You might think you know everything there is to know about Henry VIII.
You will know he married six times
and had two of his wives executed.
But the truth about our most famous king is much more complex
and far more compelling.
This series tells Henry's story
over six of the most tumultuous decades in English history,
separating the real man from the myth.
To some, Henry was a cruel bully.
Henry was self-obsessed, desired admiration.
He could never be wrong.
He wanted the theatre of punishment to be perfect.
This is what happens when you defy Henry.
To others, he was a charismatic and successful ruler.
He jousts, he rides, he sings.
What more could you want from this perfect prince?
But Henry's personality, his innermost thoughts
and his motivations have remained elusive.
Today, we might call Henry a little bit OCD.
It was said of him he couldn't hold somebody's gaze.
He felt uncomfortable.
Now, a team of Tudor experts have come together
to investigate who the real Henry was.
They'll unearth never-before-seen documents,
including some from the Vatican's archives.
Thank you so much for showing me
one of the greatest prizes in Tudor history.
And they'll go backstage at Henry's court
to unravel a murky world of power, plots and petrifying ambition.
The Tudor court is a bear pit.
It's an aggressive and violent place.
When somebody is no longer useful to him,
that's it. He cuts them out. It's almost pathological.
He was willing to change the entire country,
even the entire map of Europe,
in order to get what he wanted.
Henry VIII is born on 28th June, 1491.
But he's never meant to be king in the first place.
He is the spare heir,
living in the shadow of his older brother, Prince Arthur.
As the second son,
the younger of the princes,
comparisons could be made with Prince Harry.
In fact, Henry was known as Harry for much of his childhood,
and there are some similarities physically as well.
He was allowed, really, to be a little bit wilder,
to indulge his favourite pastimes.
He just didn't have the same pressures as his elder brother.
Henry clearly sees himself as the spare, rather than the heir.
I suppose, in some ways, that might be liberating,
but in other ways, it might nurture a certain jealousy.
But Henry, later in life, has this urge to prove himself all the time,
to show that he can be a success, even at his most successful,
and there's something
that must relate there to his childhood.
His mother and all her female attendants
spoilt him and made sure
that the hard knocks
and bruises of boyhood
weren't inflicted on their charge,
and anything he wanted, he got.
As the second son, Henry is ignored by his father,
and instead, raised by his loving mother
in the protective female world of Eltham Palace.
Henry's relationship with his mother was unusually close.
His mother seems to have taken a real care
for the education of her son.
For a royal princess to grow up in this sort of environment
wasn't that unusual.
For a royal prince, however,
it was a little bit strange,
and it just goes to show how unimportant, really,
Henry was considered in the line of succession.
But when Henry is just ten years old,
something happens that transforms his life.
Unexpectedly, his older brother dies,
leaving him as heir to the throne.
He's no longer the second son.
He is the first son, and he's going to be king of England.
It's hard for us to imagine the pressure on him,
the idea of having to take up that position.
To make matters worse, Henry's beloved mother,
Elizabeth of York, dies just months later.
Recently, this remarkable survival
from Henry's childhood has been revealed to us,
and it's incredibly exciting,
because for a long time, it was thought
that this was just any old page in an illuminated manuscript.
But when we look behind this figure of King Henry VII here,
we see King Henry VIII, as he later became, as just a boy.
This weeping child on the edge of an empty bed, that of his mother.
He can't contain his emotion.
His head is thrown into his arms in despair.
We imagine Henry VIII as being
someone that maybe didn't feel emotion,
that wasn't affected by grief,
but we can see, in his reaction to his mother's death,
that it really broke his heart.
He was now the heir to the throne
and he didn't have his mother to guide him.
He had, instead, a very different figure in his father,
a very problematic, I think, figure
to try and move him into this new phase of his life,
and I don't think that made it any easier for him.
Henry's father, Henry VII, won the Wars of the Roses,
a bitter civil war which lasted three decades
and divided the kingdom.
As the first Tudor king,
he united the warring houses of Lancaster and York.
But he now reigns over an unstable and uneasy peace.
Paranoia was part of the Tudor DNA.
The Tudors really had a rather tenuous,
legally fragile claim to the throne of England.
They were a very insecure dynasty.
There is a seed of insecurity planted in Henry
from a very early age.
The political history of his father's reign
has, essentially, been the history of plots and conspiracies,
the hanging-over from the Wars of the Roses,
who's in, who's out, who's being watched.
Everything changes for Henry when he becomes next in line to the throne.
He is now brought up directly by his controlling father,
after years of being sidelined.
Henry's relationship with his father was really complex.
There are lots of eyewitness accounts
that Henry was never permitted to go out of the palace,
he was kept to his rooms,
and that, when he did appear at court,
he never opened his mouth, except to answer a question.
This is so different to the upbringing that Henry had known.
He must have felt like a virtual prisoner.
As soon as Henry VIII is brought under his father's control,
you see his personality just being squished,
almost this overbearing weight of his father's anxieties,
his paranoia, his concern that something might happen
to this last vestige of the Tudor dynasty.
As a very young boy,
he hadn't really had much of his father's attention at all.
But then, of course, suddenly,
Henry had too much of his father's attention.
He found it suffocating
because Henry VII was trying to make up for lost time,
and kind of chiselled this young, wild prince into a future king.
Sometimes, they argued quite violently in front of the court.
On one occasion, a scandalised ambassador reported,
"It looked, this evening, as if the King might murder his son."
Little wonder.
There was a deeply personal resentment against his father.
After seven years of living under this harsh regime,
Henry finally glimpses freedom.
His father is now dying,
and Henry has been summoned to see him one last time.
He knows that, in a few short hours, his father will be dead
and he will be king.
This is a king who is dying,
still not feeling anywhere near secure on his throne.
He wants the Tudor dynasty to continue.
So, to his last breath, he's giving advice to his son
how to secure the realm,
what sort of advisers to surround himself with.
He told Henry that he had to marry Catherine of Aragon,
the widow of his elder brother, Arthur,
and he would rule England with her.
It wasn't a sort of if or but. This is what you're going to do.
And Henry meekly accepted it.
HENRY VII WHISPERS
At exactly an hour before midnight, Henry VII dies.
In that moment,
the 17-year-old Prince Henry becomes King Henry VIII.
Henry's feelings about becoming King would have been
a mixture of apprehension about what was going to happen,
would he be able to smoothly take over the levers of power,
mixed with a wonderful sense of release
that he was going to be his own man, his own master,
and he could do things which he wanted to do
instead of other people telling him.
Remarkably, no-one outside that room will hear
there's a new king on the throne for two whole days.
The story of what happened in that 48-hour period
has intrigued historians for centuries.
The next 48 hours will decide the fate of the kingdom.
As soon as the old king dies,
his closest courtiers start plotting.
When Henry VII dies, there's essentially a court coup.
His death is kept a secret for the best part of two days,
while in the background,
they decide how to bring on this new regime with a splash.
Henry played
a full part in this great cover-up
of his father's death.
Of course, he had a vested interest in it
because he wanted to secure the throne.
For Henry, this is his first real experience
of the ruthless machinations of Tudor politics.
The Tudor court is a bear pit.
It's an aggressive and violent place.
Your best friend can become your enemy
and your enemy can become your best friend.
You need to be able to plan and plot your way
through this vacuum of power,
and in order to do that, you have to make sure
that nobody knows the King is dead, nobody has time
to stage their own coup d'etat.
He must have been affected by this atmosphere
of intense fear and suspicion, not knowing who to trust,
being very, very aware
that, actually, the Tudors were a fragile dynasty.
INAUDIBLE
Henry is convinced that the biggest threat to his new reign
is a rebellion coordinated
by two of his father's most powerful advisers -
Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley.
Empson and Dudley were the sort of slick apparatchiks
that Henry VII brought in to enforce his will,
and they resorted to unsavoury methods -
rigging jurors, accusing people of crimes they hadn't committed.
Probably everybody disliked them.
Early on the morning of 24th April, 1509,
after 48 hours in limbo,
Henry VIII is finally proclaimed King.
But at the same time, he issues orders
for the arrests of Empson and Dudley.
Empson and Dudley are scapegoats. They're convenient.
You get rid of them, you appear to distance yourself
from what has gone before. Politicians do this.
Dudley, open the door! Open up! Dudley!
POUNDS ON DOOR
I think people had underestimated Henry before
because they may have thought that he was merely a puppet
that his father was controlling.
But now, Henry makes it very, very clear
he's the one calling the shots.
In the name of the King. You're coming with us!
Get your hands off me.
The arrests win the new king instant support with his people,
but it's likely that Henry has an ulterior motive.
Henry VIII continued to resent his father for quite some time.
He had had lots of his own impulses suppressed for years and years,
and because Henry couldn't do anything about it
as long as his father was king, when he was gone,
well, there's an opportunity, with Empson and Dudley,
to play out his irritations, his frustrations with his father.
Down the stairs!
On the same day,
Henry issues a ground-breaking piece of legislation - a general pardon.
This extraordinary document sees Henry explicitly criticise
his father's reign.
What Henry is trying to do is to win popularity, and quickly.
So, as well as getting rid of his father's despised ministers,
he issues a general pardon
to all of those who'd fallen foul of Henry VII's justice,
so, of course, this makes him incredibly popular. People love him.
Now, that pardon is basically rubbishing Henry VII.
This is an extraordinary move,
that you use your father's unpopularity
to sell yourself to your subjects.
Henry is telling his subjects that he knew
they had suffered grievously through injustices imposed by his father,
and he was happy to do all he could to right those wrongs.
He wants to begin in a way that is going to make a break with the past.
Of course, it's all about reputation.
It's all about this gleam in his eye that he's going to be
a famous monarch, the best king
that ever reigned in English history.
Henry is determined to distinguish his father's reign from his own.
But that doesn't stop him honouring his father's dying wish
and marrying his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon,
just seven weeks after he becomes king.
Catherine is the most desirable bride in Europe -
the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain,
the most mighty empire in the world at the time.
But I think Henry really did love Catherine of Aragon.
He professes himself to be deeply in love.
It's part of those early grand gestures
which he thinks he can make.
But of course, he's also got an eye on security, and this is a monarchy,
so it means dynastic security, so it means a son.
His attempt to produce a male heir was pragmatic.
He did not intend that the decades of conflict
that had preceded his father's reign would continue into his reign.
