In this quiet church in the heart of England
there's a curious object that bears witness to a book so influential it
would help usher in centuries of religious intolerance.
In 1570, the most important men in Elizabethan England,
the Queen's Privy Council,
made an unprecedented decision to put an unknown and gruesome work
into every church in the country.
This was Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
A graphically illustrated catalogue of the violent deaths
of Protestants killed by Catholics.
It joined two other 16th-century tomes
already in every English church.
The Bible and the Book Of Common Prayer.
This lectern is an enduring testimony to the easy familiarity
that the common people of late 16th century England
had with these books.
Instead of just one ledge to hold a Bible this has four sides,
so it allowed the two volumes of Foxe's Book Of Martyrs
to sit alongside the Bible and the Book Of Common Prayer.
In the history of England there were just a handful of works that have
truly changed the soul of the nation.
These books chained here are three of them.
In this film I'm going to tell the remarkable story
of William Tyndale's Bible,
Thomas Cranmer's Book Of Common Prayer
and John Foxe's Book Of Martyrs.
They are titles that, today, don't sound controversial but in the
16th century their words and phrases sparked revolts,
were debated in Parliament,
and eventually became the backdrop to English life
for over four centuries.
It's the book that people live and die to, and for that matter,
live and love to.
Played out against the backdrop of a Tudor dynasty
at war with itself, it's a story of intrigue,
changing fortunes and three men who pursued their religious vision
even in the face of their own destruction.
This is an extraordinarily dangerous book.
And Tyndale knows it.
These were works that defined the most radical religious revolution
England has ever known -
the Reformation.
Foxe is literally rewriting history at this moment.
In their pages, men believed, lay the key to the salvation of their souls,
making the difference between an eternity in heaven or hell.
These are far more than works of religious literature,
they are propaganda, poetry, manifestos of belief,
in whose pages lie the story of a battle for the soul of a nation.
The three men whose books would turn against Catholicism
paradoxically began life passionately devoted to Rome.
THEY CHANT IN LATIN
William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer and John Foxe were all born
within three decades of each other, into a world dominated
by the Catholic Church.
And, like everyone in the early 16th century, their lives had one focus,
their eternal salvation.
To that end, they would have said confession,
done penance and, most importantly, gone to Mass -
the most sacred of all Catholic rituals, both then and now...
..and a moment where a miracle was believed to take place...
..one that had the power to save your soul.
As the priest uttered the sacred Latin words,
Jesus' sacrifice on the cross was believed to take place again
throughout eternity.
Hoc est enim cor pus meum, quod pro vobisr tradetur.
BELL RINGS
The bread became, quite literally, his body.
The wine, his blood.
It was known as transubstantiation.
The Mass in Latin was a ritual so sacred that it enabled the divine
to break into the ordinary world.
And once transformed it was believed that even to glance upon this
fragment of the transcendent was to be healed, protected, blessed.
It was even processed around the streets so that ordinary people
might have the chance to see the divine.
In this world, the sacred and the secular were one
and the common language of power was Latin.
A world where even to attempt to translate the Bible
and the rituals of the church into English
was an act of heresy punishable by death.
So I grew up in a Polish-Irish Roman Catholic household
and I have been to hundreds of Masses in my time,
but I've never sat through a full, High Church Latin Mass.
With the incense, the chanting, the gold, it is incredibly seductive.
But what it also made me realise as I'm watching the priests
up there chant in a language that I can't understand
is how difficult it must have been for ordinary people
to access the spiritual.
The idea that there are people up there who know,
whereas down here are the people who don't.
It was this divide, this wall of Latin, that the writings of Tyndale,
Cranmer and Foxe would tear down.
From their words and phrases,
the Church of England itself was moulded
and its Protestant beliefs first expressed.
And this battle for Britain's soul would begin with a book
that would cost its creator his life.
William Tyndale was just 12 years old when he arrived in Oxford.
He attended Magdalen school and then Magdalen Hall where he did his BA.
Brought up in Gloucestershire, the son of cloth traders,
he spent his childhood among farmers and merchants,
with the English babble of everyday conversations of the marketplace
ringing in his ears, but here,
at arguably the greatest university in the medieval world,
the language of the classroom was Latin.
Oxford was a bastion of traditional Catholic learning.
Tyndale hated the dry and sterile way the Bible was studied in Oxford.
The text was in Latin and the emphasis was on the endless analysis
of individual verses and passages
rather than a sense of the whole work.
