Inquisition_2of4_The Spanish Inquisition
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00:00The Inquisition swept like a plague across medieval Europe.
00:04It was without question one of the darkest and bloodiest episodes in human history.
00:09A time when thousands of people accused of heresy by the Catholic Church
00:13were arrested, tried and put to death.
00:17It was ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
00:21It was one faith trying to exterminate another.
00:26There were Inquisition tribunals going on all over the country.
00:31It really was a people living in fear.
00:34This religious fanaticism spread to Tudor England
00:38where Catholics and Protestants did their best to wipe each other out.
00:42The persecution continued in the 18th century
00:45when countless ordinary women were drowned or burned at the stake
00:49after they were accused of being witches.
00:51One third of the entire population was accused of heresy and witchcraft
00:56by the other two thirds.
00:58The Christians were actually aiming to stamp out something
01:01that had been in place for thousands of years before them.
01:05This was a war of magic and witchcraft
01:08but what it really was was a war of people that couldn't fight back.
01:13The world lived in the shadow of Inquisition and persecution
01:19for over 500 years.
01:22You would think we would have learned our lesson.
01:26Thousands of heretics in this country died
01:30under the knife, the axe or in the flames.
01:38The Spanish Inquisition is perhaps the most infamous
01:41of all religious persecutions
01:43and it caused ever greater conflict
01:45between Christians and Catholics in Tudor Europe.
01:48As we'll see in this episode of Inquisition.
01:52I really don't think you can underestimate
01:55how much the Inquisition and the tribunals
01:58affected the mindset of the people in Spain.
02:19By the middle of the 15th century,
02:21most of Europe was firmly controlled by Rome.
02:25The Crusades had been something of a disaster.
02:28After nine attempts to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims
02:32spread over nearly 200 years,
02:34the Crusaders had been routed from Jerusalem
02:37and other key Muslim strongholds
02:39and forced to flee back across the Mediterranean
02:42to the Mediterranean Sea.
02:44As a result, the world was now divided
02:47into Christian and Islamic lands.
02:56Buoyed by the success of the suppression
02:58of the Cathars in France,
03:00but smarting from the humiliation in the Holy Land,
03:03the Pope and his cardinals began looking
03:05for new heretics to pursue,
03:07who could be converted to Islam
03:09and who could be converted to Christianity.
03:14Or executed, not to mention have their lands,
03:17assets and monies confiscated.
03:20There was one very obvious target.
03:22The Jews.
03:29So on 1st November 1478,
03:32Pope Sixtus IV issued a papal bull ordering a Holy Inquisition
03:36in the Kingdom of Castile in Spain.
03:41The targets were the new Christians,
03:43the conversos.
03:44These were descendants of people
03:47who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism.
03:51Between 1391 and 1415,
03:53around the turn of the 15th century,
03:56there had been a series of riots in that time
03:59directed at Jews,
04:00and many had either migrated to North Africa
04:02or had converted to Catholicism.
04:04But they lived in urban areas
04:06and they were an unpopular class
04:09among the rest of Spanish society.
04:11And because of the discord and tensions between the groups,
04:14many of them were thought to be still practising the Jewish religion
04:18and therefore to be heretics,
04:19because while they were Catholics and had been baptised,
04:22they were not actually performing the Catholic rites
04:24as they should have been
04:25and they were keeping other practices,
04:28Jewish practices, secret.
04:30So the Inquisition was founded as a way
04:32of seeking out potential heretics,
04:35potential converso heretics and trying...
04:42At the end of the day, the Spanish Inquisition,
04:45like all the Inquisitions before it,
04:47France, everywhere,
04:49these Inquisitions were all about control and wealth.
04:52If there's an upsurge in movement,
04:54if it's religious, if it's political,
04:56they are going to be taken down because they are a threat.
05:01In 1483, Thomas the Torquemada, a Dominican monk,
05:06was made the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.
05:14He opened tribunals which eventually spread across the whole of Spain.
05:19The brutal Torquemada became known as the Hammer of the Heretics.
05:25He was most definitely a sadist.
05:29He was a Dominican friar.