And he felt that only a legitimised male heir could do it.
Henry's dream of producing a male heir soon comes true.
On New Year's Day, 1511, Henry does have a son.
Catherine of Aragon gives birth.
Henry was beside himself with joy at having a son and heir.
His hopes and dreams had been realised.
But Henry's happiness is short-lived.
His newborn son dies at just seven weeks old.
BELL TOLLS
Henry doesn't seem to have responded very much at all
to the news of his son's death.
He does comfort Catherine, but there's no real sense,
from any of the chronicles or ambassador records of this time,
that he is actually grieving himself.
He is able to almost put a full stop
on that child's life and move on from it.
He has something intrinsic within him that he can just be cold,
that he can shut down emotion.
Throughout their marriage,
Henry and Catherine will lose a total of six children,
and Henry's anxieties about having a son and heir
will intensify as the years go on.
The big "what if" of Henry's reign is, had that young Prince Henry,
who was born on New Year's Day, 1511, had he survived,
everything would have been different.
Henry would have had that son and heir
from the beginning of the reign, he would have had dynastic security.
Maybe he could have relaxed a bit.
When Henry lost his son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall,
he was also losing the opportunity
to pass on his crown to a legitimised male heir.
He must have wondered, at that moment,
whether that marriage could produce a male heir.
After five years of marriage, Henry still doesn't have a son
and his new dynasty is beginning to show signs of vulnerability.
To bolster his authority, he enlists the talents of a cardinal
who has rapidly risen through the ranks at court.
Cardinal Wolsey is a political genius and a mastermind.
He's Henry's fixer, and he does an incredibly good job.
Of course, Wolsey was the man who would relieve him
of all the tedious business of state.
He is the guy who's going to help Henry fulfil his desires.
If the King wants it, Wolsey will deliver it.
Wolsey is a churchman, but let's just say,
he's not the sort of vicar
that you'd sit down to tea and biscuits with.
He likes the finer things in life.
He insists on being served on golden plates,
he surrounds himself by luxury,
and he also has a few mistresses
and he has at least one illegitimate child.
Thomas Wolsey is somebody who's come from a relatively poor background.
He is the son of a butcher
and people will make jokes about this throughout his career.
He's risen up through the Church to become somebody influential
who wants to make a difference,
and who is delighted to have that opportunity in government
to put all his ideas into practice.
For Henry, Wolsey becomes indispensable.
Henry has always loved outdoor pursuits,
and whilst he hunts, jousts and fights,
the Cardinal takes all matters of state into his own hands.
Henry, in his 20s,
is often described as the most handsome prince in Europe.
He was six foot one, stood above the other courtiers,
and he certainly stood above the general populace.
They could see him coming.
One of the really important things
about Henry and Wolsey's relationship
is that Henry really does believe that Wolsey is his friend.
They walk about together arm in arm in the King's privy garden.
Wolsey can always walk in to see Henry.
He doesn't need to make an appointment.
Other ministers can't do that.
Wolsey, he sees a huge opportunity for himself here and he takes it.
According to most courtiers, he has absolutely no right to be there.
He is of lowly birth.
He's worked his way to the top, which is highly unusual,
but Henry really doesn't have that same snobbishness
that the rest of his court have.
Within a few years, Henry raises Wolsey
to become his chief counsellor and one of his closest friends.
Hidden away in the archives of the Vatican library in Rome
is a remarkable account,
written by a 16th-century Italian diplomat,
which reveals more about their relationship than anything else.
The Vatican has never given permission
for it to be filmed before.
Well, thank you so much for showing me this work.
This is the first time, though, that I've seen the original,
so it's an absolute privilege.
This wonderful work, which is called Anglica Historia.
It is about the history of England
and the King himself,
Henry VIII,
Ariigo 8.
The wonderful thing is, for a historian,
is that this is an eyewitness account...
Yes, yes. ..of Henry VIII and his court.
One of the best bits of his account is his description
of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, so Henry VIII's right-hand man.
I mean, my Italian isn't great, by any means,
but I think, in the page we have open here,
it says what good fun Wolsey was as well. Yes.
He would sing. It talks about him, "cantava, saltava", so, smiled.
"Giocava", he told jokes.
So, he would entertain and tell jokes,
and you can see the appeal of Wolsey for Henry,
I think, from this account.
At first glance, the document paints a picture of Wolsey
as an entertaining member of Henry's court.
But it's not what it first seems.
It reveals that Wolsey has been manipulating Henry
from the moment they met.
This account is not at all flattering about Cardinal Wolsey
and the methods that he employed to manipulate his royal master.
He describes him as a "witty fellow"
who would "cling to the royal side,"
"strum the loot, dance, indulge in pleasant conversation."
He's almost doing his business by stealth.
Henry doesn't realise all the things he's agreeing to.
And that, by these methods,
he would "inculcate, instil and drum into Henry's ears"
all of the messages that Wolsey wanted to get across.
My favourite extract comes when he kind of lures Henry in
by showing him a pretty jewel or a ring.
It's almost like he's treating Henry like a child,
tempting him with sweets, and Henry, then, just agrees
to whatever the Cardinal asks of him.
Henry's weakness for flattery and manipulation
allows Cardinal Wolsey to rise to the highest echelons of court.
But in a few short years,
Henry will turn on his close friend and adviser with a vengeance.
Henry VIII is worrying over the future of the Tudor dynasty.
He still doesn't have a male heir
and he is surrounded by potential rivals to the throne.
All his nightmares, all his problems
haven't gone away.
They've just been, like good wine, lying there,
getting stronger and more colourful.
As Henry gets into his 30s,
we see little glimmers of paranoia,
to the extent that he has started to change his personality.
He's started to mistrust people around him.
As his paranoia grows,
Henry increases the provisions for his personal security.
There is a quite extraordinary security service
surrounding this king.
His food is tasted before he is able to eat it.
There's this elaborate ritual,
in order to put him to bed each night,
where the covers are checked for any knives in his bed.
What effect that must have had on Henry,
because for all his confidence and his sense of invincibility,
he's made very aware, on a daily basis,
that, really, he's incredibly vulnerable.
Henry's suspicions extend to the servants
who surround him day and night.
The barber is one of the very few people
who are allowed close proximity to Henry.
To be the royal barber means that you are holding
a sharpened blade next to the King of England's throat.
If you make one mistake,
you've killed a king, you've committed treason.
And so, therefore, it's very clearly specified
how a barber should be behaving,
even what company they can keep.
These increasing provisions come from his paranoia,
and they also start to feed it,
because every single part of Henry's life was underscored
with this sense of unease and suspicion
about the people around him.
Henry fears an uprising from a rival claimant to the throne,
and he hears a rumour
that the Duke of Buckingham is secretly plotting against him.
The Duke of Buckingham was
the highest-ranking nobleman in England,
and he had royal blood, and lots of it.
Henry is particularly suspicious of Buckingham
because he doesn't make any secret of his claim to the throne,
nor of his desire to be King.
Henry's suspicions reach boiling point
and he writes a letter to Cardinal Wolsey
that seals Buckingham's fate.
Henry's letter survives to this day,
and it's held here at the British Library.
It's extremely exciting for me to see this original letter by Henry.
There actually aren't many of them
because, as Henry himself says here,
he finds writing "tedious and painful".
He tends to entrust that task to scribes.
So, the fact this is in Henry's hand is hugely significant.
This letter was intended for Wolsey's eyes only.
It's top secret.
So, Henry is instructing Wolsey
to "keep good watch on the Duke of Buckingham".
He effectively wants Wolsey to spy on Buckingham.
He is Henry's prime target.
He's the one he is most afraid of.
Wolsey soon uncovers a whole raft of evidence
that's enough to condemn Buckingham for treason.
He's plotting rebellion,
he's even stealing some of Henry's own servants
and placing them in his household.
Also, the thing that rankles most with Henry
is that a monk has prophesied that Buckingham will be King.
Well, for a man as paranoid as Henry,
that really is going to be the nail in the coffin.
Wolsey's investigation produces enough evidence
for Buckingham to be found guilty of treason
and he is beheaded by an inept axeman,
who takes three strokes to cut through his neck.
Henry's treatment of Buckingham is one of the earliest
and most vivid indications of his brutality.
This caused shockwaves across the kingdom.
He wasn't going to suffer any hint of treason,
even amongst the highest nobles of the realm.
Fearing further plots against him,
Henry's attitude to his noblemen changes.
Henry starts to get rid of some of those older courtiers
and counsellors who had surrounded him for a long time.
He mistrusts some of the old nobility
because the Duke of Buckingham has demonstrated
that maybe they can't be entirely trusted,
that they will have agendas of their own.
He replaces them
with the promiscuous, young aristocrats
he grew up with, men he trusts.
But with such a debauched entourage,
Henry's palaces are transformed into houses of pleasure.
Even though Henry joins in with all the fun,
at heart, he's actually quite prudish.
You can almost picture Henry, the morning after,
walking through this scene of devastation
with food strewn everywhere.
There were people just sleeping on the floor wherever they could.
Henry's a real contradictory character in all of this.
On the one hand, he is encouraging this quite wild party atmosphere,
but on the other, he's quite fastidious.
I think, actually, today, we might call Henry a little bit OCD.
For as much as he liked to project himself as a party boy,
actually, he found it all deeply unsettling.
The best evidence of Henry's controlling behaviour is contained
in a little-known court document called the Eltham Ordinances.
The Eltham Ordinances are effectively
a great long list of rules that were drawn up by Cardinal Wolsey
on Henry VIII's command to reform the royal household.
But what's fascinating about them is that they give us
an insight into Henry's psyche.
One of the things that's really clear here
is just how bossy Henry is.
He instructs here that the people in his privy chamber
"shall be loving together and of good unity and accord".
So, in other words, go about your work with a smile.
And, perhaps more importantly, "keeping secret all such things
"as shall be done or said in the same privy chamber".
I mean, this is basically a gagging order.
If you're working for the King,
then don't speak about what you see or hear in the privy chamber.
But for Cardinal Wolsey,
the Eltham Ordinances serve another purpose entirely.
Wolsey had an ulterior motive.
He wanted to control the people who were getting close to the King.
He wanted to ensure that other people couldn't bend his ear
and, as it says here, not intermeddle "of causes or matters".
In other words, the people who were close to the King
should not be talking politics
and they shouldn't be trying to move up in the world.
