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   BREAKING the DEADL…

   
   

   22 May 2026

   This event began 05/22/2025 and repeats every year forever

   
   

   BREAKING the DEADLOCK: A Power Play
   https://www.pbs.org/video/breaking-the-deadlock-a-power-play-14yofj/
   VIDEO
   
    
   TRANSCRIPT
   If you don't rein in executive power when it's your guy in office, then we're just on this never-ending cycle. Right now, we have a system that's electing performance artists in the highest levels of government. TIM RYAN: We need leaders with guts. "Can" does not mean "should." I've been in the Oval Office before with a resignation letter in my pocket. It's not easy. Don't you have a responsibility to hold up your institution? Just do proximate justice. Just try to get in the ballpark. The oath that I took put my allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, not to any one particular elected president. I am salivating at the subpoena power. (laughter) Consider your political position before you step out here and cause a problem for yourself or the president. ALLYSON K. DUNCAN: Criticism is legitimate. Threats are not. I've had death threats. Power is so intoxicating. JON TESTER: You've got to start talking to one another and you've got to develop trust. And you use the Constitution as the foundation for moving forward. ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by viewers like you. Thank you. Location furnished by The New York Historical. ANNOUNCER: Introducing "Breaking the Deadlock" is Katie Couric. In September 1787, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was confronted with a question. "Well, Dr. Franklin," he was asked, "do we have a monarchy or a republic?" Franklin responded, "We have a republic-- if we can keep it." Franklin and the other founders understood that this experiment in democracy wouldn't be easy. Their instruction manual for us-- that's the U.S. Constitution-- laid out the duties and powers of each branch of government. But they understood that whether or not it would work would depend on our ability to find and respect common civic norms and values. So, where are we today? What do we agree on? And what values can we share? In this program, we challenge a group of panelists to wrestle with the same basic questions about power-- power to determine how we live, work, and think, and whether the people would rule or those in power would rule us. Now we go to Professor Aaron Tang and our hypothetical scenario: A Power Play. AARON TANG: Welcome. This is a story about power. We begin in the state of Middlevania, during the first-term presidency of a person that many of you voted for. Paul Powerton. Now Powerton is getting to work, and he's wielding presidential power in some bold ways to do it. It's gonna lead to some hard questions, starting with one for you, Jon Tester. For generations, your family has owned a farm here in Middlevania. But now that farm is about to go under, all because President Powerton canceled a major federal grant program, and it's left you, Jon Tester, and thousands of other small business owners deep in the hole. How does it feel knowing that you might lose the family farm? Well, it feels pretty bad. My grandfather came out to the farm and homesteaded that place, uh, when there was nothing but grass there. It's part of my person. It's part of what I've done my entire life. Uh, and, uh, to lose that, is losing a part of yourself. And if the farm goes under, are you the only one, you and your wife, who'll be affected? TESTER: Yeah, probably not. TANG: Your community? The fact is that rural America will be affected. If I'm, if I'm going under, it's probably a lot of others going under, too. And then the community gets smaller, Main Street gets smaller, the schools get smaller, and rural America continues to dry up. So it's bad all the way around. TANG: Option number one, you could take out a second mortgage on your home, go further into debt and maybe things will get better. If they do, you might save the farm. But if they don't, you'd lose it all-- the farm, your house, your savings. Option number two, you could sell the farm. I think I would try to keep the farm under all, all options. If you sell the farm, I mean, you've literally let down generations of your family, uh, and you failed them. And you failed your kids and your grandkids, too. TANG: Hard decisions like this are happening at kitchen tables around the country. But Jon, like generations of Testers before you, you steel yourself, and you forge ahead, because today is going to be a special day. It's your favorite day of the year, the annual family barbecue. Dave Brat. Dave, you are a retired United States congressman. You're also Jon's closest cousin. Practically like brothers. Here's what's going through your mind as you head over to the farm. You've got mixed feelings. You know this could be the last barbecue at the farm. And you know it's all because President Powerton canceled that major grant program. And by the way, the name of the grant-making agency that President Powerton has canceled is the Green Business Bureau, GBB. It provides grants for clean energy, environmental projects for small businesses. For Jon's farm, it was solar panels. So, here's the question. When you see Cousin Jon, are you gonna tell him what you believe, which is that the president was right to cancel the Green Business Bureau even if it destroys the farm? BRAT: I'm very sorry to hear about the, the grant and the impact that's gonna have on your farm. But we have $37 trillion in debt. We've fired five million manufacturing folks. So we feel bad for a lot of people in the country right now. And, uh, how do you look at this? I thought that grant would do, uh, some things to help do my part in, in the climate change fight. The bottom line is, though, is that, uh, in the end, uh, we lose the farm. And that... I don't think that's a good thing for me, uh, my family or the community. And I don't think it's a good thing for society either. You're talking in the front yard when you hear another truck pull up, and you turn and you look and you both smile because it's your favorite niece, Sarah Isgur. Your uncles call you over. "Sarah, Sarah, we're having a debate." You, you know about the farm. You know it might be lost. What would you say to your Uncle Jon? I'd say, I think you're making all the right decisions. You know, you took the grants because you thought it would provide a little extra income even though you kinda knew you didn't want to. It didn't pan out. I think the delay would've been nice. It's not what happened. Uh... I certainly would want to look at some legal options for how that grant got canceled. I'm curious about President Powerton's powers to unilaterally cancel that. But, uh, but I support the second mortgage. Don't give up the farm yet. TANG: All right. It's a good niece. TANG: It's a good niece. It's a good niece. As you're talking in the front lawn, a family member calls out from inside the house. "Hey! It's a breaking news story." You look up at the TV and there's a special press event about to start at the White House. So let's go to Washington, DC, now where one of you is in charge. Scott Jennings, you are President Powerton's press secretary. And he's put you in charge today with a simple goal-- "Communicate to the American people how great it is "that I am shutting down the Green Business Bureau. "Billions in dollars in grants for solar panels and windmills. "Because of me, this executive order I've issued, we're saving all of that money for the American people." So, are you excited to communicate that message today? Absolutely. Because it's what President Powerton ran on and was elected to do. And the truth is, what we've uncovered in our investigation since we've taken office, is that billions upon billions of dollars that we don't really have, that we borrow from China, have been spent on political cronies and technologies and unproven ideas. And so what we're doing is we're canceling these grants. And it's unfortunate that there are going to be some people who are going to feel some pain. TANG: You have wisely brought three prominent leaders from your party to join you today to help you spread this message to the American people. Should we meet them? - Absolutely. TANG: All right. Chris Christie. You are a United States Senator from Middlevania. You are a maverick, not afraid to tell it as it is. (chuckles) Marc Short. You are a representative in the United States House of Representatives. In fact, the Speaker of the House. You have a reputation in Powerton's party for getting things done. Roger Severino, you're at the press event, too. You are a close advisor to the president and the former head of a think tank that is very popular with the president's base. Congress, in the past, has debated bills, considered bills to eliminate the Green Business Bureau, to defund the Green Business Bureau, but Congress didn't have the votes. So now President Powerton is doing, through an executive order, what Congress couldn't do. So you're each gonna have an opportunity to get on national TV and thank President Powerton for standing up in Congress's place. Senator Christie, any qualms about standing up on that stage and thanking the President? Well, I'm a little concerned about whether the president has the authority to do that, take away, um, monies that were already appropriated by the House and the Senate. Probably are going to want to talk to the president about whether or not there might be another way to get done what he wants to get done. So, um, as most of my colleagues in the Senate often do, I'll wait and see. Okay. (laughter) JENNINGS: Senator, consider your political position and consider what the American people asked us to do last November, uh, before you step out here and cause a problem for yourself or the president. Don't be on the wrong side of history. Save the republic's fiscal situation. CHRISTIE: Well, while I often take advice on history from press secretaries, um... (laughter) ...I, I, I would, I would, with, with all due respect to, to Mr. Jennings, say that, you know, the oath that I took as a United States senator um, put my allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, not to any one particular man or woman who happens to be elected president or at any other position. And, um, if they're uncomfortable with me saying that this is something that I'm gonna have to really think about, then they could just take me out of the press conference, and I'll hold my own press availability, you know, in front of the West Wing. - Well... - Wow. (laughter) Do you mind, do you mind if I call the Secret Service and have his, uh... (laughter) - Credentials. JENNINGS: ...credentials revoked for the day, or...? TANG: Senator Christie, Mr. Jennings' history lesson wasn't persuasive. His political appeal... CHRISTIE: It could be persuasive. No, no, I... as with many of my colleagues, I just haven't made up my mind yet. TANG: Yeah. And I don't think that I should go out there and just read a position of talking points that was written by the White House. I was elected by the people of Middlevania, and I took an oath to the Constitution. And those two things are my most important constituencies. TANG: Will you be willing at least to stand at the press conference but not speak? No. So you're gonna leave? CHRISTIE: Well, if that's the choice I'm given. I'd like to go and say, "I'm willing to work with the White House "along with my colleagues in the Senate to try to get to a legal and appropriate resolution." Are you okay with him saying that? Well, I'm, I'm okay with him saying that he supports the president's mission. I am not okay if he wants to stand at our press event and call into question the president's motivations or, uh, authority to do it, because we obviously have a different view on that. Don't want to have a public debate at our press event over method, if that's something that we can work out in private later. CHRISTIE: Well, I mean that's okay. I got invited to the press event; I didn't ask to be there; if they're now rescinding the invitation, based on the fact that I can't speak my mind, that's their, that's their right-- it's their White House. You could be sure, though, that I'll have a press event someplace else. So... SEVERINO: If I could jump in. Senator, the problem is that Congress has not cut this program, which requires a president to step in. When there's a vacuum of leadership, the president has the authority to say we're not gonna be spending the money on the Green Business Bureau. And I know there's people that are hurt by this, but there's another side to this equation, the American taxpayer. And the authority of the president to say, "Look, "this is what is best for the American people. "The president ran on this. "We're gonna cut the waste. "We're going to cut the cronyism "with this Green Business Bureau. "And Congress was unwilling to act. So that's why we're in the situation we're in." Those are really all good think tank points. But they, they don't, they don't take into consideration the Constitution, which they may have misplaced over there at the foundation. Um, the fact is that Congress has the power of the purse. Um, the president is not permitted to just unilaterally take away spending that has been appropriated in a budget that was signed by a president. But the foundation did not misplace the Constitution. CHRISTIE: Maybe just didn't... Maybe just didn't read it, I don't know. Well, let's see. TANG: All right. Speaker Short. Are you a thumbs up to speak at the event? While I would encourage the executive branch for what they're doing, would want to stand behind it... - Uh-oh. - Senator Christie, I think, is, is correct that the power of the purse belongs with Congress. And if the courts decide that the executive branch can unilaterally eliminate these programs, then the next time you elect a left-wing president, he can unilaterally restore these programs. TANG: Wow. Scott, some tough calls. So I think, I think I'm okay with the speaker because he obviously shares the president's vision about what the outcome needs to be. And we actually do agree, uh, that we would like to see some permanency in the restoration of fiscal sanity to the national budget. TANG: Okay. Folks, the press starts to enter the room, and one of our members of the press is Lesley Stahl. You are the senior White House correspondent for the Global News Network, GNN. As you are walking in, you get a phone call. You look down at your phone, and it's from corporate headquarters... Ooh... TANG: ...parent company of GNN. And somebody at the parent company says, "Lesley, you know we are on thin ice "with the Powerton administration. "This might be our last press conference "if we don't get this one right. "So, please, if you get a chance to ask a question, "make it a softball, "something that will make President Powerton look good "or at least okay. Will you please do that?" I, I hear what you're saying, but I have to do my job. This is what I was hired to do... TANG: Fierce. - ...ask tough questions. That's my role in society. TANG: So it's not a hard call for you, what you say. But I have to ask you this, Lesley, if this is, in fact, your last press conference in that seat, who do you think the administration will put in the seat at the next press conference? Is it a media outlet that will scrutinize the administration the same way that you and that GNN would? No. But to be honest, I don't think you have to be sitting at the White House to cover the president. And I think you're freer to cover the president in the way I think the press should handle these tough issues... TANG: Okay. STAHL: ...from outside because you can become a captive when you're inside the gate. TANG: Okay. Mr. Jennings, do you want to kick off the event? - Absolutely. TANG: Who are you gonna call? Is your hand up, Lesley? STAHL: Oh, yeah. TANG: Who are you gonna call? Is there only one journalist...? (laughter) Yes, I'm willing to call on Lesley Stahl. TANG: Lesley. STAHL: My question is about the farmers. This is a huge, important, uh, block within your constituency, um, and I know that they are not at all pleased. So please address the problems that the farms are having. JENNINGS: President Powerton loves farmers. We know that. And ultimately what we think we're gonna be able to do is give them better economic opportunities to make a living without having to have artificial income supports from the federal government. STAHL: But why aren't you leaving this up to Congress? I mean, to the speaker, this whole structure that the founders organized is crumbling. Don't you have a responsibility to hold up, as Nancy Pelosi used to say all the time, to hold up the power of your institution? Lesley, appreciate the question. Uh, Speaker Pelosi's not the model that I'm looking to follow, but, um, nonetheless, I think that it is our job in the legislative branch to, uh, fight for the power of purse. And we're the ones that allocate the resources. And it's also our jobs to pass legislation that cuts these programs. Congress has an essential role. It's the role of the purse. SEVERINO: But Congress has refused to act. The, the budget is out of control. The American people spoke loudly. And may I add, the only person who has the weight of the entirety of the American people behind him is the president. Everybody else gets elected by constituents or a state. Only the president speaks for the entirety of the American people. And the American people have said, "Enough is enough. We have to cut the spending and give it back to the Americans." TANG: Let's get some quotes from the opposition party, who hasn't had a chance to chime in yet. We have Senator Tim Ryan, United States Senator, in fact the Senate minority leader. And we have Middlevania's very own attorney general, elected attorney general, Dan Goldman. Who are you gonna call first? I c... I would call the senator first. RYAN: Good to be a