There are ghosts in this 0:00:18

place.
You don't notice them right away.
At first glance, Binham Priory in Norfolk looks like a typical English country c
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 treaso
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
We can't bring back the lost world of Binham's painted saints, whole and aliv
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
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, popu
alive.
This is Walsingham in Norfolk, once the home of the miracle-working shrine
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 pi
and poured scorn on tales of sacred milk and chapels airmailed in from the H
But his was the minority intellectual view, safely expressed in Latin,
and tolerated, though not necessarily endorsed, by members of the ruling Tu
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 th
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 wh
This magnificent building was paid for with Suffolk wool money.
However, what you see today are just the bare bones of what it was suppose
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 Ma
Writing in the very different times of Queen Elizabeth, Roger Martin, with a m
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 artificial
"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
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 se
guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Christian belief.
Every time the priest celebrated communion, Christ crucified would be there
blood.
Hoc est corpus meum...
The priest was the indispensable man and there was no getting to heaven bu
hands.
But elsewhere other hands were hard at work.
The miracle-working priest was about to be challenged by the word of God it
translated into English and printed in black and white.
Handwritten English Bibles had been in circulation since the days of the Lolla
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 t
The idea of a Bible in English,
cheap and freely available to anyone who could read, put the fear of God int
William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous ta
of translating, publishing and printing an English version of the New Testame
Tyndale is a recognisable historical type.
Austere, steely, unswerving, even a little fanatical, and disarmingly clear in h
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 tong
In 1524, Tyndale fled London for mainland Europe,
ending up in Worms in Germany, a city which had recently been made safely
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 Testa
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 so
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 Prote
Well, for a start, he was never supposed to be king.
But when his older brother Arthur died, Henry, aged eleven, became heir app
He also acquired his brother's wife, the Spanish Catherine of Aragon.
The marriage alliance between Spain and England was just too important 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 fabri
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-rou
kind,
which, depending on his mood, could betoken either sudden promotion or im
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 F
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
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 prom
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
Behind all this activity at home and abroad,
keeping the army supplied, negotiating the treaties, channelling the king's en
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
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
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 thre
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 th
acting as impresario for one of the greatest shows in his career, the Field of
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 de
In the greatest transportation exercise seen since the campaigns of Edward
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 m
dressed in crimson velvet.
Music played, wine ran red and white from fountains, a great deal of heron g
The two kings spent hours trying on glamorous outfits that could be worn onl
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 lau
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 cra
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 produc
but us serious historians are supposed to avert our gaze from the tragic soap
and concentrate on meaty stuff,
like the social and political origins of the Reformation or the Tudor revolution
But try as we might, we keep coming back time and again to the subject of A
because on close inspection it turns out that she was, after all, historical prim
one.
At the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Anne would have been a teenag
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-hono
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
Desire, endlessly deferred, sexual passion transfigured into pure, selfless lov
troubadours, masks, silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing. That was the theory
Underneath the stage-managed surface, the old basic instincts seethed awa
Anne returned to England in 1522,
a sophisticated, accomplished, ambitious young woman with a mind of her o
Anne Boleyn entered the glittering, dangerous world of the Tudor court in he
Physically she was no raving beauty, despite the long, black hair and dark ey
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 - Tho
The epitome of the Renaissance courtier. A soldier, a diplomat and above al
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 chasin
Unable to divorce his wife, all that Wyatt could offer Anne was that she shou
mistress -
not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make.
Besides, there was another reason why Wyatt would never catch his hind, as
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 t
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 i
woo her.
She represented everything Catherine of Aragon was not.
Ten years younger, merry rather than pious, spirited rather than gravely defe
Anne opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness and perhaps mos
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 Walsing
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 prospec
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, v
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 ma
a virtual prisoner.
Charles, Queen Catherine's nephew, wouldn't allow an annulment while he w
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 hea
It was Anne herself who at some point in 1530 steered the whole problem in
direction.
She put into Henry's hands a little book that to her seemed not only fundame
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
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 roya
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 h
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 ba
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
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 expe
Three vast larders for the meat alone.
A specially designed wet larder for holding fish, supplied by water drawn from
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
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 C
Now, inevitably, the Church, with its allegiance to Rome, found itself on the w
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 sca
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 b
recognition for the unborn child that by the spring of 1533 was already swelli
Anne was duly crowned at Westminster Abbey in May by a new Archbishop
the obliging Thomas Cranmer.
This was not yet a Protestant Reformation.
The English Church had broken from Rome, but no core doctrines had been
The real presence of Christ in the mass was preserved, priests were expecte
prayers and the Bible were in Latin.
The beautiful stained glass at Fairford Church in Gloucester offended no offi
And so things might have remained, but they didn't.
To understand why, we must look at one of the most extraordinary working p
British history...
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey's former enfor
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 m
Their agenda was more radical than the king's.
