Original subtitles

In 1536,

after more than 25 years

of magnificence, splendor and glory,

the reign of king Henry viii reached a turning point.

The worst year of his life so far.

A jousting accident had left him

with a painful, debilitating wound to his leg,

his second wife had failed to give him a male heir

and been executed,

and he was about to face the first open rebellion

of his reign.

In this single year,

Henry had cause to question his mortality, his virility

and the loyalty of his subjects.

It was as if his world was falling apart.

I'm Dr. Tracy borman,

and this is the story of england's most famous monarch,

not through his six wives,

but through the numerous men who were influences in his life;

some well known, others mere footnotes in history.

To get through this terrible year,

Henry would draw upon all the men around him,

from advisors and ministers to painters and physicians.

But the man who emerged from these experiences had changed.

And as he grew more vulnerable,

Henry would increasingly turn against the men around him,

and they would turn against him.

January 1547 was the last month of Henry viii's life.

Overweight, bad tempered and racked with pain,

his health slowly failed him.

On the 28th, the king breathed his last,

and his 36-year reign was over.

The man who lay on his death bed in 1547

was no longer the athletic, vivacious king

who had ascended the throne almost 40 years earlier.

He's intelligent, perceptive.

He speaks many languages.

He is almost a clich�

of the renaissance man

as the renaissance monarch.

But in 1536, everything changed.

Make way for the king! Make way!

A jousting accident left Henry with a wound

that would plague him for the rest of his life.

His second wife, Anne boleyn, miscarried a child

that would have been his long-sought-after male heir

and was executed.

His illegitimate son, Henry fitzroy, had died,

and the break from Rome had divided the country.

The effects these trials and tribulations had

on the king's character were profound.

The king becomes slightly paranoid,

and that paranoia turns into a sort of capricious sadism.

He enjoys frightening people,

he enjoys the whole business of being unpredictable.

But Henry's change in fortunes

coincided with the rise of one of the king's men.

1536 had been a terrible year for Henry,

but for Thomas cromwell,

everything was starting to fall into place.

He'd persuaded Henry to get rid of the dangerous Anne boleyn,

he'd been knighted and made baron of wimbledon.

Acting as chief minister, cromwell's role was arguably

the most crucial to steering the course of Henry's reign.

But as well as serving the king,

cromwell served his own interests.

He was a commoner,

desperate to join the world of royalty and aristocracy.

He wanted to be part of the grand court...

The court to which the nobility belonged

and had a place by virtue of birth.

Cromwell is a member of the middling gentry

as a result of rising through the legal system.

Cromwell doesn't own that position.

It was this combination of low birth and high ambition

that made cromwell a very dangerous man.

I think he was ambitious and insecure

in a strange combination of ways,

and that made him willing, I think,

to go much further than others would go.

And he was soon to reveal his true colors.

With the country having broken from the pope in Rome

to secure Henry's divorce from Catherine of aragon,

nearly 900 religious houses,

from monasteries to abbeys and priories,

were now under the control of the king himself.

It's like a vast nationalization.

It is as if a government today came in

and nationalized half of the wealth of the country

that was in private hands.

Cromwell spotted an opportunity

to enhance his standing with Henry by making his king rich.

With papal jurisdiction out of the way,

it's as if the constraints are gone.

Cromwell has a mandate to do whatever he wishes.

And so across the kingdom,

cromwell began pulling down religious buildings

and stripping them of anything of value.

They're taking ornaments,

they're taking linen, they're taking beds.

Vast amounts of books, libraries of books are burned.

And then they're just thrown onto a bonfire.

It's an amazingly disruptive social moment

and sort of like an orgy of stripping

and, you know, gutting a great institution.

There's no precedent for it.

The devastation that this wreaked

can still be seen to this day.

These magnificent buildings

had dominated the landscape for centuries,

inspiring reverence and pride

among the people who lived by them.