05:32And, to be quite honest with you, the Pope set up the Dominican friars,
05:38Dominic being, for want of a better word, the first Inquisitor.
05:41But these Dominicans, wearing black habits,
05:44were, for want of a better word,
05:46the first people to be in charge of the Spanish Inquisition.
05:50The first people to be in charge of the Spanish Inquisition.
05:53And the Torquemada had well over 2,000 heretics tortured
05:58and burnt at the stake for heresy.
06:07Here's a guy that hated Jews, hated Muslims,
06:11and wanted to return the whole of Spain to the Spanish Inquisition.
06:16Here he was, standing at the stake, or standing in the torture chamber,
06:20hearing the bones crunch, listening to the sinews snap,
06:24hearing the flesh sizzle, and the screams of those poor and fortunate heretics
06:29that were being burnt alive on his sadistic orders.
06:36It was Torquemada who really set the tone for the Spanish Inquisition.
06:43It was Torquemada who really created the new institution.
06:47So he was the one who centralised its powers
06:50among the Consejo Suprema, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition.
06:54He was the one who instituted its processions through the town,
06:59its manifestation of its power. That came from Torquemada.
07:02And, of course, he was also the one who legitimised and authorised
07:06the most brutal phase of Inquisitorial history.
07:09So for all those reasons, that's why he's rightly remembered
07:13as one of the most brutal people associated with the Inquisition.
07:31On March 31st, 1492, based largely on the recommendation
07:36of Thomas de Torquemada and the Inquisition Tribunal,
07:40King Ferdinand of Spain issued what became known as the Alhambra Decree,
07:46an edict which forced more than 40,000 Jews to leave Spain.
07:55Under the terms of the decree, if suspects were denounced
07:58by two or more persons of good nature,
08:01they were investigated by an Inquisition tribunal,
08:04and the charge was heresy.
08:16The Inquisitors typically announced their arrival in town in advance
08:21and expected that everyone attend and confess the error of their ways.
08:27But those who volunteered and did so readily,
08:30especially to minor misdemeanours,
08:32and those who pledged allegiance to the Catholic Church,
08:36and especially those who ratted on their friends,
08:39well, they were let off easy.
08:41However, those who did not readily confess,
08:45well, that very fact was used as evidence against them
08:48for a much harsher sentence.
08:52Inquisitors would come to town,
08:54and they would announce an edict of fate.
08:57So anybody who had any knowledge of something
09:00which was contrary to the faith in their view,
09:02the practice of the faith,
09:03had to come within 30 days and denounce this to the Inquisitors.
09:06The Inquisitors would then amass their evidence,
09:08and then they would start interrogating suspects.
09:12They would arrive at a significant town.
09:15They would publish the edict of faith.
09:18So that was the beginning of a process.
09:21They would collect all these denunciations.
09:24They would start trials.
09:27They would detain people,
09:29and they would bring these people to the headquarters of the tribunal.
09:33So it was systematically done.
09:36They would proceed town by town.
09:45The Inquisitors kept incredibly detailed records
09:48of everything that they did.
09:50All of the interrogations, all of the sentences, all of the penances.
09:53Inquisitors had incredible power
09:55over the people that were contained within them,
09:57which is why you see people trying to get hold of these registers
10:00and to destroy them or to sell them back to the heretics,
10:03because they represented the source of the Inquisitors' power, really.
10:08So even if you'd been up before the Inquisition,
10:11and they said,
10:12have you had any involvement in heresy?
10:14And you say, no, no, nothing to do with me.
10:16I've never seen anything.
10:17And then you go away.
10:18If it later transpires that that was a lie,
10:20they then have a record of you being caught in that lie,
10:23and you can be subjected to much more serious punishment.
10:26So they're a very serious source of power.
10:29So the Inquisitors don't really need to be particularly brutal,
10:33because people understand that merely the existence of these records
10:38is enough to give the Inquisitors power over people.
10:41People are willing to come forward and to confess things
10:45in order to escape serious punishment.
10:51The Inquisition is amazingly efficient,
10:53both in the sense that it's good at detecting people with wrong thoughts
10:57and it's good at removing them.