During his time here he heard rumours of a radical new approach.
Stories of an obscure, inflammatory German friar were being whispered
in the corridors of English power.
His name was Luther, and in 1517 he launched an attack on the wealth
and power of the Pope,
an attack that had its basis in his studies of the Bible.
Luther's message was devastatingly simple, but he believed
men's eternal lives were at stake.
In the Catholic Church, salvation was to be found in its rituals -
practises that had been carefully moulded by popes and bishops
down the centuries.
But Luther disagreed.
Luther claimed that the Bible says nothing about being saved
through going to church or doing penance for sin,
salvation came from faith alone.
So, the Catholic hierarchy and its practises, things like pilgrimage,
penance, confession, were all redundant.
And to prove it, he translated the Bible from Latin into German
so the common people could decide for themselves.
For the Catholic hierarchy this signalled the beginning of a crisis
that had to be avoided at all costs.
Their fear was chaos, moral disorder,
and Luther's theories did plunge Europe into revolution.
But for Tyndale, these ideas were the inspiration
for what would drive the rest of his life.
His determination to translate the Bible into English.
In a furious argument with clergy in his home county of Gloucestershire,
Tyndale made clear his subversive ambition.
"I defy the Pope and all his laws," he said.
Adding, "If God spares me I will cause the boy
"that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than thou dost."
Tyndale's words caused rumours of heresy,
and he was forced to flee, to London.
In the 16th century this was a city crawling with heretic hunters,
keen to stamp out Lutheran sympathies.
Those caught could be tried and tortured.
And the king, Henry VIII, was himself a staunch Catholic.
When Tyndale arrived here,
Henry had already been on the throne for two decades.
The king was fiercely opposed to Luther and had written
a stinging attack on his ideas.
This earned him the favour of the Pope, who rewarded him
with the title Defender Of The Faith.
It was in this unlikely atmosphere that Tyndale sought a patron
for his translation of the Bible.
He went to see the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall,
to try to get his support
but Tunstall hated Luther as much as the King did
and Tyndale's request was refused.
It was a rebuff with potentially deadly consequences.
And in 1524, Tyndale left England.
From now on his passion to translate the Bible was all-consuming.
It was an obsession that would earn him some formidable enemies -
King Henry VIII, the spies of the Holy Roman Emperor,
and even the Pope himself.
Enemies determined to do everything in their power to stop him.
Tyndale's destination was Germany,
Luther's home, a place where he believed he would find
the finance for his work.
For the rest of his life he would be a marked man.
Tyndale spent the next ten years on the run,
working 12 to 15 hours a day to complete his dangerous translation.
In a Catholic continent it was a task fraught with risk.
As he travelled, he learned German
so he could read Luther's translation of the Bible.
He pored over the great humanist scholar Erasmus' New Testament
in Greek, the language the text was originally written in.
For two years he was utterly absorbed.
The result was a translation of the New Testament so brilliant
that it would inspire even the lowliest ploughboy
for the next 500 years.
Thousands of copies of Tyndale's 1526 New Testament were printed
but only one complete copy still survives.
Amazing to see this. Why is it so important?
It doesn't look like much, does it?
But this is very deliberately a small,
discrete object because this is contraband.
You could end up being burnt at stake if you are caught
with this thing, but I think this book,
this ACTUAL book in front of us here, is the most important printed
book in the English language, ever.
Tyndale's words and phrases are ones that still echo down the centuries.
"In the twinkling of an eye, eat, drink and be merry."
"In the beginning was the word."
They're expressions that have shaped the English language.
But it wasn't the beauty of his prose
that so inflamed Tyndale's adversaries.
There's a series of particular word choices that Tyndale
very deliberately makes, which are direct, pointed attacks
on the power of the Church establishment.
So for example, where Jesus says,
"And upon this rock I will build my"...?
Church. That's the traditional view.
But, Tyndale translates that Greek word, ecclesia,
as congregation, which is not an institution,
not something headed by a Pope but a collection of people,
a community and so this is a direct attack on the idea of hierarchy
and suggesting that all Christians stand equal before God.
So it's about the body of the faithful making the church,
not the hierarchy, not the bishops, the people.
This is absolutely revolutionary, I think. It is.
