Killer Kings S01E01

Name: Killer Kings S01E01
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T09:14:13+00:00
Duration: 44 min 58 s
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#Killer Kings S01E01

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00:00London at the dawn of the 16th century.

00:05By a twist of fate, a teenage prince inherits the throne.

00:10This pampered, resentful little boy contemptuous towards women.

00:16All of these things are setting a really dangerous scene

00:20for somebody who then comes into a power unforeseen.

00:25In a battle with the Pope, the notorious Henry VIII

00:28obliterates hundreds of monasteries

00:30and persecutes any who oppose him,

00:33plunging his country into chaos.

00:36There are so many lives wrecked.

00:38It's estimated 30, 40, 50,000 people are up in arms against the king

00:42and there are mass executions.

00:45And in his maniacal pursuit of a male heir

00:48to continue the Tudor dynasty,

00:50no one is immune from losing their heads.

00:54This golden boy, this glorious man of youth,

00:58this heroic, chivalric figure,

01:01had turned into a paranoid, murderous monster.

01:05But can medical science shed new light on Henry's rabid behaviour?

01:10Henry has a very bad jousting accident.

01:14He might have had an injury to the frontal lobe of his brain

01:17from the repeated blows,

01:19which would have caused his personality to change.

01:22Using groundbreaking AI imagery to revisit the world of Henry VIII,

01:27we separate the facts from the legend.

01:29Monarchs rise and fall,

01:33but what legacy will the sands of time leave behind?

01:36Henry VIII,

01:37is he no more than a product of the times

01:39or truly a killer king?

01:59From a long line of English and Welsh nobility,

02:10the house of Tudor's most infamous son,

02:12Henry VIII,

02:13has fascinated and horrified us in equal measure.

02:18It's estimated he may have killed upwards of about 70,000 people

02:22during his reign.

02:24Burning, boiling, stretching, crushing, decapitating,

02:29all become the stuff of his legend.

02:32You know, you can be hanged in Henry VIII's England

02:34if you steal goods worth more than a few pence, for example.

02:37Henry also makes witchcraft a felony for the first time,

02:40which means that many more witches are hanged

02:42or imprisoned during Henry's reign.

02:45But are there more layers to this bloated,

02:48bloodthirsty, temperamental wife-killer?

02:51He was a polymath.

02:53He spoke several languages.

02:55All of those things are a sign of great mental acuity.

02:59So who is the real Henry VIII?

03:02What is the true picture of this complex man and seismic monarch?

03:07Henry's story begins in south-east London.

03:24Henry was born in 1491.

03:27He was the spare heir, so his parents had an elder son, Prince Arthur.

03:31I think Henry's background really set the whole stage for what was to come.

03:40Henry VIII was never destined to be king.

03:45Arthur, who was raised separately in his own household as Prince of Wales.

03:49Henry probably didn't really know Arthur that well.

03:52He won't have spent very much time with him.

03:54His father, Henry VII, has big plans for brother Arthur when he inherits the throne.

04:00But Henry is pretty much an afterthought and needs to be kept out of the way.

04:05Henry was sent to live with his sisters.

04:07And he really was the star of his household because Arthur wasn't there.

04:12Now, what this meant was that he was brought up in a very female household.

04:19It meant, I think, that he was very pampered.

04:24He was somebody treated as terribly important, cosseted and he was a prince and rather a beautiful young boy.

04:34So I think you get a sense that he saw himself as possibly more important than he was.

04:41Somebody who, in this rich female environment, became overly familiar with female attention.

04:49Leading, I think, to no small degree of contempt towards women.

04:55Henry might have enjoyed his pampered life in relative obscurity had fate not intervened.

05:04His brother, Prince Arthur, dies suddenly of the sweating sickness.

05:08Which is a uniquely Tudor illness that carries people off really within hours.

05:13Some sort of influenza, perhaps.

05:15And immediately the future Henry VIII, who's only ten years old, is promoted to heir to the throne.

05:21And I think you do get a sense that he starts to see it as his destiny.

05:25You know, this brother has cleared the way for him.