10:59But by definition, the dream Spain for the Inquisition
11:02is one in which it doesn't have to execute or indeed try anybody,
11:06because it's got rid of all the wrong opinions.
11:09THEY SHOUT
11:16What we have to understand with the Inquisition
11:18and the fear it creates in communities is its scope as an institution.
11:21So, you know, the great set pieces like, for example,
11:24the great film of The Name of the Rose in the book by Humberto Eco
11:28is of these very all-powerful people riding into town
11:33and wreaking havoc and people being burnt at the stake.
11:36That went on.
11:37It went on particularly in the 1480s, 1490s,
11:40into the 16th century it went on.
11:42And it carried on in the minor key
11:44going on through to the 17th and 18th centuries.
11:46But what, in a way, was more terrifying for people
11:50was the power the Inquisition could have over their daily lives.
11:53So if you were tried and penanced by the Inquisition,
11:56a frequent punishment was banishment.
11:58You would be sent away from your home community for five years, ten years,
12:02you couldn't work there, you couldn't have any contact with your family
12:05until you would basically be made destitute.
12:08The first wave of persecution in the last decades of the 15th century
12:14was one of the most massive and brutal waves
12:20in the history of the Inquisition.
12:22So it is Torquemada, but all the other inquisitors
12:26were involved in all this, in all this procedure.
12:31I have no doubt that the Inquisition was the first
12:35that the Inquisition was feared
12:38and there was a clear impact on behaviour.
12:50As Inquisition fever swept across Spain,
12:53Torquemada's tribunals were soon heaving with thousands of cases
12:57and thousands of suspects.
12:59Fear was the key.
13:00Fear that not being an accuser might lead to being one of the accused.
13:04In this poisonous atmosphere of mistrust, the Inquisition thrived.
13:11Of course, there were many reasons to report someone to the tribunals,
13:15some of them rather less than godly.
13:18Some began to realise that it was a convenient way
13:20to get rid of business rivals, unpopular family members,
13:24even husbands, wives and mistresses.
13:29The important thing to think about accusations,
13:31the way that people denounce one another,
13:33there were many aspects of this which made it a really remarkable case
13:38of legitimising and, in fact, making gossip into a good thing,
13:42a noble thing to do.
13:43Of course, we all like gossiping about each other,
13:46but we tend to feel a certain amount of reticence
13:49or maybe we shouldn't be doing this,
13:51but the Inquisition made it into a noble act.
13:53In fact, it was a moral duty.
13:54If you'd heard some gossip about your neighbour
13:56who might be doing something, you had to go and denounce them.
13:59That was your duty and, in fact,
14:00you could be brought before the Inquisition if you didn't do it.
14:08The whole era was nonsensical, was crazy.
14:12All it was was, you know, you wanted the cottage
14:16that the old lady still lived in,
14:18you owed the baker some money,
14:21you didn't like the old woman that lived down the road,
14:25you wanted to get rid of your wife,
14:27you wanted to get rid of your girlfriend,
14:29you wanted to get rid of your husband,
14:31and so you would make up some nonsensical stories
14:34that they would creep out in the middle of the night
14:37and down at the bottom of the garden would be a hare
14:41that suddenly turned into a demonical figure
14:43and had sex with them at the bottom of the garden.
14:46All manner of absolute nonsense that went on in those days.
14:51The whole thing was rubbish, was nonsense,
14:55and it was a disgrace to this country
14:57in a way that it's never been gripped before
15:01and hopefully will never be again.
15:09Everything which happened within the bounds of the tribunal was secret,
15:12so an accused person did not know who their accusers were.
15:15When they were trying to defend themselves,
15:17they had to guess who it might be,
15:19so you would find huge lists of all the people
15:22who this person says is an enemy of theirs
15:24and you would think that one of them may be the actual accuser,
15:27which gives a sense of the way in which, really,
15:30what this legitimisation of gossip did
15:33was to make those kinds of tensions and enmities worse, to accentuate them.
15:39HE SPEAKS SPANISH
15:49Torture, and the fear of torture,
15:52was the real weapon of the Inquisition in Spain.
15:55It was the job of the Inquisitors to force a confession
15:58from those who had been accused.