But the money the dissolution made

went straight into Henry's pocket.

The treasury swelled,

and cromwell's favor with the king increased.

Both Henry and cromwell were in for the money

when it came to the dissolution of the monasteries.

It amounted to a huge amount of wealth,

and cromwell wanted Henry to be an independent, strong monarch,

and that required money.

But he was not only trying

to increase his standing with the king;

he had an ulterior motive.

Cromwell had spent most of his formative years

traveling around Europe,

which had given him a Cosmopolitan outlook.

But it had also exposed him

to some of the radical religious ideas

that were taking hold there.

Well, when he'd helped to secure Henry's position

as supreme head of the church,

cromwell spied his opportunity to bring these ideas to england.

This put him dangerously at odds with the king

because Henry, despite appearances to the contrary,

was and would remain a catholic to the day he died.

Nigel Henry, of course, was conflicted,

but on the other hand

he desperately needed the money that the church represented.

But if Henry had his doubts,

so did the population at large

who were about to turn against him.

The religious houses represented a social system.

They supported the poor,

they were part and parcel of the social fabric,

so it was seen by them as an attack

on their whole way of life.

In October 1536, Henry's subjects Rose up

in the first English rebellion of his reign...

The pilgrimage of grace.

The large popular rebellion occurred,

and it was not only the lower orders,

it was the aristocracy,

the ancient feudal families who ruled in the north as well.

They all Rose together in a massive popular outcry.

Henry listened to his loyal subjects

and promised to negotiate to reach a peaceful resolution

if they would lay down their arms.

But in reality Henry had no intention

of keeping his promise.

When he'd effectively disarmed them

and their large popular armies had dispersed,

he then went in with the forces that he had raised,

with the crown forces,

crushed them mercilessly

and executed virtually all their leaders.

Although there had been glimpses

of Henry's brutality in the past,

his savage suppression of the perpetrators of the rebellion

marked a turning point.

A line had been crossed.

The renaissance king had become a tyrant.

While Henry had been able

to put down the rebellion,

it had profoundly shaken him.

The unquestioning loyalty of his subjects

had been put in doubt for the first time,

and a dangerous crack had appeared in his relationship

with the chief advocate of these reforms,

Thomas cromwell.

Henry did think twice about going forward

in the reformist agenda that cromwell was so committed to,

and that created

a split, really, between the two men.

But it was not only the king and cromwell

who were becoming divided;

Henry's entire court began to split along religious lines,

and cromwell made enemies.

Chief among them was Thomas Howard,

Duke of Norfolk and uncle of Anne boleyn.

He resented cromwell principally on two grounds.

He was a base-born upstart

who was offending and threatening

the feudal rights of the old medieval aristocracy,

and because he was a sympathizer with the reformed religion,

and Norfolk was an ardent,

extremely conservative, reactionary catholic.

They disliked his religious policies.

They disliked the influence that he had over policy making,

but that he also wasn't one of them.

This discontent that cromwell had sown

would soon come back to haunt him,

and Norfolk would prove to be a deadly enemy.

But for now, cromwell was able to bring the king back on side

because he had a secret weapon.

He understood Henry's character.

Henry was a king with a short attention span.

He was a king who was not very often sitting

attending to the business of government,

and so in order to get the king's attention,

there was no point waiting around at court.

You actually had to go and find the king where he was.

And one of the best places

to have alone time with the king

was out in the pastureland surrounding Leeds castle,

where Henry indulged in one of his greatest pleasures:

Hawking.

Hawking was one of Henry viii's great passions.

So, surprise, surprise, it was also taken up

by his chief minister, Thomas cromwell,

who knew the king well and appreciated the fact

that Henry liked to mix business with pleasure.

So, he would invite him on Hawking expeditions

and get him to agree to all sorts of business

while he was having fun.

He seemingly convinced the king

to not only continue with the plans

but to intensify their efforts.