And if we look at the beginning of Mark's gospel
where Jesus is preaching, "Repent and believe the gospel,"
which to our eyes sounds almost innocuous, but the
Latin equivalent of that had traditionally been, in effect,
to do penance, focused on confession to a priest and performing penance
rather than repentance as something that's inward,
that happens between the believer and God,
with no need for any intermediary.
What is it that the Catholic hierarchy are so afraid of here?
Well, on one level they're afraid because their entire institution
is under direct attack, but it's threatening at a much deeper level.
When you're telling people that there's no such thing as a church,
that there's only a congregation,
when you're telling people that there's no thing
as sacramental penance,
there's just sort of feeling sorry within your own heart,
then you are threatening to lead people on a path to hell.
So from the point of view of the hierarchy who are responsible
before God for the souls of the English people
this is something which is absolutely their responsibility
to stop, and to stop by any means necessary.
Tyndale had unleashed the words of the New Testament
so they could no longer be controlled.
This small volume was about to undermine the foundations
of an entire nation.
In 1526, copies of Tyndale's New Testament began to be smuggled into England.
Hidden illegally amongst ships' cargoes,
his clandestine work was an instant underground bestseller.
For the first time the words of the New Testament were liberated
for all to read.
But whilst it was popular with ordinary people,
for the Tudor establishment it was of the devil.
And it was at St Paul's that the battle against Tyndale
and his New Testament was most ferociously fought.
Those caught with this translation faced a humiliating punishment.
They were made to process through the city
with copies of the New Testament hanging around their necks.
And when they reached St Paul's all copies of Tyndale's work
were set ablaze.
In the face of such opposition to his work, Tyndale was unrepentant.
But it was only a matter of time before his luck ran out.
And it was in Belgium that he was finally caught by Catholic agents
of the Holy Roman Emperor with King Henry's connivance.
On 6th October, 1536,
Tyndale was tried and condemned to burn to death for heresy.
His final words were a plea for Henry to allow a Bible in English,
"Lord, open the King of England's eyes."
Tyndale died believing that he'd failed, his Bible in English,
accessible to every person in the country, was still a far-off dream.
And yet, even as he burnt,
Tyndale's work had powerful, secret supporters.
As the man who pioneered the English Bible breathed his last,
his words were about to take on a life of their own.
It would fall to a quiet Cambridge don
to help make Tyndale's dying wish a reality.
Eight years before Tyndale's death,
Thomas Cranmer was plucked from his life of obscurity
and thrust onto the global stage.
He was among a handful of Oxford and Cambridge scholars picked to work on
compiling the arguments for Henry VIII's divorce
from Catherine of Aragon.
As a task that would make him one of the most powerful men in England.
For the first 40 years of his life,
Cranmer had been a conservative Catholic.
But as he began to work on Henry's annulment, his views began to shift.
His task was to find a way to get Henry the divorce he wanted.
The obstacle was the Pope refused to grant it.
Cranmer's solution was to search for evidence that would question
the authority of the Pope to make such a decision.
Cranmer pored over the history of church councils to see
if legitimate decisions had ever been made outside Rome
by bishops rather than the Pope.
And he found, they had.
It brought him to a radical conclusion,
that it wasn't the Pope who should be the judge of what was,
or what was not God's will on Earth, it was the monarch.
Unsurprisingly, it was an idea with which Henry strongly agreed
and in 1533 he rewarded Cranmer by making him Archbishop of Canterbury.
Cranmer's ingenious thinking not only informed Henry's divorce,
but would also shape the future of the entire English church.
It marked the beginning of a fundamental shift
from an English church, loyal to the Pope,
to a national one, answerable to the King.
And through Cranmer's promotion came the fulfilment
of Tyndale's lifetime ambition, a Bible in English.
In 1534, Cranmer commissioned ten bishops to work on a New Testament
in English, but they failed to deliver.
Their translations were either inadequate or not completed at all.
Cranmer was in despair.
He said that the proposed Bishop's Bible wouldn't be completed
until the day after doomsday.
He and Henry's right-hand man, Cromwell, were forced
to do something of which Henry wouldn't approve,
secretly rely on Tyndale's translations.
The eventual result was the Great Bible,
authorised by the King, with a preface by Cranmer himself,
but based closely on the unmentionable Tyndale,
with only a few of his most explosive translations changed.
In 1538, two years after Tyndale's death, a ruling was passed
that this Great Bible should be placed in every church.
The first of the three books of the English Reformation
was finally in the hands of the nation.
But it would need more than just a Bible in English
to transform the soul of England.