So, this is really something of a political coup,
at the same time as it is a book of rules
for how the household should behave.
The Eltham Ordinances helped Wolsey to become
the most powerful man in England, other than the King himself.
But there are signs that Henry feels
the Cardinal is getting too big for his boots.
Wolsey runs a court
that is spectacular.
When he holds parties at Hampton Court,
there are hundreds of people there for dinner.
But it's also getting to a point
of almost competing with Henry himself,
and that's a bit of a problem.
Henry starts to look more closely to what people are doing for him,
and that includes Wolsey.
He's contradicting Wolsey from time to time.
They have the odd little clash.
Henry was always in charge,
even when he was just leaving things to other people.
A real indication of Henry's growing unease with Wolsey's status
comes over the issue of Hampton Court.
Wolsey knows that Henry is a bit jealous of it,
and when he realises that he is starting to lose Henry's favour,
he makes this very symbolic gesture of giving it to the King.
BELL CHIMES
As his relationship with Wolsey begins to unravel,
Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon is falling apart.
One of the deep-seated things in Henry's character
is that if something goes wrong, it's always somebody else's fault.
And so, Henry does start to blame Catherine.
After the birth of the Princess Mary, their only child,
there are no more living children, and then, of course,
Catherine is almost six years older than he is
and she's going to enter the menopause, and that worries him.
Throughout his reign, Henry has this problem,
which is that he is King,
he is meant to be in charge of everything,
he's meant to be able to decide his own fate.
And yet, there are so many places in his life
where he then discovers he's not in control of things.
He's not in control of whether his wife has a son.
A queen is there for one principal purpose and that is to produce sons.
Catherine is not doing that
and, therefore, Henry, he's bound to look elsewhere.
Henry's attentions are turning to a young woman at court, Anne Boleyn.
He's had affairs before, but this time, things feel different.
Anne plays things slightly differently.
As soon as it becomes apparent that Henry is considering
the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon,
she starts positioning herself as a potential future bride,
and Henry is quite happy to go along with this.
And so, they start on this attempt
to get Henry's marriage to Catherine declared invalid.
Desperate to end his marriage,
Henry starts searching for a way to divorce Catherine.
Once Henry's decided that he wants to marry Anne Boleyn,
he goes all guns blazing to research this himself.
He gets it into his head that the reason he has no sons
is because he has transgressed that biblical rule in Leviticus
that you must not marry your brother's widow.
The thing about Henry is,
once he has his mind set on a particular course,
he can be extraordinarily cold and ruthless in achieving it,
and anybody who gets in his way, well, they need to watch out.
Henry tasks Wolsey with securing permission from the Pope
to end his marriage.
With the divorce, Henry gives Wolsey an impossible job to do.
Divorce isn't unheard of,
but for a king to set aside a wife
to whom he had been married for 20 years, that doesn't happen.
There is no way that the Pope is going to agree,
and Wolsey must be thinking, "I've got the boss from hell here.
"I just cannot deliver this. What am I going to do?"
Wolsey's attempts to secure a divorce are failing.
Losing patience, Henry takes matters into his own hands
and he initiates a very public trial of his marriage to Catherine.
From Henry's point of view,
the divorce trial should have been a way to sort things out
and get a legal ruling to get his own way.
But the Queen comes in.
She gets down on her knees before Henry
and she makes this extraordinary plea to her husband,
asserting her role as his wife,
pleading for her rights to stay in the marriage.
He doesn't react. There is nothing.
He is not at all swayed by all of this emotion.
This is an indication of that coldness
just coming to the surface in Henry's character.
It's almost like when he's decided
that somebody is no longer useful to him,
that's it, he cuts them out.
He moves onto the next thing. It's almost pathological.
The divorce trial ends in failure
and Henry blames his chief minister.
Wolsey has genuinely tried to get Henry the divorce he wanted,
and it's not really Wolsey's fault that this has not worked out.
I mean, the big balance of power is against him.
And yet, in Henry's mind,
Wolsey has failed in the most significant diplomacy
that Henry has ever asked him to do.
There was this invisible line which Henry drew,
and once you crossed that line, you'd pay the penalty for doing it.
There's no going back. You can't rub out history.
Once you have annoyed Henry, once you have damaged his ego,
you will pay for it,
and Wolsey knew his days were numbered.
Henry VIII has turned his back on his wife
and his closest adviser,
and strange quirks are emerging in his character.
If you actually met Henry VIII, it would be important
not to fix your eye upon him for too long
or stare straight in the face, cos he really didn't like that.
It was said of him he couldn't hold somebody's gaze.
He felt uncomfortable.
This is one of the strongest kings of England,
and yet, there is a certain personal insecurity,
even when he's at his most secure.
Henry has this tendency to turn on his most trusted advisers.
He puts them
in impossible positions,
giving these incredibly difficult tasks,
and when they fail, as inevitably they must,
they get all the blame, not Henry.
Henry banishes Cardinal Wolsey
for his failure to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
Once the King's most powerful subject,
Wolsey is stripped of his post as Lord Chancellor
and his property is seized.
For Cardinal Wolsey, who always saw himself as Henry's man,
to have the King say that he didn't trust him
was completely crushing, and from that moment on,
we don't ever really see him regain Henry's trust.
He's just slowly sliding inexorably towards his ultimate fate.
Wolsey sends Henry a letter begging for his forgiveness.
This letter, held in the National Archives,
gives an insight into Wolsey's desperation.
Wolsey is appealing so completely submissively
to Henry in this letter,
that it starts with, "I, your poor, heavy
"and wretched priest do daily pray, cry and call upon you..."
and then ends with, "Your most prostrate poor chaplain,
"creature..."
Creature - I mean, not even a human being any more,
just a sort of beast of King Henry VIII's.
It could not be more clear in this
that Wolsey is lowering himself in Henry's eyes.
It really is quite heart-wrenching, I think,
that he was reduced to this.
The Cardinal's letter fails to win the King over.
I find Henry VIII quite challenging because time and again,
Henry can't admit himself that he's made a mistake.
He is completely certain that he is in the right at all times,
and so, as a result, the person who gets scapegoated is Wolsey.
Henry issues orders for Wolsey to be arrested
on charges of treason and sent to the Tower of London.
But he will never make it there.
After arriving at Leicester Abbey to spend the night, he collapses...
..and dies.
In the aftermath of Wolsey's death,
one of his servants goes to see Henry
to try and persuade him to look kindly on his old servant.
This is when we see Henry's contradictory nature
because Henry declares,
"If I could lay out £20,000 to bring back the Cardinal,
"I would gladly do it."
In the next breath, he reminds Wolsey's servant
that his master had died whilst owing him £1,500.
After Wolsey's death, it becomes clear
that the Pope will never grant Henry a divorce.
But Henry is so determined to marry Anne Boleyn
that he will stop at nothing to achieve it.
The next few years will see Henry make the cataclysmic decision
to break with the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.
He didn't want to be
responsible to the Pope.
He wanted to centralise power to himself.
It was the only way
he would get a divorce.
It was the only chance of having a son and heir.
Henry has started to radically change
the course of English history.
He transformed every aspect of his kingdom -
religious, political -
but he's developed into a very different man.
He's moved from being someone who is a bit anxious and uncertain
to someone completely convinced of his own rightness,
the justice of all of his decisions.
He was willing to change the entire country,
even the entire map of Europe, in order to get what he wanted.
In the next episode,
Henry turns on his new queen, Anne Boleyn.
The English court is a nest of hissing snakes.
Absolutely nobody is safe.
This reads, "Her crimes were so abominable.
"Anne is the most wicked queen in history."
And Henry's paranoia begins to creep into England's politics.
Henry VIII comes down on opponents with murderous force.
You were either with him or against him,
and if you were against him, you paid for it.
You might think you know everything there is to know about Henry VIII.
You'll know he married six times and had two of his wives executed.
But the truth about our most famous king is much more complex
and far more compelling.
This series tells Henry's story over six of the most tumultuous decades
in English history, separating the real man from the myth.
To some, Henry was a cruel bully.
He wanted the fear of punishment to be perfect.
This is what happens when you defy Henry.
This is what traitors get.
To others, he was a charismatic and successful ruler.
He jousts, he rides, he sings.
What more could you want from this perfect prince?
But Henry's personality, his innermost thoughts
and his motivations have remained elusive.
When somebody is no longer useful to him, that's it - he cuts them out.
It's almost pathological.
Once Henry has his mind set on an idea,
he will stick with it no matter the consequences.
Now, a team of Tudor experts have come together to investigate
who the real Henry was.
Here are Henry's insecurities written in black and white.
They'll unearth never before seen documents, including some
from the Vatican's archives.
Thank you so much for showing me one of the greatest prizes
in Tudor history.
And they'll go backstage at Henry's court to unravel a murky world
of power, plots, and petrifying ambition.
Henry VIII comes down on opponents with murderous force.
Henry's growing increasingly paranoid.
He's starting to lose his grip on reality.
Henry has got older, he's got more tyrannical.
His reign has got bloodier and he's more determined than ever
to get his own way.
Henry VIII is now 41 years old.
His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, has failed to provide him
with a longed for son and heir.
And he's becoming increasingly anxious about the future
of his dynasty.
He's banished Catherine from court and is embroiled in an attempt
to divorce her and marry his long-term mistress Anne Boleyn.
The way in which Henry's treating the two women
in his life could not be more different.
On the one hand, you have this great chivalrous love play
with Anne Boleyn,
and on the other there is the incredibly cruel, heartless
rejection of Catherine of Aragon, the wife who served him loyally
for more than 20 years.
It's interesting to think what it was about Anne Boleyn
that made her so attractive to Henry, but also so enigmatically
attractive to so many people.
Her education in France may have been a factor.
She had a style and a glamour that other people didn't.
But also her intelligence, her ability to argue with scholars
and theologians about religious and moral issues.
Henry, the scholar who flattered himself
as being the philosopher prince saw in her, I think,
a consort who shared some of those values.
But as their relationship develops, Anne puts pressure on Henry
by refusing to sleep with him until their wedding is in sight.
Her own sister had been discarded as Henry's mistress.
She wanted more for herself than that.
She wanted to be Queen.
So for seven long years she keeps him at arm's length,
giving him a little bit of encouragement and then destroying
his hopes the next.
That speaks volumes about just how much Henry was in thrall to Anne.
Henry's love letters reveal his obsession with Anne.