05:29This is somebody who has been brought up in the shadow of Arthur.

05:34Brought up with a festering resentment feeling that he was less significant.

05:40And now here he is, given the chance to step into his shoes as the monarch.

05:49On April 21st, 1509, when his father dies of tuberculosis, Henry's star can truly shine as he becomes King of England to a tumult of public acclaim.

05:59He comes to the throne when he's 17 and there is this anticipation, people are excited, he's young, he's good looking, he's sporty.

06:08He was so beautiful that ambassadors described him as having a face that would please a pretty woman.

06:15So we're talking about Hollywood actor, heartthrob, teen idol level beauty.

06:22He was six foot two, he could pull the Welsh longbow with his Welsh longbowmen, he could ride, he could hunt, he could joust.

06:30Henry is so young and energetic that he can tire up to ten horses a day.

06:36He was athletic, he was all that a king should be.

06:40There's brains behind the brawn too.

06:45He could do engineering with his engineers.

06:47Not only was he smart, he was known to be able to hold his own debating luminaries like Erasmus and Thomas More.

06:57The Dutch scholar Erasmus is widely celebrated as one of Europe's leading thinkers.

07:03Fellow intellectual Thomas More had tutored Henry as a child.

07:08They praised Henry for his ability to logically work things out.

07:15He was considered this great hope.

07:19And people were still being influenced by an older sort of Greek belief that outward beauty would reflect inner beauty.

07:26Early weeks into his reign, Henry's under pressure to consider an heir to his throne.

07:35One major factor for him in being king is to produce heirs for the Tudor dynasty because they're not a very fecund family.

07:43He doesn't have any surviving brothers. His father doesn't have any surviving brothers either.

07:47So really the whole Tudor line rests on Henry.

07:50He certainly has an eye for the ladies. Even his brother Arthur's widow is fair game.

07:57Catherine of Aragon arrived from Spain in 1501 to marry Prince Arthur.

08:02That marriage obviously didn't last very long.

08:04He died and she was almost immediately betrothed to the young Prince Henry because her parents didn't want to lose out on the dowry or the alliance.

08:12Catherine's mother Isabel, the Queen of Castile, who's an independent sovereign in her own right, dies, which debases Catherine's worth.

08:20And the future Henry VIII is told to disavow his betrothal, to break his betrothal.

08:25But he does make a free choice to marry Catherine.

08:27And I think that's really key to their marriage.

08:29It speaks of some degree of spite that he would take the widow of his brother.

08:35Henry will have experienced no small degree of malice in doing that.

08:42It's not just the personal satisfaction of taking the bride bent for his brother.

08:47There's also a decent financial upside in it.

08:52By the time he marries her, his father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon has effectively taken over the whole of Spain.

08:58So Catherine does bring this alliance with Spain.

09:02In a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey, Henry and Catherine are formally crowned King and Queen of England.

09:10They immediately attempt to produce heirs to the Tudor throne, really to shore up the succession,

09:15but also to silence any claims that perhaps someone else has a better claim to the throne,

09:20or perhaps there should be a different dynasty on the throne.

09:22Henry wants, above all else, a male heir.

09:27I think the degree to which he requires a male heir is more than simply to do with royal protocol and ascendancy.

09:36I think he has a real contempt towards women, even at this stage.

09:45Barely a year into his reign, the teen king starts getting tough.

09:49There are hints at times of some ruthlessness there. For example, he has Empson and Dudley, his father's two effectively closest servants, executed really just because he knows it will bring him popularity.

10:04He does it for likes, effectively.

10:06It is a sign that perhaps Henry VIII isn't necessarily going to be following the letter of the law.

10:12And they certainly are judicial murders by any modern reckoning.

10:17The fledgling monarch has flexed his muscles.

10:21Are these flashes of teenage exuberance or a harbinger of evil to come?

10:26For somebody to have the emotional emptiness to be able to do this hints very strongly that we're looking at somebody who has a psychopathic tendency.

10:41In the early years of his reign, Henry VIII wastes no time in cementing his reputation as a battle-hardy warrior.