senator, I guess. (laughter) STAHL: Um, I assume you saw the press conference from the White House. Um, what do you think about the, the legal issue, and what do you think about the power of Congress? I would like to challenge the Speaker of the House, the president of the Senate, to stand up for the Constitution. The founders, who were breaking free from a king, wanted the people to have the power and the authority. To acquiesce to the president, I think is, is tragic, uh, and completely undermining our democracy. TANG: Okay. Lesley, do you have a question for Attorney General Goldman? STAHL: Given the legal issues involved here, and the fact that you are the attorney general of the farm state, which will be hurt dramatically, is there anything you can do um, to get that money back for your farmers? Yes. I'll immediately be filing a lawsuit, uh, for a violation of the Impoundment Control Act. It does not allow for a president to unilaterally, uh, cancel appropriated funds. It is, uh, the law of the land. And we will protect our farmers at any cost. We have heard a very forceful case for the president's power to save this money for the American people. And we've also heard some competing arguments. Let's return to Middlevania, to the Tester family farm. Farmer Jon, I heard you have that big audience on the YouTube with the tractor repair videos, you know the ones? 300,000 subscribers, right? Will you make a video and tell your people what's really happening to us with this GBB thing? What I would say is, is, uh, I will, but there's got to be more than just me. TANG: Okay. - There's got to be more people so that it, so that it looks as broad-base of a problem as what I and you think it is. TANG: Are there any risks? Sarah, will you tell your uncle is there anything he should worry about before he posts this video on his tractor channel? Sure. I mean, anytime you're calling attention to yourself in the political arena, uh, there's huge risks within your community, within your church. You could get threats. You could have people, um, coming to protest your farm or vandalize your farm. And that can be really dangerous. TESTER: I'm willing to take the risk. But there needs to be more than just me. TANG: Okay. You get a phone call from Middlevania's attorney general, Dan Goldman. He is gonna file a lawsuit for the farmers of Middlevania, and he wants to know if you will join him. Absolutely. TANG: Attorney General Goldman, you have sued, asking a court for an order that the president cannot unilaterally shut down the Green Business Bureau and defund it without Congress. Yes. Uh, Article One makes it very clear that Congress has the power of the purse. The president can come back to Congress with any recommendation to cut the GBB, but the president cannot do it unilaterally. TANG: Okay, so you filed this lawsuit. You're asking for a court order that the Green Business Bureau be reopened. Who's the defendant in that lawsuit? It's you, Roger Severino. The president was so pleased with your performance at the press event that he fired the old GBB director, and he put you in charge. You're the new acting director. And as he gave you that job, he winked at you. And he said, "Roger, you know the assignment. "We've got to shut this thing down for the American people. "And after you do that, I've got your back. Any job you want in my administration, it's yours." But unfortunately for you, the federal judge in the district where Attorney General Goldman chose to file this lawsuit has issued an order requiring Director Severino to reopen the Green Business Bureau offices nationwide. Now, Roger, it's a moment of truth. You have a mandate from your president. You have a core value about returning money to the American people. But you have a federal court order telling you you can't do it. What are you gonna do? SEVERINO: Well, you can't have single judges dictating what a federal agency can or cannot do within the scope of the authority of the president. TANG: You need to make a decision. Are you going to comply with the district court's order and reopen the Green Business Bureau? Well, if this single district judge wants to run my department, we'll see how, how well that goes. TANG: What does that mean, Director Severino? Are you going to say, "No, I'm not complying with this order"? Is that what you're saying? Are you gonna... SEVERINO: No, no. We're, we're gonna see how much stomach this judge has for this sort of fight. Because I think the Supreme Court will back us all the way. And if this judge wants to run my department, have at it, good luck with that. TANG: Okay, folks. A week goes by after the federal judge has issued her order. Two weeks. Folks like Jon are still not getting their grant checks. And the American people don't know what to make of it. They're looking around for somebody in the room to make a decision as to what is gonna happen when we've got a dispute over power between a federal judge and the president's administration. Allyson K. Duncan, You are the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. What's going through your mind? Are you worried to be watching a district judge battling with the president's administration, arguing about who's gonna follow the law, what the law is, like this? Is that concerning for you? - I worry about everything that affects the integrity of the court and the way in which it is regarded. The federal judiciary, the judiciary, is the weakest branch of government. It lacks the power of the purse, which Congress has, and the power of the sword, which the president has. TANG: Are you worried that Director Severino hasn't fully complied with this order right away? Does that worry you? It certainly worries me. If the money leaves the gate, we're not getting it back. That's the fact. The president was elected to end the wasteful spending. If we reopen it, that money's gone forever. We're not getting it back. And that's hurting the American taxpayer. TANG: Attorney General Goldman, should those checks be going out the door while the full case makes its way up? Absolutely. And while I appreciate that the president thinks that every single thing he does is valid because he won an election, unfortunately, every president wins an election. So that's not actually a grounds to stop the payment. TANG: So, Chief Justice Duncan, there is a person on this panel, in fact, who you know very well. They're a former law clerk of yours, smartest law clerk you've ever had. You trust her judgment implicitly. It's Sarah Isgur. Would you give Sarah a call and ask her to help think through this case with you, how you might approach it? Absolutely not. (laughter) She's not working for me now. She is, she is not-- we are not in confidential relationship with one another. She can clerk for me now. You can come back and clerk for me now. TANG: Would you clerk for her now, or do you want to use a different... I've already clerked for her, yes? TANG: You've already clerked for her once. Yeah. - Yeah, I'm not going back. TANG: You're not going back. - (laughter) TANG: What a lonely job, Chief Justice Duncan. Fortunately, Sarah, you have a platform of your own. You are, in fact, a prominent social commentator. You've got a podcast. And Chief Justice Duncan is a big fan of the podcast. So you can say what you think about this case and maybe she'll hear it. Who should win? Should attorney general win, and these checks go out the door, or should Director Severino? ISGUR: Yeah, I don't think this is a close call. For many of the arguments that the attorney general has made, this is simply not within the powers of the president. All the more so because Congress debated this, had bills in front of it, and rejected them. They didn't have the votes. The process is supposed to be exactly that. And if you don't have the popular political will to pass it through Congress, which is meant to be hard and annoying and long and compromising, then you don't get to do it. And just because you were elected president of the nation, I don't give two anythings about who elected you or by how much. (laughter) So Chief Justice Duncan... - Yes. TANG: ...we've heard the arguments. And you do have to cast a vote in this very hard case. DUNCAN: Okay. - What's it going to be? I, I vote that the president does not have the authority to cancel. TANG: The Supreme Court has spoken. Let's call it a five-four vote. Director Severino, what are you gonna do? You have to comply with that order. As erroneous as it may be. (chuckling) We get that half the time. Uh, it was close, unexpected, five-four. But it's one of those things where, if the court has spoken in this sense... ...we'd have to comply with it. Now, doesn't mean it's the end of the fight. We will show how extraordinarily harmful this will be to the American people. I want to come to Senator Christie for a comment. You maybe called it. You could have an "I told you so" moment. Do you go to the press and comment on this order? No. I, I go to the president. And I'm part of his party. Um, I have the president's cell phone number, and I call him. Uh, I'd go around Jennings and call him. I'd say to him, "You know, Mr. President, "I'd like to cut Tester's funding, too. "But I, I want to cut it in a way that makes sense..." TANG: Okay. ...and that doesn't get overturned by the court." I wouldn't go to the press. The press all knows I was right already. So there's no reason for me to go back and reiterate it. TANG: All right. Lesley Stahl. The American people are very confused. There's been a lot of orders, questionable compliance. The people are looking to you for clarity. What's your headline? How are you covering this? STAHL: Well, the first thing I would do is that, uh, I would call Chris Christie and encourage him to leak to me every little thing that's going on. TANG: Senator Christie would never leak anything to you. You don't know him very well. (laughter) Do you see what I'm dealing with every day? I guess the headline is that, uh, "The President Loses." "President Loses." Scott Jennings. Let me tell you something, the president didn't lose. The American people lost. But that's okay, because we think we have enough allies in Congress to ultimately get what we want, even if it's on delay. TANG: Okay. Folks, we've had a big battle. Congress passed the law appropriating money for the Green Business Bureau. The president tried to cancel it. And the Supreme Court has ruled for Congress. President Powerton, as you might expect, is not happy. His supporters are not happy. They're criticizing federal judges. Criticism is part of our tradition. That's what democracy is. Okay, so you're comfortable with criticizing federal courts. Senator Ryan, is it appropriate to criticize federal judges? RYAN: Absolutely. Absolutely. Have you criticized federal courts from time to time? RYAN: From time to time. TANG: Sounds like folks are very comfortable with criticism of judges. It's American. Right to free speech. DUNCAN: Criticism is legitimate. Threats are not. So will you make a public statement? I will, because I believe that this is important. I've had death threats. I know what it's like to have my name and face appear on a program with a death threat from someone who didn't even understand the reading. Thank you, Chief Justice. Folks, let's go back to the White House. The president can't believe that the Supreme Court has ruled against him. But he's got an idea. He's got an idea for how he's going to fight back. And so he calls you into his office, Alberto Gonzales. You are now the United States Attorney General. President Powerton calls you in and says, "Mr. Attorney General, priority number one, investigate Dan Goldman." You'll do that, right? Investigate Middlevania's attorney general, Dan Goldman. What do you say to him? "Obviously, this is a great concern to you, "Mr. President, and, and we'll look at it. "But I'm going to only move forward in an investigation "and prosecution if, in the judgment of my team, we believe that something illegal has, has occurred here." The president says, "Some of my loyal followers "have been taking pictures, photographs, "of Mr. Goldman's home. And it looks like he's gotten some fancy upgrades lately." You know, of course, that Mr. Goldman is now running for the United States Senate in Middlevania. There's an open seat, it's not Senator Christie's seat. You're good. - Thank you. (laughter) Too bad. TANG: But the other seat is open, and if he is using campaign funds to upgrade his house, that would be illegal. So you'll investigate him now, won't you? We might-- we may look at that. Yes, we may look at that, but without, without it becoming public. The president is looking at you and says, "I'll tell you what, Mr. Attorney General, "I want to make a statement to the press that the attorney general, Mr. Goldman, is under investigation." I would urge you, Mr. President, not to make that statement. We don't talk about pending investigations publicly. TANG: What is driving you to resist the president's request? It's not the law. I don't hear you saying it would be illegal or unlawful... Because we keep politics... if this is driven by politics, we absolutely are not going to engage in any kind of investigation, prosecution of our political enemies. We don't do that. TANG: Would you call it... Would you call it a norm? What? That we... TANG: That we don't investigate our political enemies. Ab... absolutely. TANG: You can tell president's not very happy with your answer. He wanted you to be on his side. GONZALES: I've been there. I've been there. TANG: Okay. Decision time. The president says, "I'm going to issue this press statement. "I've changed my mind: it's not seven days, it's 24 hours. "And I need to know if you will sign it, "as my attorney general, that we are investigating "Dan Goldman for campaign finance violations. Can I put your name on it?" First of all, I would try to talk him out of this. You've tried. He's very stubborn. (chuckling) GONZALES: Then I would tell the president, "Mr. President... "I can't sign this statement. "And if that means that you would like me to resign, then I will... then I will resign." I, I've been in the Oval Office before with a resignation letter in my pocket. It's not easy. TANG: It's not easy. But you have to do what you believe is right in the interest of justice. Okay. I'm sorry to tell you, you are no longer the United States Attorney General. (laughter) Mr. Severino. SEVERINO: The resignation is the proper course if you cannot execute it. But the president is going to find somebody that will eventually follow his orders. He wants to know if it'll be you. He wants to know if you will investigate a person-- there is plausible evidence. We've got the photographs. You were good on the Green Business Bureau. Would you? Yeah, if there's enough there there, then I would investigate. TANG: You would investigate. There would have to be sufficient suspicion. TANG: Well, that's what we're finding out, to find... SEVERINO: Right. Look, we're not like the communists-- "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime." Right, we don't do that in the United States. But if there is enough there, there... TANG: Yeah. - Then I would be able to investigate. TANG: Okay. It all depends on the facts. - Yes. SEVERINO: But the president does get to say, "We ought to look into this area." - Okay. - Look, if the president says we're going to take down the mob in New York... - Yes. - ...you go to New York and you shake down mobsters, right? So, the president can order the attorney general... - Congratulations, you are now the Attorney General of the United States. (laughter) CHRISTIE: Not so fast, because I think Ryan and I have something to say about that. And if Gonzales resigned because he felt he was asked to do something by the president of the United States that was unethical, you can imagine that would be questions one through 50 for Severino at his confirmation hearing. TANG: Okay. - So, not so fast. TANG: Not so fast. - Not so fast on the attorney general... TANG: Acting Attorney General of the United States, Roger Severino. And the president says... "Priority number two, investigate that farmer guy who's on TV criticizing me." Will you do that? There would have to be some basis. TANG: Oh, he says... SEVERINO: ...to suspect A crime was done, a federal crime. TANG: Totally. He's looking on his desk, he's like... "He's got that tractor side hustle. "You know people like this, they don't report their income, taking deductions." IRS, everybody's committed a little bit of tax fraud. (chuckling) TANG: Will you investigate Farmer Jon? For tax fraud? That would be a tough one. TANG: That would be a tough one? Because I, I know the context, you see. And I would go through the same thought process as my predecessor attorney general, that we should not be targeting our political enemies and selectively enforce our law. So you agree with the norm, we should not use the power of prosecution against a political enemy. That should not... that should not be the way the law enforced... the law is enforced. No, we are, we are better than that as a nation. Okay. So... You're not the attorney general anymore, and Mr. Severino is no longer the attorney general, either. (laughter) - Resigned. TANG: The president finds another acting attorney general who will investigate Farmer Jon. Mr. Tester, you are under the most intrusive level of audit that the IRS can perform. And I'm curious, what's happening in your life now that you've been targeted in this way by the president? Are your kids, your spouse, are they affected? You've got to defend yourself. That's additional resources that are going out the door, in a marginally... uh, financial situation. TANG: Yeah. So, it would probably push you over, you'd lose the farm quicker. You mentioned your bank account. TESTER: Yeah. - With lawyers' bills... TESTER: Yeah. - You've hit empty. Yeah. TANG: So you call your niece, who is, after all, the greatest niece in the world. Sarah, you call around to some law