As a result, the dissolution continued at pace,

and at its peak, monasteries were being dismantled

at a rate of 50 per month.

But to bring his people back on side,

hans holbein, the most renowned painter of the tudor era,

was commissioned by Henry to revamp his public image

by painting a mural for whitehall palace.

I'm heading to the national portrait gallery in London

to meet curator Charlotte bolland

and see holbein's original design.

So, Charlotte, this is quite an impressive

and, I have to say, intimidating portrait of Henry, isn't it?

Charlotte bolland: Absolutely.

I think the word iconic often gets used quite casually

but is really applicable in this case.

This is a kind of preparatory drawing

for an incredible mural in whitehall palace

that is now lost,

so it's the only trace that we have of it,

and it was painted in 1536, we believe,

in order to celebrate kind of the tudor dynasty.

Through this drawing, holbein constructed

a radically new image of Henry viii.

Bolland: This image of Henry has become

not only the kind of image of Henry

that's sort of branded into the public imagination,

but also the image of what a king should look like,

so it gets replicated down the centuries,

this kind of stance and this idea

of the sort of broad shouldered, hands on hips

and that kind of idea of power and authority.

But interesting that increasingly

this public image is far removed from the private reality

of how Henry actually looked.

He's grown more and more infirm, he's gaining weight,

but thanks to holbein, he remains just like this.

While only later reproductions of the mural survive today,

they do capture the splendor of what holbein created,

which would set the tone for a host of subsequent portraits.

Holbein did more to shape the king's public persona

than any other man who surrounded him,

creating an image of the king

that would echo down the centuries.

Henry's image as king also received another boost

in the form of some long-anticipated news.

On the 12th of October 1537, here at Hampton court palace,

Henry's wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a baby boy.

At a lavish christening three days later

he was given the name Edward.

Henry was ecstatic.

The birth of the long-awaited son

is a moment when he can show

unrestrained happiness in public.

And it's like a flash of light, a blinding flash of light,

and in that flash of light he stands, perfectly justified.

500 years ago,

my office here at Hampton court was Edward's nursery.

From the moment of his birth,

Henry lavished enormous care and attention

on the upbringing and the security

of his precious son and heir.

But Henry's happiness was to be short-lived.

Less than two weeks after delivering

Henry's long-awaited son and heir,

Jane Seymour died of complications

resulting from the birth.

The death of Jane Seymour was devastating for Henry.

But as king he would need to take another wife,

once again, opening him up to the manipulations

of the men around him.

Thomas cromwell was first to offer up his suggestion...

A young German woman of noble blood

who fitted in with his own religious agenda.

Cromwell convinced Henry that Anne of cleves

was worth considering as a potential bride,

so Henry dispatched hans holbein to paint her picture.

He was so delighted with the result

that Anne made her way over to england.

Problem was, she didn't quite match up to her picture.

When Anne arrived in england,

it wasn't so much that she was ugly...

She wasn't a flanders mare at all...

But she was charmless, and she also didn't get Henry's jokes

or Henry's displays of courtly love,

and Henry just found he couldn't go through with this marriage.

Henry accused cromwell of deceiving him.

The Duke of Norfolk now had a chance

to seal his rival's fate

by offering up his catholic niece, Katherine Howard.

Here is this sweet, not very bright,

coquettish girl.

And he is attracted to her.

So they know exactly what they're doing,

they know what they're dangling in front of the king.

Norfolk's plan appeared to be working.

The passion the king felt for Katherine Howard

intensified his dislike for Anne of cleves.

But cromwell held his nerve,

claiming that he could not get Henry

out of the upcoming marriage.

Now, I'm sure cromwell could have

if he had put his mind to it,

but what worried him was that Henry

was now attracted to Katherine Howard,

and if Henry married her and Anne was put aside,

then the Howards would come back center stage

and cromwell's own position would be endangered.

Cromwell got what he wanted.

On the 6th of January 1540,

Henry had no choice but to marry Anne.