10:58He personally leads a charge into northern France, capturing the towns of Tournai and Terreauon.

11:05Henry also imprisons high-ranking French nobility to the delight of his subjects.

11:12He would have been incredibly popular, a rock star of royalty.

11:16He loves going to war. He does what kings traditionally do in England.

11:20They go and fight the French.

11:22And people quite liked him in general.

11:30Whilst Henry is overseas, his Spanish queen holds the fort as regent.

11:36She repels an invasion by the King of Scotland, James IV, and victoriously claims his scalp in the Battle of Flodden.

11:45Catherine even sends her husband the King of Scots bloody cloak as a souvenir.

11:51But back in the bedroom, all is not well.

11:55Still no sign of Henry's Tudor heir.

11:58Catherine of Aragon's pain was unique in that she lost her babies at the end of her pregnancy.

12:06Sometimes they're recorded as stillbirths.

12:08Sometimes they're recorded of having died shortly after birth.

12:11Almost half of all children were lost by the age of five.

12:15It was a horrific time to have to be a parent.

12:17At last, Queen Catherine has a child that survives the fragile first weeks of life.

12:28But King Henry is left wanting.

12:31It's a girl, Princess Mary.

12:33Henry talks to the Venetian ambassador after Mary's birth.

12:37We are both young.

12:40If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God, sons will follow.

12:44This is somebody who's very egocentric, who's very proud, who's very self-satisfied.

12:50So for somebody like Henry VIII, a male heir will have been an absolute obsession.

12:56Despite Henry's hopes, no more children follow.

13:01And by 1522, Henry has grown tired of his queen's perceived failures.

13:11A new arrival at the royal court catches the king's wandering eye.

13:17Anne Boleyn is a maid in Catherine of Aragon's household

13:21and Henry is used to drawing his mistresses from amongst his wife's maids.

13:24Catherine of Aragon just closes her eyes and ignores it.

13:27And that's probably what he first wanted from Anne Boleyn.

13:31But unlike other women at the court, Anne goes,

13:33no, absolutely not. I'm not going to be your mistress.

13:36And we can follow the chart of their early relationship

13:39because Henry pursues her with love letters.

13:41He talks about being struck with the dart of love.

13:45Let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two.

13:49It is absolutely necessary for me to obtain this answer.

13:52I promise you that I will take you for my only mistress,

13:57casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections

14:01and serve you only.

14:03I beseech you to give an entire answer to this my rude letter

14:07that I may know on what and how far I may depend,

14:10written by the hand of him who would willingly remain yours, H.R.

14:14The love-struck king stalked his mistress with seventeen ardent letters

14:20over the next two years.

14:23Mine own sweetheart, wishing myself, especially an evening,

14:27in my sweetheart's arms, whose pretty duckies I trust shortly to kiss.

14:32Written by the hand of him that was, is and shall be yours by his own will, H.R.

14:38He talks about wanting to fondle her pretty duckies, which is slang for breasts,

14:43so they've clearly got some level of physical relationship,

14:46but she's very much holding him at arm's length as much as she can.

14:50Eventually, he offers to make her his official mistress at court,

14:54so to give her an official role, and she says no, and then he offers her marriage.

14:57But there's one big problem.

15:00Henry's already married and bound to one of the most powerful Catholic families in Europe.

15:06So Henry orders his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey,

15:11to ask the Pope to annul their marriage.

15:14Cardinal Wolsey had been the key figure in Henry's reign.

15:19He really runs the country, but he can't get Henry his annulment from Catherine of Aragon.

15:23And Catherine has big backers who put pressure on Pope Clemens VII.

15:29The problem for Henry is her family in Spain.

15:34Her nephew is the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

15:37He rules across Germany, he rules parts of Italy, he rules the whole of Spain, the Netherlands.

15:42He is the most powerful man in Europe at the time.

15:46The Emperor was already incredibly offended that Henry would think about discarding his aunt

15:49because surely it's an absolute honour to be married into the imperial royal family.

15:55For the King's Chancellor, time is running out.