firms. And crickets. No one is willing to represent the farmer who is the president's outspoken critic. What's happening? Why not? Obviously, the president's threats have worked and it's chilling people from wanting to stand against the administration. Is that a problem? Yeah. (laughter) TANG: But why? I mean, are we really worried about elite DC, New York, San Francisco lawyers who are being cowed into silence? They're going to be fine, they're rich. How does it affect Americans? Legal representation is at the foundation of our adversarial system. If you're being accused of a crime under investigation, just being under investigation alone will really require having legal representation. Great legal representation, ideally. And so, if lawyers don't feel free to take on unpopular clients because of the political atmosphere, then we've lost what we founded this country to do. TANG: Mr. Brat, one final word. BRAT: Yeah, I just want to weigh on this... this-- the moral issue here and the legal issue is clouded by the fact that this President Power guy was targeted back in '16. You have some concerns. BRAT: A few. - About the other side... BRAT: Yes, yes. TANG: ...using prosecutorial power. This is nothing new, in other words. TANG: I understand. Yes. We're going to fast forward a little bit, because I have some news. There's a special election in Middlevania. And our winner of the election is none other than Attorney General Dan Goldman. Senator Goldman, congratulations. Thank you so much. (laughter) TANG: So, the House and the Senate were under control of the Powerton party by the slimmest of margins, and the Senate was 50 to 50. So that one election flips control. Which means, Senator Ryan, congratulations. You are now the Senate majority leader. You've got power, maybe you've got some options. so you are hosting a strategy call with some other prominent members of your party. It's on Zoom. Senator-elect Goldman has joined the Zoom call from his phone. Mr. Tester is on the call. He is gaining some prominence in the party, considering a run for public office himself. Help us think through what the opposition party's strategy should be. Should you resist President Powerton at all costs or try to reach across the aisle and find common ground? From kind of the power struggle that we were talking about here earlier, I think it would be constructive. I think the American people want to see us working together. TESTER: Absolutely, unequivocally. You reach across the aisle, you try to find people that you can work with on the other side of the aisle and within your own party to retake the legislative branch's... power. TANG: Hold on, I'm sorry. Hold on. You were under investigation... TESTER: Yeah. From President Powerton's Department of Justice. - Yep. TANG: An IRS audit. You were almost bankrupted, you almost lost the farm. Yeah. TANG: And now you want to work together? Yeah. With his administration, his party? I, I work with the people in the Congress to come up with a plan to take the power back that the executive branch has taken from the legislative branch. TANG: Wow. - Absolutely. If, if you go in with personal axes to grind, and, "I want to just grind this ax," totally ineffective. And I want to be effective, I want to make sure this democracy works the way the forefathers intended. TANG: Senator-elect Goldman, are you in agreement? No. (laughter) I am salivating at the subpoena power. (laughter) TANG: You want to take it to the president? GOLDMAN: Well... You don't want to cooperate? I think you go on two different pathways. Um... The abuse of power through executive orders has to be reckoned with through oversight and, if necessary, through the subpoena power. TANG: The strategy call is difficult. You can see the opposition party struggling with the weight of governing. But while the Zoom strategy call is happening, all of a sudden... loud boom. There has been a terrible car accident. Somebody slammed into Senator-elect Goldman as he was getting out of his car. He's in the hospital. He's been badly injured, but he will survive. The driver of the vehicle was a 28-year-old man named Kent Knightley. He says it was an accident. Kent Knightley is tried, convicted of felony assault. President Powerton's most fervent supporters are sharing memes saying "Pardon Kent Knightley." Now, many of you are at a meeting with the president when he brings this up. "Have you guys heard how they're calling "this Kent Knightley kid a hero? "I think they might be right. I think I'm going to pardon him." Senator Christie? I would advise the president that, you know, he should look very carefully at the factors that are considered historically for these type of pardons to be granted. I would say to him, you know, it would be a very, very unpopular decision to do that. But it's his call. It's... It's the president's judgment. That's why we need to elect presidents with judgment. (laughter) TANG: We've got something really interesting happening over at this table. Constitution of the United States is out on the table. Chief Justice Duncan, Mr. Severino, working together, despite being on opposite sides, looking at the Constitution. Any thoughts? SEVERINO: Well, yeah, it goes back... DUNCAN: Excuse me, I'm not on a side. (chuckling) Fair enough. SEVERINO: On the side of the Constitution. (applause) - Touché. Touché. SEVERINO: So, it goes back to an earlier point: can you weaponize the justice system? And some political parties do, and some presidents do on occasion. Very recently, we've had that experience of weaponization. The pardon power is actually a check on that weaponization. If one president goes too far, the next president could pardon the people who are unjustly prosecuted for political reasons. TANG: Okay. - Yeah. TANG: The president likes what he's hearing. The president says... "Roger, absolutely." The other side, right, they... Maybe he should have kept him as attorney general. TANG (laughing): Maybe... he's rethinking it. JENNINGS: Well, the discussion in the room among the president's advisors is very simple. "Can" does not mean "should." And as a political advisor to the president, the correct thing to say here is, "You can do this, "but you have to ask yourself whether you should do it "as it relates to your own personal political influence in this country and your legacy." TANG: The president listens to everybody. He really appreciates what you said, Roger, and he says to you, "You know what? "The other side did this. "They were out there pardoning friends, family members. I'm pardoning Kent Knightley." Folks, the Powerton administration continues. It's a bumpy ride, but eventually he has to run for re-election, and ladies and gentlemen, he loses. He loses to a firebrand young governor named Dana Novo. Dana Novo is the president of the United States. Her vice president is somebody who's in this room, a citizen whose plain-talking style has connected with the American people. (laughter) Goldman. (laughter) TANG: Congratulations, Mr. Tester, you're now the vice president of the United States. - Perfect. (applause) - God, what a country. CHRISTIE: So sorry. I'm so sorry, Jon. - Yeah, I know. TANG: Only in America. - What was that about a warm bucket of spit? (laughter) TANG: You're going to have a chance, Mr. Vice President, to give some advice to your new president, President Novo, but right now she's on TV. She's on TV giving a speech. It's her first week in office, she's rallying the base. So here's what she says. She says, "We fought against "President Powerton's overreach at every turn. "There were no limits on what President Powerton could do. "Well, turnabout is fair play. "I am going to "defund an institution, an agency "that we all know is wasteful. "It's the Department of Defense. "$800 billion it spends. (panelist chuckling) "I'm issuing an executive order, "cutting spending by 20%. "The waste, we're going to find it, "and we're going to cut it, "and here's what we're going to do with it. "We're going to spend that money on the true source of "American national security, our public schools. "We're going to buy books, not bombs. I'm calling it Operation Education." Senator Christie, you, at the very beginning, made a comment that predicted a lot of this. You said, "You want to reduce funding at a federal agency, go through Congress." Now, a president of the opposing party wants to do the same thing. You could run a victory lap. You could tell us, "I told you so." It would be appropriate. Anything you'd like to say? Yeah, well, now you do a press conference. (laughter) Sure, now you definitely do a press conference, and, and you go after the current president for, I'm sure, that the current president had negative things to say about President Powerton trying to cut the GBB. So I would have my staff go and find those comments. And I would say, you know, the president is a hypocrite. TANG: Okay. CHRISTIE: That the current president isn't the flaming star you talked about, but is a flaming hypocrite... TANG: Is a hypocrite. - ...for, you know, having prosecuted the case against the GBB, but now is trying to do what I consider substantively the same thing. TANG: Mr. Severino, do you agree that President Novo does have the legal power to cancel spending at the Department of Defense? Cancel, yes. Reallocate spending that was appropriated is a different question. TANG: Got it. So you would tell members of Powerton's base that, yes, she can cut $160 billion in defense spending. What you can't do is buy your kids books or good teachers. Wouldn't frame it that way. (laughter) TANG: Do you have any regrets about making such bold claims to presidential power when Powerton was in office now that the shoe is on the other foot? SEVERINO: No, you have to be consistent about it. Now, unfortunately, we lost the Supreme Court, so now they have to apply by those exact same rules-- play by those same rules, so. TANG: Oh. Is that what you were going to say, Mr. Jennings? Absolutely. We had a legal point of view on it at the time, we lost. We tried to work with the Congress on it. The new administration-- by the way, I'd just like to get a little sympathy for Roger and I being unemployed at this point. (laughter) And... and that, you know, that's the rules of the road. Now you got to play by the, by the Supreme Court ruling. Are you a little bit grateful now that the shoe is on the other foot, that the Supreme Court, our third branch of government, has ruled against you on the first case? I'm neither grateful nor ingrateful. I just react to the circumstances as they exist in the moment. At the time, I was the president's spokesperson. We had a point of view, we lost, and now I expect every subsequent administration to abide by that or have their own point of view. And when I'm, you know, the next administration's spokesperson, I'll... (chuckles) I'll abide by their point of view at that time as well. He's enjoying his time in the private sector right now. (laughter) TANG: Chief Justice Duncan. As you know, the Supreme Court establishes precedent in every case. It's not necessarily bound, except to the extent that it wishes to be viewed as consistent by what prior Supreme Courts have held, but they are very clear about the facts of a case and whether those facts are on all fours. Subsequent facts. JENNINGS: I will give you some political advice, though, which is that there's a big darn difference between canceling Farmer Jon's solar panels and turning off the national security of the United States. And I do appreciate that, and if I took political advice, I would value it. (laughter and applause) TANG: Senator Ryan, Vice President-elect Tester, Senator Goldman, you are sitting in the Oval Office when President Novo comes into the office after the speech, and she's looking for high-fives. "We did it. We took it to them. Everything Powerton did," right? "We're using it on him now. This is great. It's our moment." Senator Goldman, would you support her effort to use bold claims about presidential power for what she believes is good? No, I, I think that you've got to follow the law. And that the law has to be adhered to, regardless of which party. And unfortunately for our party, we generally take the high road and make sure that we follow the law, whereas... sometimes that's not always the case in President Powerton's party. That's why he's the junior senator from our state. (laughter) TANG: Mr. Vice President. This country's been around for nearly 250 years and, and we've got a constitution that is really the basis for this country moving forward. Follow the Constitution. Mr. Vice President Tester has made a powerful plea to his president, "Please don't do this." Is that what you're saying? That's exactly correct. TANG: Please don't do this. I am president of the Senate, as vice president, so yes. TANG: You are president of the Senate. President Novo looks at you and she shakes her head. She says, "No, this is the way the game is played now. And as you shuffle out of the Oval Office, you hear her call out something that sends shivers down your spine. She says, "Bring me my attorney general. I've got a long list of political enemies." We have one more question for all of the panelists. We've seen a lot unfold today. Some bold claims to power by presidents from two very different parties. Maybe you were okay with some of those power plays. But maybe you were deeply troubled. My question for you is this: is there anything that we can do better, anything we can agree on for how to move our country forward? ISGUR: The source of a lot of these problems is Congress has dwindled in power and prestige. The American people should be holding Congress accountable for actually doing their job, whether it's passing appropriations, reining in executive power, insisting that their laws be actually passed, holding investigations when they're not. None of that is happening. And if you don't rein in executive power when it's your guy in office, then we're just on this never-ending cycle. TANG: Senator Ryan. I think we need leaders with guts. Like we need leaders with, with courage that are able to not just tell the opposition no, but to tell your own party, sometimes, no. No, you're crossing a line. TESTER: You've got to start talking to one another, and you've got to develop trust. And that's how you do it, and you use the Constitution as the foundation for moving forward. Congress can't be AWOL. GOLDMAN: I think the Senator Tester is correct that we have to be able to... TESTER: Vice President, please. (laughter) RYAN: Way to go, Jon. - So sorry. (laughter) That's why he's a freshman. (laughter) I... I think Mr. Vice President Tester is correct that we do need to be able to sit down and figure out a solution. But before we get there, we need everybody to commit to wanting to find a solution. SHORT: Strongly agree that Congress has abdicated a lot of responsibility. But, you know, next year, we celebrate 250 years of our country. And I think that we don't often appreciate what an amazing system our founders created. But our founders also said it's for a moral and highly educated people. And I think that, right now, we have a system that's electing performance artists in the highest levels of, of government. And until the American people reclaim that responsibility, I think you're going to continue to have challenges. And I think it, it ultimately-- the system is working the way our founders intended, but it's the responsibility of the American people and the voters to elect people of high moral character who honor their oaths. You know, power is so intoxicating, as we know. And so, to place that power in someone who doesn't have the character to exercise it responsibly, as the president of the United States, this is very, very dangerous. One last question. Folks, is there any reason for hope? JENNINGS: I'm hopeful. As long as we can speak and speak to each other, and debate each other, and vote and then do it all again two years later... it will-- it will all work out, because this experiment is working, in my opinion, even through troubled times. STAHL: I'm not hopeful. TANG: You're not hopeful? STAHL: I look at our institutions, all of which have lost the respect and trust of the public. I worry about the future of democracy, obviously. And I don't see the path out. So, I'm kind of down. TANG: Roger Severino. Well, I'm hopeful because the American people, you never want to bet against them. And our system allows course correction. We've gone through a massive course correction, so I'm much more hopeful now than I was just a few months ago. And that really goes to the genius of our system. You knew what you're getting once, you try it out, you see something different, you don't like it, you switch back. What really gives the, the fundamental hope for us being able to go through all these problems, still go home as Americans united because we know our democracy is what holds us together. This democracy is exactly what our founders represented it to be, which is not perfect. And they say it right in the beginning of the Constitution, it was an effort to form a more perfect union. And so, to me, I'm hopeful, because I look at all the other alternatives out there-- I'm not moving. TANG: John Tester. The young people that I've been around are going to do a hell of a lot better job of running this country than my generation. And I firmly believe that. And I think, I tell them all the time, "Make a difference. Run for office. "And then when you get in, follow your gut, because you got a better one than my generation has." TANG: And with that, folks, we bid farewell to Middlevania, until the next time. (applause) - Thank you. - Thank you. - Appreciate it, thank you. - Thank you so much. - Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Roger. Appreciate it. Thank you. ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: For more about "Breaking the Deadlock," visit us at pbs.org/deadlock. ♪ ♪ "Breaking the Deadlock" is available on am*zon Prime Video. ♪ ♪
    