Despite Henry's hatred of the Pope,
the King and his people were still deeply attached to
their Catholic rituals and beliefs.
It would take a second radical work to turn the religious ideals
sewn in Tyndale's pages into a day-to-day reality.
With Henry now the head of the church in England,
he wasted no time in imposing his authority.
In 1534, the great Catholic monasteries began to be dismantled.
Unacceptable symbols of the church still loyal to the Pope.
On 3rd December, 1538, Rievaulx, a 12th century Cistercian Abbey,
closed its doors for the last time.
But the destruction of these powerhouses of prayer
had a profound effect. One that formed the backdrop to Cranmer's
decision that a new prayer book in English was vital
for the survival of the church in England.
It wasn't just the lead roofs and stained-glass windows
that disappeared from these buildings,
it was the constant round of monastic prayers and rituals.
These monasteries were hubs of pilgrimage, where the laity
came to ask for prayers.
The monks here prayed eight offices a day from a Breviary -
that's their daily prayer book, so everything from matins
through to vespers.
These rituals formed the backbone of the religious life in England.
If they were gone, something was needed to replace them.
And it wasn't just the monasteries that were changing,
during the 1530s reforms were being passed.
There were fewer holy days, an end to pilgrimages
and no cult of saints.
All to reflect the shift away from Rome.
These changes in religious structure and belief needed to be echoed
in the worship of the church. Its prayers, its rituals, its creeds,
all stemmed from an institution with the Pope at its head.
A new liturgy to unite a new church in England,
stripped of its popish practises, was absolutely vital.
As the great monasteries fell silent,
Cranmer began work on his Book Of Common Prayer.
It was in the winter of 1538,
in the London palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury,
that Cranmer is believed to have begun the labour of love
that would destroy him.
It's amazing to think of Cranmer being here
and wrestling with the book that would come to define him.
We know he consulted a large number of different sources like these,
copies of the Sarum Rights. They're collections of the most common forms
of worship in the Catholic Church in England going back
to the 11th century.
But he also read the works of German Lutheran Protestants
and even Spanish prayers in search of the perfect words
and expressions to describe the important moments in life.
Things like birth, death, marriage,
the passing of the seasons but, most importantly,
the new beliefs of the Reformers in England.
And at the heart of the work a ritual so sacred
that to question it was to be burned for heresy.
In the last years of Henry's reign,
English evangelicals were starting to interrogate the central right
at the heart of Catholicism - the Mass...
..and the idea of transubstantiation.
These Reformers shockingly denied the real presence of Christ's body,
claiming that communion was merely a ritual of remembrance.
Their views were so controversial that they were condemned to death.
Cranmer stayed away from their arrests and examinations,
perhaps because he secretly shared their heretical beliefs,
beliefs that would cost him his life if he'd confessed them.
And although he may well have been working on a Eucharist service with
these new ideas at their heart,
while Henry was alive any ambitions he had to make them real
were impossible. Despite his rejection of the Pope,
King Henry was at heart traditionally Catholic.
He believed in the real presence in the Latin Mass,
he and his conservative bishops dealt ruthlessly with anyone
who didn't share their religious views.
It would take the death of the monarch who had handed him power
to enable Cranmer to realise his Protestant ambitions.
And in 1547, his opportunity came.
On 28th January, Henry died.
His son, Edward, the first monarch ever to be raised a Protestant,
was crowned, aged only nine.
With Henry dead, the remnants of Catholicism he had clung to
could begin to be dismantled.
It was the moment for Cranmer to realise the religious revolution
he had waited for, with his own prayer book at its heart.
Within six months, all religious processions were banned.
Worship no longer spilt onto England's streets.
And in 1548, Cranmer finally began lobbying for his prayer book
to replace all Catholic worship in England.
But it wasn't straightforward.
The church was split, with Conservatives on one side
and Reformers on the other.
The controversial issue of the Eucharist was even passionately
debated for five days at the House of Lords.
It was during these discussions that Cranmer, for the first time,
publicly revealed the views he had held private,
namely that he no longer believed in the real presence at the Mass.
Despite its lack of universal support,
Cranmer got his way and an act was passed
making the Book Of Common Prayer compulsory
in every church in England.
Why was the Book Of Common Prayer one of the most important books
written in the English-language?
Well, the Book Of Common Prayer provides a template for experiencing
and practising religion in a completely different way.