15:59Anne Boleyn hates Wolsey, the feeling is mutual.

16:03He calls her a serpentine enemy or the Night Crow.

16:06But they really dislike each other.

16:08Eventually Wolsey is arrested, not quite trumped up charges.

16:11England's most senior cleric is apprehended near York and accused of treason.

16:16He's actually tied to his mule as he's brought south, so he's really clearly heading for the Tower of London.

16:25As he's brought south, he dies at Leicester.

16:28I think in many respects Wolsey does escape what was coming to him.

16:34Undoubtedly he would have been executed and I think really no chance he could have survived that.

16:38The following year, Henry brings in a new law making high treason punishable by boiling to death.

16:53The Tudor king is turning vengeful.

16:57But it's the battle to win Anne Boleyn's hand that will have a cataclysmic effect on his kingdom.

17:03He can't get an annulment from the Pope. He attempts it for six long years.

17:08Eventually, he breaks the English church away from Rome.

17:12So he breaks the English church from the Pope.

17:14He says, the head of the church is me. I can give myself an annulment.

17:17Henry declares himself supreme head of the Church of England.

17:24At a stroke, he completely changes Britain's status and destiny.

17:30At this time, to go against the church in this way is hugely significant.

17:36The sense of superiority meets with that actual power that now sits in his hand.

17:40And we see someone who believes he is utterly autonomous, that he is utterly omnipotent.

17:48He is somebody who believes that he is above anything and everything, including the church.

17:52In early 1533, the hell-bent Henry finally seals the deal.

18:02He marries Anne Boleyn in January 1533, when she's already in the early stages of pregnancy.

18:09And that September, she gives birth to a girl, which is a bit of a disaster for Anne and a bit of a disaster for Henry.

18:14The infant Elizabeth would become the future Queen of England.

18:19But Anne hasn't produced the son that Henry craves.

18:24She has at least two other pregnancies. She then doesn't produce a surviving child.

18:33For now, the King's ire is directed towards Rome and the Pope.

18:38In 1535, he takes a wrecking ball to England's monasteries.

18:47In the coming years, 800 are destroyed, their possessions plundered by the crown.

18:54Those who won't swear allegiance to the new head of the church risk their lives.

19:00He started solving all of his problems with an axe and a sword.

19:03On May 4th, 1535, he ordered the execution in a horrible, horrible way.

19:13A traitor's death. The hung, drawn and quartered.

19:16For four Carthusian monks and a Brigittine monk.

19:19He ordered that the hangman cut out their hearts while they were still alive.

19:24The sadism integral to this act is beyond comprehension.

19:29But more than that, following their deaths, Henry ordered that their heads were placed on spears as trophies to warn off any other possible dissenters.

19:48But the Killer King doesn't stop there.

19:51The axe falls on his most trusted advisers.

19:54Thomas More, he'd been Henry's Lord Chancellor, a real mentor in his youth.

20:00He wouldn't swear the oath of supremacy. He wouldn't say that the Anne Boleyn marriage was valid.

20:05And for that, Henry has him executed.

20:07Before that, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who was a saintly figure, was also executed by Henry because he wouldn't agree to the annulment.

20:15They refused to declare Henry the head of the church. They were maintaining their Catholicism. And that became unbearable to Henry.

20:28He just couldn't stand for anyone to disagree with him. It wasn't safe anymore to defy Henry.

20:34The monarch is now raging against all around him. Even those closest to Henry are no longer safe.

20:44What has triggered this man who was once so popular as a king?

20:49They were not used to the king behaving this way. It was so shocking. Overnight, he became a monster.

20:57Now, in his 40s, an angry and increasingly bellicose Henry VIII is flying off the handle.

21:16Henry's mental profile was his ever-increasing paranoia and irritability. Before, when he was described as being patient and gentle in debate, that didn't happen anymore.

21:29There was a point where he was even threatening to kill his own fool in the court.

21:33He was not the person he had been.

21:37What is the root of this relentless rage and paranoia? The answer may lie in an incident recorded at Greenwich Palace.