They survive to this day,
and are held deep within the Vatican library.
Regina, thank you so much for allowing us to film here
and for showing me what has to be one of the greatest prizes
in Tudor history.
These are the original letters from Henry VIII
to his great love Anne Boleyn.
You're very welcome, and we are happy to show people
in Great Britain these documents so precious to you and to us.
Precious for, I think, all mankind.
Henry's letters are written in French,
the language of courtly love,
and are filled with romantic gestures.
You see that in French, "To my mistress"
there at the top of the page.
"Mistress", he wishes!
And you know, he talks about being struck by the dart of love
or "dart d'amour".
Now, this is very famous, isn't it? The love heart.
It's very romantic that he draws a love heart
around Anne's initials and then either side or his own initials.
And even though we don't have Anne's responses, we can sense
that she's the one in control because it's all Henry
making the effort and trying to woo her.
Yes. And she's remaining just out of reach, which I think was part
of her genius, actually. Yeah.
The letters demonstrate just how desperate Henry is.
The longer Anne holds him off, the more insecure he becomes.
This is probably my favourite of the letters because I think
it's the most revealing of Henry's state of mind.
You sense his insecurity in a way because he talks
of how he's been in a great agony since receiving Anne's last letter,
not knowing how to interpret it.
Here is a man who has showered his love with affection,
with letters, with gifts.
He's had very little back.
One of the naughtiest letters in the whole collection is this one
here where you REALLY get a sense of Henry's frustrated lust.
He writes to Anne, "Wishing myself especially
"of an evening in my sweetheart's arms."
Here's a man in TORTURE through this unrequited love.
Anne's not giving him much back.
Henry doesn't know where he stands, and it's sending him crazy.
Anne Boleyn's behaviour and the desire for a male heir
have provoked Henry into making one of the most monumental decisions
in English history.
Breaking with the Roman Catholic Church.
Eventually, free from the Pope's authority,
Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon.
And marries Anne Boleyn.
But all of this comes at the highest imaginable price.
Henry's break with Rome was probably the most devastating political
and religious and social event for 500 years.
I mean, to suddenly decide that England was not part
of Catholic Christendom, to reject the authority of the Pope
and everything that that represented was something
which disoriented and terrified everyone.
The nation was traumatised.
Henry then declares himself head of his own Church of England.
For Henry to claim to be the head of a church was unprecedented.
It's very hard to imagine the radical,
shocking nature of that claim.
A layman, not someone trained in the church, not a bishop,
not someone in holy orders.
Henry believes this makes him second only to God.
On the one hand, you need to have quite a big ego
to deal with that.
On the other hand, it's a great deal of responsibility.
Henry, who is already trying to manage a kingdom, is now trying
to manage a church as well.
So, at the point that Henry breaks with Rome,
I don't think anybody quite knows what is going to happen next.
Henry might have got his wish to marry Anne Boleyn,
but this revolutionary decision is about to catapult England
into chaos and damage Henry's reputation with his people.
England is in turmoil after Henry's decision to break with Rome.
But despite opposition, he is now ruthlessly forcing the new religion
on his Catholic people.
To push his religious revolution through, he has a secret weapon
in the form of his new chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell.
Thomas Cromwell is nothing less than a genius, talented lawyer.
He's a property developer, a moneylender, trader.
But Cromwell is very different to the noblemen
that Henry's surrounded by.
Thomas Cromwell was the son of a lowly person in Putney,
just down the river from London, and he had this unique ability
to annoy people, particularly the rich nobility of old England
who regarded him as a common upstart because he wasn't
from the great and good families.
Men like Cromwell owe everything
to Henry his readiness to put them in place.
So, they really suit Henry cos they're going to be loyal to him.
Henry is really drawn to Cromwell.
He's got a cheeky sense of humour.
He's not afraid of Henry.
And as a natural bully, Henry is actually rather disarmed by that.
He was ruthless, ambitious and quite happy
to tread on anyone who got in his way.
Cromwell seizes the opportunity to win favour
and hatches a plan to make Henry rich.
He's worked out that England's monasteries possess millions
of pounds in untapped wealth.
Thomas Cromwell said, "I'm going to make you rich.
"I'm going to dissolve all these monasteries
"and it's all gonna go straight into your pocket."
Kings are always short of money, and that was music to Henry's ears.
Henry wanted to be the richest king in Christendom.
It's all about his image for Henry.
He wants to have the most magnificent court
to put one over on his rivals, such as the king of France.
I'm not sure Henry's greedy.
I think that Henry feels that as king, it is his right
to be in charge of everything.
To justify this moneymaking scheme, Henry and Cromwell
start a slanderous propaganda campaign
against England's Catholic monasteries.
If you're gonna dissolve the monasteries,
you have to have an excuse to do it.
So, Cromwell and his agents go round
and they start drawing up lists of things
that the monks and nuns are doing wrong.
Monasteries were always controversial places.
These were houses of celibate men living on their own,
often in remote, inaccessible places -
who knew what they were doing?
Protestant reformers are saying not only are these places of idolatry,
but they're places of sexual sin.
They're superstitious, they're monsters.
It's quite astonishing that the first piece of explicit legislation
against sex between men comes in 1533,
precisely in the context of this campaign.
They find it useful to say,
"You know what's going on in these monasteries?
"This is why we need a crackdown."
And so they use this not just to attack the monks,
but to close down the institutions altogether.
They say things have got so bad, they've all got to go.
Under Henry's orders, hundreds of monasteries
across the English countryside are pillaged and destroyed.
Henry closed in the region of 563 monasteries.
That's an enormous amount.
These buildings had dominated the English landscape for centuries.
They were almost like the social services of their day, fulfilling
the role of hospitals, a charitable function.
And, so, of course their loss had a huge impact on Henry's people.
There's one report that suggests there was 20,000 monks and nuns
wandering around the country homeless.
That just gives you an indication of how much of a shake-up
of society this was.
Henry had pledged that all of the income from these religious houses
would be invested in creating new reformed religious establishments.
He didn't keep his promise.
He gave away a lot of the riches, a lot of lands to his nobles,
and he kept an awful lot for himself.
25 years into his reign, Henry has come close to destroying
the Catholic Church in England, and made a fortune in the process.
But remarkably, in private, he's still clinging
onto the traditional Catholic beliefs that he grew up with.
There's a real contradiction in Henry's attitude
towards the religious changes.
While in public he's outlawing all sorts of things,
such as going to mass in private,
that's exactly what he's doing.
The Catholic mass is at the heart of Henry's religious beliefs
and really at the centre of his life.
And he attends mass every single day.
We know he crept on his knees to the cross at Easter.
These are in the views of most Protestants superstition.
But Henry was convinced they weren't -
superstition were the things the other people did.
These things were true belief.
Because in his heart, he was performing them in the right way.
There is an enormous double standard with Henry.
It's all very well for him to continue worshipping as he likes,
but his people have to toe a different line.
They have to be part of the new reformed religion.
But Henry's religious hypocrisy is testing some
of his closest friendships,
to people like Thomas More.
Thomas More's relationship with Henry VIII was as close
to a friendship as a Tudor king could have.
They argued long into the night.
They talked about the latest works of philosophy and religion.
They went up on the ledges of the palaces and looked
at the stars and talked about astronomy.
They'd first met when Henry was just eight years old,
so More was a huge influence on Henry,
and he rose and rose in Henry's service.
He was Lord Chancellor of all England's by the 1530s.
But Thomas More was acutely religious, devout to the point
of wearing a hair shirt under his clothes so that his flesh
was mortified by the irritant.
I mean, these were the kind of extreme religious practises
that the most reclusive Catholics would use.
As a devout Catholic, Thomas More disagrees strongly
with Henry's decision to break with the Roman Catholic Church.
And he's not the only one.
Growing numbers of people are speaking out
against Henry's new regime.
These voices of dissent play heavily on Henry's insecurities.
Some outspoken priests in Middlesex said that Henry's private life
resembled a pig wallowing and defiling itself.
A nun makes these prophecies saying that she's seen a place reserved
for him in Hell.
For Henry, this is all deeply personal.
Anyone who speaks out against his reforms is criticising himself
and he can't take that.
Like his father before him,
Henry VIII comes down on opponents with murderous force.
Hidden away in the Houses of Parliament is evidence
of just how murderous Henry is becoming.
Here I am in the Parliamentary Archives looking at
the 1534 Treason Act, one of the most extraordinary documents
in Henry's reign.
Here are Henry's neuroses,
Henry's fears, Henry's insecurities written in black and white.
The 1534 Treason Act says it's now high treason to "maliciously wish,
"will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine,
"and attempt bodily harm" against the king or the queen
or their heirs apparent.
This document says that it's now high treason
to "maliciously publish and pronounce by express writing
"or words that the king is a heretic, schismatic, tyrant,
"infidel or usurper of the crown."
The act is extraordinary because it's not only governing
how people behave, but it's governing how they think
and what they say.
Henry VIII believed that as far as his subjects were concerned,
you're either with him or against him.
And if you were against him, you paid for it.
This document changed Henry's realm into a land of fear.
Words spoken in jest or in drink or in anger
could lead you to the scaffold.
This brutal act significantly widens the scope of treason, and it marks
a turning point in Henry's reign.
That need not only to have people obedient, but to believe absolutely
in the justice of what he was doing was unprecedented.
No-one had asked this before.
That is intruding into everyone's belief system,
into their consciences in a way that no-one had tried before or since.
One of the first victims of Henry's ruthless new regime
is his old friend, Thomas More.
Henry locks him in the Tower of London because Moore refuses
to endorse his religious reforms.
More is very much a devout Catholic, and that idea
of England breaking completely away and defying the Pope
defying tenets of Catholic faith is not something
that More can really live with.
More remains in the Tower for a year, and during that year,
Henry does everything he possibly can to persuade him.
He even says to him, "Believe what you like in your heart so long
"as in public, you're with me."
I think Henry still had that deep felt conviction that eventually
their friendship would prevail and that More would be won over
by the sheer weight of argument and the force of Henry's personality.
Tudor history is full of these moments where people
who have been working together for months and years
suddenly fall apart.
But I think it's particularly traumatic when it comes to Henry
and Thomas More because of that deeper intellectual connection
that the two of them had forged.
Eventually, Henry has had enough,
and he authorises his former friend's death.
The Parliamentary Archives still holds the document
that sanctions Thomas More's execution.
