Burning Convictions A History of Britain by Simon Schama

There are ghosts in this place.

You don't notice them right away.

At first glance, Binham Priory in Norfolk looks like a typical English country church - plain and simple.

Limestone, limewash, nothing fancy.

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

That grandiose, timber-vaulted roof, those multi-storey arcades,

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

Then you start to fill in the gaps and bit by bit a lost world remakes itself.

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

A world of brilliant images.

The world of Catholic England.

For centuries, this didn't sound strained.

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

And then, in a generation, it stopped being a truism and started being treason.

Images of the Virgin, the apostles and the saints,

once cherished and glorified, were now mocked and vandalised.

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

painted over with verses from an English Bible.

Today they're restored, but the world over which they once presided is dead and gone.

We can't bring back the lost world of Binham's painted saints, whole and alive again.

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

and because the Reformation and the wars of religion it triggered

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

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

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

Whatever did happen to Catholic England?

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

thinking that the English Reformation was a historic inevitability -

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

But on the eve of the Reformation, Catholicism in England was vibrant, popular and very much alive.

This is Walsingham in Norfolk, once the home of the miracle-working shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Along with the Becket shrine at Canterbury,

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

a tradition revived this century by High-Church Anglicans.

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

A gaudy, rowdy mix of hucksterism and holiness, piety and plaster saints.

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

not in the depths of East Anglia.

But even then, as today, not everybody approved.

Erasmus, the Catholic scholar superstar of the age, came here on a mock pilgrimage

and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk and chapels airmailed in from the Holy Land.

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

and tolerated, though not necessarily endorsed, by members of the ruling Tudor dynasty.

The Tudors were regular and devout pilgrims.

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

offering a necklace of rubies and dedicating a giant candle

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

Prince Henry died within weeks, but the king's candle continued to burn at the shrine for many years to come.

What a strange world this Catholic England was.

The urge for renewal and reform

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

But all apparent contradictions could be accommodated

under the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church.

And what a mother she was!

Come to Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford in Suffolk and you'll see just what I mean.

This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money.

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

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

thanks to an account left by Roger Martin,

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

Writing in the very different times of Queen Elizabeth, Roger Martin, with a mixture of pride and regret,

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

"At the back of the high altar, there was a goodly mount carved very artificially

"with the story of Christ's Passion,

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

"And at the north end of the same altar

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

"in which there was one fair large gilt image of the Holy Trinity, besides other fine images."

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

He describes a living world of processions and festivals,

ceremonies and rituals, involving the whole community.

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

guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Christian belief.

Every time the priest celebrated communion, Christ crucified would be there in flesh and blood.

Hoc est corpus meum...

The priest was the indispensable man and there was no getting to heaven but through his hands.

But elsewhere other hands were hard at work.

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

translated into English and printed in black and white.

Handwritten English Bibles had been in circulation since the days of the Lollards,

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

But manuscripts represented hard labour and cost pounds to buy.

However, a printed New Testament could be mass produced and sold for a tenth of the price.

The idea of a Bible in English,

cheap and freely available to anyone who could read, put the fear of God into the authorities.

William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous task

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

Tyndale is a recognisable historical type.

Austere, steely, unswerving, even a little fanatical, and disarmingly clear in his own convictions.

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

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

In 1524, Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe,

ending up in Worms in Germany, a city which had recently been made safely Protestant

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

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

Within weeks, copies were on sale in London.

What followed was an English version of the Inquisition.

Denunciations, arrests, book burnings, show trials.

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

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

And in 1530, symbolism gave way to gruesome reality

when a priest named Thomas Hitton confessed to smuggling in a New Testament.

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

The Reformation had claimed its first victim.

And cheering all this on from the sidelines was the king, Henry VIII, dutiful son of the Church

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

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

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

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

the man who, without really meaning to, turned Catholic England into a Protestant nation.

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

But when his older brother Arthur died, Henry, aged eleven, became heir apparent.

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

The marriage alliance between Spain and England was just too important to be allowed to lapse.

In 1509, King Henry VII died and his 17-year-old son came into his own.

The young king was a spectacular sight.

You could practically smell the testosterone.

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

In the saddle, on the dance floor, or on the tennis court,

where a besotted courtier wrote of the king's skin, "Glowing through the fabric of his finely woven shirt."

His famous breezy charm was dispensed like the English weather -

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

The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, punch-in-the-belly, arm-round-the-shoulders kind,

which, depending on his mood, could betoken either sudden promotion or imminent arrest.

Henry wallowed in the praise lavished on him by courtiers and ambassadors.

Henry the gallant, Henry the handsome, Henry the superstar,

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

and featuring young Henry himself as lead singer-songwriter.