21:47Many historians have already speculated that Henry suffered a traumatic brain injury in January of 1536.

21:56He was knocked unconscious during a jousting match.

22:00He's knocked out cold for quite some time.

22:03His behaviour changed so drastically after the jousting accident that there's widespread support that he would have had an injury to the frontal lobe of his brain, which would have caused his personality to change.

22:19Or caused his mental deterioration.

22:21Henry's accident would have immediate ramifications on his relentless pursuit of a male heir. As the king was lying prone and unconscious from the accident, Anne's distress causes her to miscarry his baby son.

22:38She blames her final miscarriage on the accident.

22:44For Henry, it's the last straw.

22:47The injury certainly causes him significant pain. It causes ongoing disablement. He'll never be the man that he was physically after the accident.

22:56So even if there isn't a head injury, and there may well be, actually the fact that every day he's in significant pain must have had an impact on his character.

23:05Once the physical disability, the physical problems started to get their grip on him, I think this spoiled, psychopathic personality came to the fore and completely knocked away this civilised intellectual persona.

23:22So we see Henry behaving in a much more unsophisticated, barbaric manner.

23:28The king's fury is now directed towards his queen.

23:30By that stage, Henry is tired of Anne. The relationship hasn't gone how he was hoping for. What he wants in a mistress isn't necessarily what he wants in a wife, and Anne is very fiery.

23:41By early 1536, he's involved with another maid-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, and really he decides he wants a new wife.

23:50Unlike Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn doesn't have a powerful family. I mean, what are the Boleyns going to do about it if Henry decides to execute her?

23:59And so he does.

24:00Anne is marched from Greenwich Palace to the infamous Tower of London.

24:07She's arrested for adultery and incest with her brother George, and that would be treason in a queen.

24:14It's clearly trumped up charges, and in fact, people who didn't even like Anne don't tend to believe that she was guilty.

24:23But nonetheless, she's convicted, and then she's beheaded by sword on the 19th of May 1536.

24:28Less than two weeks later at Whitehall Palace, wedding bells. A heartless Henry marries his new flame, Jane Seymour, and crowns her queen after slaying the so-called love of his life.

24:49The fact that Anne Boleyn does not provide a male heir for Henry VIII sees him reacting violently against her.

25:00He needs somehow to restore the wound to his pride.

25:04But can Henry's midlife crisis really be pinned on that one jousting accident months earlier? Or are there other factors at work?

25:15It's not an excuse at all, because most people, of course, who've had a head injury do not then go around killing their nearest and dearest.

25:23That may well account for some personality change, although there are, of course, signs of difficulties earlier.

25:31Medical anthropologist Kyra Kramer has been poring through the historical records of Henry's ailments.

25:37She also questions the accident theory.

25:40In 1535, the year before his accident, that's when he started killing people like Bishop Fisher, like Thomas More, like anybody who disagreed with him.

25:53That change happened before.

25:56I agree with the historians thinking that his brain was injured, but I think it was from chronic traumatic encephalopathy rather than one singular incident.

26:07Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, is a brain condition linked to repeated blows to the head.

26:16Later in life, it can cause aggression and mood swings, something certainly seen in Henry.

26:22You get repeated blows, little ones that cause little concussions or sub-concussions, which eventually turn into a large bruise or bleed in the frontal lobe of the brain.

26:38That's where you keep your personality.

26:39He was an avid jouster.

26:42Now, when you joust, you're basically taking the force of a small car behind a stick and hitting someone in the head with it.

26:49We know he got hit in the head because in at least one incident, he forgot to have his visor down.

26:56Proof of this head trauma is found in 1524 when a chronicler of the day describes a duel against the Duke of Suffolk.

27:03His helpers didn't put down his visor, and he got hit in the face with splinters, which could have killed him, easily killed him.

27:10And everybody was waiting for this rage to happen, but he was still a young man.

27:16He immediately forgave not only the knight who hit him, but he forgave the squire who had failed to lower his visor.

27:23That is how even-tempered and logical and decent Henry VIII was before he turned 40.