It states that, first of all, just if you look at the page here
from the preface, which was written by Cranmer,
the reason for the book he says is that, "The service in the church of
"England, these many years," he says,
"hath been read in Latin to the people, which they understood not,
"so that they have heard with their ears only, and their hearts,
"spirit and mind have not been edified thereby."
Now we might take that in terms of the difference between Latin and
English simply, but what Cranmer is most interested in
is the bit about "in their heart, spirit and mind".
He thinks that if you can't understand a service
you can't internalise it and if you haven't internalised it
that's not proper religion so he's trying to replace
what he thinks of as being a religion which is communal
and perhaps learned by rote,
with something which is felt by every person in an individual way.
With his work now complete, in 1549,
the Archbishop unveiled his masterpiece.
In that very place Tyndale's New Testament had been burned as heresy,
now congregations could hear his words at the heart of a liturgy
in their own tongue.
This was a moment of triumph for Cranmer.
A culmination of years of planning,
meticulous hard work, and the absolute conviction
that in the words of this book, lay the path to true salvation.
The Book Of Common Prayer still forms the basis of worship
in Anglican churches around the world.
Its words marking life, death, birth and marriage.
Giving us phrases that are part of the bloodstream of our lives,
to love and to cherish, lighten our darkness, ashes to ashes.
And at its heart was the new rite of communion.
No longer a moment of miracle, but a service of remembrance.
The book was a practical manifesto of a religious revolution
now placed in every church.
But the reaction to Cranmer's great work wasn't celebration...
..but violent revolt.
From the early summer of 1549 the compulsory introduction of Cranmer's
new book to replace the well-loved Latin Mass provoked outrage.
Across the Counties of Devon and Cornwall men rose up
and began to march in bloody battle for the liturgy of England.
The rebellion began in the small Devon village of Sampford Courtenay.
The parish priest waited until the final date allowed by the government
before he introduced the new prayer book, but his parishioners rose up.
They forced him to wear the old popish attire and to,
"Sayeth Mass and all such services as in times past accustomed."
In their makeshift camps,
rebel groups began to gather and burn copies of the offending work.
In July, they laid siege to Exeter.
For these intensely loyal Catholics
the demand to use the new prayer book wasn't just an attack
on long cherished beliefs...
..it was the final provocation for a people who felt that the rituals
and customs that held the fabric of their lives together
were being ripped apart.
And, for many, the power of the Mass lay in the mystery of its language.
Take that away, and the ritual was merely words.
Being able to read the Bible in English was one thing
but the enforced introduction of a new service in English
was quite another.
News of the uprising was slow to reach London.
But when it did, the reprisals were devastating.
On 3rd August,
Royal forces descended on the rebel stronghold of Clyst St Mary.
The village was set alight and the soldiers ordered to kill their captives.
The Army were utterly ruthless.
Ordinary men, armed with nothing more than pitchforks,
were crushed by thousands of English soldiers, backed up by mercenaries
from Germany, Italy and Albania.
Here, in one of the bloodiest moments of the rebellion,
in just ten minutes, 900 men had their throats slit.
It was the beginning of the end for the rebels.
By August the rebellion was all but over.
Nearly 4,000 men lost their lives in the rebellion.
Men prepared to die for the sake of a book.
But Cranmer's vision to reject England's 1,000 year Catholic past
was abruptly halted.
In 1553, the Protestant boy king Edward contracted tuberculosis
and within months he was dead.
The night before his funeral his body was carried into Westminster Abbey.
Around him gathered his court,
Reformers who knew their dreams of a Protestant future
were now in jeopardy.
The heir to the throne was Mary,
the daughter of Henry and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
As a committed Catholic she had every reason to hate
all that her half-brother and his advisers stood for.
On that August night, as the Archbishop stood by the body
of the young king he'd invested so much in,
he knew that his time was running out.
He had humiliated the new Queen's mother by granting Henry a divorce
from her, he destroyed the religion that she'd loved so much,
and even declared Mary illegitimate.
He knew the time would come when Catherine of Aragon's daughter
would exact a terrible revenge.
With Mary's return, England went into sharp reverse.
She began a dramatic reintroduction of the Catholic rituals
that Cranmer had begun to tear apart.
And within a month of her coronation,
Latin Mass was once more heard in churches across the land.
Cranmer was furious and privately wrote, condemning this insult
to the Eucharist. But his letter was leaked and copies spread across
London before he was ready to make his views known.