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

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

He tried to get his Spanish father-in-law, King Ferdinand, to come in on joint ventures

against King Louis of France.

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

shamelessly exploiting Henry's lust for glory but failing to deliver on the promised armies.

Henry pushed on without him

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

into a major victory called the Battle of the Spurs.

Meanwhile, back home, Queen Catherine and her councillors

managed a military victory of major importance at Flodden Field,

which left the King of the Scots, James IV, and a dozen Scottish earls, dead on the battlefield.

Behind all this activity at home and abroad,

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

was one of the greatest organisational brains of the age...

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

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

someone who comes to work every day and says, "And what would be your pleasure, Majesty?" and then does it.

The occasional document will slide across the desk for signature,

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

Wolsey was a consummate manager. Attentive to detail in both matters and men.

Someone who could stroke Parliament when necessary,

or bang even very aristocratic heads together when that was called for.

He was a master manipulator of patronage, of honours, of bribes and of threats.

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

Wolsey also understood the relationship between display and power.

He used it for his own ends here at Hampton Court, but he also used it for the king,

acting as impresario for one of the greatest shows in his career, the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

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

was supposed to be a demonstration of heartfelt amity,

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

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

But it came to war, anyway, not with weapons, but something much more deadly - style.

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

Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England -

earls, bishops, knights of the shire,

5,000 men, including, in a display of unconvincing humility, the Cardinal on muleback,

dressed in crimson velvet.

Music played, wine ran red and white from fountains, a great deal of heron got eaten.

The two kings spent hours trying on glamorous outfits that could be worn only once.

They wrestled with knotty problems of state, and with each other,

the nimbler Francis at one point throwing Henry on his back. No doubt he laughed. No doubt he hated it.

Somewhere in the middle of all this melee was a young Englishwoman,

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

This was the woman who would bring Wolsey's immense house of power crashing down in ruins

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

Her name was Anne Boleyn.

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

so many Hollywood movies made, so many bodice-buster romances produced,

but us serious historians are supposed to avert our gaze from the tragic soap opera of her life

and concentrate on meaty stuff,

like the social and political origins of the Reformation or the Tudor revolution in government.

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

because on close inspection it turns out that she was, after all, historical prime cause number one.

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

She had been away from England off and on since the age of twelve,

when her diplomat father, Thomas, arranged for her to become maid-of-honour to Margaret of Austria

at one of her many courts, this one here at Mecklin in Flanders.

Margaret was recognised as the world authority on courtly love,

that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation around which a whole culture had grown up.

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

troubadours, masks, silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing. That was the theory, anyway.

Underneath the stage-managed surface, the old basic instincts seethed away.

Anne returned to England in 1522,

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

Anne Boleyn entered the glittering, dangerous world of the Tudor court in her twenties.

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

but she knew how to exploit her natural vivaciousness

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

One of the first to fall was a man every bit as sophisticated as she was - Thomas Wyatt.

The epitome of the Renaissance courtier. A soldier, a diplomat and above all a poet.

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

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

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

and in one of his famous poems compares himself to a hunter, vainly chasing a deer.

Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne was that she should become his mistress -

not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make.

Besides, there was another reason why Wyatt would never catch his hind, as his poem goes on to explain.

"And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

"there is written her fair neck round about, 'Noli me tangere

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

Noli me tangere - do not touch.

For Caesar, otherwise known as Henry VIII, had already committed himself to the chase.

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

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

The man who, as Wolsey could testify, hated writing letters, wrote umpteen in his attempts to woo her.

She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not.

Ten years younger, merry rather than pious, spirited rather than gravely deferential,

Anne opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness and perhaps most important than any of these,

the possibility of a son and heir.

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

and the death of their son Henry, who despite the offerings made at Walsingham, lived only a few weeks.

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

but Henry began to recoil from his queen.

After more than 20 years, Henry had no legitimate male heir and no prospect of one.

By the time Anne came on the scene,

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

The king was an assiduous reader of Scripture.

There must have been a sharp intake of breath when he read Leviticus 20, verse 21, in which God tells Moses,

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

who as usual refused to become his mistress,

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

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

but the Pope couldn't oblige,

for in May 1527, the armies of the Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and made Pope Clement a virtual prisoner.

Charles, Queen Catherine's nephew, wouldn't allow an annulment while he was in control.

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

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

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

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

It was Anne herself who at some point in 1530 steered the whole problem in a radically new direction.

She put into Henry's hands a little book that to her seemed not only fundamentally true,

but also, given present circumstances, extremely useful.