   

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   The Witch Hunts fr…

   
   

   22 May 2026

   This event began 05/22/2025 and repeats every year forever

   
   

   The Witch Hunts from Lucy Worsley 
   https://www.pbs.org/video/the-witch-hunts-xkubjt/
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   https://www.pbs.org/video/imprisonment-agnes-gzj5ww/
   TRANSCRIPT to full show
   [ Bird cawing ] -Scotland, 1591. A woman is about to be executed. Her crime? She is a witch. -Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. -She's been interrogated and tortured, and now she'll be strangled and burnt at the stake. This woman met her death a century before the notorious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. I want to know how her execution sparked terrifying witch hunts across Britain and America, leading to the death of thousands more like her. -The ungodly are not so! ♪♪ In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history. ♪♪ It wasn't just one generation. It was three generations losing their lives, bam, bam, bam. These stories are epic and legendary, and they all have fascinating mysteries at their heart. It's chilling to think that this could actually be evidence in a murder investigation. I want to look at them from a fresh and modern perspective to see if I can unlock their secrets. ♪♪ It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture, isn't it? -Absolutely. -By uncovering forgotten witnesses, reexamining old evidence, and following new clues, can I get closer to the truth? -It is one of the great British mysteries. -It was one of those moments, I'm afraid, for a historian, that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. [ Bird cawing ] ♪♪ [ Thunder rumbling ] ♪♪ -Today when we think about witches, we think about old hags with pointy hats and broomsticks and black cats. But witches have a history that's long, sinister, and very real. 400 years ago, thousands of ordinary women were tortured and executed in witch hunts. I want to know who these women were and why they were killed. ♪♪ This story begins 400 years ago in Scotland, near Edinburgh, in a small seaside town called North Berwick. What happened here would start a craze for witch hunting that would spread across the country and to North America. I'm heading to the scene of the crime, the Old Kirk, or church, of St Andrew. Though it looks a bit like a small hut. ♪♪ Today, this is all that remains of a once-sizable church. And it was here one night in October 1590 that a group of witches supposedly gathered. ♪♪ What a great place for a witches' meeting, right on the edge of the sea with a huge, craggy, devilish looking rock in the background. In 16th century Britain, everyone believed in witchcraft. This was the story told about what supposedly happened here. "On the night of All Hallow --" That means Halloween, the perfect time for some witchy business... ♪♪ [ Women singing indistinctly ] ...there were a great many witches to the number of 200. And it says that they had flagons of wine, they were making merry and drinking, and that they were singing all with one voice. ♪♪ The story goes that the devil was here. [ Distorted singing ] And these witches were concocting dangerous spells. ♪♪ [ Women singing indistinctly ] They took a cat and christened it and afterward bound to each part of that cat the chiefest parts of a dead man. And the said cat was put in the sea. And then there did arise such a tempest in the sea as a greater hath not been seen. [ Thunder crashes ] This storm had been conjured for one purpose -- to kill the king of Scotland. ♪♪ James VI had been returning by ship from Denmark and was lucky to survive. It all sounds absolutely bonkers. [ Laughs ] But it all, uh... It makes a crazy sort of sense. This is exactly the sort of thing that witches are supposed to do, isn't it? They're supposed to play around with corpses and cats. Witches are supposed to be able to control the weather. It's one of their powers. ♪♪ It might sound like a fairy tale, but what happened here set off a devastating chain of events. Dozens were executed for this alleged plot, and it triggered a century of persecution across the British Isles and beyond. Thousands more would be killed for the crime of witchcraft, some of them men, the majority women. ♪♪ [ Bell tolling ] To understand why this story had such impact, I want to see the original text for myself. It's held here at the University of Glasgow archives. It's a pamphlet printed in London called "Newes from Scotland," and it gives a full account of this plot against the king and the trial of those held responsible. Only a very few of these pamphlets survive. ♪♪ This little book is more than 400 years old. It's an account and quite -- in fact, it's quite a sensational, tabloid-y account of the first major witch hunt in Scotland. It was written in 1591, shortly after the events it describes. I-I have picked up many, many old books, and it never gets old. It's a pleasure every single time. You can't open it too wide. Don't want it to snap. Here's a little summary. It's "a true discourse of the apprehension of sundry witches lately taken in Scotland, whereof some --" whew -- "are executed, and some are yet imprisoned." ♪♪ These must be the witches. They're all bustling along in a sort of girl gang. And it's pretty clear that they are witches, because here is the devil. He's in a pulpit. He's making a sermon like a priest would do. But he's the flipped image of a priest. He is, in fact, the devil. And these witches here at the top, they are working magic with their cauldron. They have cooked up a storm that has destroyed His Majesty's ship. You can see it's been wrecked. People are falling into the waves. And these are the witches who disrupted the king's journey back from Denmark. ♪♪ This pamphlet was commissioned by King James himself. It was distributed in England to tell the story of his triumph against the witches' wicked plot. It's clearly designed to be dramatic. Mm, so, this is quite emotive language here. They're not just witches. They are wicked and detestable witches. They had seduced by their sorcery a number of others to be as bad as themselves. So, this is a problem. The number of witches in Scotland is growing. There are more and more of them every day. We should be very afraid. The author tells us that God hath lately overthrown and hindered the intentions and wicked dealings of a great number of ungodly creatures no better than devils. "Newes from Scotland" paints witches as a serious threat to order and stability and the witch hunt as the necessary means by which the godly can prevail. But why was the Scottish king so eager to tell the English about his triumph over evil? ♪♪ Son of the infamous Mary Queen of Scots, he became king at a time of great change in politics and religion. The Reformation was sweeping across Europe, as Protestants rejected the Pope's authority and centuries of Catholicism. Here in Scotland, James was the figurehead for this new Protestant church, but he also had his eye on the English throne. Queen Elizabeth I was getting older. She had no children. James was positioning himself as a strong and godly ruler, as a worthy successor to the crown of England. ♪♪ I wonder if the Scottish King's desire for the English throne played a part in the ramping up of a war against witches. I want to find out more about him. So I'm meeting an expert at Edinburgh's National Portrait Gallery. -James has just turned 24. He's already had two decades of his reign, and a very turbulent reign it has been. Remember, he's still quite a young king, sort of dealing with noble factions and quarrels, and he doesn't have the all-important heir. -So, am I right that in 1590, James has just got married? -Yes, he's just got married to Anna of Denmark. She's just a teenager. She is his new bride. And of course, now James has the hope that they're going to have children, they're going to produce heirs. -But there have been a few problems in getting her from Denmark to Scotland, haven't there? -Anna's meant to be coming to Scotland, but there are these terrible storms, and her ship springs a leak, and the admiral in charge of the fleet says, "No, we have to turn back." And James makes a decision. "I'm going to go to Anna." Originally, he's driven back by storms. He has to go back into one of the five ports and then try again. But eventually, they make it through, but he's had to leave his country. I mean, okay, he has taken a lot of his nobles and gentlemen with him, where he can keep an eye on them, but he has had to leave Scotland. -It's a risk. -Yes. -So these storms, this business of the weather in the North Sea, is psychologically onerous to him. It's more than inconvenient. It's dangerous. He's had to take risks to his personal safety to overcome it. -Yes. And remember, we've only James. There's no heir. If James goes down with the ship. Scotland is plunged into chaos. -Louise, how familiar do you think James was with the idea of witches and witchcraft? -Witchcraft has been around in Scotland from before the Reformation. The important thing is that people believed that witchcraft is real. And it's also about living in a providential world where you believe God is looking over everything. So if the king is godly, then God blesses him. God blesses his rule. God blesses his country and people. Now, if you annoy God by letting sinners like witches go unpunished, well, that's when God might visit your country with famines and plagues and losses in battle. So, you know, to show you're a good, strong king, you must show you're a godly king upholding God's law and especially against the enemies of God, the witches. -I think King James had found a way to show the English he would be a righteous and godly king, by winning a face-off with witches. That pamphlet, "Newes from Scotland," was clearly good spin for James. But who were the real women from North Berwick in rural Scotland who were branded as witches, strangled, and burnt at the stake? ♪♪ I want to find these women, but it won't be easy. They would have been illiterate and left no writing of their own. And many documents from the witch trials have been lost. This book is a history of King James VI. It's contemporary. It was written in his lifetime, and there's a whole section in it about witches. And there should be a reference to the very first woman to be executed in the North Berwick witch hunt. And here, I think -- Yes -- is her name. Agnes Sampson. ♪♪ Agnes Sampson, "grace wyff." That means midwife. ♪♪ Somebody who brings you God's grace when you're giving birth. ♪♪ And it says "alias callit," which means "otherwise called," "the wyse wyff of Keyth." That means a wise woman, a-a folk healer, somebody with slightly mysterious powers. And it looks like she's from Keyth. ♪♪ So how on earth did Agnes Sampson, midwife and folk healer, get caught up in this brutal witch hunt? [ Baby coos ] ♪♪ The answer could lie in the role she played in her community and in the tools of her trade. Hidden away in the storerooms of the National Museum of Scotland is a unique collection of everyday objects with magical powers. ♪♪ -Well, what we have here is a selection of some of our large collection of charms and amulets which are reputed to have superstitious powers. So, these were objects put to protect you, and they are also curative. -So, what sort of a world are we looking into here, then? One where people probably believed in God but also believed in a load of other sorts of supernatural powers? -Yes. We have religious belief, belief in God, that is able to coexist in their mind quite happily with the supernatural, so, a belief in fairies, malevolent elves, evil witches. -What's this neat, little black one that looks like a Christmas pudding tied up with a ribbon? -This is a seed pod... -Oh, is it? -...that's come all the way possibly from the Caribbean. And it's floated on the Gulf Stream. So, local people, ordinary people, would pick them up off the beaches and use these to help them during childbirth. And as a result, they are called Mary's Nut. -Mary's Nut. -Yes, or St. Mary's Nut. So it's really Mother Mary's protection in childbirth. So it's that combination of a religious belief allied to something that is more of a folk belief and a superstitious belief. -And is it the sort of thing that you'd lend to your friend when she was pregnant? -Yeah, I think you could. -And then pass it on? -Yeah. But you'd probably want your own one anyway, 'cause you're probably giving birth quite a lot. -Oh, many times. Yes. A lot of -- A lot of use for the Mary's Nuts. -Yes. Yeah. -This one catches my eye. -Well, this little cross is a wonderful example of something everyday that anyone could have owned. It's made from rowan, and the rowan tree is supposed to be protective against evil spirit. So you might just carry this. You could have it on your person, or you could have it under your pillow. -Mm-hmm. -And you planted rowan trees in your gardens to keep away the evil spirits. -So, how does a folk healer fit into this world of the amulets and the charms? -So, you'll have had these as your everyday item for everyday protection. And you would bring in someone like a healer, a wise woman, when something has gone really badly wrong. She will have had knowledge of herbs and so on like a homeopath today. But they're also presumed to have magical powers. -This sounds like witchcraft. What's the difference between folk healing and witchery? -The witch is living within the community and associated with evil things, evil spirits, nasty things happening -- disease, crops failing. The folk healer is associated with good things. -So, the folk healer is on your side, and the witch is against you. -Yes. Indeed, she's a witch buster, because she's associated with getting rid of those evil spirits. ♪♪ -As a midwife and healer, Agnes would have been important to her community. ♪♪ But she'd have walked a fine line between helping people and being blamed when things went wrong. ♪♪ ♪♪ It makes me wonder what triggered the first accusation against Agnes. The pamphlet "Newes from Scotland" says a servant girl called Geillis Duncane was the first to say that Agnes was a witch. But I can't find any evidence to back that up. What I have uncovered is this document describing a church leaders' meeting. 