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00:00We live in an age of religious extremism, an age of terror and violent slaughter.
00:22We are locked in a bewildering ideological battle with religious fundamentalism.
00:29It's a battle that's taken most of us by surprise, because religious fundamentalism
00:34seems so odd, so alien to our own easygoing way of life.
00:41But you know, it's not.
00:44We've been here before, here at home, here at the very heart of our own civilization.
00:52Exactly 500 years ago, a breach within Christianity tore Europe, England and the Church apart.
01:01It was the same literalism, the same passionate intensity, the same apocalyptic violence as
01:10now.
01:12It's our very own jihad.
01:15It's called the Reformation.
01:22The Protestant Reformation was also a political and cultural revolution.
01:28It unleashed bloodshed, terror and the destruction of religious art, a combination we recognize
01:35all too well.
01:37It began with a provincial German monk, and it threatened the most powerful institution
01:43in the Western world, the Catholic Church, with destruction.
01:48In England, it led to a hard Brexit, 16th century style, as King Henry VIII broke with
01:54Rome and declared himself supreme head on earth of the Church of England.
02:02It was a tale of espionage, enhanced interrogation and horrific death, as a handful of brave
02:10and inspired souls fought to introduce the new ideas, and the authorities fought back,
02:16savagely, to stamp out the infection.
02:21So how did one man's simple act of protest in the backwoods of Germany spark a violent
02:28revolution that would transform England, Europe and the Western world?
02:46In the early 1500s, the Catholic Church shaped every aspect of human life.
03:00And here in Rome, its head, the Pope, ruled a spiritual empire bigger than the Caesars.
03:10It's hard to overestimate the power of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages.
03:16It was a vastly wealthy, bureaucratic machine, the very heart of Europe.
03:21It controlled education, media, family law.
03:25It had its own private language in Latin.
03:29The clergy, whatever their nationality, swore obedience to the Pope, whose toe even kings
03:35knelt on the ground to kiss.
03:38But its greatest power was over men's minds.
03:46Churches were dominated by a huge painting of the Last Judgement.
03:54When Jesus as judge sentenced each soul to the joys of heaven...
04:01..or the eternal torments of hell.
04:08It was a terrifying vision.
04:14The Church mitigated its stark horror by the doctrine of purgatory.
04:19This was an intermediate state between heaven and hell,
04:24where the not-too-sinful soul was purged of its offences
04:27and made fit to enter paradise.
04:30You could reduce the amount of time you spent in purgatory by doing good works,
04:35saying prayers, going on pilgrimages, giving to the poor.
04:39Or you could draw on the good works of others.
04:43Jesus, the saints, the Virgin Mary,
04:46whose transcendent goodness had endowed the Church with a treasury of merit.
04:52The Pope dispensed, in return for consideration, of course,
04:56this treasury in the form of spiritual IOUs, known as indulgences.
05:03These were printed bits of paper that, in return for cold, hard cash,
05:10absorbed the soul of its offences and acted as its passport to paradise.
05:25Indulgences were often sold to finance Church schemes,
05:29and in 1517, the Pope's pet project
05:33was the rebuilding of St Peter's on a magnificent scale.
05:44Indulgences were sold across Europe.
05:47There was even a catchy advertising jingle.
05:51As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
05:54the soul from purgatory springs.
05:57It was as though the Church had forgotten Christ
06:00and become fixated on wealth.
06:05And for one German monk, this was an abomination.
06:19On 31st October 1517,
06:22Martin Luther very publicly denounced this scandal.
06:28According to legend, he strode through the town
06:32to the great doors of All Saints Church
06:35and hammered up a document for all to see.
06:41It was his 95 theses, a mere 95 points of contention
06:47with the Church's teachings on sin and penance.
06:51Were these the brave hammer blows of fate against the old order,
06:56as the traditional story goes?
06:59Or was it the equivalent of pinning an agenda
07:02on a university notice board, as revisionists suggest?
07:07Actually, you know, it doesn't much matter,
07:10since nobody disputes the magnitude of the results.
07:15Luther's protest would plunge Europe
07:17into two centuries of religious war...
07:23..unleashing bloodshed and brutality across the continent...
07:28..all in the name of God.
07:45Martin Luther was an unlikely revolutionary.
07:49In 1517, he was a 33-year-old monk
07:53and professor of biblical theology
07:55at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony.
08:03Saxony was just one of a jigsaw,
08:06a small German city on the outskirts of Saxony.
08:10Saxony was just one of a jigsaw of small German-speaking states
08:15that comprised present-day Germany.
08:18Each had its own ruler,
08:20but all fell under the overlordship of an elected monarch,
08:24the Holy Roman Emperor, who was crowned by the Pope,
08:28and all were subject to papal authority and taxation.
08:37In the introduction to his theses,
08:40Luther wrote of his wish to stir up debate.
08:47A new invention allowed him to succeed beyond his wildest dreams.