27:32We know from incidents like that that not only was he gentle-tempered, we know that he was getting hit in the head by sticks.

27:42As the damaged brain ages, the symptoms of this illness take hold.

27:46The athletes who have this, they've done things like suddenly kill their families.

27:54So when I say that CTE can cause a radical change in personality, it can cause a lethal change in personality.

28:03And Kira has come up with another theory that could also blow apart the accident hypothesis.

28:09When we were first publishing our article in the Cambridge Historical Journal, we were trying to figure out a reason for Henry's personality to have changed so drastically.

28:22From 1531 onward, his 40th birthday, he became more and more erratic, paranoid, until eventually he became the monster that everyone remembers.

28:33And when we were looking at illnesses that may have applied to this, one of the contenders that we thought was the strongest was something called McLeod syndrome.

28:44McLeod syndrome, an unforgiving genetic disorder causing physical and psychiatric problems later in midlife.

28:52Could this have afflicted the Tudor bloodline? Could Henry have suffered from it?

28:57On the patient's 40th birthday, no one knows why it is the 40th birthday that triggers it, their personality can change so drastically that a few patients have been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.

29:12So we thought between that and the fact his health was progressively going downhill, as would happen with McLeod syndrome, we thought that it might be a very plausible answer.

29:23Whatever the cause of the king's torment, just months after sending his wife to her death, Henry even surpasses himself.

29:40His religious reforms are causing a groundswell of discontent amongst his largely Catholic subjects.

29:46In October 1536, a huge rebellion erupts against him. It starts at Louth in Lincolnshire and a group of townspeople actually walk in procession behind their cross.

30:00And as they do, a rumour gets up that Henry is going to dissolve the parish churches.

30:05Rebellion spreads like wildfire leading to an insurgency, dubbed the Pilgrimage of Grace.

30:11They ring their church bells in alarm, and within weeks the whole of Lincolnshire and then the whole of Yorkshire are up in arms against Henry.

30:20It's an absolutely enormous rebellion.

30:23It's estimated 30, 40, 50,000 people are up in arms against the king, and he has an army of about 8,000 people at best that he's able to cobble together.

30:32So he negotiates with the rebels. He agrees with them that he will hold a parliament at York. He says, you know, you can all go home, you'll be fine.

30:43But a vengeful king has other plans in mind. To make the traitors pay.

30:49These people have risen against the king, but they've then gone home on the basis that they'll receive pardons and they'll receive at least an assessment of what their demands were.

31:01Henry has no intention of doing anything he said. He's furious with the rebels and he's really just biding his time until he can kill them.

31:08Following a rebellion in the north of his kingdom, a tyrannical Henry VIII is seething.

31:30At the start of 1537, Henry suddenly acts against the rebels.

31:37He uses a smaller rebellion as a pretext to go against everyone who was involved in the earlier rebellion.

31:44He has Robert Ask, who's the rebels' leader, executed at York, which is the centre of his rebellion.

31:51And he also moves against many of the people who are just minor figures in the rebellion.

31:55There are mass executions.

32:01Henry had more than 200 everyday people eradicated, obliterated, simply because they opposed his reforms.

32:13One of Henry's most horrific offences.

32:17It really leaves a scar on the north of England that will take decades to heal.

32:21This disproportionate level of violence is a key mark of a psychopath.

32:28Back at Hampton Court Palace, barely months into his third marriage to Jane Seymour, the king seems to be getting itchy feet.

32:45He frequently told other ambassadors, other members of the court, ooh, I see that pretty lady, I wish I'd seen her before I got married.

32:55He was waiting to see if she got pregnant.

32:58It would have been very easy to divorce the daughter of a minor country knight.

33:02The threat of the axe looms large over Jane until suddenly, a miracle.

33:13She got pregnant and had a baby boy and then magically became the love of his life.

33:17To royal fanfare, Jane produces a healthy son and heir to the throne, Edward VI.

33:26In Henry's eyes, she is the only valid wife and I think that's purely because she provided the male heir.

33:3412 days later, Jane suddenly dies from complications after childbirth.

