:25:14Wolsey was the first to be dragged under by this crisis.
0:25:14 > 0:25:18Henry had no use for a Mr Fixit who couldn't fix it
0:25:18 > 0:25:23and Wolsey was quickly got rid off, ostensibly for fraud and corruption.
0:25:23 > 0:25:30Within a year he was dead, charges of high treason still hanging over his head.
0:25:30 > 0:25:38It was Anne herself who at some point in 1530 steered the whole problem in a radically new direction.
0:25:38 > 0:25:44She put into Henry's hands a little book that to her seemed not only fundamentally true,
0:25:44 > 0:25:48but also, given present circumstances, extremely useful.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51It was by William Tyndale
0:25:51 > 0:25:58and it was called On The Obedience Of A Christian Man And How Christian Rulers Ought To Govern.
0:25:58 > 0:26:02Like all Tyndale's work, it was a pungent read.
0:26:02 > 0:26:08"One king, one law is God's ordinance in every realm," he wrote.
0:26:08 > 0:26:14In other words, the writ of the Bishop of Rome did not run in England.
0:26:14 > 0:26:17But Anne wasn't finished yet.
0:26:17 > 0:26:21With a mixture of conviction and self-interest,
0:26:21 > 0:26:25she got a think tank of theologians, including Thomas Cranmer,
0:26:25 > 0:26:32to come up with documents from the history of the early Church, proving royal supremacy.
0:26:32 > 0:26:37The more he learned about his supreme power, the better Henry liked it.
0:26:37 > 0:26:41It may have begun as a tactic in political intimidation,
0:26:41 > 0:26:47but now the royal supremacy seemed on its own merits a self-evident truth.
0:26:47 > 0:26:54You can almost hear him exclaiming, "How could I have been so dull as to have missed this?"
0:26:58 > 0:27:02Not surprisingly, around the summer of 1530,
0:27:02 > 0:27:08the telling word, "imperial" begins to show up regularly in Henry's remarks.
0:27:08 > 0:27:12Emperors, of course, acknowledge no superior on earth.
0:27:13 > 0:27:21Henry's ego, never exactly a modest part of his personality, now began to balloon to imperial proportions.
0:27:21 > 0:27:27And he'd got the palaces to house it - 50 of them before his reign was done.
0:27:27 > 0:27:32Some of the grandest had been Wolsey's, most notably Hampton Court,
0:27:32 > 0:27:36which now became the stage for the swaggering theatre of court life.
0:27:41 > 0:27:49Nothing measures the imperial scale of Henry's court better than the size of the space needed to feed its gut.
0:27:49 > 0:27:54Here at the kitchens at Hampton Court, 230 people were employed
0:27:54 > 0:28:00servicing another 1,000 who every day were entitled to eat at the king's expense.
0:28:00 > 0:28:04Three vast larders for the meat alone.
0:28:04 > 0:28:12A specially designed wet larder for holding fish, supplied by water drawn from the fountains outside.
0:28:12 > 0:28:16Spicearies, fruitaries, six immense fireplaces,
0:28:16 > 0:28:21three gargantuan cellars capable of holding the 300 casks of wine
0:28:21 > 0:28:26and the 600,000 gallons of ale downed each year by this court.
0:28:26 > 0:28:33And at the centre of it all, though carefully protected in the privy chamber from undue exhibition,
0:28:33 > 0:28:39was England's new Caesar, the king, at 40, colossal, autocratic,
0:28:39 > 0:28:46bestriding the realm with all the god-like power and authority of the Roman Caesars.
0:28:48 > 0:28:56Now, inevitably, the Church, with its allegiance to Rome, found itself on the wrong side of a nasty argument.
0:28:56 > 0:29:01They must have shivered at the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace
0:29:01 > 0:29:08when Henry said of his bishops, "They be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects."
0:29:12 > 0:29:17The threat was clear and the capitulation inevitable.
0:29:17 > 0:29:22It came in spring, 1532, with the so-called Submission Of The Clergy
0:29:22 > 0:29:25which conceded all Henry's demands.
0:29:25 > 0:29:31From now on, the laws of the Church will be governed by the will of the king
0:29:31 > 0:29:33and the king's will was clear.