08:56Just over 70 years earlier,
08:58Johannes Gutenberg had developed his printing press.
09:04This piece of technology would transform Luther
09:07from a little-known monk and academic
09:10into Europe's most published author...
09:14..and a wanted man.
09:18Luther originally wrote the 95 Theses in Latin,
09:22the language of academic and theological discourse.
09:26But even within the Latin of the Theses,
09:29Luther showed himself aware of that wider audience
09:32outside the universities,
09:34and nine of the Theses list the sharp arguments
09:38that the laity were using against indulgences.
09:41And how, Luther asks, are we going to answer those arguments
09:44if the Church doesn't reform itself?
09:47Well, of course, the Church showed no sign of reforming itself.
09:52So what Luther did was to write a tract.
09:55He called it A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,
09:59and he wrote it in German, and he had it printed.
10:05MUSIC CONTINUES
10:10Experts still marvel at the extraordinary impact
10:13of Luther's sermon.
10:15This was the work which propelled Luther
10:19to the front ranks of European thought and theology.
10:24Until that point, he'd been writing in Latin,
10:27but when he did this and published
10:30these 20 short propositions in German...
10:33Just one second.
10:35So the form in German very closely echoes the 95 Theses.
10:39These are numbered points.
10:41They're numbered points, but they're reduced.
10:43So we have 20 instead of 95.
10:45We have short paragraphs. He's learned how to lecture.
10:48I've always said to my students,
10:50can you imagine the lecturer concluding,
10:52and 95thly, yes.
10:54Well, I think he's learned how to write as well,
10:57because this is a work of instinctive brilliance.
11:00I mean, he calls it a sermon, but it's nothing like a sermon.
11:03Sermons are meant to be endurance tests
11:06of repetition and reiteration.
11:08A biblical citation, yes.
11:10And this can be read aloud in ten minutes.
11:13It's 20 short snappy points.
11:15A tabloid sermon.
11:17Well, you could say.
11:19And it's published in Wittenberg,
11:21but unlike the 95 Theses,
11:23which circulated only intellectual community,
11:26this went viral immediately.
11:28It was reprinted in Leipzig, in Nuremberg,
11:31in Augsburg, and then Strasbourg as well.
11:35And so by the end of 1518,
11:37there were at least 14 editions of this circulating.
11:41And by 1520,
11:43Luther had written something like 60 original works.
11:46Collectively, they had sold several hundred thousand copies,
11:51and Luther was now the most published author
11:54in the history of printing.
11:56And that is an extraordinary transformation
11:59for someone who, five years before,
12:01had written precisely nothing.
12:10Luther's enemies would liken the spread of his ideas
12:13to a virus or contagion.
12:17And the carrier is the printed word.
12:26We too are living through a media revolution
12:29with the rise and rise of social media.
12:32So, think of Luther and the printing press
12:35as the ultimate Twitter storm,
12:38with Luther himself,
12:40pungent, pithy, fearless,
12:43often downright vulgar and rude,
12:45cutting the self-styled great and good down to size,
12:48winning the largest number of followers
12:51and taking on all comers in what?
12:55An Arab Spring?
12:57A Velvet Revolution?
13:01A jihad?
13:10In Rome, the Pope, Leo X,
13:13was made aware of Luther's attack.
13:15But he dismissed it as a quarrel among friars.
13:21Rome was a vast, slow-moving legal bureaucracy.
13:29But Luther's ideas moved fast.
13:31They were getting everywhere.
13:35And England was next.
13:45In March 1518,
13:47just five months after Luther's protest in Wittenberg,
13:51a ship approached the south-east coast of Catholic England.
14:01On board was a courier bearing a letter.
14:07The letter was from the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus,
14:12and it was addressed to his friend and fellow scholar Thomas More,
14:16who'd just joined the inner circle of the government of Henry VIII.
14:20Enclosed in the letter was a copy of the 95 Theses.
14:25As far as we know, it's the first time that they'd reached England.
14:29But Erasmus pays them no particular attention.
14:33After all, both he and More, as scholars and free thinkers,
14:37had written equally scathing satire
14:40on the corruptions of church and state.
14:43But they'd kept their satire safely in Latin.
14:47Presumably, they thought that Luther would do the same.
14:55But Luther didn't respect polite academic convention.
14:59He was spreading his ideas in German.
15:04A stream of Lutheran publications in German,
15:07increasingly radical and in ever-increasing numbers,
15:11made it to England across the trade routes of the North Sea.
15:15And, as they did so, Thomas More abandoned his earlier,
15:19cultivated, ironical detachment and took sides.
15:24The Lutheran heresy, he decided,
15:26threatened the unity of the Catholic faith in periled souls
15:30and must be stamped out.
15:33Or, at least, it must be stopped from infecting England.
15:49In Wittenberg, Luther's attack on indulgences
15:52was evolving into fundamental doctrines.
15:57The key one, raising the power of personal faith
16:01above the remedies offered by the hierarchy of the church.