Cromwell's Protestantism came from the kind of anti-establishment killer inst
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 pr
Christian state.
The people would be given their Bible from on high, authorised, and no othe
tolerated.
This picture of an orderly, even authoritarian Church of England is what you
on the frontispiece of this great Bible commissioned by Thomas Cromwell an
1539.
Thomas Cromwell is probably the least sentimental Englishman ever to run t
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 ev
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
excommunication.
And if the king was to win the war, he'd better fight back with something quite
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 ma
coercion.
An oath had to be sworn, recognising the royal supremacy,
the legitimacy of the heirs of the King and Queen Anne and the bastardisatio
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 we
right thing.
Nowhere in Cromwell's strong-arm regime did his shock troops seem to enjo
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. W
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 t
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 und
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 monk
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 Londo
after he'd witnessed the execution of five innocent men.
A few days later, an innocent woman would also die. As you probably know,
Boleyn,
and as you can probably guess, the author of this bloody drama was Thoma
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 da
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 starte
For Cromwell had decided to engineer a reconciliation between Henry and th
Charles V.
With the Emperor's Aunt Catherine now safely dead, the timing was perfect,
thing...
Anne.
The price of peace would include the re-legitimatising of Lady Mary and to th
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 witchc
Anne was defenceless. Cromwell moved against her with breathtaking speed
From the decision to act, taken around Easter, 1536, to the first arrests took
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 cham
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 o
even perhaps conspiring to pass off the poisoned fruit of all this copulation a
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 th
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 Fra
"I heard say the executioner is very good," Anne told the constable of the To
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 hereti
bookmen.
Cromwell, meanwhile, stepped up his assault on the old religion with a series
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
The following year, 1537,
Henry, with a new wife, Jane Seymour, celebrated the longed-for arrival of a
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 - ni
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 E
Instead of being read quietly with silence,
the Bible was now being bandied about in acrimonious disputes that raged in
taverns -
the exact opposite of the respectful scenes promised in Cromwell's Great Bib
In 1543, a law was introduced
restricting the reading of the Bible in English to churchmen, noblemen and ge
For ordinary people who'd got used to the idea of an English-speaking God,
deprivation.
We get an inkling of that in a brief inscription written that year by an Oxfordsh
on the flyleaf of a religious tract.
It reads, "I bought this book when the Testament was abrogated that shephe
read it.
"I pray God amend that blindness. Written by Robert Williams, keeping shee
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 Lut
collapsed.
Unfortunately for Cromwell,
the Lutheran princess, Anne of Cleves, the mail-order bride he'd arranged fo
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
mass.
To the dismay of the reformers, these core Catholic beliefs turned out to be H
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 thou
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 A
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
final years -
the Tudor medicine man who had laid the body of England on the operating
and cut out the cancers of popery and superstition.
The patient was now fully recovered, the nation duly grateful, the operation a
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 fanat
And the road the country took after Henry - back to a Catholic past, or forwar
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 f
ever.
You have to wonder how he apparently failed to notice that Edward had bee
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 Jo
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 y
reign.
All the customs and ceremonies of the old church -
the blessing of candles at Candlemass and palms on Palm Sunday were ban
Away went the religious guilds and fraternities.
The cults of saints that survived Cromwell's attacks, with their relics and pilgr
forbidden.
And images, statues, stained glass, paintings were attacked with chisels and
A new book of Common Prayer, now required in all parishes, brought Englis
service.
To get a measure of that cultural revolution, you need only come to Hailes ch
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 prie
The screen which had been a barrier, protecting the mystery of the mass, is
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 comm
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 su
While Edward led the Protestant state, resistance came close to home, as he
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
The mass had been outlawed since the Act of Uniformity in 1549, but Mary ig
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 Edwa
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
aims in mind -
to return England to its obedience to Rome and to produce a Catholic male h
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
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 rest
Latin mass.
Heretical England had been received back into the fold, forgiven by Mother R
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
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 sho
England now.
But that was 50 years ago. Much had been done that could not now be undo
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 be
When Thomas Wyatt, the son of Anne Boleyn's old poetical admirer, led an a
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 re
consort,
Mary set about the zealous work of cleansing her realm of the Protestant her
undoing Edward's Reformation as completely as she could - by fire, if that's w
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 re
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, a
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 th
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 hope
Elizabeth cast herself as the healer,
someone who would bring the violent pendulum swings of the religious war b
and steady centre -
a middle way between the courses chosen by her half-brother and her half-s
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 o
way.
Under Elizabeth, Englishness was discovered, celebrated, shouted from the
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
at the end, became obsessed with it.
When the Pope offered to bless anyone who would assassinate Elizabeth, th
strengthened.
Now Catholics would be forced to choose between their church and their que
English Catholic priests, trained in foreign seminaries, would be smuggled in
and end up either dead or in hiding with Catholic families who were rich and
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 Saw
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.