15th of September, 1589. The minutes at the synod say they've ordered the Presbytery of Haddington -- That's the local church committee in Haddington -- to summon before them Agnes Sampson, suspected of witchcraft. So here it is in black and white. On the 15th of September, 1589, we have the first reference to Agnes Sampson in connection with witchcraft. ♪♪ So Agnes is under suspicion, and church leaders want to question her. And all this happened a year before the North Berwick trial. ♪♪ By this time, the Scottish Church was in the hands of radical Protestant reformers who'd been led by John Knox. Knox had wanted to create a new godly state based on the pure message of the Bible, obedience and discipline, ushering in a new age of religious puritanism in Scotland. [ Bird caws ] ♪♪ This is St Mary's Church in Haddington. North Berwick and Agnes' village both came under its jurisdiction. The Protestant elders of this church were keeping a close watch on suspected witch Agnes. ♪♪ Hello? ♪♪ And this church was also at the forefront of religious change sweeping the country. -Hello. Will you be Stewart? -Hello, I'm Stewart. Yes. -It's really nice to meet you, Stewart. -Nice to meet you. Welcome to St Mary's. -Thank you for having me. -Not at all. -Now, I know -- Every historian knows -- that in the 16th century, the big thing that happens in Scotland is the Reformation, which is led by John Knox. He's -- He's a Haddington boy, isn't he? -Well, John Knox was born about 200 yards from where we're standing on the other side of the river. And he was almost certainly baptized in this church. -Oh, wow. So, this church -- Well, he was baptized here. This is right at the cutting edge of the Reformation, then, this place. And how would you characterize this -- this Scottish Reformation religion that John Knox was keen on? -'Course, it was a much simpler, stricter, and very -- in some ways, very harsh religion. -So, what kind of behavior did the Reformed Scottish Church disapprove of? -What we might describe as frivolous behavior -- singing, dancing, drinking, and of course fornication. You could be called up in front of the congregation if you're misbehaving in some way. -And that's because the devil is just around the corner, and your soul is at risk of eternal damnation if you step out of line. -Yep. -And John Knox didn't approve of women, did he? -Well, he didn't approve of women being in positions of authority. -Mm. So, if the new church did not like to have women in positions of authority, someone like Agnes, who was a wise woman, who had the trust of the community, do you think maybe they felt threatened by that? -That's quite possible, yes. [ Bell tolls ] -I wonder if Agnes was aware that she was being watched by the church as she went about her business as a midwife and a healer. It's starting to look like there's no place in this new Protestant order for women like her. She is a woman in a position of authority. She's got this power of healing. People in the community trust her, need her, look up to her. Do the church authorities feel a bit threatened by that? [ Bell tolls ] Agnes' fate now lay in the hands of these fervent Protestants. And these religious leaders were absorbing new ideas circulating in Europe about the nature of witchcraft and how to deal with it. They were laid out in a book written by two German Catholic theologians in the 15th century. This is a direct translation of a text that's more than 500 years old. It's called "Malleus Maleficarum," "The Hammer of Witches." And it's a sort of a manual of how to spot a witch and what sort of things they're going to get up to. Demonology books like this made it clear the devil was specifically recruiting women to do his evil bidding. "Why is it that more witches are female than men?" I'm quite interested in what they're going to say about that. Well, it's basically because of the wickedness of women, as spoken of in the Bible. "In Ecclesiasticus 25 -- There is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman." [ Woman moaning, echoing ] "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable." And that's why the devil's able to recruit them more easily. They're so desperate to fill their wombs that they will consort even with devils. You know, if there aren't enough men to go around, devils will do. The witches meet together in conclave on a set day. And the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man. And he says to them, "Look, if you have sex with me, ladies, I will give you long life." That is the deal. And this witch is showing her allegiance to the devil by kissing his backside. [ Laughs ] Oh, dear. What has surprised me reading through this book -- And I really wasn't aware of this -- was just how much witchcraft and sex seem to be mixed up together. Fear about sexual matters and the lust of women seems to be absolutely fundamental. ♪♪ So, poor Agnes. She's had the bad luck to be born at a really bad time. It's like the end of days. In the 16th century, everybody gets utterly obsessed with the devil. People now genuinely believe that witches are largely female, that they gather in groups, that they have this kinky sexual pact with the devil, and that their number is growing. More and more witches are being recruited. So what are the authorities going to do to deal with these wicked women? ♪♪ For centuries, accusations of witchcraft had largely been settled within the local community. But if these witches were the devil's agents, the authorities had to do something and crack down. ♪♪ Well, this is the Scottish Witchcraft Act. So, this act was drawn up by Scotland's Protestant reformers. John Knox may even have had a hand in it. It is statute and ordained that no manner of person or persons of whatever estate, degree, or condition is to use any manner of witchcraft. And if you do do that, they'll be under pain of death. It actually says under the pain of "deid," but that means death. You will be killed. It has become a capital offense for the first time. So the Act is really clear that the whole weight of the law is going to come down on anybody doing witchcraft. ♪♪ But there's a -- It seems to me there's a huge problem here. It doesn't actually say what witchcraft is. So witchcraft is open to interpretation, and that means the law is open to interpretation, and that seems to me to be very dangerous. What the Witchcraft Act provided was a legal framework for the prosecution of witches. Now if enough evidence could be gathered, a suspected witch could be tried in the courts and sentenced to death. ♪♪ By autumn 1519, the church elders in Haddington had been investigating and building a case against Agnes for more than a year. I'm told that very few witch trial documents still exist, but remarkably, Agnes' have survived. I can't access the originals in the National Records of Scotland, but the history center in Haddington has a copy. Incredibly, they include detailed transcripts of the evidence against Agnes. It says here, "Here follows the articles of her Dittay, whereof she was convicted, by number, 53." Now, a Dittay -- It's from the French, Dittay meaning "said." These are the things that were said against her, and there were 53 charges. That's quite a lot, isn't it? Okay. Here, she's charged with using of witchcraft in healing of John Thomson in Dirletoune, who remained -- Oh, I see what she's done. She's -- She used witchcraft to heal John Thomson. But he remained crippled -- that's crippled -- notwithstanding thereof. I can see that if you'd booked Agnes to heal you, and then it failed, then he'd want his money back, wouldn't he? You might be so cross that you reported her to the authorities. Let's have a look at this one. Item, for coming to Bessie Aitkenhead and using her prayer and devilish charms for the recovering of her health to her. Well, here's someone who's pleased. Bessie -- Bessie Aitkenhead has been cured. So, when I look at the list of people who've been either cured or not cured by Agnes, it's a bit confusing, 'cause you can't see what the problem is. She's sort of going about her business as a healer. But perhaps the problem is that this old, traditional way of doing things, of healing people, has now become suspicious, because people are increasingly worried about witches. There's a lot of talk here about witchcraft and prayers to the devil. I mean, I cannot know whether all of these people who were Agnes' clients, whether they really said these things, or were these important people who were determined to catch a witch, were they taking the evidence and twisting it and putting on this whole witchy layer? I can't rely on this document for hard facts, but it does offer a tantalizing glimpse of Agnes herself. We're told that she's a widow and has children and that she learned her folk healing skills from her father. So I love the way that, hidden within this formal document written by men who had it in for Agnes, we're actually meeting the real person. And then here, now, this is really extraordinary, because this is just what you don't normally get. You do not normally get the recorded words of somebody living in a tiny village in remote Scotland in the 1590s. That's not somebody that we normally hear from in history. But here we do, because recorded here, are the words to Agnes' prayer to her patients for life or death. "All kinds of ills that ever may be, in Christ's name, I conjure thee. I conjure thee both more..." -I conjure thee both more and less with all the virtues of the mass. And right so the nails sore that nailed Jesus and no more. And right so the same blood that reeked o'er the ruthful rood. Forth of the flesh and forth of the bone and in the earth and in the stone, I conjure thee in God's name. -These are supposed to be her very words. It's like she's speaking to us. ♪♪ It gives a wonderful, tingly feeling. This is -- This is -- This is why we do this, to bring people back from the dead. But one thing is clear. Even if some of Agnes' clients were grateful for her powers of healing, and even if she claimed that her prayer was to God, the authorities were intent on painting her as a witch in league with the devil. And there's something else in here that's really intriguing. ♪♪ People are summoning her from far and wide, and it's not just villagers who are after her services. It's -- It's the toffs. Posh people are after her, too. Perhaps her far-reaching reputation as a healer helps explain why, when the king was looking for a scapegoat for the storms that beset his ship, Agnes Sampson was a ready name on people's lips. ♪♪ In the fall of 1590, just weeks after the alleged witches' gathering at North Berwick, Agnes was arrested and imprisoned in Scotland's capital city, Edinburgh. And in early December, she was brought here to be interrogated. This is the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This was the home of King James VI. This part of the palace here has been altered, but this part is the original palace that Agnes would have seen. She would have set eyes on these two rather sinister-looking turrets. So I really am walking in Agnes' footsteps at this moment. [ Door clanks ] ♪♪ ♪♪ This is the actual chamber in which James VI received visitors. His bedchamber is just through there. And it was here in this room, to the best of our knowledge, that Agnes came face to face with the king. ♪♪ What an extraordinary encounter. A woman from a tiny rural village brought before the king. A Protestant monarch determined to prove he had the power to drive out the devil. So, what on earth happened in this room? "Newes from Scotland" offers this account. Agnes Sampson was brought here to Holyroodhouse before the King's