16:06Mankind was saved, not by prayer or fasting or indulgences,
16:11but only by faith, by faith in Christ, as told in the New Testament.
16:18Anything else was a corruption, an obstacle, and that included Rome.
16:32Meanwhile in Rome, the papal condemnation of Luther
16:35was reaching its stately climax.
16:39On the 15th of June, 1520, after four all-day meetings,
16:44the Pope and his council issued the formal decree known as a bull
16:49and entitled, after its opening words,
16:52Ex Sorge Domine, Arise, O Lord.
16:56Learning a little from Luther himself,
16:58the bull employed the strongest and most violent language
17:02and, printed in pamphlet form like this,
17:05it too became an instant bestseller.
17:12Luther was given 60 days to recant or be excommunicated,
17:17which meant expulsion from the church
17:19and condemnation to the eternal fires of hell.
17:24His works were ordered to be burned.
17:29Far from backing down, Luther seemed energised, liberated even,
17:34and in a matter of a few mere weeks, produced three crucial works
17:39that, between them, amounted to a manifesto
17:42for a political and religious revolution.
17:45The most important of them was addressed to
17:48the Christian nobility of the German nation.
17:51Writing in German, Luther called on the German princes
17:55unilaterally to reform the German church
17:58and rescue it from the clutches of Rome
18:01that was bleeding Germany dry.
18:04Brilliantly targeted, seething,
18:07the German nobility,
18:09seething with hatred of Italians and Jews.
18:12Here was the rampant, uninhibited voice of German nationalism.
18:18And it sold like hot cakes.
18:25But Luther went further.
18:27On 10th December 1520, he publicly burned the papal bull.
18:34There could be no going back.
18:42In January 1521, Martin Luther was formally excommunicated
18:47from the Catholic Church.
18:50Two months later, he was charged with heresy
18:53and summoned to a hearing in Rome.
18:56The imperial diet, as it was known,
18:59was to be held in the German city of Worms.
19:05While Luther remained in Wittenberg, he was safe.
19:09But a journey to Worms would take him
19:12through less friendly German society.
19:15In the early years of his reign,
19:18Luther was a frequent visitor to Worms.
19:22But a journey to Worms would take him
19:24through less friendly German states,
19:27risking kidnap, torture, execution.
19:32Luther's survival had, to date,
19:35been ensured by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony.
19:41Frederick now secured a promise of safe passage, and Luther set out.
19:47If the Catholic Church was hoping to destroy Luther at Worms,
19:51it had badly miscalculated the popular mood.
19:55Everywhere he went, he was hailed as a hero.
19:58A hundred horsemen rode through the city gates to escort him inside.
20:03And, as he descended his carriage,
20:06a monk reached out to touch the hem of his robe.
20:11By taking on the power of the church, Luther had become a local legend,
20:16a figurehead for a populist anti-establishment movement
20:20that was spreading across the German-speaking states,
20:23as resentment about taxes and foreign interference grew.
20:30The Pope's ambassador at Worms was horrified
20:33as he reported back to Rome.
20:36The whole of Germany is in full revolt, he wrote.
20:40Nine-tenths raised the war cry, Luther,
20:44whilst the watchword of the other tenth, who were indifferent to Luther,
20:48is death to the Roman Curia.
20:56Summoned before the Diet,
20:58Luther was ordered to renounce his heretical writings.
21:02He refused.
21:05Here I stand, he is supposed to have declared.
21:09I can do no other.
21:21Whilst the Emperor Charles V and the Diet were debating Luther's fate,
21:26Luther's safe conduct was honoured and he was allowed to leave Worms.
21:30As Luther and his two companions were riding through thick forest,
21:37suddenly they were ambushed by a posse of armed and masked highwaymen.
21:47Luther's companions were overpowered at the point of a sword.
21:51Luther ordered down from his wagon and flung on the back of a horse
21:55and spirited away.
22:01No one knew where or by whom.
22:21Back in England, the figure of Martin Luther, this curious German monk,
22:26was beginning to register with the authorities.
22:31Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor,
22:34had a palace here in Whitehall at the time.
22:40He had eyes and ears everywhere,
22:43and one of them, Cuthbert Tunstall, had been dispatched to Worms.
22:51Cuthbert Tunstall was an outstanding figure of the early Renaissance in England.
22:56Educated in different countries,
22:58multilingual and a polymath, he was scholar, lawyer and theologian.
23:05Wolsey had talent spotted Tunstall early,
23:08and in 1520 he was given the plump post of ambassador
23:12to the young Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
23:16As such, he accompanied the Emperor to the Diet of Worms,
23:20from which he sent an extraordinary series of dispatches,
23:24mostly in cipher.
23:26And the dispatches finished up here,
23:29in what was then Wolsey's great town palace in Westminster.
23:38Tunstall was the first Englishman fully to understand the threat
23:42presented by Martin Luther, and he gave Wolsey a stark warning.