33:43The grief-stricken king retreats into mourning.

33:48But within weeks, the search is on to find a fourth wife, with the help of his right-hand man.

33:55Henry doesn't like to get his hands dirty. In fact, he tends to vanish if bad news is coming for somebody.

34:04He uses other people. And of course, when we think about Henry VIII's ministers,

34:08we think about Thomas Cromwell, who is undoubtedly his chief enforcer.

34:13Whatever Henry wants, Thomas Cromwell does it.

34:16Including the arrest of Anne Boleyn, that's very much Thomas Cromwell's work.

34:20Henry is on the hunt for a queen who can give him his second son.

34:26Cromwell looks to Central Europe, where they can forge a strategic alliance with the Protestant German states.

34:33He arranges a fourth marriage for Henry with a German princess called Anne of Cleves.

34:45And it turns out to be an absolute disaster. Henry can't stand her.

34:48The feeling is probably mutual.

34:51Nothing to report in the bedroom, either.

34:54They're unable to consummate the marriage, so there's no hope of a second son for Henry.

34:58And Henry is absolutely furious that Cromwell has got him into this situation.

35:04The writing's on the wall for Cromwell.

35:08Or maybe not. It seems Henry has decided uncharacteristically on forgiveness.

35:14He actually creates Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, which is a huge promotion for this lowborn man.

35:22And it looks as though he's not too bothered about Thomas Cromwell's role in the Anne of Cleves' debacle.

35:27And then suddenly, effectively, the axe swings.

35:33Cromwell goes to a council meeting one day and he's arrested.

35:37He's then taken to the tower. He's ordered to help the king annul his marriage to Anne of Cleves.

35:41And then he gets beheaded for treason.

35:49Unlike Cromwell, Anne of Cleves gets to keep her head, even though her marriage had lasted only seven months.

35:57Cromwell can't have seen this coming. I don't think anybody saw this coming.

36:00He is very, very loyal to Henry.

36:03And if you want an example of judicial murder, this really is it in Henry's reign.

36:08Now approaching 50, the moods of the cantankerous and ailing king are increasingly erratic.

36:24Henry's high life doesn't help.

36:27His doctors implore him to cut down on the vast quantities of meats and fine wines that he gorges on.

36:33The once athletic monarch can now barely walk.

36:36What I think is really key with Henry is that really for the last decade of his life he's in constant pain.

36:42An agonising pain. He has an ulcer in his leg which won't close.

36:46There's no painkillers really that are effective in the Tudor period.

36:50The fact that his ailments are all likely self-inflicted won't have occurred to the sybaritic monarch.

36:57He was very, very fond of hunting.

37:00In the 1500s, you're going flat out over very rough terrain on horseback.

37:04You land heavily.

37:07So one of the things that could have done is jostle the long bones in his upper thighs.

37:14And they can send off teeny tiny little microscopic sized splinters of bone.

37:19And the splinters of bone work their way up through to the surfaces of skin causing ulcers.

37:27In modern times, osteomyelitis, those are treated with a simple antibiotic.

37:32Or surgery if they really need to.

37:33Obviously, there were no antibiotics at the time.

37:37So every morning he wakes up, he's going to be in agony.

37:40And I really think that shows in his personality.

37:43He's moved from an entirely luxurious pampered physical reality to one of suffering and pain.

37:51Moving from being adored for your physical beauty to one of repulsing other people.

37:58Henry would not have been able to keep pace with this psychologically.

38:01Despite his age and ill health, Henry makes a beeline for his soon-to-be fifth wife.

38:14Catherine Howard is a pretty young maid.

38:17She comes to court as a lady in waiting to Anne of Cleves and catches Henry's attention.

38:20She may be as young as 15 when she meets him in 1540.

38:26She's very, very young, much younger than him.

38:29And she's really sort of pushed in his direction when it becomes clear that the king is interested in her.

38:34And she is massively unsuitable to be queen. There's no doubt about it.

38:39Catherine has a secret, scandalous history of which the king is completely unaware.

38:45She has had previous relationships, although they begin so early in her childhood actually.