Majesty and sundry other of the nobility of Scotland. But it says here she stood stiffly in the denial of all that was laid to her charge. So she stood up to them. This is a fearsome situation to be questioned by the king himself in his royal palace. But she wasn't giving way an inch. ♪♪ Despite this, at some point, Agnes cracked and confessed. ♪♪ It's chilling to realize that all the detail of what happened in North Berwick, as recounted in "Newes from Scotland," actually comes from the confession Agnes made right here in Holyrood Palace. It was Agnes who said 200 witches gathered together and used a dead man and a christened cat to raise the storm that almost killed the king. This is her story. But why would she say all these things? Reading on, I think I can see why. Agnes Sampson has all her hair shaven off in each part of her body and her head "thrawen" with a rope. But during this time, she would not confess anything until the devil's mark was found upon her privities. ♪♪ Now, to my mind, this is -- this is torture of a really horrible, sexual nature. ♪♪ It's a sort of a sexual assault. ♪♪ And then when this -- when this happened, when they did this to her, she immediately confessed whatsoever was demanded of her. And, goodness me, I'd do exactly the same thing. Poor Agnes. ♪♪ It's hard to be sure whether these descriptions of torture are true. Was this the sort of treatment inflicted on women like Agnes? ♪♪ To find out, I'm traveling to the small Scottish town of Forfar. When a witch hunt happened here in the 1660s, more than 50 women were accused from this small town alone. [ Gasps ] It's Judith. -Hello! -I meet you in the flesh at last. -I know. -One local historian has been doing groundbreaking research into the experiences of these so-called witches. She's uncovered shocking new evidence of their interrogation from unlikely historical documents, the town's financial records. -"Accounts of the town officials" sounds a bit dull. [ Chuckles ] -Yes, it does, if you -- if you don't realize what's going on. And what's going on in Forfar at that time is a witch hunt that's been described as being like no other in Scotland. And when you follow the money, you find some really interesting things. Okay, on the first page, the first section, "ye examiner of Girsell Simpson." She was a suspected witch, but she was arrested, and she was put in a tollbooth. It says an item to Andrew Taylor for closing of the high tollbooth yea time that Girsell Simpson was therein and for taking down of them again. -Oh, so when the suspected witch was in the prison, they closed up the windows. -Yep. -And then when she had been executed, they opened up the windows again. -That's right. -And that would be to keep her in the dark? -Well, it's the devil, and you don't want the devil cursing the people in the street when they walk by. -Wow. Oh, look at this! For the making of two pairs of stocks for the witches. -Oh, yes. So, the stocks are really interesting, 'cause stocks sound like they are quite innocent. You know, we have images of people in the stocks outside. -Being hung up like this, and people throw eggs at them. -That's not what's happening here. In Scotland at the time, stocks were used on the accused witches as a form of torture. -It says here that candles are bought for those who did watch Girsell Simpson, who's the suspected witch. What does that mean to watch her, do you think? -Watching usually comes with waking. So watching and waking was a form of torture in itself. It's sleep deprivation. Later on, we'll see that there -- There are other prisoners in. They're male prisoners, and they're murderers, and they're not being watched. There's no -- There's no candles being paid for for them. -Mm. So the suspected witch is treated worse than the murderers. -Yes. -Wow. -Absolutely. These women, they're a danger because they endanger the whole of society. -Yeah. -They put the idea of the godly society at risk. If you go down to the 13th of September... -Yes. -...John Kincaid and David Cowand come to Forfar. So, John Kincaid is the famous witch-pricker. -The witch pricker. -Yeah. -That's a very resonant phrase. What exactly does that mean? -Well, they pay for two -- "twa preens" for him. -Here it is. This is the purchase of two preens for the pricking of Catherine Porter. -Preens are pins. They're made of iron, and they're usually about 3 inches long. Or some people would say -- -3 inches. -Yeah. -Oh, not tiny, little dressmaking pins. Big things. -Big pins. -And what ex-- Why -- Why do they want to stick these pins into the suspected witches? -They're trying to find the devil's mark. -What's that? -It was usually thought to be a blue mark. It could be a mole. It could be an extra nipple. It could be scars. Anything that they thought was unusual on a woman's body that doesn't respond to pain or doesn't bleed. That was evidence, pure and simple, that you had convened with the devil. So what they would do was they would -- they would shave the woman. They would shave all her hair. And they would -- She would be naked. She's in front of a panel of men, and she's having these pins stuck in all over her body. And they would prick people for hours. There's mention in one of the Privy Council documents of a woman dying from witch pricking. -It's a really -- It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture, this, isn't it? -Absolutely. -What really shocks me, Judith, is that the evidence is here, that they've recorded it for us to see. -Indeed. When I read these treasurers' accounts, and I've read them many times, the hairs never cease to stand up on the back of my neck. And I think, how could they have treated people like this? And then you have to remember what they had in their mind. And in their mind, they were absolutely convinced that they were not people. You know, they -- -They were devils. -Yeah. -Inhuman. -They are the devil. -How long have you been trawling through all of these records, Judith? -About 10 years. -Oh, wow. [ Chuckles ] -At least 10 years. -And what -- what motivates you to do this? -Well, um, one, it's just so incredibly interesting. And, two, there's the real sense of injustice. ♪♪ -Judith's fascinating research shows how the authorities devised a system for rooting out witches. Torture was an acceptable means to elicit a confession. And the so-called devil's mark, which wasn't too hard to find, provided undeniable proof. Under this kind of duress, in December 1590, Agnes made her confession. ♪♪ Remarkably, the National Records of Scotland holds an account of what was said during Agnes' actual interrogation. It also offers clues as to why Agnes' case triggered a terrifying craze for witch hunts that tore across Britain and reached as far as Salem, the fledgling Puritan colony of Massachusetts. Is this word for word, then? Was there someone in the room making notes? How -- How was it put together? -This has been written up afterwards. There was probably a scribe in the room at the time jotting down a few things. But this isn't a transcript of her actual words. This is a summary in the third person, you know. You know, "She confessed that, she denied that," and so on. And we see breaks in the document where perhaps she was tortured. It's hard to tell. We do know in general terms that she was tortured. And we can see this text as a kind of negotiation, because Agnes probably didn't know anything about those storms at the time, but they're asking her about it, so she knows she can't just remain silent. She has to tell a story. Otherwise, she'll get tortured more. -Do you think that the interrogators were asking what we might call leading questions to get a particular answer? -Oh, undoubtedly, yes. You know, "Tell us about when you met the devil," and, "How does one worship the devil?" And so, one of the things that witches do is that they kiss the devil's ass. That is -- -Does it say that in her actual confession? -It actually says. Yes. -"Before they departed, they all kissed his ass." That almost certainly comes from a leading question from somebody who has come across the European learned idea of how witches worship the devil, and Agnes has been made to say it. If people torture you enough, you do get so confused that you lose confidence in your own memory and you start thinking, "The interrogators are right, and perhaps I'm a witch after all." -That's awful. They're breaking her body, but they're also trying to break her mind at the same time. -Yeah, I'm afraid so, yeah. -Really, it seems to me that they're fitting her up. -You certainly could say that. I mean, they're doing it unwittingly. They're terrifyingly sincere, these guys. You know, they think they're getting the truth. They are trying to save themselves and everybody from the terrifying power of the devil. And, you know, it certainly by this time has become a conspiracy. They -- They think it isn't just one witch. You know, it's a group who has done this. And this is what the elite understand that witches will do. They will gather in groups. So they're asking Agnes, you know, "Who else was there?" You know, whether these were names that she gave or names that were fed to her and then she repeated, you can't always tell. You ask for names of accomplices, and you get a sort of snowball effect. And once you've got one witch, you can then go to another and another and another. And, you know, the snowball can go on getting larger until everyone's sick of it. -How any people eventually get pulled into the whole thing? -How many people ultimately is one of the very difficult questions to answer. Almost certainly dozens, probably hundreds, but, you know, many of the records have disappeared. It's very hard to put numbers on it for that reason. -Julian, why is the North Berwick Witch Hunt in particular so important? -There have been earlier trials with individual witches, but they never get into large numbers. They don't manage to interrogate them properly, and it all fizzles out. This is the first big, successful one where we see the witch hunters really working out how to do it. So this provides a sort of blueprint for how to have what you might call a successful witchcraft panic that actually leads to large numbers of executions. And versions of that then get repeated time and again over the next 100 years or so in Scotland. ♪♪ -What's so horrifying is that, clearly, if you torture someone, they'll say anything to make it stop. It's this that made Agnes into a witch and, in a final tragic irony, offer up the names of 59 other people, too, who'd go on to face the same fate. But here's the problem. She's now "officially confessed" to causing storms and to conspiring to kill the king. ♪♪ Six weeks after her confession, Agnes was put on trial in Edinburgh. The building Agnes' trial took place in stood right here. It was in the shadow of the great cathedral. She would have been the only woman in a courtroom full of men. The trial took one day, and the verdict was guilty. ♪♪ The following day, the 28th of January, 1591, Agnes was brought here to Castle Hill. ♪♪ She was to be strangled and burnt at the stake, a sentence reserved only for the most dangerous of heretics. I can't begin to imagine how petrified she must have felt as she was being brought here, knowing what was going to happen. [ Bird caws ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. On his law doth he meditate day and night. -In this moment, religious zeal, fear of the devil, and an ambitious king had collided to create a system of persecution from which there was no escape. And Agnes Sampson paid the ultimate price. ♪♪ [ Bird cawing ] ♪♪ This event, it makes me angry. It seems like a terrible, tragic miscarriage of justice. This is a woman who tried to help people but who ended up being punished for it. [ Bird cawing ] ♪♪ King James got what he wanted and became king of England. Agnes' execution set a blueprint for a century of witch hunts across Britain and America, leading to the trial in 1692 of 200 suspected witches at Salem and the hanging of 19 people. But it was Scotland that would have one of the highest rates of witch killing anywhere. In total, 2,500 people would be executed, the vast majority women. And imagine what it was like for other women in this society, the fear they must have felt that they could be next. The only national monument in Scotland to the thousands killed is this small drinking fountain known as the Witches' Well. But a campaign is now under way for a larger-scale memorial and an official pardon. It's hard to know what to do with these dark chapters from our past. Seems to me there's a double injustice for the women caught up in the witch hunts. They were wrongly convicted, but on top of that, their stories have been forgotten. They've been buried under a pile of stereotypes. Now is the time to restore the voices of women like Agnes Sampson and to make sure they're heard. -"Lucy Worsley Investigates" is available on am*zon Prime Video. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
    