23:49This dispatch was written on the 29th of January, 1521,
23:55around the time of the opening of the Diet of Worms.
23:59In it, and with extraordinary prescience,
24:02Tunstall explains how Luther's shift of language from Latin into German
24:07had turned him into a mortal enemy of the Church.
24:11And then he goes on to recommend what had to be done
24:14to stop the threat spreading to England.
24:17Wolsey must, he says, call before him the printers and booksellers
24:22and give them a straight charge
24:24that they bring none of Luther's books into England,
24:27nor that they translate none of them into English.
24:32Lest thereby might ensue great trouble to the realm.
24:42Tunstall's hair-raising dispatch from Worms galvanised Wolsey into action.
24:53He ordered a ceremonial burning of Luther's books.
25:06It was to be one of many book burnings all over Europe
25:10in response to the Pope's condemnation of Luther.
25:15And it was one of the most spectacular.
25:24It took place here, in the precinct of old St Paul's Cathedral,
25:28on the 12th of May, 1521.
25:33As books were tossed onto the bonfire, before a vast crowd,
25:37John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, priest of St Paul's Cathedral,
25:41preached a two-hour sermon against Luther and his perilous heresy.
25:49Fisher's sermon was in English,
25:51but the books burned whilst he spoke were in Latin or German.
25:55This meant, for the time being at least,
25:58in England, Lutheranism was someone else's problem.
26:02And the book burning itself was aimed largely at a foreign audience.
26:06Also aimed at a foreign audience,
26:08was the book that Wolsey brandished in his hand throughout the ceremony.
26:12It was the unfinished draft of a Latin treatise against Martin Luther.
26:17And it was being written, Wolsey and Fisher,
26:20loudly proclaimed, by none other than King Henry VIII himself.
26:33Two months after the book burning,
26:36Two months after the book burning at St Paul's,
26:39Henry's manuscript was printed by the King's printer.
26:45It was entitled,
26:49Defence of the Seven Sacraments.
26:52It was a strike against Luther's biblical fundamentalism,
26:56and dedicated to Pope Leo X himself.
27:01It was also thanks to Tunstall's reports from Vaughan's bang up to the minute.
27:06In his key dispatch of the 29th of January,
27:09Tunstall had informed Henry and Wolsey
27:12that Luther's latest book committed the ultimate heresy
27:16of reducing the traditional seven Catholic sacraments to only three.
27:22Henry's book called The Defence of the Seven Sacraments
27:26was a powerful reassertion of the traditional number and doctrine.
27:39Richard, we're looking here at a first edition of Henry's book.
27:44Explain to me, seven sacraments, what actually is a sacrament?
27:49Well, the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church
27:52are the, held to be the guaranteed means, really,
27:56by which the benefits of Christ's saving work
27:59are communicated to the faithful.
28:01In other words, the sacrament is part of the soul's progress to salvation.
28:08That's right. The merits, as they would say in the late Middle Ages,
28:11the merits of the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ
28:14are communicated, first of all, in baptism,
28:16and then at various stages of life, for example,
28:19through the Eucharist, through the ritual meal of bread and wine
28:22or the body and blood of Christ.
28:24Confession, because it was expected that everybody
28:27should make a full and proper confession of their sins
28:30before receiving the Eucharist.
28:32And then there were the sacraments that marked,
28:34for the most part, stages of life.
28:36Confirmation, marriage, of course,
28:38and then, at the end of life, extreme unction,
28:41as it was known then, the final anointing,
28:43which would prepare the body and soul for the separation of death.
28:46So, why is it, then, that Luther feels so passionately,
28:51first of all, that the number has to be reduced,
28:54and questions, in some ways,
28:56the fundamental doctrine of the sacrament itself?
28:59Luther and the other Protestant theologians after him
29:02are concerned that with any sacrament that should deserve the name,
29:05Christ himself should be shown to have instituted it.
29:09And it is with baptism and the Eucharist that they're happy.
29:12The other sacraments are, as it were, not instituted by Christ.
29:18So, R.S. Sertio, what is the impact of it?
29:21I mean, there weren't many books by kings, were there?
29:24There were very few in Latin.
29:26Its impact was substantial for a few years,
29:28I think not least because of its royal authorship.
29:30Between 1522 and 1524, there were eight or nine editions of this text
29:36at places as far apart as Cologne and Rome.
29:39He's almost getting up there with Luther, isn't he?
29:41Well, he's a fair way short of Luther, it has to be said.
29:45But still.
29:46But he's ahead of most of Luther's Catholic opponents at this point.
29:49That is itself something really astonishing, isn't it?
29:52It's quite an achievement.
29:53England really is, and England's king,
29:55is seen, and sees himself, as Martin Luther's principal opponent.
30:00Yes, he's taking this and himself very seriously.
30:04King David confronting, you know, the giants.
30:07The German Goliath.
30:08The German Goliath.