It was by William Tyndale

and it was called On The Obedience Of A Christian Man And How Christian Rulers Ought To Govern.

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

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

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

But Anne wasn't finished yet.

With a mixture of conviction and self-interest,

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

to come up with documents from the history of the early Church, proving royal supremacy.

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

It may have begun as a tactic in political intimidation,

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

You can almost hear him exclaiming, "How could I have been so dull as to have missed this?"

Not surprisingly, around the summer of 1530,

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

Emperors, of course, acknowledge no superior on earth.

Henry's ego, never exactly a modest part of his personality, now began to balloon to imperial proportions.

And he'd got the palaces to house it - 50 of them before his reign was done.

Some of the grandest had been Wolsey's, most notably Hampton Court,

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

Nothing measures the imperial scale of Henry's court better than the size of the space needed to feed its gut.

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

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

Three vast larders for the meat alone.

A specially designed wet larder for holding fish, supplied by water drawn from the fountains outside.

Spicearies, fruitaries, six immense fireplaces,

three gargantuan cellars capable of holding the 300 casks of wine

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

And at the centre of it all, though carefully protected in the privy chamber from undue exhibition,

was England's new Caesar, the king, at 40, colossal, autocratic,

bestriding the realm with all the god-like power and authority of the Roman Caesars.

Now, inevitably, the Church, with its allegiance to Rome, found itself on the wrong side of a nasty argument.

They must have shivered at the Archbishop of Canterbury's palace

when Henry said of his bishops, "They be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects."

The threat was clear and the capitulation inevitable.

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

which conceded all Henry's demands.

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

and the king's will was clear.

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

recognition for the unborn child that by the spring of 1533 was already swelling Anne's belly.

Anne was duly crowned at Westminster Abbey in May by a new Archbishop of Canterbury,

the obliging Thomas Cranmer.

This was not yet a Protestant Reformation.

The English Church had broken from Rome, but no core doctrines had been touched.

The real presence of Christ in the mass was preserved, priests were expected to be celibate,

prayers and the Bible were in Latin.

The beautiful stained glass at Fairford Church in Gloucester offended no official doctrines.

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

To understand why, we must look at one of the most extraordinary working partnerships in British history...

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey's former enforcer and now secretary of state.

Here are the Tudor odd couple, on the frontispiece of an English Bible.

Take away any one of them and the Reformation wouldn't have happened,

or at least not in the way it did, because they were like two pillars.

Theological on the left, political on the right, with the king triumphant in the middle.

Their agenda was more radical than the king's.

Cromwell's Protestantism came from the kind of anti-establishment killer instinct you might expect

from the Putney clever dick out to make a name for himself.

Cranmer's convictions were more profound and thoughtful,

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

Shortly before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,

Cranmer had secretly married a German woman, Margaretta,

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

Cranmer, like Cromwell, was devoted to the Renaissance idea of a strong prince in a strong Christian state.

The people would be given their Bible from on high, authorised, and no other version would be tolerated.

This picture of an orderly, even authoritarian Church of England is what you see...

on the frontispiece of this great Bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell and published in 1539.

Thomas Cromwell is probably the least sentimental Englishman ever to run the country.

He understood with the clarity that Henry could never quite manage

that it would not be enough to proclaim the break with Rome, then expect everyone to fall into line.

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

Cromwell knew that sooner or later the Pope would throw his big gun into the battle - excommunication.

And if the king was to win the war, he'd better fight back with something quite novel in politics - patriotism.

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

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

To this engine of chauvinist propaganda, Cromwell added the necessary machinery of coercion.

An oath had to be sworn, recognising the royal supremacy,

the legitimacy of the heirs of the King and Queen Anne and the bastardisation of the Lady Mary.

Insulting the new queen was treason.

Calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason.

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

Cromwell turned England into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place

where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty

and countless petty scores got settled by people who protested that they were just doing the right thing.

Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime did his shock troops seem to enjoy their work more thoroughly

than in the visitations to the monasteries,

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

The uprooting of nearly 10,000 monks and nuns,

the destruction of an entire ancient way of life,

had little to do with reforming zeal.

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

you don't get the impression that they thought of themselves as renovators. Wreckers, more likely.

They seemed to enjoy their work a bit too much.

"I laid unto him a concealment of treason," wrote one of Cromwell's hit men to his chief,

about a prior he had at his mercy.

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

"and him all the time kneeling

"and making intercession unto me not to utter to you the premises of his undoing."

Such were the pleasures of reform.

The property bonanza that followed the dissolution of the monasteries

was on a scale no other English revolution ever approached.

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

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

The former residents were soon forgotten

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

Let's call the next chapter of the story Circa Regna Tonat.