He made the best of a terrible situation.
Instead of denying the words he'd written, he published more copies.
In it he denounced the Latin Mass as of the Devil's devising
and he defended his own work, saying it was more pure
and according to God's word, "Than any that hath been used
"in England this thousand years."
For Mary's government, Cranmer's words were incendiary.
Only months after Edward's death he was taken to the Tower of London.
He would never be a free man again.
It was in Oxford that Cranmer faced his dramatic end.
As he waited for his execution,
from his prison window he was forced to watch the procession
of the Blessed Sacrament.
The ceremony he had banned Mary Tudor had reinstated.
On a rainy morning in March he was led to the University Church
to make his final statement.
As he processed up the aisle, with the sound of the Catholic liturgy
in his ears, to those watching Cranmer appeared
to be a man defeated.
The religious zealot who had spearheaded the Reformation
had descended into a spiral of loneliness, fear and doubt.
In this fragile state he signed no less than six dramatic recantations
of everything he'd worked his whole life to achieve.
Before Cranmer spoke, the provost of Eton, Henry Cole,
sent by Queen Mary, gave a sermon in which he listed the reasons for Cranmer's death.
Reasons he read from a statement Cranmer himself had signed only three days before.
In front of a packed church, Cole explained why,
despite having repented of his sins, Cranmer still had to burn
for his heresies and the charges which he himself admitted being guilty of were read out -
masterminding the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon
and the denial of the real presence in the Mass,
the central belief at the heart of the book he thrust on every church
in England, and an act, which he himself admitted,
had put other souls in jeopardy.
In his statement he begged forgiveness of the Pope and Queen Mary.
As Cole finished, the waiting crowds would have been on tenterhooks
as the once all-powerful Archbishop started to speak.
Cranmer began by asking the assembled Masses
to pray for his forgiveness but he enigmatically added,
"Yet one thing grieveth my conscience more than all the
"rest whereof, God willing, I intend to speak more hereafter."
The listening officials had a copy of what he was expected to say,
that it was his untrue books and writings contrary to the truth
of God's word that so troubled him.
But it suddenly became clear this was not Cranmer's intention at all.
Instead, he said,
"The writing that was contrary to the truth I thought in my heart
"and was written for fear of death consisted of all such papers,
"I have written and signed since my degradation.
"And as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy,
"as Antichrist, with all his false doctrines.
"And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book."
Cranmer could barely be heard in the commotion that followed.
He was pulled from the stage and dragged through the streets
to the stake amid scenes of chaos.
As the wood was lit, the fallen Archbishop
stretched out his hand in one final defiant gesture.
"For as much as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart,
"my hand shall first be punished."
Although he knew his final hours were a triumph
for the Protestant cause, he must have feared that his hopes
for a reformed England would die with him.
Little did he know his death was just the beginning.
The dream he died for not only become a reality
but within a decade, every English church would echo
with the words of the liturgy in which he so passionately believed.
His prayer book would not only survive, but go on to define
the soul of a nation for over 400 years.
As the flames of Mary's Catholic passions enveloped England,
news of her burnings travelled across Europe
to the ears of a man in exile.
A man whose work would help ensure the future fate
of both Tyndale and Cranmer's works.
His name was John Foxe and although today he's largely forgotten
his work, the Book Of Martyrs, would transform England.
It so savagely turned the country against Catholicism
that just over a century after it was published laws were passed
which ensured that no English monarch was allowed
to be Catholic again.
Foxe had been a Oxford don but he was caught up with the ideas of the
Reformation and forced to leave the University.
When Mary came to the throne, Foxe knew he was in danger,
so he and his heavily pregnant wife fled for the continent.
And it was here in Basel where the seeds for his revolutionary work were sown.
This city was a safe Protestant stronghold
in a continent still largely under Catholic control.
And Foxe, penniless and full of zeal for the new faith,
became a proof-reader for a famous printer, Johannes Oporinus.
Oporinus's printing house still exists.
And it was in these rooms that John Foxe's imagination was fired
by ideas that would become the foundation for his magnum opus.
Oporinus's printing press was publishing the most important books
by Reformist scholars, so Foxe found himself at the heart
of a secret and sophisticated network of Protestants
from across the continent.
They were risking their lives to smuggle out heretical documents,
letters from Reformers in prison and news of the latest executions.
It was an atmosphere of dangerous innovation.
One of the most popular types of books being printed were martyrologies.