0:29:33 > 0:29:40Divorce from Catherine, marriage to Anne, Princess Mary to be declared a bastard,
0:29:40 > 0:29:47recognition for the unborn child that by the spring of 1533 was already swelling Anne's belly.
0:29:47 > 0:29:53Anne was duly crowned at Westminster Abbey in May by a new Archbishop of Canterbury,
0:29:53 > 0:29:56the obliging Thomas Cranmer.
0:30:04 > 0:30:08This was not yet a Protestant Reformation.
0:30:08 > 0:30:14The English Church had broken from Rome, but no core doctrines had been touched.
0:30:14 > 0:30:21The real presence of Christ in the mass was preserved, priests were expected to be celibate,
0:30:21 > 0:30:23prayers and the Bible were in Latin.
0:30:23 > 0:30:30The beautiful stained glass at Fairford Church in Gloucester offended no official doctrines.
0:30:30 > 0:30:34And so things might have remained, but they didn't.
0:30:34 > 0:30:41To understand why, we must look at one of the most extraordinary working partnerships in British history...
0:30:41 > 0:30:48Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey's former enforcer and now secretary of state.
0:30:50 > 0:30:56Here are the Tudor odd couple, on the frontispiece of an English Bible.
0:30:57 > 0:31:02Take away any one of them and the Reformation wouldn't have happened,
0:31:02 > 0:31:06or at least not in the way it did, because they were like two pillars.
0:31:06 > 0:31:13Theological on the left, political on the right, with the king triumphant in the middle.
0:31:13 > 0:31:17Their agenda was more radical than the king's.
0:31:17 > 0:31:23Cromwell's Protestantism came from the kind of anti-establishment killer instinct you might expect
0:31:23 > 0:31:27from the Putney clever dick out to make a name for himself.
0:31:27 > 0:31:32Cranmer's convictions were more profound and thoughtful,
0:31:32 > 0:31:36but he too had strong personal reasons to side with the Reformers.
0:31:36 > 0:31:40Shortly before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
0:31:40 > 0:31:45Cranmer had secretly married a German woman, Margaretta,
0:31:45 > 0:31:50thereby committing himself to one of Luther's most shocking innovations.
0:31:52 > 0:31:58Cranmer, like Cromwell, was devoted to the Renaissance idea of a strong prince in a strong Christian state.
0:31:58 > 0:32:06The people would be given their Bible from on high, authorised, and no other version would be tolerated.
0:32:06 > 0:32:12This picture of an orderly, even authoritarian Church of England is what you see...
0:32:12 > 0:32:19on the frontispiece of this great Bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell and published in 1539.
0:32:24 > 0:32:31Thomas Cromwell is probably the least sentimental Englishman ever to run the country.
0:32:31 > 0:32:36He understood with the clarity that Henry could never quite manage
0:32:36 > 0:32:43that it would not be enough to proclaim the break with Rome, then expect everyone to fall into line.
0:32:43 > 0:32:47He was anticipating a fight and he was prepared to fight hard.
0:32:49 > 0:32:56Cromwell knew that sooner or later the Pope would throw his big gun into the battle - excommunication.
0:32:56 > 0:33:04And if the king was to win the war, he'd better fight back with something quite novel in politics - patriotism.
0:33:04 > 0:33:10The country had to be aroused to a new sense of its sovereignty, its potency.
0:33:10 > 0:33:14Demonise Rome as the foreigner, the alien, the enemy.
0:33:17 > 0:33:24To this engine of chauvinist propaganda, Cromwell added the necessary machinery of coercion.
0:33:24 > 0:33:28An oath had to be sworn, recognising the royal supremacy,
0:33:28 > 0:33:35the legitimacy of the heirs of the King and Queen Anne and the bastardisation of the Lady Mary.
0:33:35 > 0:33:38Insulting the new queen was treason.
0:33:38 > 0:33:43Calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason.
0:33:43 > 0:33:48For the first time in English law, it was a crime just to say things.
0:33:50 > 0:33:55Cromwell turned England into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place
0:33:55 > 0:33:59where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty
0:33:59 > 0:34:07and countless petty scores got settled by people who protested that they were just doing the right thing.
0:34:13 > 0:34:19Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime did his shock troops seem to enjoy their work more thoroughly
0:34:19 > 0:34:24than in the visitations to the monasteries,
0:34:24 > 0:34:29done with lightning speed, during the course of 1535 and early 1536.