But there was one thing the king refused to do...

Consummate the marriage.

What we have instead is an unhappy king

telling cromwell that she has bad breath

to be followed that he's worried

that he can't perform any longer.

Now, why would Henry put himself through that humiliation

if Henry wasn't already thinking I need a way out of this?

Meanwhile, the war between cromwell and Norfolk

turned personal,

as the dissolution had reached

somewhere very close to Norfolk's heart.

Thetford priory.

Thetford priory is the home of the Norfolk dynasty,

first and second Dukes.

So, all of the first lot of norfolks,

the mowbrays are buried there,

and it's like a family mausoleum.

So though it's a priory, it's really almost to the norfolks

like their private chapel.

So, when the dissolutions come,

Norfolk tries repeatedly

to get thetford spared,

and cromwell refuses.

Thetford priory was pulled down

a month after Henry married Anne of cleves.

The rivalry between cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk

was reaching boiling point,

and Norfolk was now even more determined to destroy cromwell.

The Duke of Norfolk, among others,

took their opportunity to bring cromwell down

and accuse him of treason,

to accuse him of treachery

and proceeded to act against him

and convince the king, of course, most importantly,

also to act against cromwell in the most ruthless fashion.

I think with cromwell and Henry,

there'd always been a little bit of distance,

so if he has people in his ear whispering about cromwell,

Henry chooses to listen.

Henry viii had always been deeply loyal to his advisors

and those closest to him right up until he wasn't.

It took little to ignite the suspicions of a king

whose paranoia was approaching that of his late father.

On the 10th of June 1540, cromwell attended

what he thought was a routine meeting of the privy council,

but it was to be his last.

The intensely personal nature of the rivalry

between the king's most powerful men

is revealed by what happened next.

Norfolk strode up to cromwell

and seized the order of St. George from around his neck,

as if by doing so he could strip him of all the honors

with which this blacksmith boy

had tried to cover up the shame of his birth.

Cromwell's highest honor, his garter, was removed.

The beleaguered minister was arrested

and taken to the tower of London to await his fate.

The glee with which at the arrest

they strip cromwell of the garter

in front of everybody on the council

and bundle him out like a common criminal.

This is personal.

But the king wasn't done with him yet,

as revealed by one of the few documents

written by Henry himself.

You can see right at the top of the page,

it's questions to be asked of Thomas cromwell,

and the vast majority of those questions

relate to Anne of cleves,

Henry's fourth wife, who he's desperate to be rid of.

So, he's asking cromwell really for evidence

to help his case for an annulment.

Henry wants cromwell to tell his interrogators.

He also in particular focuses in here

on the question of Anne's prior betrothal to somebody else

before she married Henry,

because this was the crucial point.

This would get Henry out of the whole sorry thing.

That's something that cromwell had specifically said

there wasn't any evidence of,

but that's not good enough for Henry,

and now clearly he is applying the pressure

because cromwell has got nowhere to go.

Cromwell finally gave Henry all the evidence the king needed

to remove Anne of cleves and begged for mercy,

but Henry's mind was made up

and the Duke of Norfolk had the king

in the palm of his hand.

On the 28th of July 1540,

as Henry was preparing for his wedding to Katherine Howard,

cromwell ascended the scaffold

and placed his head on the block.

Unfortunately, as very often happened

with executions in the 16th century,

the executioner made a botch of it.

It took several strokes of the axe,

reducing his neck and head to a pulp

before his head was finally severed.

Cromwell's downfall is very revealing

of Henry's character by this time,

and in particular his ruthlessness.

If someone was no longer useful to him,

he would have them airbrushed from history.

The Duke of Norfolk

had successfully removed Thomas cromwell,

and his catholic niece was now married to the king,

shoring up his religious agenda.

She was considerably younger than Henry himself.

Henry described her as his Rose without a Thorn.

He, in, with a sort of dribbling senescent lust,

he regarded her as a perfect little rosebud.