30:14The Pope's own copy is a magnificent illuminated manuscript
30:19bound in cloth of gold,
30:21and with verses chosen by Wolsey inscribed in the king's own hand.
30:26The manuscript, as Wolsey foretold,
30:29was laid up amongst the treasures of the Vatican library,
30:33where it still remains.
30:35And Henry was given the papal title of Defender of the Faith,
30:40which Queen Elizabeth II still proudly holds.
30:51Henry had established his credentials as the Pope's most loyal ally.
30:57But where was Luther?
31:00Luther's mysterious disappearance on the way home from Wurms
31:05occasioned his followers much anguish.
31:08But it wasn't a kidnapping or an assassination
31:11by the stooges of the Pope or the Emperor.
31:14It was a rescue by the agents of Luther's protector,
31:17the Elector Frederick the Wise,
31:19charged with bringing him to a place of safety.
31:22And they brought him here,
31:24to the isolated, almost impregnable Wartburg,
31:28high on its towering peak.
31:38Here, in Wartburg Castle, Luther went undercover.
31:46He grew his hair and beard and became Junker Georg, or Squire George.
31:53Confined to his room,
31:55Luther embarked on the next stage of his religious revolution.
32:01The medieval church used St Jerome's
32:04fourth-century Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.
32:09Known as the Vulgate, it was treated as the sole authoritative text,
32:14and crucial Catholic doctrines
32:16depended on its particular choice of words.
32:20All Luther's religion was rooted in the Bible.
32:24He believed in sola scriptura,
32:27that the Bible was the sole infallible guide to faith and practice.
32:33So Luther decided to use his time in the Wartburg to start afresh
32:38and to make his own new translation of the Bible,
32:42from the original Greek into German.
32:45But it was to be his German, pungent, pithy,
32:50incomprehensible by all Germans, north and south.
32:54And above all, it was to be his, Luther's, reading of the Bible.
33:01The thing that strikes an English reader
33:04is how much there is of Luther in it.
33:07He, at times, as far as I can see,
33:10doctors the translation to make it clearer.
33:15Luther does, at certain points,
33:18he introduces nuances into his translation
33:21to reflect his theological beliefs.
33:24The most famous is, of course,
33:26when he translates, man is justified by faith alone.
33:30Alone is nowhere to be found in the Greek original,
33:33but Luther is convinced it has to be faith alone,
33:36because that's the way...
33:38That's what Luther thinks it means.
33:40That's the way the Greek must be translated in German.
33:43But, of course, Luther was on a mission
33:46when he translated his New Testament.
33:48It was fundamental for him to deliver the unabridged,
33:52in his view, gospel to the Germans.
33:56Setting aside its religious impact,
33:59what is its impact on the German language, as I understand it?
34:03I'm no German expert at all.
34:05It really is one of the fundamental texts of modern German.
34:09Yes, it is. It's very influential for modern German,
34:12because it was so widespread and it received...
34:16It was read by so many people.
34:18Luther didn't invent modern German,
34:21but he was quick to embrace certain changes in syntax and grammar
34:27that had already been around in his time,
34:30and he adopted a sort of German
34:34that could be understood by a large...
34:37..by many people.
34:38He says of himself he doesn't speak any particular German dialect,
34:42but speaks or writes in a German that can be understood as well...
34:46By a Bavarian.
34:47Exactly.
34:48As a Bavarian or a low German speaker.
34:55Published in September 1522,
34:58Luther's Bible began to fix a standardised modern German language.
35:03It forged a growing sense of nationhood
35:06and national identity amongst the German states.
35:12And that helped turn Luther's religious revolution
35:16into a political revolution as well.
35:20Luther's revolution now threatened to carry all before it.
35:25The princes were attracted by the political and economic pie it gave them,
35:30and the common people by the freedom and the autonomy
35:34that it seemed to promise them.
35:36The term Protestant was coined in 1529,
35:40and in 1531, the Lutheran cities and principalities
35:44united themselves into a defensive alliance
35:47known as the Schmalkaldic League.
35:51In little more than a decade,
35:53half of Germany had gone Protestant, gone Lutheran.
36:05As Europe began to fracture along religious lines,
36:09it would be engulfed by apocalyptic violence.
36:14Waves of holy war, terror,
36:18and iconoclasm of the kind we are all too familiar with today.
36:23In England, Luther's revolution was being held at bay
36:27by Henry VIII's Catholic government.
36:31But in the mid-1520s, one man would challenge that.
36:37William Tyndale was a Gloucestershire man through and through.
36:41He studied at Oxford before returning to England.
36:45He was a young man who had just finished his second year of university.
36:49He was a Gloucestershire man through and through.
36:52He studied at Oxford before returning to his native county
36:56as a chaplain and tutor to a rich and well-connected family
37:00here at Little Sodbury.
37:03Tyndale was a natural linguist.
37:05He also had a powerful religious conviction,
37:09and he combined the two in his life's work
37:12to translate the Bible from the original languages into English.
37:19Tyndale was risking his life by confronting the church authorities.