0:34:29 > 0:34:33The uprooting of nearly 10,000 monks and nuns,
0:34:33 > 0:34:37the destruction of an entire ancient way of life,
0:34:37 > 0:34:40had little to do with reforming zeal.
0:34:43 > 0:34:48When you look at Cromwell's flying squads up close and in action,
0:34:48 > 0:34:55you don't get the impression that they thought of themselves as renovators. Wreckers, more likely.
0:34:55 > 0:34:59They seemed to enjoy their work a bit too much.
0:34:59 > 0:35:05"I laid unto him a concealment of treason," wrote one of Cromwell's hit men to his chief,
0:35:05 > 0:35:08about a prior he had at his mercy.
0:35:08 > 0:35:13"I called him heinous traitor in the worst terms I could devise,
0:35:13 > 0:35:15"and him all the time kneeling
0:35:15 > 0:35:22"and making intercession unto me not to utter to you the premises of his undoing."
0:35:22 > 0:35:24Such were the pleasures of reform.
0:35:24 > 0:35:29The property bonanza that followed the dissolution of the monasteries
0:35:29 > 0:35:34was on a scale no other English revolution ever approached.
0:35:34 > 0:35:39Abbeys like this one at Laycock were offered at bargain basement prices
0:35:39 > 0:35:44and loyalty to the new order secured with bricks and mortar.
0:35:44 > 0:35:47The former residents were soon forgotten
0:35:47 > 0:35:54or reduced to delectable family legends of headless nuns and spectral monks.
0:36:13 > 0:36:18Let's call the next chapter of the story Circa Regna Tonat.
0:36:18 > 0:36:21"Around the throne the thunder roars."
0:36:21 > 0:36:23CRASH OF THUNDER
0:36:23 > 0:36:30Thomas Wyatt used the line in a poem written in a cell in the Tower of London
0:36:30 > 0:36:34after he'd witnessed the execution of five innocent men.
0:36:34 > 0:36:40A few days later, an innocent woman would also die. As you probably know, she was Anne Boleyn,
0:36:40 > 0:36:47and as you can probably guess, the author of this bloody drama was Thomas Cromwell.
0:36:50 > 0:36:55It wasn't the birth in 1533 of a baby girl, Elizabeth, that did for Anne.
0:36:55 > 0:37:00Henry WAS disappointed, but he didn't turn against his new wife.
0:37:00 > 0:37:07No, he laid his hand on the baby's head, recognising her as his legitimate daughter
0:37:07 > 0:37:09and hoped for better luck next time.
0:37:09 > 0:37:13Eighteen months later, Anne was pregnant again.
0:37:13 > 0:37:18At the beginning of January, 1536, more good news.
0:37:18 > 0:37:20Catherine of Aragon was dead.
0:37:20 > 0:37:23Henry was relieved.
0:37:23 > 0:37:28"God be praised," he said, "that we are free from all suspicion of war."
0:37:30 > 0:37:37Maybe it was at this point that the cogs and wheels of Cromwell's mind started to whirl.
0:37:37 > 0:37:44For Cromwell had decided to engineer a reconciliation between Henry and the Emperor Charles V.
0:37:44 > 0:37:52With the Emperor's Aunt Catherine now safely dead, the timing was perfect, except for one thing...
0:37:52 > 0:37:53Anne.
0:37:53 > 0:38:01The price of peace would include the re-legitimatising of Lady Mary and to this Anne would never agree.
0:38:01 > 0:38:05Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned, Anne must go.
0:38:08 > 0:38:10On 29th January, Anne miscarried.
0:38:10 > 0:38:14Had the baby lived, it would have been a boy.
0:38:14 > 0:38:19The disaster seems to have reawakened Henry's darkest fears.
0:38:19 > 0:38:23"I see now that God will never give me a male heir," he told Anne.
0:38:23 > 0:38:30To one of his intimates, he hinted that Anne had seduced him through witchcraft.
0:38:30 > 0:38:36Anne was defenceless. Cromwell moved against her with breathtaking speed and ferocity.
0:38:36 > 0:38:43From the decision to act, taken around Easter, 1536, to the first arrests took just two weeks.
0:38:43 > 0:38:46Anne was doomed.