This document says that Thomas More is guilty of high treason by sowing
sedition, by obstinately, contemptuously refusing to take
the oath supporting the succession to the crown.
They are powerful words.
And later on, they describe the ingratitude of Thomas More
towards the King.
It lays down Thomas More's crimes and legalises his execution.
And to all intents and purposes, it's his death warrant.
On July the 6th, 1535,
Thomas More is executed on Tower Hill.
I can't help but wonder whether Henry just had those moments
where he's looked at himself in the mirror and thought,
"How on Earth have I come to this?"
Here he is ordering the execution of some
of his closest friends and advisers.
He's caused turmoil in his kingdom.
Did he ever bring any of that back on himself
and actually examine his own motives, his own character?
I don't think Henry had a conscience about what he was doing.
No, he's not a man who's gonna lose any sleep over things like that.
He has an objective which he wants to achieve, the continuation
of the Tudor dynasty, and nothing or no-one is going to stand in his way.
He absolutely believed in the righteousness
of his own conclusions, and that's what drove him through.
There's definitely a sense at this point in Henry's reign
that it's almost gathering a momentum of its own.
There's no stopping Henry now, and it's going
to get more and more brutal.
Little does Henry know that a freak accident is about to alter
the future of his kingdom and the fate of his second wife.
Henry VIII is now 44 years old.
And his break with the Roman Catholic Church is beginning
to tarnish his reputation.
He's desperate to project the image of a king
at the height of his powers.
In the middle of the 1530s,
Henry was a man increasingly obsessed by his public image.
He would spend many hours getting dressed by his men,
covering up all those signs of weakness and projecting this idea
that here is the most magnificent king ever to sit
on the throne of England.
Henry, from the beginning, is very conscious of the importance
of the public eye, but also he really enjoys it.
He loves performing to people.
Being the monarch, you have to look the part.
And the Henry is particularly adept at this.
He's really interested in fashion.
So, we have records of Henry spending really huge amounts
of money on cloth of gold
and he buys about 175 pairs of shoes in one single 12-month period.
Henry is the ultimate investor in, dare I say, bling jewellery.
But beneath the royal clothing is a king
who is far more vulnerable than he looks.
Concerned he's losing the love and respect of his people,
Henry's propaganda machine goes into overdrive.
Having broken with Rome, it was really important for Henry
to win some hearts and minds if he's gonna avoid a big rebellion.
It involves a certain amount of PR effort using print,
which is a pretty new technology, to produce lots of pamphlets
and try to win back some of that popular support.
It's not easy to get a country to break away from a faith
that it had as a part of its way of life for centuries beforehand.
So, that trauma of separating from the Catholic Church is something
that Henry has to respond to directly.
Whilst Henry hopes to escape public unrest,
he can't seem to avoid it in private.
Henry develops increasingly bad temper because he's losing patience
with Anne and with this marriage and also the fact
that he hasn't yet produced a male heir.
And so he just now wants results.
Henry needs God to show him that he approves of his actions
by giving him a son.
And yet Anne does not produce a son.
She has miscarriages.
She has a daughter.
It's as if his first marriage is just repeating itself.
And that worries him.
"What's wrong about this marriage?
"Is this marriage cursed as well?"
As time went by, there were more reasons for them
to dispute and argue with each other.
Her inability to produce the male heir was the grumbling resentment,
but also her commitment to religious reform,
her willingness to argue with Henry.
These things were things that,
over time, became more annoying than attractive.
The real turning point for Henry is when Anne accuses him in public
of having an affair behind her back, and Henry is angered
that she would dare question him in public about his behaviour.
Henry responds to Anne by telling her that she needs to turn
a blind eye to this behaviour as her betters had done,
meaning Catherine of Aragon, and that he could unmake her
just as quickly as he had raised her.
There's another person causing trouble inside the royal marriage.
Henry's adviser, Thomas Cromwell.
Henry's court has become like a pressure cooker.
So at the centre of this we have Cromwell and Anne
who are each other's rivals and enemies.
Anne has her own faction behind her.
And Cromwell has his supporters.
And we see in the court these two rival factions
fighting for Henry's attention.
Cromwell knew that Anne Boleyn was intent on having his head.
So, he was very keen to act against her, to strike first,
before he was attacked himself.
Anne has an ace up her sleeve that she thinks will secure her position.
She's pregnant.
However, something is about to happen that will shake both Anne
and Henry to the core.
When Henry takes part in a jousting tournament,
he falls from his horse.
An account from the time reveals that the accident is so serious
that Henry is knocked unconscious.
There's a report by Dr Pedro Ortiz,
who is the Imperial Spanish ambassador to the Vatican.
He's picked up some gossip coming from Francis I of France,
who's no friend of Henry VIII's...
READS ALOUD
So, here we have Henry lying on the ground,
not speaking for two hours.
I believe that horse rolled on him.
It crushed him.
He suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury.
Recent research has demonstrated that such an injury
can actually cause neuroendocrinal damage.
People suffering this very rare disorder become depressed,
irritable, and very suspicious of everyone around them.
In the latter years of Henry's reign,
he was displaying all those symptoms.
Henry's accident also has a dramatic effect on his wife, Anne Boleyn.
What is absolutely certain is the shock of hearing that Henry
had this accident caused Anne Boleyn to miscarry a male child.
"Queen Anne was brought to bed and delivered of a man-child
"before her time. It was said she took a fright."
It was a 3-month-old foetus, male child, perfectly formed.
And if the child had lived,
it could have been Henry's longed-for male heir.
The miscarriage is a personal disaster for Anne,
because that possibility that the male heir was finally,
at last, about to appear is taken away again and she's damaged goods.
After his accident, Henry becomes increasingly paranoid.
And at court, things are now more dangerous
for Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell.
There is a diplomatic letter which describes the English court
as a nest of hissing snakes.
There are eavesdroppers at every corner.
Absolutely nobody is safe - from the Queen
to the greatest statesman of the country.
Around Easter 1536 we see a real shift now
between the relationship of Cromwell and Henry.
Henry calls out Cromwell in front of the whole court,
publically disgraces him.
And this now puts Anne back on the chessboard.
And so she's removed Cromwell, her rival.
And once again, she's the centre of Henry's world.
Cromwell storms out and the first thing he does
is to stop plotting to get rid of Anne.
Cromwell has decided it's Anne or him, and it's going to be Anne.
Secretly, Thomas Cornwell launches an investigation
into Anne's behaviour.
As soon as he's left court, Cromwell puts the word out that he's sick.
But Cromwell is far from sick.
He is using this two-week absence as the perfect cover for him to start
plotting the downfall of his arch enemy, Anne Boleyn.
Cromwell has this incredibly sophisticated network
of spies and informants.
Among his network are a number of ladies
from the Queen's own household.
Now, Anne isn't popular with her ladies.
She's a fairly cruel mistress, so you might imagine how willing
those ladies are to give Cromwell little titbits of gossip information
that he can slowly craft into a case.
One of the things about the early modern court is that it is based
upon flirtation and it's based upon the language of courtship.
So, at any point, those acts which could have been perfectly normal
are reinterpretable as much more culpable.
If you'd say you love the Queen, what do you mean?
Cromwell began to find a lot of evidence of people
saying inappropriate things.
Just two weeks later, Cromwell presents his findings to Henry.
When Cromwell had to go and tell Henry what he'd discovered, it must
have been the most terrifying moment of his political career...
..to say that the king's wife, his queen, was adulterous.
I mean, that's not news you can slip in in a list of other things
as you're going through the morning's business.
Cromwell's evidence accuses Anne of conducting an affair
behind her husband's back with not one, but five men.
He had to take control of that and he took control of it
with a ruthless passion of rage, that meant that it had
to be driven through that there was no escape.
This is a man not in denial, but in manic acceptance of the charge.
And I think that's what drives the process from there on in.
When he wanted something to be true, it became true.
And this was absolutely the case now with his second wife's infidelity,
because her real failure, let's be honest about it,
was not giving Henry a son.
That was the only way she'd let him down.
I don't believe she was guilty for one moment of anything else.
But Henry needed her out.
And, of course, this was all too convenient.
In the archives of the British Library is a letter that provides
a glimpse into Henry's mind during this time,
as well as the man manipulating him, Thomas Cromwell.
This is a letter by Thomas Cromwell written in May 1536,
at the height of the controversy surrounding Anne Boleyn.
This letter is undoubtedly one of our best sources for understanding
Henry's perspective on Anne Boleyn.
Cromwell says here, "The King's highness thought convenient
"that I should advertise you of the same,"
I should tell you about what's been going on,
about the case against Anne.
Really, what he's saying is the King has instructed Cromwell to spread
the word about Anne Boleyn's crimes, and they are all described here
in their full, gory detail.
This bit here reads, "Her crimes were so abominable
"that I think the like was never heard."
And there's some fairly graphic language used here
to describe the Queen's "incontinent living".
This is written for an absolute purpose.
It's telling the world Anne Boleyn is guilty of heinous crimes.
Anne is the most wicked queen in history, according to Cromwell.
Alongside charges of adultery, Cromwell's letter also accuses Anne
of plotting Henry's death.
At the bottom we have here talk of a certain conspiracy against the King.
So, in Henry's mind, it goes beyond just adultery, an unfaithful wife.
She's plotting treason.
This is a pure piece of PR on Cromwell's part.
Cromwell manipulated, Henry.
And, in fact, he later boasted
that he had dreamt up the whole scheme against Anne Boleyn.
Whatever the truth behind the accusations,
Henry falls for them hook, line, and sinker.
Once convinced that there was a kernel of truth to it,
Henry's imagination knew no bounds, and at one point, famously, he said,
"Well, maybe it's 1,000 men. Who knows what Anne is capable of."
Henry VIII is a great fan of good stories.
He's good at spinning them and he is also taken in by them.
And the story that has spun around Anne is the one of the wicked
woman, a woman with an insatiable desire to manipulate men.
Henry orders Anne's arrest and she is escorted to the Tower of London.
He will never see her again.
As Anne Boleyn awaits her trial in the Tower of London,
reports suggest that Henry VIII is becoming mentally imbalanced.
The Spanish ambassador reported that Henry had collapsed in tears
about Anne Boleyn's downfall.
Henry VIII was always an extraordinarily emotional man.
Tears were never far from the surface.
Tears of joy, tears of grief.