37:23They only banned translations of the Bible, he said,
37:27to keep the world still in darkness
37:30and to exalt their own honour above God himself.
37:35And he was resolute his work would change that.
37:43In 1524, Tyndale slipped out of the country
37:47and took refuge in Germany.
37:51There, he found the support and protection
37:54needed to undertake his subversive work.
38:00The following year, in 1525, his translation was complete.
38:05German presses began printing his English translation of the Bible.
38:10Even in Germany, this was a dangerous enterprise.
38:14Catholic spies were everywhere.
38:17The printing of Tyndale's English New Testament began secretly in Cologne.
38:23An edition of 3,000 copies was well under way
38:27when it was accidentally uncovered
38:29by a fierce opponent of Martin Luther called Johann Cochlius.
38:37The presses were stopped, Tyndale fled with the printed sheets,
38:41and Cochlius informed Wolsey and Henry
38:44of what had happened in blood-curdling terms.
38:50There was an underground plot, he wrote,
38:53and the heretics had sworn to turn England-Lutheran willy-nilly.
39:05Inspired by Luther's attack on the Catholic Church
39:08and fiercely resenting papal taxes,
39:11German peasants were rising up to win greater freedoms.
39:16Reports of the peasants' revolt made Henry's court extra jumpy.
39:20They were terrified the insurrection might spread to English soil.
39:26The King and Cardinal Wolsey relaunched the campaign
39:30against Luther and his followers in England.
39:38The dirty work was left to Sir Thomas More.
39:43On the 26th of January, 1526,
39:46the King and Cardinal Wolsey launched a campaign
39:49against Luther and his followers in England.
39:52On the 26th of January, 1526,
39:55More led an armed raid on the steelyard,
39:58the Thamesside London depot,
40:00of the German merchants of the Hanseatic League.
40:07Twilight was falling and the merchants were about to sit down to their supper
40:11when More and his men burst into their hall.
40:17The doors were locked and guarded and More harangued the merchants,
40:21accusing them of possessing and importing Lutheran heretical works.
40:26Three of them were arrested on the spot and others the following morning
40:30when More returned to the steelyard to conduct a room-by-room search.
40:37Those found in possession of heretical works
40:40were interrogated, some by Wolsey himself.
40:45Overawed, they confessed and recanted.
40:51On the 11th of February, another book-burning was staged at St Paul's.
40:57And the contrite Lutherans were subject to public humiliation.
41:09They were paraded three times round the fire,
41:12bearing faggots of wood kindling.
41:16Which, at the end of their ordeal, they cast into the flames
41:20as an awful warning of what would happen to their bodies if they offended again.
41:29But, despite the warning, heretical books were still being smuggled into England.
41:38Including, for the first time, Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English.
41:44Karen, we're looking at one of the world's most important, rarest books.
41:49The first New Testament in English,
41:52translated by William Tyndale, the first complete version of it.
41:56And I'm struck by it's really rather a handsome, dignified book.
42:00It is indeed. It's actually very beautifully printed.
42:03Have we any idea at all of how long this would have taken to do?
42:08There was a first edition at printing the New Testament,
42:11translated by Tyndale in Cologne, printed by Peter Quintel,
42:15which, as you know, was then interrupted.
42:17The printing process was then interrupted.
42:19They grabbed the sheets and ran to Reims, where this edition was produced.
42:23And it's thought that the first copies of this particular 1526 edition
42:27were already sold here in England in February 1526.
42:31So it must have been probably even produced at the end of 1525, beginning of 1526.
42:36It is weeks. It is weeks.
42:38Do we have an idea of quantities, three surviving?
42:42Yeah.
42:43Is there any guess as to what the size of the first edition might have been?
42:47The first edition in Cologne was about 3,000.
42:49The 1526, this one, was supposed to be about between 3,000 and 6,000,
42:53so quite a large number. It's a lot.
42:55It is a lot. I mean, there was a market for it in England.
42:58It couldn't be produced there, but they knew they could sell it
43:01if they could get the copies over to England.
43:03People treasure it, clearly, as a source of revelation.
43:07Absolutely.
43:08We have accounts, don't we, of people, in a sense,
43:11they know the Bible exists, they hear it,
43:15but suddenly in their own language.
43:18Yeah, and it's not interpreted for them by the priests,
43:22which is obviously the great revelation,
43:24and it's a very, very accessible language.
43:26He uses a lot of verbs, so he makes the language come alive
43:29and the word of God come alive to people.
43:31So everybody does something or says something rather than...
43:34Right, we've got it here, we've got it here.
43:36Eat, drink and be merry. Exactly.
43:38We're at just that point. Three verbs.
43:40And three verbs we still use today in everyday language,
43:43where people probably don't necessarily realise where it comes from.
43:49A stream of heretical works
43:51followed Tyndale's New Testament to England,
43:54all in multiple printed copies, and all in English.
44:02The appearance of heretical printed books in English
44:07was a game-changer.