"Around the throne the thunder roars."

CRASH OF THUNDER

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

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

A few days later, an innocent woman would also die. As you probably know, she was Anne Boleyn,

and as you can probably guess, the author of this bloody drama was Thomas Cromwell.

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

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

No, he laid his hand on the baby's head, recognising her as his legitimate daughter

and hoped for better luck next time.

Eighteen months later, Anne was pregnant again.

At the beginning of January, 1536, more good news.

Catherine of Aragon was dead.

Henry was relieved.

"God be praised," he said, "that we are free from all suspicion of war."

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

For Cromwell had decided to engineer a reconciliation between Henry and the Emperor Charles V.

With the Emperor's Aunt Catherine now safely dead, the timing was perfect, except for one thing...

Anne.

The price of peace would include the re-legitimatising of Lady Mary and to this Anne would never agree.

Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned, Anne must go.

On 29th January, Anne miscarried.

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

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

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

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

Anne was defenceless. Cromwell moved against her with breathtaking speed and ferocity.

From the decision to act, taken around Easter, 1536, to the first arrests took just two weeks.

Anne was doomed.

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

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

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

a handkerchief drooped at a May Day tilt, not belonging to the king,

a dance taken with a young man, also not the king, a blown kiss, a giggle,

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

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

She'd had sex with her court musician

and with the groom of the stool, the most important courtier in the privy chamber,

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

She'd even had sex with her brother.

She had presided like some possessed Messalina over this diabolical orgy of treason,

even perhaps conspiring to pass off the poisoned fruit of all this copulation as the royal heir.

The confession of her musician, Mark Smeaton, extracted under torture,

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

All five of Anne's so-called lovers were sent to the block.

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

peering through a grating of his cell in the bell tower.

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

"There did I learn out the grate,

"For all favour, glory or might

"That yet circa regna tonat."

Two days later, it was Anne's turn.

As a special privilege, an expert swordsman had been brought over from France to do the job.

"I heard say the executioner is very good," Anne told the constable of the Tower, "and I have a little neck."

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

When news of Anne's execution reached Dover,

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

For the vast majority of the country,

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

her death seemed like a long-overdue judgement on those they called heretics and twopenny bookmen.

Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up his assault on the old religion with a series of fierce injunctions,

enforcing royal supremacy and crushing the cult of saints and shrines.

The Becket shrine in Canterbury, the richest in the land, was vandalised and ransacked.

The following year, 1537,

Henry, with a new wife, Jane Seymour, celebrated the longed-for arrival of a son, Edward,

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

At Walsingham, the statue of the Virgin was burned.

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

"Payment for the king's great candle at Walsingham, salary for the abbot - nil."

But then a remarkable thing happened.

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

An instinctive conservative, he'd been angered and alarmed

by the passions that religious controversy had aroused and he blamed the English Bible.

Instead of being read quietly with silence,

the Bible was now being bandied about in acrimonious disputes that raged in alehouses and taverns -

the exact opposite of the respectful scenes promised in Cromwell's Great Bible.

In 1543, a law was introduced

restricting the reading of the Bible in English to churchmen, noblemen and gentry.

For ordinary people who'd got used to the idea of an English-speaking God, this was a real deprivation.

We get an inkling of that in a brief inscription written that year by an Oxfordshire shepherd

on the flyleaf of a religious tract.

It reads, "I bought this book when the Testament was abrogated that shepherds might not read it.

"I pray God amend that blindness. Written by Robert Williams, keeping sheep upon Saintbury hill."

By the time Williams wrote his prayer on his hillside,

the course of reform in England had suffered major setbacks.

In 1540, Cromwell had fallen,

tossed to the executioner after his schemes for an alliance with Europe's Lutheran princes collapsed.

Unfortunately for Cromwell,

the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves, the mail-order bride he'd arranged for Henry,

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

By then, Parliament had enacted the Six Articles

which, under pain of death, outlawed marriage for priests and reaffirmed the sanctity of the mass.

To the dismay of the reformers, these core Catholic beliefs turned out to be Henry's, too.

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

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

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

All things considered, Henry was pretty satisfied with the middle way he thought he'd found.

Which is what we see in this massive picture by Hans Holbein -

King Henry all-powerful, all-knowing, the guardian and ruler of the temporal AND the spiritual realm.

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

They hail the king as a healer, a great physician, just how Henry liked to see himself in his final years -

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

and cut out the cancers of popery and superstition.

The patient was now fully recovered, the nation duly grateful, the operation a complete success.

Except of course it wasn't. Because after Henry came Henry's children -

with their own ideas of what was best for the country's health.

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

both restored to the succession a few weeks before their father's death.