But, of course, Henry always cries only for one person
and that person is Henry himself.
For a Tudor man, not being able to control your wife
is really is seen as the cardinal sin,
and the biggest flaw against your masculinity.
I'm sure that Henry did believe Anne was guilty
because it was convenient for him to believe that Anne was guilty.
And, it made him right.
He was the good person. She was the bad person.
While Anne is under lock and key,
the investigation into her infidelities ramps up.
This letter was written by Sir William Kingston,
who was Anne's jailer at the Tower,
and Kingston had been set upon Anne as a spy by Henry.
Henry wanted to know her every move, her every word.
Kingston reports this overheard conversation between Anne
and Henry Norris.
Norris was actually one of the gentlemen who served the King,
but he was also a great favourite with Anne and stood accused
of adultery with her.
"Anne asks Norris why he would tarry before getting married."
Why is he waiting to get married?
And she says the following throwaway remark,
"Did he look for dead men's shoes?"
Effectively, she's kind of teasing Norris saying,
"Are you waiting for the King to die so that you can marry me?"
The fact that such a throwaway remark, harmless in itself,
was enough to condemn a queen of England shows you just how febrile
the atmosphere was at Henry's court.
The King himself was growing increasingly paranoid.
He's starting to lose his grip on reality, and that is all reflected
here in this piece of evidence against Anne.
Based on this evidence, Anne is tried for treason
and quickly found guilty - as are the five men accused
of sleeping with her.
Henry does not attend Anne's trial.
But he is heavily involved in the plans for her execution.
He wanted the theatre of punishment to be perfect.
He wanted the execution to be exemplary.
This is what happens when you defy Henry.
This is what traitors get.
Henry didn't ever like to associate himself with death.
He wouldn't go to funerals.
He wouldn't be anywhere near anyone who was mortally sick.
And he didn't want to be seen in the same space
as Anne Boleyn ever again.
Her name was not to be mentioned.
All trace of her was removed from his palaces.
So, of course, he's gonna be nowhere near the Tower that day.
But he invited 1,000 people to watch Anne Boleyn's head being struck off.
Those are the actions of a madman.
On the morning of the 19th of May, 1536,
Anne Boleyn is executed.
But Henry has already lined up his next wife.
The speed with which Henry moves on to wife number three,
Jane Seymour, is deeply disturbing, really.
The very next day, they are betrothed.
They're married ten days later.
Now that is fast even by Henry's standards.
He needs to get cracking because, you know,
he needs to have a son and he needs to live long enough
for that son to grow to adulthood.
So, he's not going to waste time pretending
to mourn a woman who's betrayed him.
The following year, Jane Seymour is able to give him what his two
previous wives have not.
A healthy son. An heir to the throne.
Tragically, Jane herself dies only two weeks after the birth,
leaving Henry once more alone.
But his reign is far from over.
The England of the late 1530s is entirely different
from the England of a decade before.
We've got the monastery's being dissolved.
We've got a dramatic change of personnel at court.
All sorts of people have disappeared.
Thomas More is gone.
Anne Boleyn has gone.
Jane Seymour has gone.
Henry himself has got older.
He's got more tyrannical, his reign has got bloodier
and he's more determined than ever to get his own way.
In the next episode,
age and infirmity start to catch up with Henry VIII.
The pain that Henry got from his leg was absolutely huge.
When the leg was really bad, he could turn black in the face
and just sort of lie still, hardly able to speak.
And he turns on his closest adviser.
Those less admirable traits that we'd seen hints of early
in his life are now front and centre.
This is Henry as a tyrant.
This is the beginning of a totalitarian state.
You might think you know everything there is to know about Henry VIII.
You'll know he married six times, and had two of his wives executed.
But the truth about our most famous king is much more complex
and far more compelling.
This series tells Henry's story over six of the most tumultuous decades of English history,
separating the real man from the myth.
To some, Henry was a cruel bully.
He's clever. What he likes to do is to trap people.
He's a very skilful manipulator.
Henry's punishment was exemplary in its brutality.
To others, he was a charismatic and successful ruler.
He jousts, he rides, he sings!
What more could you want from this perfect prince?
But Henry's personality, his innermost thoughts and his motivations,
have remained elusive.
Henry didn't take the blame for his own mistakes
because that would not have worked for him as a king.
He was so good at convincing himself of what he saw as the truth.
Now a team of Tudor experts have come together to investigate who the real Henry was.
If you ever needed proof that Henry was a bit of a megalomaniac, this is it.
And they'll go backstage at Henry's court
to unravel a murky world of power, plots and petrifying ambition.
The English court is a nest of hissing snakes.
No one quite knows who to trust. There are spies and informers.
It's very, very clear that behind this public facade
was somebody who was fundamentally vulnerable and insecure.
Henry VIII has been on the throne for 28 years.
And the once-carefree prince has become a paranoid king, suspicious of everyone around him.
He's divorced his first wife,
he's executed his second.
And his third wife has died after the birth of his only son.
Now Henry is alone.
His controversial break with the Roman Catholic Church is making him unpopular
and there are rumblings of dissent across his kingdom.
Feeling increasingly vulnerable, Henry commissions a portrait
designed to promote himself as a formidable ruler.
This is the iconic portrait of Henry.
This is what everybody sees in their mind's eye
when they think of Henry VIII.
The silhouette of that figure could identify him just by itself.
It shows Henry sure-footed, wide-legged,
staring straight at us.
He looks like a mighty emperor.
It's no coincidence that the codpiece
is at eye level. You can't fail to notice it.
It's sending out a message that Henry is this great virile king.
Everybody knows all the problems he's had getting a male heir,
but this painting sets the record straight. None of that was Henry'sfault.
The painting presents Henry as a powerful monarch in total command of his country,
but this portrait is a lie.
That picture is propaganda.
We know that it's been changed to make his legs look longer, to make him look more muscular,
but, in reality, Henry was slumping into geriatric decay.
It's an image of Henry that he wishes the world to see, not the actual Henry,
the sick Henry, the overweight Henry,
the Henry that's suspicious about everybody
and that's also feeling the effects of the infirmity of age
and the oncoming march of death.
Henry is suffering from a painful leg ulcer,
which deeply affects his state of mind.
Some time in the 1530s, Henry suffered a jousting injury
which caused a terrible, debilitating,
agonising disease in both his legs.
Tudor medicine was rather basic.
So his doctors advised that his wound would be kept open,
which meant that he smelled, that his bedsheets stunk,
his clothing stunk.
This is a man that you could smell before you saw.
The pain that Henry got from his leg was absolutely huge.
When the leg was really, really bad,
he could turn black in the face and just sort of lie,
still hardly able to speak, for several hours on the trot.
The infection had to be released,
which meant the leg often had to be cut open
and pus drained and ointment stuck on it.
There was a lot of decaying flesh,
and they wanted to remove that by cauterising him.
Red-hot irons were applied to these wounds in his leg.
It must have been a living nightmare for him.
Henry's increasing infirmity, his ailments, had a profound effect on his psychology.
He couldn't cope with the knowledge that he's no longer this kind of thrusting young king he had been.
He's turned into this incredibly vulnerable,
pain-ridden old man.
Henry's infirmity is laid bare
when you look at his private household accounts.
So there are these primitive lifts to move Henry between the floors of his apartments.
He's wheeled about in a chair,
he has a whistle to summon his attendants.
This is not the image that Henry wants for himself.
Henry thinks that he knows how to cure his leg ulcer better than his doctors.
A 16th-century manuscript contains 32 medicinal recipes
that Henry concocted himself.
Most of his recipes are concerned with pain in the legs.
Here's a plaster devised by the King at Oxford
to ease the pain and swelling about the ankles.
I would not use some of the ingredients today.
The King's grey plaster, for example,
contains various roots, flower buds,
garden worms, scraping of ivory and powdered pearls.
And, finally, it also contains red lead,
which is deadly poison. Do not try this at home.
The exact nature of Henry's health has been subject to speculation.
Recent research suggests that he suffers from a rare condition which affects his mentalhealth.
Down the centuries, people have had lots of different theories about what was the matter withHenry VIII.
I think Henry suffered from an hormonal disorder
called Cushing's syndrome. In 20% of cases,
it turns the victim into a suspicious person,
wary of everyone around them. They become melancholy,
depressed, anxious.
They can't take a decision, or change their minds continuously.
Now all these symptoms Henry displays
in the latter years of his life.
Other historians attribute Henry's increasing paranoia to diabetes.
There's a lot to be said for the view that as he became more and more obese,
he got Type 2 diabetes.
It can start to affect your mind
and you can sort of develop elements of paranoia.
Henry certainly has elements of paranoia in these last years.
Whilst Henry's body and mind are starting to fail,
his enemies are gaining in strength.
There are reports of a huge uprising in the north of England
and Henry has to act swiftly if he's to keep control of his kingdom.
Henry VIII is now 46 years old.
His painful leg ulcer has transformed the highly active King
into a man who struggles to even walk without assistance.
This lack of exercise, combined with massive overeating, are making him obese,
and there are detailed records of the enormous quantities of food he eats.
Here we have an example of what Henry would be eating
on pretty much any given day of the week.
We have everything from swan and custard
through to "rich, roasted baby kid" or lamb, there's butter and eggs,
there's jelly and hippocras,
porpoise and seal for the King's delight.
But it's been estimated that King Henry VIII would have been having
about double the number of calories, bare minimum, that you would recommend in the 21stcentury.
Because Henry was eating so much meat, he inevitably suffered severe constipation
and there's an account in the letters and papers of King Henry VIII
of how one of Henry's physicians actually had to come
and administer a clyster, an enema as we'd call it today, to the King
in order to try and flush out his system.
And the document goes on to proudly report how the King got up in the middle of the night
and had "a fair siege" on the toilet.
Delightful for all those around him, obviously.
Henry always saw himself as that beautiful young prince he had been once,
universally adored as a sportsman, an athlete, a Renaissance prince.
I think he found it very difficult towards the end of his life
as what he saw in the mirror was no longer that handsome young man,
but instead, undeniably, a sort of slightly hideous sort of old creature.
It's three years since Henry broke with the Roman Catholic Church
and declared himself Head of the Church of England.
But now the repercussions of his religious revolution are catching up with him.
CROWD JEERS
This radical move is extremely unpopular
and results in a religious uprising in the north of England
known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
This was the first major rebellion
against Henry's Reformation and it shocked him to the core.