0:38:49 > 0:38:54What Cromwell now cooked up was a thing of pure devilry -
0:38:54 > 0:38:59a finely measured brew, one part paranoia, one part pornography.
0:38:59 > 0:39:04Moments of dalliance, nothing really untoward in a Renaissance court,
0:39:04 > 0:39:09a handkerchief drooped at a May Day tilt, not belonging to the king,
0:39:09 > 0:39:14a dance taken with a young man, also not the king, a blown kiss, a giggle,
0:39:14 > 0:39:21all these were twisted by Cromwell into a carnival of unholy traitorous sex.
0:39:22 > 0:39:27The queen, it seems, had had sex with just about everyone.
0:39:27 > 0:39:29She'd had sex with her court musician
0:39:29 > 0:39:35and with the groom of the stool, the most important courtier in the privy chamber,
0:39:35 > 0:39:40she'd had sex with the king's tennis partner, presumably between sets.
0:39:40 > 0:39:42She'd even had sex with her brother.
0:39:42 > 0:39:49She had presided like some possessed Messalina over this diabolical orgy of treason,
0:39:49 > 0:39:57even perhaps conspiring to pass off the poisoned fruit of all this copulation as the royal heir.
0:39:58 > 0:40:04The confession of her musician, Mark Smeaton, extracted under torture,
0:40:04 > 0:40:10supplied the fig leaf of legality for Cromwell's judicial murders.
0:40:10 > 0:40:14All five of Anne's so-called lovers were sent to the block.
0:40:14 > 0:40:21Thomas Wyatt, swept up in a wave of arrests, but spared prosecution, saw them die,
0:40:21 > 0:40:25peering through a grating of his cell in the bell tower.
0:40:26 > 0:40:32"The bell tower showed me such a sight that in my head sticks day and night
0:40:32 > 0:40:34"There did I learn out the grate,
0:40:34 > 0:40:37"For all favour, glory or might
0:40:37 > 0:40:41"That yet circa regna tonat."
0:40:47 > 0:40:50Two days later, it was Anne's turn.
0:40:50 > 0:40:56As a special privilege, an expert swordsman had been brought over from France to do the job.
0:40:56 > 0:41:04"I heard say the executioner is very good," Anne told the constable of the Tower, "and I have a little neck."
0:41:04 > 0:41:09And then she put her hands round her throat and burst out laughing.
0:41:19 > 0:41:23When news of Anne's execution reached Dover,
0:41:23 > 0:41:28it was said the candles in the town's church spontaneously ignited.
0:41:30 > 0:41:32For the vast majority of the country,
0:41:32 > 0:41:37which despite the break with Rome still regarded itself as Catholic,
0:41:37 > 0:41:45her death seemed like a long-overdue judgement on those they called heretics and twopenny bookmen.
0:41:51 > 0:41:58Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up his assault on the old religion with a series of fierce injunctions,
0:41:58 > 0:42:05enforcing royal supremacy and crushing the cult of saints and shrines.
0:42:05 > 0:42:12The Becket shrine in Canterbury, the richest in the land, was vandalised and ransacked.
0:42:14 > 0:42:16The following year, 1537,
0:42:16 > 0:42:23Henry, with a new wife, Jane Seymour, celebrated the longed-for arrival of a son, Edward,
0:42:23 > 0:42:28but twelve days later, mourned the death of his new queen.
0:42:30 > 0:42:35At Walsingham, the statue of the Virgin was burned.
0:42:35 > 0:42:41Henry's account book for that year contains the following bald statement...
0:42:41 > 0:42:48"Payment for the king's great candle at Walsingham, salary for the abbot - nil."
0:42:50 > 0:42:52But then a remarkable thing happened.
0:42:52 > 0:42:57The king had had enough and tried to put the genie back in its bottle.
0:42:57 > 0:43:02An instinctive conservative, he'd been angered and alarmed
0:43:02 > 0:43:08by the passions that religious controversy had aroused and he blamed the English Bible.
0:43:08 > 0:43:12Instead of being read quietly with silence,
0:43:12 > 0:43:18the Bible was now being bandied about in acrimonious disputes that raged in alehouses and taverns -
0:43:18 > 0:43:25the exact opposite of the respectful scenes promised in Cromwell's Great Bible.