But Katherine Howard would turn out to be

a less than reliable ally for her uncle.

Rose she may have been, but she also had thorns,

which pricked Henry in the places

where it really hurt.

Cranmer was unhappy with the situation

of there being a catholic queen, especially as she was the niece

of the man who'd helped bring down his friend and ally,

Thomas cromwell.

But he soon became privy to compromising information

on Henry's new wife.

After just giving thanks for his marriage

here at Hampton court in the chapel royal,

archbishop cranmer presented him with the news

that his wife was having an affair.

Accounts of Katherine's infidelity sealed her fate.

Katherine was executed at the tower of London

on the 13th of February 1542.

In contrast to the demise of his other marriages,

this one plunged Henry into a deep depression.

Never again would he trust any man to the same extent.

Now he would rule by fear.

Following Katherine Howard's alleged affair

with a lowly member of court,

Henry's paranoia reached new heights.

He would turn to an unlikely man for comfort.

Will somer, the king's fool or Jester.

Jesters were more than just frivolous appointments at court.

The tudors believed that laughter

was essential for health.

But somer's popularity with Henry went further than that.

He became one of the few men

whom the king could really trust.

I think Henry, who certainly didn't have

much to laugh about in the last years of his reign,

this dying, obese, unhappy, unfulfilled man

employed the court Jester, will somer,

to give him the bonus of laughter.

Will somer was a natural fool,

which meant he probably had learning difficulties,

but such people were valued by the tudors

because they were believed to be closer to god.

And somer's natural honesty,

unfettered by political ambition or guile,

meant that he was one of the few men who Henry truly loved.

Somer represents that form of ancient fool

that speaks truth unto power.

Because they have no family and no affinity, no family interest,

they represent a different ability to speak to the king,

and therefore there is this bondedness

between the relationship.

Such was the closeness of somer and the king

that he was depicted in paintings

as if he was almost part of the family.

They're part of, not an extended family,

they're part of the intimate family

and they represent something honest.

Henry would remain close to somer to the end of his days.

Meanwhile, the catholic faction in court

was to be dealt a blow in 1543

when Henry married his sixth and final wife,

Catherine parr, a religious reformer.

Catherine was a recipient of all the favors

that came with being queen.

Men like the Duke of Norfolk were forced to watch

as members of her family were promoted

to positions close to the king.

As always, as happened with Anne boleyn

and as happened with Catherine of aragon

in a sense that her friends were pushed up,

when Catherine parr becomes queen,

her brother and others in her family are pushed up.

And with Henry now married to a reformer,

fellow reformer Edward Seymour

came to dominate the privy council.

But while the catholics and reformers continued to clash,

the king himself became increasingly ill and secluded.

Probably because he was aware

that he was an increasingly repulsive figure

both physically and morally,

he was more and more isolated and lonely,

kept to his lodgings in his palaces,

saw fewer and fewer people.

With it becoming increasingly apparent

that Henry was not long for this world,

the fighting among the factions at court intensified

because the king's heir was just eight years old.

They were all jockeying for power

because the reign, the power

was going to be in the hands of a child,

was going to be in the hands of Edward vi,

who was still a very young boy,

so whoever controlled this child would control the kingdom.

Henry realized that without uniting the factions

he was going to pass on a divided kingdom to his son.

And so he took matters into his own hands.

With the country divided and his end growing near,

Henry took drastic action.

On Christmas Eve 1545,

he addressed parliament personally for the last time.

The speech he made reveals a man worn down

by years of bitter infighting between his courtiers,

by frailty of body and by dejection of spirit.

It's interesting that after decades

of promoting faction and friction at his court,

nurturing these factional intrigues,

pitting courtier and nobility against each other,

Henry now called for unity.

He wanted them to follow Christ's teachings

and love each other.

It may be yet another sign

that at the end of his day, he was having second thoughts.