These were gruesome accounts of those brutally killed
for their faith throughout history.
These Protestant martyrologies addressed the most difficult
intellectual challenge the Reformers faced
as they fought for their survival in Catholic Europe.
The problem for Foxe, and the other Protestant visionaries around him,
was that those being killed were not seen as heroes or martyrs
in Catholic England, but as heretics,
as political dissidents so dangerously wrong in their beliefs
that they were jeopardising not only their own souls
but the spiritual health of the nation.
Foxe and the Reformers knew that in order for Protestantism
to win out in England, they had to prove
that, far from being radical heretics,
these men were, in fact, the true church,
and that it was Catholicism which had perverted the Christian message
and was leading people astray.
Foxe's task to prove this was nothing less than a re-writing
of a thousand years of English history,
showing how her millennium as a Catholic country was a heretical
aberration, and how her people now had the chance to reject this false
faith and embrace the true church.
And in 1558,
Foxe finally saw his opportunity, with the death of Mary Tudor
leaving Anne Boleyn's daughter, Elizabeth, as her heir.
Elizabeth was Protestant.
It was the moment Foxe had been waiting for.
It was a chance for a martyrology he would produce to influence
the thinking not just of a queen but of an entire nation.
Now he just had to turn his vision into a reality.
In 1559, Foxe returned to England with a mission
to write a martyrology in English, of Protestants who'd suffered
under the Catholic Church from early Christianity
to the reigns of the Tudors.
And within weeks of arriving in London,
he met the man who would help him make his book
one of the most popular in English history, the publisher John Day,
a passionate Reformer and with a genius for PR.
A work of such an enormous scale was a huge financial risk for him
but he immediately saw the potential of Foxe's ambitious plans
to turn the lives of their friends and fellow Reformers
burned as heretics into tales of religious heroism.
From the minute Foxe set foot again on English soil he and Day
raced to complete the work as soon as it was physically possible.
18 months later the first edition was finally finished.
It was the most complicated and technically demanding book
ever printed in England and in its fullest manifestation
was six times the length of the Bible.
And I've come to Foxe's old Oxford college, Magdalen, to see it.
So exciting to see this particular book.
It's huge.
It is.
This is the first English edition of John Foxe's Acts And Monuments
otherwise known as The Book Of Martyrs.
Not only that, it's the copy that John Foxe dedicated and gave
to Magdalen College, Oxford and there we can see,
down at the bottom, John Foxe's signature.
The book was full of Foxe's detailed accounts of the deaths of Protestants.
But what made it an instant success was a rather more tabloid idea of Day's.
In a masterstroke he took the financial risk
of funding woodcuts of the martyrs being killed in ingenious ways.
Ensuring that an even largely-illiterate population
would understand the message they were trying to convey.
So this particular one, what's that showing?
So this is three women who were burned at the stake in Guernsey
and what you can't help but see is that the lady in the middle
is giving birth to a child.
Yep, there's a child flying out of a ripped abdomen.
Yes. This is Perotine Massey with her mother and her sister,
long story short, they're charged with heresy and, therefore,
burned at the stake but what, presumably,
was not taken into account because she didn't tell the authorities
Perotine is pregnant, so that she gives birth in the flames.
But, as grisly as that is, it gets worse.
What happens afterwards is that someone rushes in,
grabs the baby to save it, he's then told, promptly, throw it back in.
Oh, my goodness! So this is really powerful imagery communicating with
illiterate people in a way that visually they can understand.
It tells a story in and of itself.
So if you see the pained look on the mother's face because she's giving
birth at the stake, and that's understandable,
but what you get with the other two, with her mother and her sister,
is a very stoic look on their face and their hands
are raised in prayer, indicating that even though they are
in the pains of death, these are clearly martyrs
because they are not suffering the pains of death.
They know they're going to a better place and so you contrast those
faces with people like here,
the Catholic authorities who are quite ugly,
and this chap here in particular, you can see he's laughing
at what's happening, so what you've got is this juxtaposition
of good, godly Protestants and a physical manifestation
of the evil within the Catholics.
And that's one of the really innovative things that Foxe
and the printer do in this, is that whilst the text is there
for those who can read, in many instances you don't have to read,
you can read the image and nobody had really done that to this extent
before with such graphic pictures.
In fact, the book was far more than a macabre record of Catholic tyranny,
it was a profoundly ideological piece of Protestant propaganda.