0:43:25 > 0:43:27In 1543, a law was introduced
0:43:27 > 0:43:34restricting the reading of the Bible in English to churchmen, noblemen and gentry.
0:43:34 > 0:43:41For ordinary people who'd got used to the idea of an English-speaking God, this was a real deprivation.
0:43:41 > 0:43:47We get an inkling of that in a brief inscription written that year by an Oxfordshire shepherd
0:43:47 > 0:43:50on the flyleaf of a religious tract.
0:43:50 > 0:43:57It reads, "I bought this book when the Testament was abrogated that shepherds might not read it.
0:43:57 > 0:44:04"I pray God amend that blindness. Written by Robert Williams, keeping sheep upon Saintbury hill."
0:44:09 > 0:44:14By the time Williams wrote his prayer on his hillside,
0:44:14 > 0:44:18the course of reform in England had suffered major setbacks.
0:44:19 > 0:44:22In 1540, Cromwell had fallen,
0:44:22 > 0:44:29tossed to the executioner after his schemes for an alliance with Europe's Lutheran princes collapsed.
0:44:30 > 0:44:32Unfortunately for Cromwell,
0:44:32 > 0:44:39the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves, the mail-order bride he'd arranged for Henry,
0:44:39 > 0:44:44had turned out to be nowhere near as cute as Hans Holbein had painted her.
0:44:46 > 0:44:50By then, Parliament had enacted the Six Articles
0:44:50 > 0:44:57which, under pain of death, outlawed marriage for priests and reaffirmed the sanctity of the mass.
0:44:59 > 0:45:06To the dismay of the reformers, these core Catholic beliefs turned out to be Henry's, too.
0:45:09 > 0:45:14So Henry's final position on matters of religion was this -
0:45:14 > 0:45:19a national Church, divorced from Rome but remarried to the English crown,
0:45:19 > 0:45:24stripped of cults and shows, but still in essence Catholic.
0:45:24 > 0:45:30All things considered, Henry was pretty satisfied with the middle way he thought he'd found.
0:45:30 > 0:45:37Which is what we see in this massive picture by Hans Holbein -
0:45:37 > 0:45:44King Henry all-powerful, all-knowing, the guardian and ruler of the temporal AND the spiritual realm.
0:45:44 > 0:45:49The munchkins grovelling at his feet are the Guild of Barber Surgeons.
0:45:50 > 0:45:57They hail the king as a healer, a great physician, just how Henry liked to see himself in his final years -
0:45:57 > 0:46:03the Tudor medicine man who had laid the body of England on the operating table
0:46:03 > 0:46:07and cut out the cancers of popery and superstition.
0:46:07 > 0:46:14The patient was now fully recovered, the nation duly grateful, the operation a complete success.
0:46:17 > 0:46:22Except of course it wasn't. Because after Henry came Henry's children -
0:46:22 > 0:46:26with their own ideas of what was best for the country's health.
0:46:26 > 0:46:31Edward, the heir apparent and his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth -
0:46:31 > 0:46:36both restored to the succession a few weeks before their father's death.
0:46:36 > 0:46:43Between them, they covered the spectrum from hard-line Protestant to fanatical Catholic.
0:46:43 > 0:46:50And the road the country took after Henry - back to a Catholic past, or forwards into a Protestant future -
0:46:50 > 0:46:56depended as never before on the lottery of births, deaths and marriages.
0:47:00 > 0:47:08When Henry died in 1547, he left £600 to pay for two priests to say prayers for his soul for ever.
0:47:08 > 0:47:15You have to wonder how he apparently failed to notice that Edward had been educated by fervent Protestants
0:47:15 > 0:47:20who obviously had no time for such superstitious nonsense.
0:47:24 > 0:47:30Led by Thomas Cranmer, they saw the nine-year-old boy king as the new Josiah -
0:47:30 > 0:47:35the biblical king who had taken it as his mission to destroy idolatry.
0:47:37 > 0:47:45This would be the real Reformation. For just look what happened in the six years of Edward's reign.
0:47:45 > 0:47:49All the customs and ceremonies of the old church -
0:47:49 > 0:47:53the blessing of candles at Candlemass and palms on Palm Sunday were banned.
0:47:55 > 0:47:59Away went the religious guilds and fraternities.
0:47:59 > 0:48:05The cults of saints that survived Cromwell's attacks, with their relics and pilgrimages, were forbidden.