16:00That meant certain death, of course,
16:02but many were killed anyway before they'd had a chance to confess.
16:09HE SPEAKS SPANISH
16:12The Inquisition torturers earned themselves fearsome reputations
16:16for the number of confessions they achieved,
16:19and they were paid accordingly.
16:21A star performer could command a tidy sum
16:24as he moved around Spain pulling off thumbnails
16:27and snapping the limbs off suspected heretics.
16:31HE SPEAKS SPANISH
16:38The torturers travelled with a gruesome array of instruments,
16:42designed to apply ever-increasing levels of pain and punishment.
16:46HE COUGHS
17:01Historian and author Richard Felix
17:03has studied the use of torture by the Inquisition
17:06and is under no illusion about how persuasive it was.
17:10This is actually a wine press, but people were pressed to death.
17:16The sentence was that you be taken back from this courtroom
17:20to the deepest dungeon, a room where no light can enter,
17:24where you will be laid naked on the floor,
17:27with a cloth around your loins and weights of iron
17:31as heavy as you can bear and heavier to be placed upon your body.
17:43Torture was a mean threat to obtain confession.
17:51We have to keep in mind that all the judicial system
17:55after the 13th century, 14th century, was based on confession.
18:01The Inquisition, even the name, the noun Inquisition,
18:06reflects this new judicial development of the late Middle Ages.
18:12The procedure was organised in the way that at the end
18:17they would obtain a confession.
18:19The torture was part of these possibilities.
18:22It was not enacted all the time, but the threat was there,
18:27and so it was an element in the production of confessions.
18:37And, of course, one of the favourite forms of torture, fire.
18:42Brazier here, branding iron, heated up.
18:46You could be branded on any part of the body.
18:49One of the favourite things as well was to heat up a metal boot
18:53and then put it on someone's foot.
18:56Would you recount after that?
18:59I think I would.
19:08And what about this?
19:10This is as bad as it gets.
19:13You are actually strapped into this and sat on this chair
19:20with these dreadful, huge, rusty nails sticking up.
19:30I think the most resonant form of torture that was used by the Inquisition
19:34is probably what was known as the potro.
19:36The potro was a form of water torture.
19:39You were tied down on a bed which had spikes on it
19:46and then you were bound to it with very tight coils of twine and rope and cloth
19:54which would be tightened with each time that you didn't confess.
19:58And then you would be forced water down your throat.
20:02And this would happen, the coils would be tightened six, seven, eight times
20:08and one of the really sad things about reading Inquisition cases
20:14is that it was one of the duties of the scribe to write everything down
20:20that was said to be a loyal and faithful witness to what has happened.
20:26And so you will read the cries, the exclamations that people made,
20:32their claim that they knew nothing, that they were going to...
20:35In fact, they often said, I'm going to commit a terrible sin,
20:38I'm going to lie and confess to something that I've never done.
20:41And then, as the torture got worse, they would eventually confess.
20:46Are you going to confess?
20:52No, no.
20:53I know you're a sinner, I know you're going to confess.
20:58Who's going to confess?
21:03And here on this table, the piece de resistance of the Inquisitor's torture weapons.
21:09Dreadful things.
21:11Pincers for pulling out the fingernails and the toenails.
21:17Here, for actually attaching it to the skin and pulling until they rip the flesh away.
21:26This dreadful piece of equipment was for ripping off the breasts of women.
21:32And goodness only knows what these were for.
21:35But if you were shown these, would you not confess?
21:38Because I certainly would.
21:41This, I suppose, goes without saying.
21:44There's one on the door over there.
21:46I presume that this was put underneath the chin and you were hung on it.
21:51And here, the heretic's fork.
21:55This was actually put around the neck.
21:58It was pushed into the chin here and here, stuck into the sternum.
22:04And then tied around the neck.
22:08And then you had to recant the words,
22:11Abduro, Abduro, Ab...
22:14But of course, it's easy for me to do it.
22:16But when it's actually sticking through your neck into your tongue,
22:19I would think it would have been very difficult.
22:22It made little difference how a person's guilt was established.