44:09Back in 1521,
44:11when he'd been an appalled observer at the Diet of Worms,
44:15Cuthbert Tunstall had realised
44:17that the key to Martin Luther's success
44:20was the fact that all his books be in the German tongue,
44:24and in the hands of every man that can read.
44:28Now, William Tyndale's books were in English,
44:32and likewise, in the hands of every man that can read.
44:38But it would be in the hands of a woman
44:41that Tyndale's books would wreak destruction
44:44on the Catholic Church in England.
44:47Heber Castle in Kent was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn,
44:52Henry VIII's mistress, and eventual second queen.
44:57She was also the femme fatale, the victim of tyranny.
45:02She was also the victim of tyranny.
45:05She was also the victim of tyranny.
45:08She was also the victim of tyranny.
45:12She was also the femme fatale of the English Reformation.
45:19Anne seems to have been a bright girl,
45:22and her father, an ambitious Tudor courtier,
45:25decided to capitalise on the fact
45:27by giving her an excellent education.
45:30So, at the age of about ten, Anne was sent to the continent
45:34to learn French and to perfect herself
45:37in the art of get-your-man, known as courtly love.
45:42Anne's father had married a duke's daughter.
45:46Anne, thanks to her excellent training, would do even better.
45:58Early in the 1520s, Anne returned to England
46:02and became Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon.
46:07It wasn't long before she caught the king's eye.
46:12Catherine was vulnerable.
46:14Five years older than Henry, she was approaching 40.
46:19And she'd only given him a daughter,
46:22instead of the longed-for son and heir.
46:31Henry and Anne spent the Christmas of 1526 apart.
46:35Henry at court, and Anne in seclusion here at Hever.
46:39But, around New Year's Day, 1527,
46:43in an exchange of letters, they agreed to marry.
46:47First, however, there was the little matter of divorcing Catherine.
46:51Probably, Henry assumed that it would be straightforward.
46:55He thought that he had an unimpeachable moral case
46:59based on the Bible itself.
47:01Catherine was the widow of Henry's elder brother, Arthur,
47:05who died in 1502.
47:07But the Bible, in the Book of Leviticus, declared,
47:11if a man shall take his brother's wife,
47:14it is an unclean thing.
47:16He hath uncovered his brother's nakedness.
47:19They shall be childless.
47:24What could be clearer?
47:26Henry fixated on this verse and clung to it like a lifeline.
47:31Henry also thought, understandably,
47:34in view of his defence of the Church against Luther,
47:37that he was in good standing in Rome.
47:40What could possibly go wrong?
47:48Henry ordered Wolsey to get the Pope
47:51to divorce him from Catherine of Aragon.
47:54But in May 1527,
47:56the mutinous troops of Catherine's nephew, Charles V,
48:00sacked Rome.
48:05And the Pope became little better than his prisoner
48:08in the Castel Sant'Angelo.
48:14Henry's services to Rome
48:16were nothing against this brutal turn of events.
48:21But Henry and Wolsey blinded themselves to the facts
48:25for the next two years,
48:27which led Henry to the greatest humiliation of his whole reign,
48:31when in 1529, the public trial of his marriage to Catherine
48:36was aborted on the direct orders of Pope Clement VII himself.
48:43Wolsey fell as Henry's struggle for divorce
48:47destroyed yet another opponent of Martin Luther.
48:51And Henry himself was left looking for a new policy.
49:05Anne Boleyn, meanwhile, had not been idle.
49:08She proved more clear-sighted than Henry
49:11and far more willing to take risks.
49:14Anne had been introduced to advanced religious opinions in France,
49:19and she continued and deepened her interest in them in England.
49:23So much so that the Spanish ambassador, who was a bitter enemy,
49:27called her more Lutheran than Luther.
49:32There's no doubt that Anne was sincere in all of this,
49:35but her self-advancement was involved as well.
49:44In 1529, Anne took a gamble and set out to turn Henry.
49:49She showed him a copy of an heretical book
49:52by the Lutheran William Tyndale.
49:55It was called The Obedience of a Christian Man.
49:58Anne even marked up passages for Henry's special attention.
50:04Passages like this, no doubt.
50:07The king is in the room of God, and his law is God's law.
50:15According to Christ's own teaching, Tyndale argued,
50:19everybody, churchmen and laymen alike,
50:22was under the absolute power of the king.
50:25In contrast, the authority of the pope
50:28and his presumption in daring to judge kings
50:31was a shameful and irreligious usurpation.
50:36For Henry and Anne, it was a eureka moment.
50:40This is a book for me and all kings to read, Henry said.
50:51Henry had found a theological justification for dethroning the pope.
50:59England was on the road to its Tudor Brexit.
51:06Ten years previously, Henry had written a book to defend the papacy.
51:11Now he set up a kind of think tank to destroy its power.