Between them, they covered the spectrum from hard-line Protestant to fanatical Catholic.

And the road the country took after Henry - back to a Catholic past, or forwards into a Protestant future -

depended as never before on the lottery of births, deaths and marriages.

When Henry died in 1547, he left £600 to pay for two priests to say prayers for his soul for ever.

You have to wonder how he apparently failed to notice that Edward had been educated by fervent Protestants

who obviously had no time for such superstitious nonsense.

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

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

This would be the real Reformation. For just look what happened in the six years of Edward's reign.

All the customs and ceremonies of the old church -

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

Away went the religious guilds and fraternities.

The cults of saints that survived Cromwell's attacks, with their relics and pilgrimages, were forbidden.

And images, statues, stained glass, paintings were attacked with chisels and limewash.

A new book of Common Prayer, now required in all parishes, brought English into the church service.

To get a measure of that cultural revolution, you need only come to Hailes church in Gloucestershire.

Three years of state-sponsored iconoclasm have produced this.

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

This whole arrangement is designed to abolish the distance between the priest and his flock.

The screen which had been a barrier, protecting the mystery of the mass, is now just a way into the communion,

a gathering of the faithful along with their priest.

As if all this wasn't shocking enough, imagine that Sunday in 1550

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

using those English words never before heard in church - "dearly beloved".

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

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

This radical transformation wouldn't have been possible without the active support of Edward.

While Edward led the Protestant state, resistance came close to home, as he recalls in his diary -

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

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

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

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

nor would she dissemble her opinion with contrary doings.

Edward's chronicle records one of several run-ins that he and his councillors had with Mary.

The mass had been outlawed since the Act of Uniformity in 1549, but Mary ignored the ban -

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

She may have had a martyr complex a mile wide,

but Catholic Mary knew her challenge was simply to bide her time until Edward died, preferably childless.

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

And so England's first female ruler since Queen Matilda ascended the throne with just two aims in mind -

to return England to its obedience to Rome and to produce a Catholic male heir who would keep it that way.

Mary's first aim was achieved with amazingly little resistance,

after it was made clear that all that real estate sold off during the dissolution of the monasteries

would not be restored to the Church.

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

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

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

Orders went out for the repainting of churches, the carving of roods, the restoration of the Latin mass.

Heretical England had been received back into the fold, forgiven by Mother Rome.

But all this would be literally fruitless

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

Her choice of husband was Philip II of Spain, a union which had, for Mary, a special personal meaning -

the vindication of her long-dead Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon.

If a Spanish Catholic marriage had been right for England THEN, then it should be right for England now.

But that was 50 years ago. Much had been done that could not now be undone.

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

It now seemed a BAD match. It seemed a "foreign idea".

"The Queen is a Spaniard at heart," it was said, "and loves another realm better than this."

When Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer, led an army to the gates of London,

he cast himself as a patriot pledged, he said, "to the avoidance of strangers."

Xenophobia was not enough to dethrone Queen Mary.

Wyatt's army melted away.

Ecstatic that for the first time in her lonely life, she had someone she could rely on, a Spanish consort,

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

undoing Edward's Reformation as completely as she could - by fire, if that's what it took. And it did.

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

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

But most were ordinary people - cloth-workers and cutlers.

And it wasn't just the literate who died.

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

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

Joan Waist of Darby, a poor blind woman, saved up for a New Testament, and paid people to read it to her.

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

suffering frantically through two false pregnancies - the second a cancer of the womb.

The resurrection of Catholic England was doomed.

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

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

Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,

someone who would bring the violent pendulum swings of the religious war back to a calm and steady centre -

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

She outlawed the mass

and brought back the Book of Common Prayer,

but allowed and encouraged priests to remain celibate,

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

But if Elizabeth put out the fires of religious fanaticism,

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

For as cautious as she was,

Elizabeth couldn't help her reign being seen by many as the reinstatement of a truly English way.

Under Elizabeth, Englishness was discovered, celebrated, shouted from the rooftops -

and it was, above all, a PROTESTANT Englishness.

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

Now Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same.

And the history you've just seen, which, at the outset had nothing to do with national identity,

at the end, became obsessed with it.

When the Pope offered to bless anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth, that bond only strengthened.

Now Catholics would be forced to choose between their church and their queen.

English Catholic priests, trained in foreign seminaries, would be smuggled into the country

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

So if we ask the question we asked at the beginning of the programme -

whatever happened to Catholic England?

The answer is that it ended up down here in a priest hole like this one at Sawston Hall outside Cambridge -

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

For the Catholics of Elizabeth's England

the retreat of the priesthood to the country house would be a final disaster.

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