22:26The fate was the same.
22:28It was called purification of sin by fire.
22:33A rather gentler way of describing being burned at the stake.
22:40And it was the same for the heretic.
22:42It was the same for the heretic.
22:44It was the same for the heretic.
22:46A gentler way of describing being burned at the stake.
22:52There were so many trials and convictions across Spain
22:55that the Inquisition couldn't keep pace.
22:58A situation soon remedied by mass executions known as autodefes.
23:03These were huge set-piece events
23:05that took place in large squares in major cities like Madrid.
23:09And they lasted a whole day.
23:11Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people would come and watch
23:14as the condemned were paraded through the city
23:17on their way to meet their deaths.
23:21Autodefes were powerful demonstrations of the Inquisition's authority,
23:26which also provided a macabre form of public entertainment.
23:32Historian Andrew Goff has made a study of these grisly spectacles
23:36and exactly what went on.
23:40Autodefe literally means act of faith.
23:43And it is the final step in the Inquisition process.
23:47This was a ritual of public penance of condemned heretics
23:51that took place when the tribunals determined their punishment,
23:55the most severe of which was execution by burning.
24:00The largest autodefe took place in a square much like this one
24:04in Madrid, Spain in 1680,
24:06when hundreds of men and women were sent to the flames.
24:13CROWD SHOUTS
24:25For the ordinary Spanish person, an Inquisition autodefe
24:29is a mixture of a really solemn religious event
24:32and a really fun mass event.
24:34You do bring the children, you do bring your lunch,
24:37you bring your friends, you make a day of it.
24:40It's enormously entertaining and yet it's religiously educational as well,
24:44so you score both ways.
24:48Autodefe were enormous events,
24:50particularly by the time you got to the 17th century,
24:53everybody was expected to come.
24:55And the stage took over a month to build,
24:58huge numbers of workmen were employed in it,
25:01the costs were enormous.
25:03And when you look through the Inquisitorial records,
25:06one of the things which is also very striking
25:08is the money spent on wax, and this is because candles,
25:11there were huge numbers of candles all around,
25:14so an amazing sense of theatre, majesty,
25:17but also an intense feeling of a deeply powerful atmosphere, I think.
25:25That was the experience which was involved.
25:32It's deliberately theatrical, the condemned are paraded through the town,
25:36they're dressed in costumes with paintings on them
25:39that emphasise their particular sin,
25:41and they're then brought up,
25:43there's a whole religious business of praying and preaching,
25:48their sense of wrong is made clear to the crowd,
25:52and if they are obstinate, as the people being executed usually are,
25:55then the crowd is encouraged to understand
25:58this person is going to plunge straight through the fire into hell forever.
26:02And then they are expertly burned,
26:04this is an era in which people watch bears and dogs and bulls
26:08being tortured to death for fun,
26:10in which criminals are killed really slowly
26:13for routine crimes like theft, murder.
26:16So cruelty is part of theatre,
26:19and the Inquisition just cashes into this.
26:24The prisoners were taken to a quermadero, or burning place,
26:29which was really just a large wooden pyre.
26:33Those who were let off,
26:37well, they fell to their knees in thanksgiving,
26:41but those who were condemned, they were sent straight to the fire,
26:45burnt alive while thousands looked on.
26:51The way in which you could be penanced by the Inquisition
26:54was if you confessed.
26:56The Inquisition only burnt people at the stake,
26:58relaxed them, as it was called, to secular justice,
27:01if they were seen to be impenitent, if they did not confess.
27:05Confession was part of the process of absolution
27:08and actually restarting your life.
27:11So there was a huge incentive to confess,
27:15even if you'd done nothing.
27:22The autodefes were the most potent symbols
27:25of the horrors of the Holy Inquisition in Spain,
27:28and the Dominican tribunals kept detailed records
27:31of all the public execution
27:33and exactly who was there, who was sent to the flames,
27:36and the numbers involved.
27:40This is an actual eyewitness account of an autodefe in Madrid in 1500.
27:47At eight o'clock in the morning, the procession began
27:50with a company of coal merchants, all armed with pikes and muskets,
27:54and people furnishing the wood with which the criminals are burnt.
