Burning Convictions A History of Britain by Simon Schama


Burning Convictions

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There are ghosts in this place.

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You don't notice them right away.

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

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Limestone, limewash, nothing fancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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A world of brilliant images.

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The world of Catholic England.

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For centuries, this didn't sound strained.

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

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

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Images of the Virgin, the apostles and the saints,

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once cherished and glorified, were now mocked and vandalised.

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

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painted over with verses from an English Bible.

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

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

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

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and because the Reformation and the wars of religion it triggered

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

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

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

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Whatever did happen to Catholic England?

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

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thinking that the English Reformation was a historic inevitability -

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

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

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

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Along with the Becket shrine at Canterbury,

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

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a tradition revived this century by High-Church Anglicans.

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

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

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

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not in the depths of East Anglia.

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But even then, as today, not everybody approved.

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

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

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

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

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The Tudors were regular and devout pilgrims.

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

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offering a necklace of rubies and dedicating a giant candle

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

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

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What a strange world this Catholic England was.

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The urge for renewal and reform

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

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But all apparent contradictions could be accommodated

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under the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church.

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And what a mother she was!

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

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This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money.

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

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

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thanks to an account left by Roger Martin,

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

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

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

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

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"with the story of Christ's Passion,

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

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"And at the north end of the same altar

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

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

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

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He describes a living world of processions and festivals,

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ceremonies and rituals, involving the whole community.

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

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

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

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Hoc est corpus meum...

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

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But elsewhere other hands were hard at work.

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

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translated into English and printed in black and white.

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

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

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But manuscripts represented hard labour and cost pounds to buy.

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

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The idea of a Bible in English,

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

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

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

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Tyndale is a recognisable historical type.

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

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

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

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In 1524, Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe,

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

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

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

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Within weeks, copies were on sale in London.

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What followed was an English version of the Inquisition.

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Denunciations, arrests, book burnings, show trials.

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

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

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And in 1530, symbolism gave way to gruesome reality

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

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

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The Reformation had claimed its first victim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The young king was a spectacular sight.

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You could practically smell the testosterone.

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

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

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

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His famous breezy charm was dispensed like the English weather -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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and featuring young Henry himself as lead singer-songwriter.

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

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

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

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against King Louis of France.

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

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

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Henry pushed on without him

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

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into a major victory called the Battle of the Spurs.

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Meanwhile, back home, Queen Catherine and her councillors

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managed a military victory of major importance at Flodden Field,

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

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Behind all this activity at home and abroad,

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

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

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

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

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

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The occasional document will slide across the desk for signature,

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

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

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Someone who could stroke Parliament when necessary,

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

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

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

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Wolsey also understood the relationship between display and power.

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

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

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

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was supposed to be a demonstration of heartfelt amity,

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

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

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

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

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Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England -

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earls, bishops, knights of the shire,

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

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dressed in crimson velvet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Her name was Anne Boleyn.

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

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

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

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and concentrate on meaty stuff,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Margaret was recognised as the world authority on courtly love,

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

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

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

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

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Anne returned to England in 1522,

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

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

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

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but she knew how to exploit her natural vivaciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make.

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

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"And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

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

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

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Noli me tangere - do not touch.

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

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

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

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

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She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not.

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

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

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the possibility of a son and heir.

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

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

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

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but Henry began to recoil from his queen.

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

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By the time Anne came on the scene,

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

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The king was an assiduous reader of Scripture.

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

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

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who as usual refused to become his mistress,

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

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

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but the Pope couldn't oblige,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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but also, given present circumstances, extremely useful.

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It was by William Tyndale

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

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

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

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

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But Anne wasn't finished yet.

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With a mixture of conviction and self-interest,

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

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

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

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It may have begun as a tactic in political intimidation,

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

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

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Not surprisingly, around the summer of 1530,

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

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Emperors, of course, acknowledge no superior on earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three vast larders for the meat alone.

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

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Spicearies, fruitaries, six immense fireplaces,

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three gargantuan cellars capable of holding the 300 casks of wine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The threat was clear and the capitulation inevitable.

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

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which conceded all Henry's demands.

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

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and the king's will was clear.

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

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

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

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the obliging Thomas Cranmer.

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This was not yet a Protestant Reformation.

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

0:30:080:30:14

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

0:30:140:30:21

prayers and the Bible were in Latin.

0:30:210:30:23

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

0:30:230:30:30

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

0:30:300:30:34

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

0:30:340:30:41

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

0:30:410:30:48

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

0:30:500:30:56

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

0:30:570:31:02

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

0:31:020:31:06

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

0:31:060:31:13

Their agenda was more radical than the king's.