   

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   Madness of King Ge…

   
   

   22 May 2026

   This event began 05/22/2025 and repeats every year forever

   
   

   Madness of King George from Lucy Worsley 
   https://www.pbs.org/video/madness-of-king-george-jpamkt/
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   [ Suspenseful music plays ] -Winter, 1788. The British king, George III, is hallucinating, violent, and abusive. -Out of my sight! ♪♪ -He's losing control -- of himself and the country. At a time of upheaval, Britain can't have a mentally ill king. ♪♪ As a last resort, a medical maverick, who runs an asylum, is summoned. ♪♪ Can he save the king? -[ Shuddering ] ♪♪ In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history. ♪♪ It wasn't just one generation. It was three generations losing their lives, bam, bam, bam. These stories are epic and legendary and they all have fascinating mysteries at their heart. It's chilling to think that this could actually be evidence in a murder investigation. ♪♪ I want to look at them from a fresh and modern perspective to try and unlock their secrets. ♪♪ It's a horrible psychosexual form of torture, this, isn't it? -Absolutely. ♪♪ -By uncovering forgotten witnesses, reexamining old evidence, and following new clues, can I get closer to the truth? -It is one of the great British mysteries. -It was one of those moments, I'm afraid, for a historian, that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. [ Cawing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I'd say I know a fair bit about George III, but, I don't know nearly enough about his mental health and now's the perfect time to take a look at it because new evidence has come to light. Just a few years ago, the royal family granted unprecedented access to his personal papers. This treasure trove of documents is stored at Windsor Castle. A residence of the British royal family for more than 1,000 years. So far, 225,000 documents -- diaries, letters, medical notes -- have been published online. But there are still more secrets to be revealed. ♪♪ I've been here to the Royal Archives before, but this is the first time I hope to get my hands on documents that will take me behind the scenes, into 1788, when the king fell ill. I've asked the royal archivist to bring out a unique private diary. It's an eyewitness account of George III's illness as it escalated. -There we are. -Thank you ever so much. This is great, thanks. This is an amazing thing to get to see. It's the diary of Robert Greville, "Journal of His Majesty's most serious and afflicting illness." He was one of the king's equerries, which means he spent a lot of time with the king. And, on Sunday, the 9th of November, he's writing about, "Great agitation & much incoherence in thought & expressions." It's fascinating that he's actually with the king. This is like a frontline report from the king's bedside. What else are we going to learn? Oh, finally, he goes to sleep, after having "talked for 19 hours without scarce any intermission." ♪♪ Poor man. What's happening on November the 24th? "We found the king violently agitated and very angry, but more particularly with Dr Warren,' one of the medical advisors. "The king advanced up to him and pushed him." ♪♪ So, Greville's getting pretty upset, actually. He says that, "the general conduct of the physicians has not been...decided or firm." They simply don't know what to do. "They appear to shrink from responsibility." Greville says here that, "a report has been sent to Mr Pitt," the prime minister, "stating that [His Majesty] had passed a quiet night, but that he was entirely deranged." ♪♪ George had at least five personal doctors and they were all mystified. In the 1780s in Britain, the medical profession still clung to a centuries-old notion about mental illness. ♪♪ When George fell ill in 1788, his doctors, at first, still believed they needed to get this disease out of his body. They gave him drugs to make him vomit. They used blisters to draw out what they thought was bad blood from his body. And they used these little suckers. Got these off the Internet. I love the way they're actually called... These are leeches! Look at them wiggle. They're just like tiny, little monsters. Ooh! He's sucking the side there. And the idea was that these would be applied to George's temples and that they would suck the madness out of his brain. ♪♪ The king is bled, blistered, and purged. Nothing works. ♪♪ His baffling illness could not have struck at a worse time. ♪♪ In the 1780s, Europe is a tinderbox. Peter III of Russia has been murdered, France is on the brink of revolution, and the American colonies have all but won the war for independence. [ Thud ] ♪♪ George was ill at such a crucial time in history. Then, and since, there's been a keen interest in working out what was wrong with him. ♪♪ And it seems to me that George's illness wasn't just misunderstood in his own lifetime. ♪♪ This essay was published in the British Medical Journal in 1966. It's by a couple of psychiatrists, Macalpine and Hunter. They looked at George's medical records and argued that he had a rare genetic blood disorder called porphyria. This idea really stuck, notably, in the stage play by Alan Bennett. When this was turned into a film, there was actually a caption onscreen suggesting that George had porphyria. But, historians have been divided about this and now, there's a rival diagnosis. ♪♪ I'm going to speak to one of the UK's most eminent psychiatrists, to see if he can shed some light. He's also been examining the papers from the Royal Archives. ♪♪ Can the new evidence settle the question of what was wrong with George, once and for all? ♪♪ Simon, how do you feel about "diagnosing" dead people? There are some concerns here, aren't there? -Oh yeah, very much so. In medicine, in general, and psychiatry, it's a very dangerous thing to do. The only reason that we can do this with George is because the documentation's so extraordinary. -Why do you think that porphyria was so warmly welcomed as a theory in the 1960s? -Macalpine and Hunter were, it now turns out, ardent monarchists, and they wanted, really, to remove the taint and the stigma of mental illness from the royal family. And porphyria did run in the royal houses of Europe, by the way, it just didn't affect George. But they wanted to kind of help the queen out by taking away the taint of mental illness. -What was really the king's condition, do you think? -The best evidence we have from George is the observations of his behavior. We've had, for some time now, what we call diagnostic criteria, in which you can fill in a computer program and that will then tell you what is the most likely diagnosis. -So, you have your computer program and you can put George into it and see what comes out? -You can, indeed. -Employment: king. -Employment: king. [ Laughter ] Residence: Windsor Castle. Grandiosity. Bit difficult, in a king, to diagnose that, actually. -Excessive self-reproach. He was a great one for beating himself up. -Poor sleep -- very, very common. Reduced need for sleep, reduced appetite. -He's having hallucinations. -Yes, there we are, he's having some hallucinations, which is common in very severe mania, the times when he had to be restrained, for example. There was also a lot of violence and things like that. And so, now, they've ticked what the diagnosis is and it comes up as the most probable diagnosis is what we now call bipolar disorder. ♪♪ Not a concept they had. -At the time. -No, not at all. Any doctor reading that now, it would just shout "bipolar" at you, it really would. -I'm convinced. -[ Laughs ] Yes. -But can you tell me what causes it? -I wish I knew. I don't. -Yeah. -Nobody knows. What we do know is there's very compelling evidence that what we call life events, major traumas in your life -- bereavement or being a victim of crime or, you know, divorcing, something like that -- it doesn't cause bipolar disorder, but what it does do, it will then trigger an episode and you'll have a full-blown illness. So, it's sensitive to what's going on in our environment. ♪♪ -If episodes of bipolar disorder can be triggered by traumatic events or extreme stress, what was happening in George's personal life in the run-up to '88? ♪♪ There's something I want to see at the Royal Academy, an art school and gallery founded by George III in London. ♪♪ By 1783, George had 15 children. The older ones, particularly, the Prince of Wales, were causing him all sorts of trouble with their overspending and their womanizing, but he really doted on the two littlest boys. [ Melancholy tune plays ] Tragically, George's toddler, two-year-old Alfred, died suddenly. ♪♪ Then, eight months later, four-year-old Octavius died, too. ♪♪ Infant death was common, so you might think parents were used to dealing with this kind of loss. ♪♪ This is such a poignant image. ♪♪ It's an engraved copy of a painting George had done to commemorate his two lost little boys. This is Prince Alfred, who died first, and he's in heaven already, and he's welcoming in his brother Prince Octavius. Octavius dies, and this angel's here to look after them both. George had the original of this on the wall of his bedchamber, so that, when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he'd see were his lost sons. That, alone, I think, speaks volumes about what this loss meant to him. ♪♪ ♪♪ It seems to me that this could have been a trigger for his breakdown in 1788, but to prove it, I need a window into George's mind. [ Suspenseful music plays ] ♪♪ You might think that's impossible, but I've come to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where Octavius and Alfred once played, to meet a professor who's doing something unique -- he's examining George's hallucinations and delusions. How do you know what the king's delusions were? -Well, we have very few direct records of what the king said, but we do have what the pages, the attendants, who were looking after the king when he was asleep or in the night told the doctors the next morning. From those, you get these often very brief references to things that he is said to have believed or imagined, but which, when you put them all together, is quite a substantial body of material that just lets you see inside the king's mind, really. -And do you think you can see evidence of specific trauma, bad things that happened to him in his life, that you see sort of being processed through these delusions? -Well, there are particular instances relating to his children. He was a very devoted father and, when they were lost, at different stages of his life, they then reappear to him in his delusions, in, really, very moving ways, actually. -What sort of delusions is he having about his lost children? -There's a very particularly moving instant that takes place on Christmas Eve 1788. On this particular night, what the king records is thinking that the pillow of his bed is Octavius, -Oh! -who's come back and... -This is so awfully sad. -...it's all then described here. -It says, "He had the pillow in the bed with him, which he called Prince Octavius, who he said was to be new born this day." The reason this is so upsetting is because you just have the image of him holding the pillow like it was the baby. Oh. -That's the recurring trope, actually, for the king because, when his daughter Amelia dies from TB, after she's dead, he begins to imagine having conversations with her and that she's had holes drilled in her coffin and, in fact, survived burial and has come back to talk to him after that. That's a very strange delusion, which, again, echoes this earlier incident with Octavius. The fact that this comes up in his delusions, not only in this illness, but in his later illness, too, suggests that that's the trigger. -Arthur, do you feel that this research is giving you a really extraordinary insight into the mind of a king? -There's a sense in which one of the things that's happening to him in his illness is he becomes disinhibited and will actually, perhaps, articulate things that he otherwise has been suppressing or repressing in his mind. -And, in a way, it's his illness, it's his so-called madness, that allows us to know him. -Absolutely. We don't get to those bits of his mind otherwise. -Hm. ♪♪ I've been left feeling really sad about what Arthur had to say about George's love for his children and his grief for their loss. It's easy to forget that he wasn't just a king, he was also a human being. ♪♪ Because the children were so young, their deaths weren't marked in the formal way a royal death normally would be, so, George doesn't have these rituals to help him deal with his loss. I think he must have repressed his grief and it burst out during episodes of mania. ♪♪ [ Suspenseful music plays ] It's clear to me there's concrete evidence of personal trauma which could've triggered a bipolar episode... ♪♪ ...but I also want to look at the political pressures on George, too. I know it was a tricky time to be the British king. George was facing problems at home and abroad. ♪♪ "An account of the rise and progress of the late tumults." ♪♪ Dead bodies in the streets of London. This is serious stuff. ♪♪ Newspaper headlines from the 1780s reveal a time of huge turmoil. ♪♪ George decided to grant some new rights to Catholics. It seemed like a generous and liberal thing to do, but it went horribly wrong. There were anti-Catholic riots and sectarian violence on the street. This newspaper article here describes a Roman Catholic chapel being set fire to. What they call the mob are out on the streets. They're waving revolutionary flags, actually. Things are on the brink of enormous trouble. This era was marked by revolution, and it wasn't just Britain on the brink. The French king faced an assassination attempt and the bloody American War of Independence was about to end almost two centuries of British rule. Here's Cornwallis, defeated at Yorktown, doing the walk of shame. They're taking down the British flag and they're putting up the American flag in its place. So, George would've hoped to have added to his empire, but, instead, he must've felt that he had, effectively, lost America. ♪♪ These crises coincided with the start of the mass news era. George had nowhere to hide. He was exposed. ♪♪ And I've found an extraordinary letter which suggests George was afraid he was failing as a king. Now, this is just the most fascinating document from the Royal Archives of 1782. It's a letter that George III has drafted, saying that he's going to hand in his resignation. "I am therefore resolved to resign My Crown." Extraordinary. No king had abdicated for a thousand years. And just think of the huge stink that there was when Edward VIII abdicated in the 20th century, at a point when the monarchy was much less politically significant than it was here in the 18th century. George has clearly agonized over his decision. There's all sorts of crossings out and underlinings in his letter. And there's a real sense of alienation here, and disillusionment. Now, he never actually sent his letter of resignation to parliament, but it shows the mind of a king in turmoil. ♪♪ George is under extreme pressure to make monarchy work in this new era. He must evolve or perish. ♪♪ George styled himself as a new, slightly more accessible, kind of a king. His line was that he was going to listen to people's grievances and respond to them. Now, ordinary working people didn't have the vote, but they could make political points through giving the king petitions. They were able