27:59They were followed by Dominicans, before whom a white cross was carried.
28:04After these came 12 men and women
28:06with ropes around their necks and torches in their hands.
28:10Next came 20 more criminals, of both sexes,
28:13who had relapsed thrice into their formal errors
28:16and were condemned to the flames.
28:20Those who had given some tokens of repentance
28:23were to be strangled before they were burnt.
28:27But for the rest, having persisted obstinately in their errors,
28:32were to be burnt alive.
28:38To get the Inquisition to put you to death,
28:40you really have to work on it
28:42by refusing utterly to give up your wrong beliefs.
28:45And at the end of that, patiently, professionally,
28:48and with infinite goodwill, they'll burn you.
28:52Submerse the ass!
29:00In recent years, a number of historians
29:03have reappraised Vatican records and archives.
29:07Some have begun to question the established history of the Inquisition
29:11and to suggest that time has exaggerated its brutality
29:14and the numbers involved.
29:16One of these is historian Francisco Bettencourt.
29:21You have, I estimate, 50,000 trials in Portugal,
29:2650,000 trials in Italy,
29:29and 200,000 trials in Spain.
29:31So we are talking, in three centuries,
29:34about 300,000 trials.
29:39If you count also with denunciations,
29:43you would have at least five times that number.
29:46In average, people would stay in jail for one year
29:50while the trials were prepared, while they were interrogated.
29:55A minority could be... was tortured.
29:59But, in general, we are talking about
30:03long periods of inquiry, long periods of detention.
30:08You have an intimidation of population.
30:10Population knew all about Inquisition.
30:12It was very visible.
30:15So, the Inquisition was
30:18prosecuting heresy at all levels.
30:27The Inquisition ravaged Spain for hundreds of years
30:30before spreading to Portugal and Mexico
30:33and then inevitably moving to the Spanish colonies in the New World.
30:37It was only officially abolished in December 1808
30:41by Napoleon after his invasion of Spain.
30:44By that time, according to the Vatican's own figures,
30:4832,000 people had been executed throughout the country.
30:58Now, in terms of numbers of dead,
31:01that is smaller than I think many people have the idea of.
31:06So, with the Portuguese Inquisition,
31:09we're talking around between 1,000 and 2,000.
31:12The Spanish Inquisition, numbers are harder to be certain about
31:16because many of the early records have been lost.
31:18Many of the Inquisitorial records of Spain
31:20were burned by Napoleon's troops
31:22when they invaded Spain in the early 19th century.
31:25So, the precise numbers are hard to be certain of.
31:28But, certainly, in that early phase,
31:31we're certainly talking no less than 10,000.
31:34That is a reasonable estimate.
31:39CHEERING
31:47But all was not rosy in the Catholic garden.
31:50While the Holy Inquisition was brutalising Spain,
31:53the English King Henry VIII had decided to break with the Church in Rome
31:58and establish one of his own, the Church of England.
32:02Henry had previously been a devout Catholic,
32:05but the Church had been unable to deliver what he wanted most,
32:08a divorce from his Catholic Queen, Catherine of Aragon,
32:12and marriage to his mistress, Anne Boleyn.
32:15To the fury of Pope Clement VII,
32:18Rome had lost religious control of England.
32:26To the Pope, Henry VIII's withdrawal of allegiance was a catastrophe.
32:31He is the first king in Europe actually to break with Rome
32:36and turn to the new-style heresies that have become known as Protestantism.
32:40And, what's more, Henry aims to be a better Catholic than the Popes.
32:43That's a double insult.
32:45It turns people who, until now, had absolutely no problem
32:48in being loyal to the King of England
32:50and loyal to the Pope as part of the package
32:52into having to make a really hard choice.
32:55And they are executed as traitors.
32:58They're not burned like heretics, they're hanged, born and caught.
33:01Which is pretty humiliating.
33:07Henry's break with Rome and, of course, marriage to Anne Boleyn
33:12was absolutely abhorred by the Catholic world.
33:16And you must remember in those days, in the 1530s,
33:19most of the world was still Catholic.
33:22And what Henry did was beyond anything.