38:49One when she's maybe around 13 years or so that actually they look quite abusive in their nature.

38:58She's married to Henry VIII in 1540 and all goes well at first.

39:02But in 1541, word comes out that she's had these previous relationships during her childhood when she was a very young child.

39:10It then comes out that she has been seeing Thomas Culpepper, a member of the king's household in private with just Lady Rochford as her chaperone.

39:20And that looks very much like adultery.

39:23By now, an unstable Henry is wracked with paranoia.

39:27He sends his teen queen and her beau straight to the tower.

39:31Culpepper and also Frances Durham, who is her lover from her childhood, who obviously met Catherine Howard before she became queen, is also executed.

39:39And then Catherine Howard is executed without a trial.

39:45But actually, she's a teenager.

39:47Henry had grounds to send her back home.

39:50She looks very much like she's validly betrothed to Frances Durham, which means that her marriage to Henry VIII would have been invalid.

39:55It is undoubtedly vindictive and it's undoubtedly murder to have killed Catherine Howard in 1542.

40:03Arguably, one of the worst things Henry VIII actually does.

40:06But all is soon forgotten by the ruthless king. Barely a year later, once again, wedding bells.

40:22His sixth marriage was famously to a widow, Catherine Parr, that didn't result in pregnancy.

40:32A mature Catherine survives where many of Henry's wives do not, perhaps mellowing the mercurial and fractious king.

40:39By that time, he had become so corporal and in such ill health that it was very unlikely that he had consummated that marriage.

40:49But Henry coins Catherine his sweetheart.

40:53She acts as regent during his final war against France in 1544.

40:59After promoting religious reform, Catherine even survives an attempt by the king's ministers to get her arrested and executed for heresy.

41:07Henry's final queen then nurses him through ill health until his death in January 1547.

41:29A few years after his death, people were really reminiscing, thinking, you know, wasn't it lovely when we lived under Henry VIII?

41:34England enters a period of turmoil with a short succession of rulers.

41:40Henry's beloved male heir, Edward VI, lasts just seven years on the throne until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 15.

41:49Despite his father leaving a legacy of debt from failed wars and his numerous executions and purges, Henry's subjects hark back to a golden era under his iron fist.

42:02He was surprisingly popular among the peasantry and that's quite surprising because you would imagine, you know, the monstrous Henry VIII.

42:11But actually, people quite liked him in general. He's this larger than life figure.

42:16That said, it is quite a dark time to live, even among the lower levels of society.

42:22With an estimated 70,000 deaths to his name, was Henry VIII a hard ruler at a time of bitter internal conflict and religious strife?

42:39Or was he just plain bad?

42:40How will the sands of time treat this killer king's legacy?

42:47I think it's arguable that Henry VIII is one of the people responsible for the most deaths in English history.

42:55Certainly no other English king ever responsible for executing two of their wives.

43:00When we look at his record of the killings during his reign, he is a serial killer and I don't think it's going too far to say that.

43:11My interpretation of Henry VIII is one of purely bad.

43:15He has a psychopathic potential disposition that's clear.

43:19And it's a disposition that he chooses to fully express purely because he can in the acts of sadism that he commits in his later life that still shock us down the centuries later.

43:35Obviously, you need to be able to think to know what you were doing is wrong.

43:39So the fact that Henry became more and more bloody and violent and paranoid and irrational, it would have been consistent with his brain deteriorating.

43:52So I think it would be unfair to call him a killer king.

43:55He was a good person who became a killer due to circumstances beyond his control.

44:03Of course, Henry VIII was a monarch, so no one was ever going to bring him to account or bring him to trial.

44:08But today, if he was hauled before a tribunal, I think he would undoubtedly be charged with murder.

44:14I think it's highly likely he would be convicted.

44:38He would have been within the rest of many years the last couple of years.

44:43But in any time, he would have been taken to death.

44:48He would have a contradiction of a victim.

44:49I think that now he would have died.

44:51He would have died.

44:53The last one was a people who werewolves of the death.

44:55He would have died in the death before.