0:31:130:31:17

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

0:31:170:31:23

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

0:31:230:31:27

Cranmer's convictions were more profound and thoughtful,

0:31:270:31:32

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

0:31:320:31:36

Shortly before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,

0:31:360:31:40

Cranmer had secretly married a German woman, Margaretta,

0:31:400:31:45

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

0:31:450:31:50

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

0:31:520:31:58

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

0:31:580:32:06

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

0:32:060:32:12

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

0:32:120:32:19

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

0:32:240:32:31

He understood with the clarity that Henry could never quite manage

0:32:310:32:36

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

0:32:360:32:43

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

0:32:430:32:47

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

0:32:490:32:56

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

0:32:560:33:04

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

0:33:040:33:10

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

0:33:100:33:14

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

0:33:170:33:24

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

0:33:240:33:28

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

0:33:280:33:35

Insulting the new queen was treason.

0:33:350:33:38

Calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason.

0:33:380:33:43

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

0:33:430:33:48

Cromwell turned England into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place

0:33:500:33:55

where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty

0:33:550:33:59

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

0:33:590:34:07

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

0:34:130:34:19

than in the visitations to the monasteries,

0:34:190:34:24

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

0:34:240:34:29

The uprooting of nearly 10,000 monks and nuns,

0:34:290:34:33

the destruction of an entire ancient way of life,

0:34:330:34:37

had little to do with reforming zeal.

0:34:370:34:40

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

0:34:430:34:48

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

0:34:480:34:55

They seemed to enjoy their work a bit too much.

0:34:550:34:59

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

0:34:590:35:05

about a prior he had at his mercy.

0:35:050:35:08

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

0:35:080:35:13

"and him all the time kneeling

0:35:130:35:15

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

0:35:150:35:22

Such were the pleasures of reform.

0:35:220:35:24

The property bonanza that followed the dissolution of the monasteries

0:35:240:35:29

was on a scale no other English revolution ever approached.

0:35:290:35:34

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

0:35:340:35:39

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

0:35:390:35:44

The former residents were soon forgotten

0:35:440:35:47

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

0:35:470:35:54

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

0:36:130:36:18

"Around the throne the thunder roars."

0:36:180:36:21

CRASH OF THUNDER

0:36:210:36:23

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

0:36:230:36:30

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

0:36:300:36:34

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

0:36:340:36:40

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

0:36:400:36:47

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

0:36:500:36:55

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

0:36:550:37:00

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

0:37:000:37:07

and hoped for better luck next time.

0:37:070:37:09

Eighteen months later, Anne was pregnant again.

0:37:090:37:13

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

0:37:130:37:18

Catherine of Aragon was dead.

0:37:180:37:20

Henry was relieved.

0:37:200:37:23

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

0:37:230:37:28

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

0:37:300:37:37

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

0:37:370:37:44

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

0:37:440:37:52

Anne.

0:37:520:37:53

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

0:37:530:38:01

Therefore, so Cromwell reasoned, Anne must go.

0:38:010:38:05

On 29th January, Anne miscarried.

0:38:080:38:10

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

0:38:100:38:14

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

0:38:140:38:19

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

0:38:190:38:23

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

0:38:230:38:30

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

0:38:300:38:36

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

0:38:360:38:43

Anne was doomed.

0:38:430:38:46

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

0:38:490:38:54

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

0:38:540:38:59

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

0:38:590:39:04

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

0:39:040:39:09

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

0:39:090:39:14

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

0:39:140:39:21

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

0:39:220:39:27

She'd had sex with her court musician

0:39:270:39:29

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

0:39:290:39:35

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

0:39:350:39:40

She'd even had sex with her brother.

0:39:400:39:42

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

0:39:420:39:49

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

0:39:490:39:57

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

0:39:580:40:04

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

0:40:040:40:10

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

0:40:100:40:14

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

0:40:140:40:21

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

0:40:210:40:25

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

0:40:260:40:32

"There did I learn out the grate,

0:40:320:40:34

"For all favour, glory or might

0:40:340:40:37

"That yet circa regna tonat."

0:40:370:40:41

Two days later, it was Anne's turn.

0:40:470:40:50

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

0:40:500:40:56

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

0:40:560:41:04

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

0:41:040:41:09

When news of Anne's execution reached Dover,

0:41:190:41:23

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

0:41:230:41:28

For the vast majority of the country,

0:41:300:41:32

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

0:41:320:41:37

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

0:41:370:41:45

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

0:41:510:41:58

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

0:41:580:42:05

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

0:42:050:42:12

The following year, 1537,

0:42:140:42:16

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

0:42:160:42:23

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

0:42:230:42:28

At Walsingham, the statue of the Virgin was burned.

0:42:300:42:35

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

0:42:350:42:41

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

0:42:410:42:48

But then a remarkable thing happened.

0:42:500:42:52

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

0:42:520:42:57

An instinctive conservative, he'd been angered and alarmed

0:42:570:43:02

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

0:43:020:43:08

Instead of being read quietly with silence,

0:43:080:43:12

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

0:43:120:43:18

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

0:43:180:43:25

In 1543, a law was introduced

0:43:250:43:27

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

0:43:270:43:34

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

0:43:340:43:41

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

0:43:410:43:47

on the flyleaf of a religious tract.