33:25Heresy on a grand scale.
33:28The fact that he'd appointed himself head of the Church
33:35nobody could cope with it.
33:37And, of course, to marry Anne Boleyn, to marry twice,
33:40was too much for everyone.
33:43And, of course, she was considered a whore.
33:45And even worse, of course, she had a child
33:48who was considered to be a bastard.
33:50And the Catholic Church really weren't happy at this.
33:56What made it really creepy for English Catholics,
33:59people more loyal to the Pope in religion than to the King,
34:02is that the King is behaving atrociously.
34:04He's getting rid of a really popular, effective, dignified, pious wife
34:10for this unknown, with an amazing temper
34:14and really dodgy ideas about religion,
34:17who's corrupted or bewitched the King
34:19and is hurtling England down exactly the wrong path.
34:23Henry's break with Rome and his violent dissolution of the monasteries
34:28forced thousands of Catholics, many of whom were from noble families,
34:33to practise their faith in secret.
34:36Places known as priest holes,
34:38in which itinerant Catholic preachers could hide,
34:41were created in many great houses in England.
34:44England is an exceptionally wealthy country.
34:49England is an exceptionally well-run, devout Catholic country.
34:54It's not one of the more risky bits of Catholic Christendom.
34:58It's incredibly loyal.
35:00So, when the King turns against the Pope,
35:03he has to do so confusingly,
35:05not by saying he's embracing a heresy,
35:08but that he's getting rid of the Pope
35:10in order to protect Catholicism better than the Pope would do.
35:14And that really does screw up people's consciences quite badly.
35:19A few of them believe him.
35:21Even fewer think that they'd actually like to have a heresy,
35:26the Protestant ideas in place of Catholicism,
35:29and Henry is the next best thing.
35:31Most people are just so stunned,
35:33because nothing like this has ever happened before.
35:36They don't know what to do, and so they do nothing.
35:44When King Henry died in 1547,
35:47his nine-year-old son Edward succeeded him to reign as Edward VI.
35:52But when Edward himself died suddenly in 1553, aged just 15,
35:57his half-sister Mary, the daughter of Queen Catherine of Aragon,
36:01eventually came to the throne.
36:04Queen Mary Tudor was young, angry and fiercely Catholic.
36:08She quickly set about reversing her father's religious reforms
36:12and decreed that Roman Catholicism
36:14was once again to be the official religion of England.
36:18She ruthlessly pursued Church of England dissenters,
36:21executing so many of them that she became known as Bloody Mary.
36:28When Henry VIII died, his feeble, weak son,
36:32Protestant son, became Edward VI.
36:36He only lived a few years,
36:38and then, of course, next in line for the throne,
36:41a woman, of course, was Mary I.
36:44Bloody Mary.
36:46She was a Catholic.
36:47She was the daughter of Catherine of Aragon,
36:49who, of course, had been thrown out by Henry.
36:52She was absolutely furious.
36:54She was a coiled spring that was waiting for something
36:58that she never thought would happen.
37:00And all of a sudden, she was queen,
37:02a Catholic queen in a Protestant country,
37:05and she did everything in the four years that she reigned
37:09to get rid, to exterminate all of these stinking Protestants
37:14that had defiled her faith for so many years
37:18while her father and brother were on the throne.
37:21And she did a very good job.
37:31Mary Tudor has had the adolescence and early womanhood from hell.
37:36She is constantly having to reckon
37:39with having been the heir to the throne,
37:42regarded with all the awe and the reverence
37:45and given all the power of that,
37:47to being regarded as a bastard,
37:49to being regarded as a slightly better bastard than before,
37:52to being regarded as an heir to the throne again,
37:56to being regarded as the treacherous sister
37:59of the reigning boy King Edward,
38:01to being stuck out of the succession altogether
38:04and declared a rebel,
38:06and seizing England by sheer courageous resistance.
38:11She is the only Tudor rebel to succeed
38:14since the end of the Wars of the Roses
38:16and actually seize London.
38:18So, what's she like? She's her father's daughter.
38:21Henry VIII is a monumental ego,
38:24flattening any opposition,
38:26driven by the sense that he is totally right,
38:28and that's what Mary is like.