0:48:05 > 0:48:13And images, statues, stained glass, paintings were attacked with chisels and limewash.
0:48:21 > 0:48:28A new book of Common Prayer, now required in all parishes, brought English into the church service.
0:48:30 > 0:48:37To get a measure of that cultural revolution, you need only come to Hailes church in Gloucestershire.
0:48:42 > 0:48:47Three years of state-sponsored iconoclasm have produced this.
0:48:47 > 0:48:52No more stone altar, just a user-friendly communion table.
0:48:58 > 0:49:04This whole arrangement is designed to abolish the distance between the priest and his flock.
0:49:04 > 0:49:11The screen which had been a barrier, protecting the mystery of the mass, is now just a way into the communion,
0:49:11 > 0:49:15a gathering of the faithful along with their priest.
0:49:16 > 0:49:23As if all this wasn't shocking enough, imagine that Sunday in 1550
0:49:23 > 0:49:29when, for the first time, the priest invited the congregation to partake of communion
0:49:29 > 0:49:35using those English words never before heard in church - "dearly beloved".
0:49:35 > 0:49:40The familiarity of this must have made many of them squirm,
0:49:40 > 0:49:45rather like these days hearing a trendy vicar insist, "Call me Bob!"
0:49:45 > 0:49:53This radical transformation wouldn't have been possible without the active support of Edward.
0:49:53 > 0:50:01While Edward led the Protestant state, resistance came close to home, as he recalls in his diary -
0:50:01 > 0:50:05The lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster,
0:50:05 > 0:50:10where, after salutations, she was called of my council into a chamber,
0:50:10 > 0:50:15where it was declared how long I had suffered her mass.
0:50:15 > 0:50:20She answered that her soul was God's and her faith she would not change,
0:50:20 > 0:50:24nor would she dissemble her opinion with contrary doings.
0:50:24 > 0:50:31Edward's chronicle records one of several run-ins that he and his councillors had with Mary.
0:50:31 > 0:50:37The mass had been outlawed since the Act of Uniformity in 1549, but Mary ignored the ban -
0:50:37 > 0:50:42indeed, she increased her attendance to two, even three times a day.
0:50:42 > 0:50:47She may have had a martyr complex a mile wide,
0:50:47 > 0:50:54but Catholic Mary knew her challenge was simply to bide her time until Edward died, preferably childless.
0:50:54 > 0:50:59And sure enough, in 1553, this is just what happened.
0:51:05 > 0:51:12And so England's first female ruler since Queen Matilda ascended the throne with just two aims in mind -
0:51:12 > 0:51:20to return England to its obedience to Rome and to produce a Catholic male heir who would keep it that way.
0:51:20 > 0:51:25Mary's first aim was achieved with amazingly little resistance,
0:51:25 > 0:51:32after it was made clear that all that real estate sold off during the dissolution of the monasteries
0:51:32 > 0:51:34would not be restored to the Church.
0:51:34 > 0:51:39In 1554, both Houses of Parliament, contrite as naughty children,
0:51:39 > 0:51:44knelt and asked forgiveness from the Pope's legate, Cardinal Paul,
0:51:44 > 0:51:49for all the anti-papal legislation passed since the 1530s.
0:51:49 > 0:51:57Orders went out for the repainting of churches, the carving of roods, the restoration of the Latin mass.
0:52:00 > 0:52:07Heretical England had been received back into the fold, forgiven by Mother Rome.
0:52:10 > 0:52:13But all this would be literally fruitless
0:52:13 > 0:52:19if Mary was unable to produce a good Roman Catholic heir.
0:52:19 > 0:52:26Her choice of husband was Philip II of Spain, a union which had, for Mary, a special personal meaning -
0:52:26 > 0:52:31the vindication of her long-dead Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon.
0:52:31 > 0:52:38If a Spanish Catholic marriage had been right for England THEN, then it should be right for England now.
0:52:38 > 0:52:44But that was 50 years ago. Much had been done that could not now be undone.
0:52:48 > 0:52:55A Catholic marriage NOW was not something that could be taken for granted.
0:52:55 > 0:53:00It now seemed a BAD match. It seemed a "foreign idea".
0:53:00 > 0:53:06"The Queen is a Spaniard at heart," it was said, "and loves another realm better than this."