0:43:470:43:50

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

0:43:500:43:57

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

0:43:570:44:04

By the time Williams wrote his prayer on his hillside,

0:44:090:44:14

the course of reform in England had suffered major setbacks.

0:44:140:44:18

In 1540, Cromwell had fallen,

0:44:190:44:22

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

0:44:220:44:29

Unfortunately for Cromwell,

0:44:300:44:32

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

0:44:320:44:39

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

0:44:390:44:44

By then, Parliament had enacted the Six Articles

0:44:460:44:50

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

0:44:500:44:57

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

0:44:590:45:06

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

0:45:090:45:14

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

0:45:140:45:19

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

0:45:190:45:24

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

0:45:240:45:30

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

0:45:300:45:37

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

0:45:370:45:44

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

0:45:440:45:49

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

0:45:500:45:57

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

0:45:570:46:03

and cut out the cancers of popery and superstition.

0:46:030:46:07

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

0:46:070:46:14

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

0:46:170:46:22

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

0:46:220:46:26

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

0:46:260:46:31

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

0:46:310:46:36

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

0:46:360:46:43

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

0:46:430:46:50

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

0:46:500:46:56

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

0:47:000:47:08

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

0:47:080:47:15

who obviously had no time for such superstitious nonsense.

0:47:150:47:20

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

0:47:240:47:30

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

0:47:300:47:35

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

0:47:370:47:45

All the customs and ceremonies of the old church -

0:47:450:47:49

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

0:47:490:47:53

Away went the religious guilds and fraternities.

0:47:550:47:59

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

0:47:590:48:05

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

0:48:050:48:13

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

0:48:210:48:28

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

0:48:300:48:37

Three years of state-sponsored iconoclasm have produced this.

0:48:420:48:47

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

0:48:470:48:52

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

0:48:580:49:04

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

0:49:040:49:11

a gathering of the faithful along with their priest.

0:49:110:49:15

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

0:49:160:49:23

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

0:49:230:49:29

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

0:49:290:49:35

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

0:49:350:49:40

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

0:49:400:49:45

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

0:49:450:49:53

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

0:49:530:50:01

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

0:50:010:50:05

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

0:50:050:50:10

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

0:50:100:50:15

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

0:50:150:50:20

nor would she dissemble her opinion with contrary doings.

0:50:200:50:24

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

0:50:240:50:31

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

0:50:310:50:37

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

0:50:370:50:42

She may have had a martyr complex a mile wide,

0:50:420:50:47

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

0:50:470:50:54

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

0:50:540:50:59

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

0:51:050:51:12

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

0:51:120:51:20

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

0:51:200:51:25

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

0:51:250:51:32

would not be restored to the Church.

0:51:320:51:34

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

0:51:340:51:39

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

0:51:390:51:44

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

0:51:440:51:49

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

0:51:490:51:57

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

0:52:000:52:07

But all this would be literally fruitless

0:52:100:52:13

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

0:52:130:52:19

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

0:52:190:52:26

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

0:52:260:52:31

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

0:52:310:52:38

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

0:52:380:52:44

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

0:52:480:52:55

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

0:52:550:53:00

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

0:53:000:53:06

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

0:53:060:53:14

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

0:53:140:53:21

Xenophobia was not enough to dethrone Queen Mary.

0:53:210:53:25

Wyatt's army melted away.

0:53:250:53:28

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

0:53:370:53:44

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

0:53:440:53:52

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

0:53:520:54:00

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

0:54:020:54:09

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

0:54:090:54:14

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

0:54:140:54:19

And it wasn't just the literate who died.

0:54:190:54:23

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

0:54:230:54:30

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

0:54:300:54:35

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

0:54:350:54:42

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

0:54:460:54:52

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

0:54:520:54:59

The resurrection of Catholic England was doomed.

0:54:590:55:03

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

0:55:030:55:08

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

0:55:080:55:15

Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,

0:55:190:55:22

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

0:55:220:55:29

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

0:55:290:55:36

She outlawed the mass

0:55:390:55:42

and brought back the Book of Common Prayer,

0:55:420:55:46

but allowed and encouraged priests to remain celibate,

0:55:460:55:49

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

0:55:490:55:54

But if Elizabeth put out the fires of religious fanaticism,

0:55:540:55:59

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

0:55:590:56:04

For as cautious as she was,

0:56:040:56:06

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

0:56:060:56:13

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

0:56:160:56:23

and it was, above all, a PROTESTANT Englishness.

0:56:230:56:27

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

0:56:270:56:32

Now Protestantism and patriotism were one and the same.

0:56:320:56:37

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

0:56:370:56:44

at the end, became obsessed with it.

0:56:440:56:46

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

0:56:460:56:53

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

0:56:530:56:59

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

0:57:010:57:08

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

0:57:080:57:16

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

0:57:200:57:25

whatever happened to Catholic England?

0:57:250:57:29

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

0:57:290:57:37

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

0:57:370:57:42

For the Catholics of Elizabeth's England

0:57:470:57:50

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

0:57:500:57:56

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

0:57:560:58:02

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