Because he was so good
at convincing himself of what he saw as the truth, he thought his people stillloved him.
This now changed everything.
The whole point of the Tudors were that they brought peace and union to England
after the divisions of the Wars of the Roses.
And now you have division again.
This is an epic failure of kingship and Henry understands that.
And he is extremely concerned.
But with no army at his disposal, Henry is unable to defeat the rebellion with brute force.
Kings of England never had standing armies,
so they had to rule with the consent of the people.
He realised that he was in a very dangerous situation now
and he needed to act tactically, politically, and this is what he did.
Henry comes up with a plan to deal with the rebels.
He offers them a pardon and invites their ringleader, Robert Aske, to a secret meeting.
Henry has this masterstroke. He invites Robert Aske and the leaders of the Pilgrimage
to court, and he entertains them for Christmas.
He gives them gifts and looks after them.
Aske went away very happy, saying that he'd enjoyed every sign of the King'sgrace,
of his mercy. "What a fantastic king," Aske is essentially saying.
But it soon becomes clear that Henry's show of mercy is a trick.
And he turns on the rebels with a vengeance.
Henry was the sort of ruler who would gull you along and then basically cut you off.
He's clever, but what he likes to do is try and trap people, move them about on a chessboard.
He's a very skilful manipulator.
Robert Aske returns home
and Henry orders his arrest and execution.
Henry's punishment of Robert Aske was exemplary in its brutality.
This is a message to the people
that this is what happens when you oppose Henry.
And, in fact, he wanted to go much further.
He wanted people from every village involved in the rebellion to have somebody executed,
but the man who was in charge of the retaliation simply didn't carry out Henry's orders.
Henry's ruthless suppression of the rebels marks a turning point in his reign.
England had changed an awful lot during this period.
It was no longer the Merry England of Henry's early years.
It was now pretty much a totalitarian state.
There were spies everywhere.
Suddenly, nobody was safe, nobody could trust anyone.
There were neighbours informing on neighbours,
so you never knew when there was going to be that knock on the door.
People were now afraid to open their mouths in any public place.
People were afraid to write letters and express an opinion
because they were always looking over their shoulder.
In the name of the King!
The man responsible for enacting Henry's crackdowns is his Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell has previously masterminded the break up of the monasteries
and engineered the downfall of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn.
But now that Henry's people are turning on him, he shifts the blame onto Cromwell.
Henry didn't take the blame for his own mistakes
because that would not have worked for him as a king.
One of the purposes of good servants was that they would take the blame if things went wrong.
It was their advice. With the Pilgrimage of Grace,
they didn't attack Henry so much, they attacked Cromwell.
There is definitely a sense in which Thomas Cromwell
is Henry VIII's scapegoat.
Henry could step back and say, "I'm innocent of this. I don't know what's going on.
"I don't know what my servants are doing. Now that I've found out, I'm absolutely appalled."
There had been warning signs for Cromwell for a few years now
that actually his luck was changing. There were arguments with the King
and, in fact, on a number of occasions, the King was said to have "beknaveth" Cromwell.
He was beating him up in front of the court,
on one occasion, pummelling him about the head as if he were a dog.
Cromwell must have been terrified.
As he starts to fall out of favour, Cromwell is given the chance to redeem himself.
It's been two years since the death of Henry's great love, Jane Seymour.
And now Cromwell is tasked with finding him a new wife.
He's now got the heir, but he doesn't have the spare.
And Henry is deeply sceptical about female monarchy.
He's not excited about the prospect of either of his daughters becoming his successor.
So he's looking for a new wife to produce sons.
Cromwell strikes a political deal for Henry to marry the German noblewoman, Anne of Cleves.
And Henry agrees to marry her based solely on seeing her portrait.
Well, he sees an image of a girl who looks like a doll.
She's pretty, she's young, she looks very unthreatening.
So Henry sees the portrait and he thinks,
"She looks a bit of all right. I'll go for that. Yep, that seems...that's fine."
But when Henry meets Anne in person, he changes his mind completely.
When Anne arrives, she's put up in Rochester Castle
and Henry can't wait to see her, so he goes in disguise with a gift to basically have a quick peep,
but Anne doesn't really take any notice of this rather obese stranger who sort of pops by
and that's not a good start.
Poor Anne of Cleves was dressed in the most hideous German costume,
sort of contrasting bands of fabric and a sort of helmet
that looks like something out of Star Wars.
And he was horribly disappointed.
Henry made his revulsion towards Anne of Cleves absolutely clear.
He complained that there were "displeasant airs" about her.
And there's a very lurid description of their wedding night.
It gave him enough of a conviction to declare that she was no maid.
Henry's smear campaign against Anne of Cleves
actually reveals more about his own personal insecurities than anything else.
Henry has, for some time, been suffering from bouts of impotence
and he finds himself unable to consummate the marriage.
I think perhaps he has a bit of a go, it doesn't work out
and then he decides, "This is not my fault."
Really, it undermined his masculinity that he couldn't have sex with his own wife,
but he was not willing to acknowledge that it was his problem.
As far as he was concerned, it was her.
Henry's PR campaign against Anne was so effective
that even centuries later, there's a tendency to still refer to her
as the Flanders mare, the ugly wife whom he was lucky enough to get rid of quite quickly.
We completely overlook the fact that actually there was probably nothing wrong with Anne.Frankly,
Henry was no oil painting by this time.
The Anne of Cleves marriage is an unmitigated disaster
and Henry lays the blame squarely at Cromwell's feet.
I don't think Henry really turns against Cromwell until the Cleves marriage.
When Henry feels that somebody has disobeyed him or has been working against him,
he feels that the scales have fallen from his eyes and he's going to do something about it,
so he will cut them off. He's got this infinite talent for turning loyal servants
into enemies of the state, and Cromwell falls into that bracket.
Seeking to exploit the growing rift between Henry and Cromwell,
Cromwell's enemies at court start to plot against him.
Chief among these enemies is Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk.
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, is one of the most unpleasant men in English history.
He was ambitious, vain, arrogant.
For Norfolk, Thomas Cromwell was public enemy number one.
Norfolk thinks that Cromwell's too big for his boots.
He's a self-made man, he's not an aristocrat,
the country should be run by people of noble blood,
the true counsellors of the King, not these upstarts.
To remove Cromwell from power, Norfolk starts a campaign aimed at discreditinghim.
It doesn't take much to stoke Henry's suspicions.
Norfolk claimed that Cromwell was plotting to marry the King's daughter, Mary,
make himself king. He pointed out the fact he had this huge household
that could perhaps turn into a private army and take the throne by force.
There was literally no evidence behind any of the charges,
but Norfolk knew Henry was so paranoid that he would believe it.
Henry was thinking if Cromwell has let him down, he must have meant it.
He must in some way have been acting cruelly to the King.
Henry's ego was particularly precious and particularly vulnerable where he thought he'd been betrayed.
For Cromwell, it's only a matter of time before Henry turns on him.
Thomas Cromwell knew the end was coming. He could smell it.
He must have constantly been looking over his shoulder, not knowing who to trust.
Henry finally gives the order to strike.
And when Cromwell arrives late at a Privy Council meeting,
the Duke of Norfolk is waiting for him.
We don't know why he was late. It might have all been part of the plot,
but he thought it was just a routine meeting,
and this is a man who has this sophisticated spy network. He knows everything.
He didn't know this.
When he moves to sit down, Norfolk said, "Stop! That's not the seat for a traitor."
Cromwell was frozen.
He must have been absolutely terrified because he knows where it ends.
When the guards rushed forward, there was a cry of, "Traitor!" and he was seized.
He was astonished and he said, "Why are you calling me a traitor? Tell me what the charges are!"
Nobody said a word because they hadn't finished making those charges up yet. They had no answer.
There's a moment that's almost Shakespearean,
where the Duke of Norfolk rips the chain of office from around his neck.
This method of arrest has been devised deliberately to surprise and shock him.
He was dragged out and taken by boat to the Tower of London on that dreadful one-way ticket.
Henry VIII has been on the throne for over three decades.
After ordering the arrest of his Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell,
Henry's suspicions intensify.
After Cromwell's fall, Henry is actually a rather different character
because he starts to say for the first time,
"I trust no one but myself."
He doesn't appoint another Chief Minister
and people have said, "Oh, these are years without a policy.
"No one was up to the job." No, no, no, no.
Henry believed he was up to the job. He was going to direct everything.
He was so sensitive to any accusation
that he was being governed by other people,
that other people were manipulating him, that he was the plaything of other people's ambitions,
that he did everything in his power to try to assert himself as the ultimate authority in the kingdom.
Even though Cromwell is now his prisoner in the Tower,
Henry still needs his former adviser's help.
Henry remains trapped in his marriage to Anne of Cleves,
and he needs Cromwell's legal expertise to get him out of it.
There's nobody else who can get him out of this fiasco marriage
with Anne of Cleves, so Henry writes to Cromwell, asking for help.
"Give me evidence that the marriage was never valid, that it could be annulled."
So Cromwell is working for Henry to his very last breath.
I think that he believes the King at some point
is going to turn around and say, "Sorry, all is forgiven.
"This is a mistake.
"I'm going to release you. Live out the rest of your years.
"We're going to find a place for you somewhere."
But once the Anne of Cleves marriage is annulled,
Henry has no further use for his former adviser.
Someone like Thomas Cromwell isn't a friend.
He's a human tool of whatever it is
that Henry wished to achieve at any moment,
and so he will pick a tool up and he will use it
and when it no longer serves its purpose, he will cast it aside.
On the 28th of July, 1540,
Thomas Cromwell, once one of the most powerful men in England,
is led to the scaffold and publicly executed on Tower Hill.
With Cromwell out of the way, his arch enemy, the Duke of Norfolk,
sees an opportunity to secure greater powers for himself.
And he has a secret weapon to help him -
his teenage niece, Catherine Howard.
The moment that Catherine Howard is in the King's bed, Norfolk probably thought he was made for life.
Norfolk was a cynical, unpleasant career aristocrat.
His wife, he knocked her teeth out. I mean, this was not a nice man.
So the fact that he was using women as pawns in a political game shouldn't surpriseus.
Do you like it here?
Norfolk's position is secured when Henry takes Catherine Howard as his fifth wife.
He seems to rediscover something of his lost youth in her.