38:30She's really brave, she's highly intelligent,
38:33she's a superb leader, but she is a fanatic.
38:37She is the daughter of an unworldly, unrealistic,
38:42unbendably brave woman, Catherine of Aragon,
38:46and she combines the lot.
38:48If she'd lived for 50 years on the throne,
38:50we'd be a Catholic nation today.
38:52Instead, she lives for five years,
38:54but in those five years, she burns more people alive
38:57for their religion than anybody else in English history,
39:00and burns more than anybody else in Europe
39:03in the same amount of time.
39:12Mary's reign was really a reign of persecution and recrimination.
39:16She wanted to get back at all of those Protestants
39:19that had caused the Reformation in the first place,
39:23had been against her mother,
39:25and basically she did everything in her power
39:28to get rid of as many Protestants as possible,
39:30including Latimer and Ridley,
39:33and of course Cranmer,
39:35who was nothing less than the Archbishop of Canterbury,
39:38but he was the guy, of course,
39:40that organised the divorce of Henry and her mother
39:44and the wedding of Henry and Anne Boleyn.
39:47So Mary hated him,
39:49and the poor guy, of course, like so many others,
39:52probably 300 Protestant martyrs
39:55burnt at the stake under Mary's reign.
39:59The execution of Archbishop Cranmer
40:02was a defining moment for Protestants in England.
40:05A pious, devout and popular man,
40:08many people saw his brutal execution
40:11as an act of petty revenge by a petulant young queen.
40:15And far from rallying people to her Catholic cause,
40:18it hardened public opinion against her.
40:21Bloody Queen Mary was feared,
40:24but she certainly wasn't popular.
40:29Mary, when she seizes the throne,
40:32finds, naturally enough, a church which is staffed with Protestants,
40:36and she simply lets most of them go.
40:38Those that haven't got married and are willing to convert
40:41just become Roman Catholic priests.
40:43Those that have got married put away their wives
40:46and find parishes elsewhere,
40:48or else they just leave the profession.
40:50And that leaves a hard core of famous Protestant bishops
40:54who are put on show trials as heretics and traitors,
40:57and she's after about half a dozen of them,
41:00but one she's really going for is the Archbishop of Canterbury,
41:03the primate of the Church of England, Thomas Cranmer,
41:06because he is the guy who declared her father's marriage
41:10to her mother invalid and Mary a bastard.
41:14And you can see how much she hates this guy's guts,
41:17that she actually gets him to declare himself wrong.
41:21He declares publicly that Catholicism is the best religion after all,
41:25and what you do then is you put this guy on show
41:28and get him to tell everybody that he's wrong.
41:31It's the classic propaganda victory.
41:33Mary insanely insists he still has to die,
41:37thereby shattering all the achievement,
41:40because Cranmer, when he's actually tied to the stake
41:43and is about to be grilled,
41:45declares the truth about Protestantism all over again,
41:48burns his own hand in front of him,
41:51which had signed the denunciation of his former beliefs,
41:54and provides the perfect Protestant martyr.
41:58It's a classic own-girl.
42:12With Europe still reeling from the Holy Inquisition
42:15that had now spread all over Europe and into the New World,
42:19the events in England had come as something of a shock.
42:22No-one had imagined that a monarch would stand up to Rome
42:25and ban the Catholic faith.
42:27But then Henry was no ordinary monarch.
42:30In contrast, Mary Tudor's bloody Catholic backlash
42:33was more in keeping with the terror sweeping Europe.
42:40But what happened next began an entirely new chapter
42:43in the history of England.
42:45An inexperienced young girl, Henry's daughter,
42:48ascended the throne in dangerous and turbulent times.
42:56Her reign became known as the Golden Age,
42:59but it was also a time of plotting, treason and treachery.
43:04The Elizabethan era was about to begin.
43:10Tudor England was a time of religious turmoil.
43:14First we were Catholic, then we were Protestant,
43:17then Catholic and again back to Protestant.
43:20Thousands of heretics in this country died
43:24under the knife, the axe or in the flames.
43:47THE GOLDEN AGE