He was having regrets for the violence,

the incredible violence that had accompanied his reign.

He ended with a final plea

to live in charity with one another

like brother and brother,

but he knew his words had come too late.

He would live out his days as an almost futile witness

to the struggles that were tearing his kingdom apart.

The 27th of January 1547

was the last full day of the reign of Henry viii.

When it became clear that he was dying,

the king sent for archbishop cranmer,

and by the time he arrived,

Henry was slipping into unconsciousness.

At two A.M. the following morning

with cranmer by his side,

the reign of Henry viii passed into the history books.

It's telling that in Henry's final hours

when he was racked by pain,

he refused to see his wife and daughters

and wanted to be attended only by his men.

That male heir whom Henry had spent much of his life seeking

ascended the throne as king Edward vi

at just nine years old.

But Henry viii's story does not end there.

Buried deep in the national archives

lies a document whose contents and significance

continue to be debated to this day.

James daybell: This is probably

one of the most controversial documents

in all of tudor history,

and the reason being

was that about a month before Henry viii's death,

this last will and testament was produced.

So, this isn't obviously in Henry's hand.

This is the secretary or...

Daybell: This is a scribal, a scribal hand,

but then you've got Henry's signature again

here at the end

and then below it, in hierarchical order,

you've got all the names of the ten witnesses

who witnessed the signing of the will.

Now, the controversy, though, relates to the signature here

because it is not Henry's own hand.

Instead it is a dry stamp.

In other words, it's a stamp

that has been impressed upon the page

and then a scribe has taken a quill and ink

and very carefully written Henry's name in

so that it looks absolutely perfect.

Now, the problem there is that if Henry isn't signing it,

what that does, that device allows people

to be able to manipulate the monarch.

The dry stamp was designed

to relieve Henry of the tedium of personally signing documents.

He had placed a man called William Clarke

in charge of the stamp.

Once a month, Clarke would give Henry a list of documents

he had signed on the king's behalf.

Daybell: Now, this will was made on the 30th of December 1546,

and it's not until the night before Henry's death

that we find William Clarke putting this

on a list of documents that have been signed.

With the stamp, the men around Henry

had the means to manipulate him to the end of his days,

potentially placing themselves in positions

of unrivaled power,

using the king's signature,

all with the aim of controlling the new young monarch.

So, who does best out of this among Henry's men,

because it has been seen

that they're just manipulating him right at the end,

kind of feathering their own nests for the next reign.

There's somerset, obviously.

Daybell: There's somerset, his brother, Thomas Seymour.

At the time of putting together this will,

the Spanish ambassador argues

that when Thomas Seymour's name was mentioned,

Henry said, "no, no, no!"

And so we know that Henry was against him,

but yet his name is on, among those of 12 assistants

who are going to play a part in the minority government.

And so, Henry has been made to put him back in.

The Duke of somerset

was a title created by Edward Seymour,

who would go on to dominate the reign of Edward vi

when he also appointed himself lord protector.

Protector somerset seizes power

and he manipulates the will afterwards, it seems to me,

in order to try and retain power for himself.

Whether the reformist faction

had indeed manipulated the king after his death

is something that will continue to be debated, but if they did,

it was merely the last in a long line of manipulations

that Henry fell prey to throughout his life.

The men who had surrounded Henry

were absolutely instrumental

in shaping the king that we have come to know.

They came from various spheres of court.

They came from the clerical spheres,

the personal spheres, the political spheres.

They all played a part in molding Henry

into the ideal king.

The last glimpse we have of Henry

is as a king and a man defined not by his six wives,

but by the men who had entertained, advised,

angered and delighted him for 55 years.

From the suffocating father

whom the young Henry would rebel against

and the ministers that shaped his kingdom for good or ill

to the man who created an image of a king

that would last through the ages.

By seeing Henry viii through the eyes of the king's men,

his reign is revealed

in all its multi-faceted contradictory glory.