51:16The Royal Library was augmented with scores of weighted tomes,
51:21all carefully catalogued and cross-referenced,
51:24and a team of scholars, working closely with the king himself,
51:28combed them to find historical evidence
51:31that the kings of England had been, in practice,
51:34as well as in Tyndale's theory, free from papal jurisdiction.
51:39And, to Henry's satisfaction at least, they found it.
51:47In 1533, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals,
51:53which repudiated the authority of Rome
51:56and declared England to be...
52:06Protected by the Act, Thomas Cranmer,
52:09the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
52:12declared Henry's marriage to Catherine invalid
52:15and his marriage to Anne good.
52:18A week later came the moment that Henry and Anne had been waiting for.
52:23Sunday, 1st June, Cranmer crowned Anne queen
52:26in a magnificent ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
52:30After six long years, Henry had got his divorce at last.
52:44The great anti-Lutheran defender of Rome was now its bitter enemy.
52:49It was Henry's turn to be threatened with excommunication
52:53and the eternal flames of hell.
52:57Henry's reply was devastating.
53:02He had himself styled Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England
53:07only under Christ by an Act of Parliament.
53:14To all intents and purposes,
53:16Henry had made himself Pope in England.
53:23The tables were now turned,
53:25and with the divorce and the break with Rome,
53:28victims and victors exchanged roles almost overnight.
53:34Lutheran heretics became government agents.
53:37Others were even made bishops.
53:39Whilst their erstwhile Catholic persecutors
53:42found themselves, if they remained loyal to Rome,
53:45facing imprisonment or death.
53:51Henry's most prominent victim was Sir Thomas More.
53:56More had succeeded Wolsey as Lord Chancellor
53:59and intensified the campaign against the Lutheran heresy.
54:04When the clergy were bullied into recognising Henry
54:07as Supreme Head of the Church, More resigned.
54:11Thereafter, he was a mocked man.
54:15More was tried for treason,
54:17for refusing to recognise Henry as Supreme Head of the Church.
54:22Despite the doubtful evidence against him,
54:25Henry was still a member of the Church.
54:28More then dropped his guard and spoke his mind.
54:31Parliament could not make the King Supreme Head of the Church, he said.
54:36Since England, being but a small part of the Church,
54:40could not make a particular law
54:42disagreeable to the general law of the Church.
54:46Its remainer, Versailles, was to be the King of the Church.
54:51A particular law disagreeable to the general law of the Church.
54:56Its remainer versus Brexiteer.
54:59And the Chief Justice, in dismissing More's arguments,
55:02came down firmly on the side of national parliamentary sovereignty.
55:22Thomas More was beheaded in 1535.
55:27And the forces of Roman Catholicism in England
55:31found themselves in headlong retreat.
55:38Between 1536 and 1540, Henry laid waste to the monasteries,
55:44plundering their riches and executing those
55:47who refused to renounce the papal supremacy.
55:52Dotted all over England, these cold, bare, ruined choirs,
55:58as Shakespeare called them,
56:00are the most visible monuments of Henry VIII's brutal triumph
56:04over the wealth and power of the Catholic Church.
56:10But, though Henry broke with Rome, he never joined with Luther.
56:15Instead, he steered a careful middle way between Wittenberg and Rome.
56:21So, Crypto-Lutherans, like Cranmer, became powerful counsellors,
56:27providing they kept their faith under wraps.
56:31And Crypto-Papists, like Tunstall, remained in high favour too,
56:35providing they acknowledged the royal supremacy.
56:40But, step out of line in either direction,
56:44a horrible death loomed.
56:46As in 1540, when, to vindicate his middle way,
56:51Henry burned three Lutherans and disembowelled three Catholics,
56:56all on the same day.
57:09Luther's reformation was fuelled by religious fundamentalism
57:14and political opportunism.
57:16Henry's was triggered by lust and a hunger for dynastic power.
57:24Henry's middle way would subject England to a long, hard Brexit.
57:31It unleashed decades of religious schism, terror and political violence
57:36as Catholics and Protestants vied for supremacy.
57:41It would drive a wedge between Britain and the rest of Europe
57:45that shapes our politics and culture to this day.
57:51It would also be the defining moment of Tudor England.
57:56Henry's reformation was as much about England and Englishness
58:00as Luther's was about Germany and German-ness.
58:04But Henry did more than print propaganda.
58:07He also built real physical defences, like this castle at Diehl in Kent,
58:13to protect an heretical England against invasion from a hostile Catholic Europe.
58:20Most importantly, Henry fostered the idea of empire.
58:24Under Henry, empire meant national self-government under the king.
58:30But under Elizabeth, Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, and her successors,
58:35empire came to mean the government of others
58:38by a rampantly self-assertive nation,
58:41confident through its reformed religion of its God-given right
58:45to rule the whole world.
58:49MUSIC
58:55The music of Morrissey.
58:57He's joining Jules for Later Live next on BBC Two.
59:01And BBC Four pays tribute to music legend Tom Petty at 10.30.
59:07MUSIC
59:18.