And it's the ornate frontispiece that epitomises what Foxee and Day were trying to prove.
OK, so here we have the title page.
On the left and on the right you see these opposing images and what it's
setting up right from the beginning is these are the Protestants,
these are the true church, these are the Catholics,
these are the false church. So what's happening?
Bottom on the right we have a preacher preaching
to a not very captivated group of people, that has to be said,
not a book in sight, it's about rosaries,
it's about processions and it's about a priest
who is thinking more about himself than preaching to his flock.
And just sneaking into the shot there is a little devil
with his tongue out and his hand ready to clutch those souls.
Because it then moves into a more sinister image.
We have again quite ugly men, kneeling, as the priest here
is elevating the host and so they are representing transubstantiation
here, they are representing that moment when body and blood
are a real thing, not a memorial as the Protestants would have said.
Right above them, that elevated host moves into some more devils
who are clutching souls and they are looking in distress
clearly because they are not saved.
Put that in comparison to the left,
we have a very handsome preacher with a fine beard,
everybody looks riveted in what he's saying
and some appear to be following. They're following in books.
Very Protestant image.
And we move from that straight up to watch those martyrs at the stake,
There's a direct correlation between the two - if you go
to goodly preaching and if you are burned at the stake as a heretic,
you're not because you are going to go and join these people up here
with their beautiful crowns and their trumpets
and clearly representing those souls who have been saved.
Foxe is literally rewriting history at this moment
saying the Protestants aren't the heretics,
the Protestants are the saved.
Foxe had visualised a new ideology.
Now he just needed it to spread.
But for that, he had to secure the backing of the Queen.
Seven years after the first edition,
Foxe and Day launched a new version of the Book Of Martyrs.
One that would make it a household name.
It was more comprehensive, with three times as many woodcuts.
And Day again had a stroke of genius -
to make exclusive gift copies for influential members
of the Elizabethan regime.
This one belonged to Queen Elizabeth's Archbishop, Matthew Parker.
What makes it so exceptional is that every single image
has been individually hand-painted.
In this epic, the new queen and her advisers
saw a unique opportunity.
A work that had the potential to persuade the entire nation to reject
Catholicism once and for all.
It was a gift that didn't go unrewarded.
In 1570, the Queen's Privy Council ordered the Archbishops of York,
Canterbury and London to acquire copies of Foxe,
that could be distributed to parish churches across the country.
The Book Of Martyrs was to act as a Protestant warning
against the tyranny and barbarism of Catholics
and persuade people worn down by decades of religious conflict
to accept a Protestant rule.
And it worked.
Foxe was an instant success.
It's easy to see why this book was so persuasive.
The woodcuts are utterly compelling and the images even circulated
on their own, they were displayed in taverns, and in people's homes.
It's no surprise that in its wake anti-Catholicism
became one of the defining traits of the English,
a people who were once utterly devoted to Rome.
Within a generation, Catholicism had been transformed
from being the only religion in England,
to being the work of the devil.
As the Book Of Martyrs was chained to lecterns across England,
it joined the English Bible and the reintroduced Book Of Common Prayer.
In 1559, Elizabeth had approved a revised version of Cranmer's liturgy
overturning Mary's ban.
Now, the once most controversial books in England
formed the backbone of English lives.
Foxe lived until old age
and would see four editions of his work in his lifetime alone.
And it was in his pages the reputations of Tyndale and Cranmer were redeemed.
The humiliating deaths of the authors of these
two incredible pieces of literature are among those
that are most celebrated in Foxe's Book Of Martyrs.
He reinvents them, they're not heretics any more,
now they're religious pioneers.
But there was a high price for their redemption -
Foxe's demonization of all Catholics,
ensuring that for the next 300 years they were excluded
from all positions of power, fined if they refused to worship
in Protestant churches and often treated with utmost suspicion.
These works have a mixed legacy.
The liberation of the word of God, the democratisation of Christianity.
The cost, religious intolerance.
But you can't help but stand in awe at how three books were able to
so entirely change the soul of a nation within just decades.
From this moment it was William Tyndale's New Testament
that the people of England heard every Sunday,
it was Cranmer's Book Of Common Prayer that would echo in their ears
from their very first breath to their last,
and it was Foxe's Book Of Martyrs that would act as a constant
reminder of the terrible fate that would befall them
if they gave up these hard-won beliefs and returned to
England's bloody Catholic past.