0:53:06 > 0:53:14When Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer, led an army to the gates of London,
0:53:14 > 0:53:21he cast himself as a patriot pledged, he said, "to the avoidance of strangers."
0:53:21 > 0:53:25Xenophobia was not enough to dethrone Queen Mary.
0:53:25 > 0:53:28Wyatt's army melted away.
0:53:37 > 0:53:44Ecstatic that for the first time in her lonely life, she had someone she could rely on, a Spanish consort,
0:53:44 > 0:53:52Mary set about the zealous work of cleansing her realm of the Protestant heresy,
0:53:52 > 0:54:00undoing Edward's Reformation as completely as she could - by fire, if that's what it took. And it did.
0:54:02 > 0:54:09In three years, 220 men and 60 women were burned on Mary's bonfires.
0:54:09 > 0:54:14Some, like Archbishop Cranmer, were high-profile victims.
0:54:14 > 0:54:19But most were ordinary people - cloth-workers and cutlers.
0:54:19 > 0:54:23And it wasn't just the literate who died.
0:54:23 > 0:54:30Morlands White, a fisherman, paid for his son to go to school and learn to read
0:54:30 > 0:54:35so the boy could read the Bible to him each night after supper.
0:54:35 > 0:54:42Joan Waist of Darby, a poor blind woman, saved up for a New Testament, and paid people to read it to her.
0:54:46 > 0:54:52But all this was in vain - for Mary, like Edward, died childless,
0:54:52 > 0:54:59suffering frantically through two false pregnancies - the second a cancer of the womb.
0:54:59 > 0:55:03The resurrection of Catholic England was doomed.
0:55:03 > 0:55:08Anne Boleyn had triumphed from the grave over Catherine of Aragon,
0:55:08 > 0:55:15as HER daughter, Elizabeth, would outlast Mary and undo all her pious hopes.
0:55:19 > 0:55:22Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,
0:55:22 > 0:55:29someone who would bring the violent pendulum swings of the religious war back to a calm and steady centre -
0:55:29 > 0:55:36a middle way between the courses chosen by her half-brother and her half-sister.
0:55:39 > 0:55:42She outlawed the mass
0:55:42 > 0:55:46and brought back the Book of Common Prayer,
0:55:46 > 0:55:49but allowed and encouraged priests to remain celibate,
0:55:49 > 0:55:54and was in no hurry to abolish the Catholic calendar of saint's days.
0:55:54 > 0:55:59But if Elizabeth put out the fires of religious fanaticism,
0:55:59 > 0:56:04she lit them in the breasts of patriotic Englishmen and women.
0:56:04 > 0:56:06For as cautious as she was,
0:56:06 > 0:56:13Elizabeth couldn't help her reign being seen by many as the reinstatement of a truly English way.
0:56:16 > 0:56:23Under Elizabeth, Englishness was discovered, celebrated, shouted from the rooftops -
0:56:23 > 0:56:27and it was, above all, a PROTESTANT Englishness.
0:56:27 > 0:56:32With hindsight, God MUST have meant this to happen all along.
0:56:32 > 0:56:37Now Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same.
0:56:37 > 0:56:44And the history you've just seen, which, at the outset had nothing to do with national identity,
0:56:44 > 0:56:46at the end, became obsessed with it.
0:56:46 > 0:56:53When the Pope offered to bless anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth, that bond only strengthened.
0:56:53 > 0:56:59Now Catholics would be forced to choose between their church and their queen.
0:57:01 > 0:57:08English Catholic priests, trained in foreign seminaries, would be smuggled into the country
0:57:08 > 0:57:16and end up either dead or in hiding with Catholic families who were rich and powerful enough to protect them.
0:57:20 > 0:57:25So if we ask the question we asked at the beginning of the programme -
0:57:25 > 0:57:29whatever happened to Catholic England?
0:57:29 > 0:57:37The answer is that it ended up down here in a priest hole like this one at Sawston Hall outside Cambridge -
0:57:37 > 0:57:42the splendour of Long Melford reduced to a cloak-and-dagger church.
0:57:47 > 0:57:50For the Catholics of Elizabeth's England
0:57:50 > 0:57:56the retreat of the priesthood to the country house would be a final disaster.
0:57:56 > 0:58:02What was once the national church would become a faith on the run.