He adores her,
and is seen playing with her in public.
So he feels himself to be this young king again.
He wanted to prove to everyone around him that he was a virile man
and I think that his caressing of Catherine Howard, his constant parading her about this place
as this young bride on his arm, is just massive overcompensation.
He's old enough to be her grandfather,
so they must have presented
this rather incongruous image of Beauty and the Beast.
But Henry and Catherine's honeymoon is short-lived.
After just 15 months together,
evidence emerges that Catherine wasn't a virgin when she married him.
On the 2nd of November, 1541,
Henry VIII was at mass up in the King's Closet,
just above us here in the Chapel Royal of Hampton Court Palace
and he was presented with a letter from Archbishop Cranmer
that relayed the sordid details of Catherine Howard's past.
And it explicitly says in this account
that Cranmer didn't just tell the King this information, but instead put it in writing.
"He declared the information thereof to His Highness in writing,"
because, as it says here, "He had not the heart to express the same to the King
"by word of mouth."
This account makes it very clear that Henry was completely heartbroken
when he discovered this news. It says, "His joy was turned to sorrow.
"He wept bitter tears."
And you get this impression of someone who really, really wanted this marriage to work,
who was deeply in love with Catherine Howard,
and whose world just came crumbling down around him when he found out the truth about her.
Several days later, the allegations against Catherine intensify
and she is accused of having an affair during her marriage to Henry.
The moment he learns about this,
the moment he learnt that it was true that she'd had an affair, he left.
And that's what we see Henry doing time and time again in his relationships.
It's quite disturbing that Henry has this capacity
to just sort of turn off and move on from a person,
even one who clearly he loved very deeply.
Catherine Howard's fate is clear the moment Henry turns against her.
She is beheaded for treason at the Tower of London.
Catherine was just a girl who'd been taken advantage of by men for most of her life,
who ended up dying very bravely, but very horribly.
After Catherine Howard, Henry's left with the reality
of an ageing man who's losing his virility.
There is a sense of deep unhappiness that this is now what he has to livewith,
the wreck of the prince he once was.
Despite five failed marriages,
Henry only has one legitimate son.
So he embarks on his sixth marriage, to Catherine Parr,
hopeful that she will provide him with a spare heir.
But Henry's also increasingly concerned about his imperial legacy
and for a Tudor king, that means only one thing -
going to war.
He's trying to recapture his lost youth
and he tries to do that by going off to war.
He's going to be this great crusading king again, reclaiming parts of France.
Henry grew up on tales of derring-do against the French.
Henry V, Agincourt, and all those other famous victories.
Henry had always wanted to have military glory in his portfolio of achievements.
In this period, the English nobility want to go smashing up the French,
just like 21st-century Tories want to go around Northern France on holiday.
Here at Windsor Castle is a treasure that epitomises Henry's image of himself
as a warrior king.
In the latter years of his reign, Henry specially commissions this suit of armour.
Here is the physical embodiment of Henry's childhood dreams.
The symbol of chivalry and the image of an armoured man.
Henry VIII's armour.
Now armour in the 16th century was made to measure. None of this off-the-pegstuff.
It provides us with the true image of Henry as he would like to be projected.
Of power and might and ruthlessness. You can almost imagine his little piggy eyes,
behind that visor, glaring at us with contempt.
Despite the commanding image that Henry wants to project,
his armour is actually enlarged to accommodate his increasing size.
Here they're having to let in 5cm plates on each side of his back plate
because of his expanding girth, because he did weigh 28 stone.
Now, in National Health Service terms,
his Body Mass Index was way off today's scale.
He was a man mountain.
In order to make him feel more comfortable
and to flatter him, his male courtiers start to wear enormous padded doublets and clothes
so that they appear just as big as the King.
This also affected Henry's psyche.
I think he was really humiliated by what he had become.
Henry's very aware that his advancing years and medical disorders
threaten to derail his battlefield ambitions.
So, while he still can, he personally launches an assault on the French port of Boulogne.
His idea of leading his army in person, of course,
means directing operations from a safe distance,
inside a sort of wooden pavilion, which is lined with fake marble inside.
He is like a small boy
with lots of toy soldiers.
He is in his element.
He loves the siege, he loves all these cannonades, which fire day and night.
It was an attempt to gain glory by conquering France again.
It was an attempt to resurrect the idea that England would be mighty by ruling over France.
Henry's attack on Boulogne is a success
and he enters the captured port as a conquering hero.
But his vanity project has a serious impact on England's economy.
Henry painted the capture of Boulogne as a great victory,
but it cost them enormous sums of money.
And, in fact, England became bankrupt by the cost of war.
Five years after Henry died, a Tudor accountant was given the task
of calculating how much the wars had cost.
He produced a 16-page account, which showed that it cost the poor English taxpayer
equivalent in today's money of £1.87 billion.
And...it shows the burden which his subjects had to bear
to pay for his hopes of military glory.
Despite plunging England into bankruptcy,
Henry's military ambitions do have some benefits.
Henry's military legacy was enormously positive.
Yes, he'd depleted the Royal Treasury in the process,
but he'd created one of the greatest navies in the world
and also an incredibly impressive army as well.
He'd made England a power to be reckoned with.
I think Henry understood that all nations in the early modern period were unstable
and so you had to maintain the appearance of a strong king,
able to deliver justice, able to lead the nation in war.
These were the things that united the realm.
Henry would have been seen as a good king
because a king who leads to victory in a war is a good king,
almost regardless of anything else.
But just after Henry secures the military legacy he's always dreamed of,
his health takes a turn for the worse.
As his health deteriorates, Henry takes to shutting himself away in his chambers.
The last years of the reign are definitely tainted
by claustrophobia. No one quite knows who to trust.
And, of course, because of his immobility,
Henry's closeted in the secret study at the far end of Whitehall Palace and doesn't come out that much.
People think that, OK, he's sort of switched off. This is not the case.
This is somebody who is almost like in his lair. He's checking up on everything.
A good way to view Henry would be as a rather malignant spider
at the centre of everything which went on within England.
All those lines of the web all run through
and end up with him.
It's becoming clear to Henry's courtiers that he's nearing the end.
In the last days of Henry's life, the atmosphere at court must have been pretty toxic.
There was a sense of fear, of anxiety,
of uncertainty for what the future would hold.
There was a real sense, I think, that the end was coming
for King Henry VIII.
But no one is brave enough to mention this to Henry himself.
A dying king is like a dying lion - extraordinarily dangerous.
Everybody was terrified that Henry still had the power to kill.
It was said that no one would give him any official advice because they were frightened of hisreaction.
Imagining the death of the King was treason.
So in a capricious reign where people had been charged with treason for all kinds of offences,
simply telling the King that he might die
is not something that even the bravest counsellors would be able to do.
The only thing to say to a king is, "It's a scratch. You're sure to get better.
"Tomorrow we'll go hunting. Everything will be fine."
As Henry's health gets worse,
the finishing touches are put on one of the most important documents of his reign.
His last will and testament.
It reveals his attempts to retain control over his kingdom even after his death.
This, very excitingly, is the last will and testament of King Henry VIII.
Here you see Henry R, Henry Rex, Henry the King.
This is Henry's last-ditch attempt at controlling the future of England.
If you ever needed proof that Henry was a bit of a megalomaniac, this is it.
An enormous proportion of this will is taken up with the thing that had concerned Henry
right from the moment he acceded to the throne,
which is the succession to the dynasty of the Tudors after Henry died.
It's not a surprise that, of course, what Henry most wants is his son Edward to become King after him,
but perhaps because he himself was a second son,
he provides for the possibility that Edward might die.
In other words, even on his deathbed,
Henry is still trying to claw his way into control beyond the grave.
Even more extraordinarily, given that Henry, as I say, is dying at this point,
he provides for the possibility that there might even be another wife in his future.
"Any lawful wife who I shall hereafter marry."
I mean, that is rank optimism in the face of all possible evidence, I would say.
I think there's something almost tragic about this king, on his deathbed,
who has striven for nearly 40 years to have absolute power over the people in hiscountry.
And now in his dying moments he's still trying to do that.
He's still trying to maintain control. And there's something moving about that.
Almost admirable, and also slightly repulsive, if I'm completely honest.
Henry is growing so ill that he's started to drift in and out of consciousness.
When Henry was on his deathbed, he must have felt that his dynasty was coming to an end.
Henry wasn't in a position to pass on his crown
to another stable, male monarch.
His son Edward was still very young.
When Henry knows that he really is now going to die, he must have been wondering
if he was going to end up on the right side of things with God.
I mean, he was Christ's deputy on Earth,
but he was also going to be judged and Henry must have been wondering
whether actually he had quite got things right.
Henry was now presiding over a realm divided,
in which religion had become an irreconcilable grievance.
Henry's lifetime as King had seen the creation of a divided England
and that was a genie he couldn't put back in the bottle.
Henry's courtiers finally mustered the courage to warn him of his approaching death.
There was a great deal of tension in the court.
Who was going to tell the King that he was about to meet his maker?
Eventually, the task fell to Sir Anthony Denny,
who in life had fulfilled Henry's most intimate needs as Groom of the Stole.
Now he had one last service to perform for his master - to tell him he was dying.
He asked Henry, effectively, if he wanted
to make his last confession. "Should I send for Thomas Cranmer,
"the Archbishop of Canterbury?"
And Henry replied, and said, "I will first take a little sleep.
"And then, as I feel myself,
"I will think on the matter."
They were the last words he ever spoke.
On the 28th of January, 1547, Henry VIII dies.
Henry VIII has gone down in history as our most famous king,
probably because he's our most married king, he's a kind of larger than life character,
but it's very, very clear that behind this public facade was somebody
who was fundamentally vulnerable and insecure.
The story of Henry VIII has everything in it.
It has transition from young, irresponsible being to someone blighted later in life
by paranoia.
Henry was self-obsessed, desired admiration.
He could never be wrong. You cannot ignore Henry.
He put England in the centre of European politics.
But he also gave the English a sense of national identity.
England was never going to be quite the same after Henry.
He'd broken with Rome, he had centralised the kingdom.
Institutions like Parliament and the Church of England hardly changed
for another 400 years.
Henry was tremendously charismatic. He knew how to be a king.
He understood the myth of English kingship.
I think if you looked at Henry VIII's reign as a whole,
you would have to accept that it had been a reign
that changed the state of England forever.