to take their problems straight to the top. ♪♪ Crowds gathered at the gates of the royal palace of St James, waving their petitions, begging the king for help. And, in August 1786, something happened that I think must've increased the pressure on his already vulnerable mind. As it says in the newspaper, "His Majesty was stepping out of his post-chariot at the garden entrance to St James's,' just over there, "when the attack was made upon his life. The woman by whom the desperate attempt was made, had been observed waiting the King's arrival for some time." ♪♪ -The woman advanced from the crowd and presented a paper folded in the form of a petition. The woman aimed a blow with a knife... -...at his majesty's breast with a knife concealed in a piece of paper. The knife cut the king's waistcoat. Accounts -- The knife was instantly wrested from the woman. -And he hastened into the palace. -The woman was immediately taken into custody and, on examination, appears to be insane. ♪♪ I'm fascinated by this assassination attempt, when a mentally ill woman and a soon-to-be mentally ill king came face-to-face. Who was she, and how did George react? ♪♪ -This is a woman called Margaret Nicholson. She's a 36-year-old spinster and needlewoman and she felt that something needed to be done to improve her life. So, she petitions the king, so -- -So, she's writing him letters, saying, "Dear King, I want you to do this for me." -Well, yeah, well, you know, if only it was that clear. She wrote a -- [ Laughs ] -What sort of things? -So, here's one of Margaret's petitions. She thought she was due a property settlement of some sort. She thought she was due a decent marriage, possibly to the king himself, if only he'd rid himself of his ghastly foreign wife. -Do you think that she was suffering from some sort of mental health issue? -Well, that's an interesting question. She petitions the king something like twenty times, just between April and August of 1786, by her own testimony. On the 2nd of August 1786, she's clearly had enough, so she turns up one more time. The king gets down out of his carriage. She's ushered towards the king. I expect they've all seen her before, they know who she is, and she's got her little piece of paper again, but the piece of paper, this time, conceals a dagger. -Yeah. -And then, immediately -- this is the interesting thing, I think -- he immediately says, "The poor woman is mad. Do not hurt her." And we know he said that straightaway because, just about two hours later, one of the young pages who'd been attending the king testifies these were the words the king used. -Do you think that, when he gave this compassionate reaction towards Margaret Nicholson, "Don't hurt her," do you think that he saw a fellow sufferer? -He immediately identifies what's wrong with her, so, whether or not, yeah, it's a little bit close to home for him or he recognizes a fellow sufferer, the incident provoked a huge public conversation, in the newspaper press and elsewhere, about whether or not Margaret Nicholson was mad. Because, if she's going to be put before a law court, it's going to have to be on a charge of high treason. ♪♪ -George's words, "Do not hurt her," became iconic. They were in newspapers, in prints. It was wonderful PR for the king. His compassion towards Margaret brought mental illness into the open. But what happened to her? Was she treated kindly, as he'd asked? ♪♪ There's no evidence of a public trial, but there is a folder in The National Archives with her name on it. Margaret's case went right to the top. It was the Privy Council, the king's advisors, who decided her fate. ♪♪ Oh, yes! ♪♪ Look at all of this! So, it's clear that they've done a pretty thorough job. They've examined Margaret herself. She has -- Oh! She said here that she never meant to kill the king, but just wanted to get his attention. And they've also talked to her brother. He says that she came to London twenty years ago and that she'd worked as a housemaid, but she'd been sacked from that job and she had been ill. He says that she's been "breaking out into fits of laughter in the night." And the brother also says this. It's extraordinary. He says that, "reading Milton's Paradise Lost and such high style Books... had contributed to turn her Brain." That's such an 18th-century thing, isn't it, to imagine that reading fancy books can make a woman mad? So, what are the Privy Council going to do? What she'd done, an assassination attempt, was treason. She could've faced the death penalty. But they didn't go down that route. So, instead, they turned to the Vagrancy Act and they used that to have her shut up in Bethlem, better known as Bedlam. This is Georgian England's most notorious madhouse. They get her assessed by one of the doctors from Bedlam. This is Dr. John Monro and he says that never in his life had he seen a person more disordered. But that's really quite a strong statement, isn't it, from the man who runs England's most notorious madhouse, that he'd never seen a madder person than Margaret? Makes you wonder if he's overstating the case, so that they can all, with good conscience, lock her up. ♪♪ [ Clang, keys jingling ] And she's not the only one. ♪♪ In November 1788, George succumbs to all the political and personal pressure and becomes seriously ill. ♪♪ After weeks of failed treatment, his doctors take an unprecedented step and secure him. Not in Bedlam, of course, but in Kew Palace, just outside London. ♪♪ The king's eldest son senses an opportunity. He tells everyone his father is unfit to rule and positions himself to seize power. ♪♪ Daily bulletins are tied to the gates of Kew Palace, but they are heavily censored and don't explicitly mention madness. Speculation runs rife. ♪♪ So, here we have two infamous so-called mad people, a seamstress and a king, tied together by this assassination attempt. I'm so intrigued! And it was the same with the public back then -- they couldn't get enough of the story. ♪♪ -These are just a small snapshot of the many, many different images that were being produced. A lot of the facts were few and far between and a lot of embellishment was going on. So, here we have Margaret in Bethlem. -Oh, my goodness! Is that her there? -That's supposed to be her -Oh wow. -and this image is kind of extraordinary. It shows this violent, strange, terrifying figure. She's clutching straw. Straw was used as bedding in asylums. -Ah! -She's kind of involved with these two figures, two of the leading revolutionaries of the day. -So, here we've got rational masculinity -Mm! -and here she is looking -- well, this is the archetype of the madwoman, having crazy hair. -Exactly, kind of Medusa-style. -Yeah. Clearly, people are making money out of Margaret Nicholson. Was there a real market for this? -Absolutely. Waxworks were being made. People would pay to see waxworks and her lodgings were described as being besieged. -When the king himself became ill, how was he treated by this sort of media of the 18th century? -I think one of the really striking and surprising things is that there was very little cultural treatment of the king. So, one of the very few images we have of the king when he went mad is this one, Filial Piety, and it shows the king looking, perhaps, ill, but none of the kind of typical iconography about madness is being applied to him. On the left-hand side, we have the Prince of Wales, who's sort of obviously drunk. We've got the kind of political backdrop of the regency crisis in 1788. -I suppose here, what's really going on is that they're using the situation to make the Prince of Wales look bad. -Exactly. The madness of the king is being downplayed. I think it's a bit of a no-go area. ♪♪ -The press show some respect when reporting the king's illness. But for Margaret, not only poor, but also a woman, they show no such restraint. [ Creaking ] She even became a spectacle. The upper classes could go and ogle her in her cell at Bethlem. It all smacks of double standards. I think, if I really want to get a full picture of mental illness at this time, I need to investigate Margaret's experience, too. ♪♪ ♪♪ These two statues are the very last surviving bits of the Bethlem Hospital, where Margaret was incarcerated. It was demolished in 1815. They represent the different types of madness that people believed existed in the 18th century. This one is melancholy madness. He's calm and still. And this one is a raving madness. He's trying to burst out of his chains. ♪♪ These two were over the entrance when Margaret arrived. Not exactly a warm welcome. ♪♪ In the 1780s, doctors still thought they could treat people with mental illness by purging it from the body. I'm hoping that Bethlem's archivist can help me uncover the details of Margaret's treatment. [ Rattling ] -We actually have her admission record here, which would've been created when she first came in to the hospital. We can see Margaret's name. -Margaret Nicholson, there she is. Do you know how they would've diagnosed her, what sort of an illness they thought she had? -The hospital would've been split into male and female wings and it would've been split into melancholics and ravers. -And where do you think she fitted into that? -I mean, I think, generally, she's described as quite a quiet... -She's quiet. -...withdrawn patient, I think, a lot of the time, so I'd be surprised if she was moved apart from the melancholy patients. -These categories are not super subtle, are they? [ Laughs ] -No, they really aren't. -What were the conditions like in the hospital? -They were probably not very good. So, people were bled, people were given medication that would make them vomit or purge themselves in other ways. -Mm. -It was known -- round about this sort of time there's a new strain of thought that's saying this isn't working, but Bethlem is still persisting in this. -So, is there some information about what happened next to Margaret? Does she appear again? -Yes, so we will see her again in the incurable admission register. So, the incurable ward would've been the long-stay section of Bethlem. -You say that, but the name, it's a very depressing thought, isn't it? -It is, yes. You know, these are people who were -A long stay. -probably lifers... -Mm. -...by this point. Note says a motion was made "that Margaret Nicholson be no longer confined in her cell by a chain." -Oh! So, what year is this? -This is 1791, so this is four years. -So, she's been in chains for four years? -She is regularly clapped in irons, yes. -Goodness me. I'm thinking what this means. Does this mean that the hospital committee have decided that she's so peaceful and not hurting herself that they don't need to bother doing that? -Yes, yes, but what is also interesting in this is the implication that she is well enough to be unchained, but she's still in the incurable wing. -And that might be because she's this special patient. What she did received national attention, therefore, the bar for her recovery is higher than it is for anybody else. -It also, perhaps, implies that the hospital has been told not to release her -Not to release her. -in any circumstance. -Oof. -Mm. She has been, if you like, disposed of by the state. ♪♪ ♪♪ -It's pretty clear that, at Bethlem, they were still committed to doing things the old way -- patients in cells, chains. And it's rather devastating to think of Margaret being written off, almost, with that word -- incurable. ♪♪ In 18th century Britain, madhouses, or asylums, were a law unto themselves. Bethlem hadn't updated its treatment plan in 100 years. But there was a new school of thought that mental illness was an illness of the brain, that needed to be treated in its own way. ♪♪ Some of these new ideas were to be found in this book. It's the first proper book about madness as a mental illness. It's called "A Treatise on Madness," by Dr. William Battie. This was really radical stuff and he suggested that it was wrong to chain up mentally ill people. Nor was he in favor of shock treatments, things like making people vomit. Instead, he proposed quiet, and fresh air and exercise, which sounds extraordinarily modern, doesn't it? That's what people are still recommended to do to this day. Battie's book was published in 1758, so that's 30 years before the king got ill, but it was George's illness, and Margaret's, too, that raised the profile of his work. It went mainstream and people started to implement it. ♪♪ So, while Margaret was written off as incurable, did these new ideas reach George? ♪♪ In winter 1788, George is delusional, aggressive, sleepless, and time is running out. ♪♪ A regency bill has been prepared. If the king is not better in three months, his son will take over. ♪♪ In December 1788, the royal family make a bold decision. They summon a man called Francis Willis, who runs a madhouse in rural Lincolnshire, to come here to Kew. ♪♪ Private madhouses begin to spring up from the 1750s onwards, as new treatments are pioneered. Willis is one of a band of so-called mad doctors, or, to you and me, early psychiatrists. Let me introduce you to Dr. Francis Willis. I'm calling him Dr. Willis, but, I do know that his contemporaries might not have agreed with me in doing that because they didn't yet have the idea of a doctor of the mind. Members of the Royal College of Physicians, for example, would've said, "No, he's just the keeper of a madhouse. We don't count him as one of us." So, I think it's quite an exciting decision that the royal family have called him in. It's...a sign of how desperate they were, I think. He's a maverick. ♪♪ This is a make-or-break moment, for him and for his nascent profession. There's no higher-profile patient than this. What on Earth is he going to do? ♪♪ George was treated by Willis here at Kew. The king's tin bath still survives. ♪♪ This source is key to what happened to him. It's a diary by Francis Willis and his son and they start off explaining what the previous doctors had given the king. The answer is really powerful sedatives. Here, he's been prescribed 30 drops of laudanum. Now, that is opium dissolved in alcohol. It's not a sustainable strategy. It's not going to make him better. It might even get him addicted. It's kind of like prescribing the king heroin. ♪♪ Willis decides to put a stop to this and he radically reduces the dosage. ♪♪ He also makes a bold decision -- to treat George just as he would any other patient in his asylum and bend the king to his will. ♪♪ Oh, wow! -I've got a straitjacket for you. -My goodness! What?! [ Laughs ] -It keeps on giving. -What is with these arms? They're so long. How does it work? -Here's the back. -It buttons up the back, so you put your arms in like that and it's done up. Why are the sleeves so immensely long? -So, you put your arms in there and then you hug yourself and then you get tied round the back. -Oh. So, it forces you to go like this, to give yourself a hug? -Yes. Once you've no longer got the use of your hands, your flight-and-fight mode is turned off, so that it could then support you to calm yourself down. -I was expecting something barbaric, something that was to do with restraint. -Compared to the manacles, which was what people were using before, this was really soft -Oh! -and kind. -This is a big step forward. -Certainly, when I first looked at this, I had the same feelings as yourself. It's like really scary, the idea of being, you know, tied up, really, but this is a treatment and most illnesses, you know, most treatments are scary. -Let me show you some of the ways in which Dr. Willis used the straitjacket. Well, he doesn't actually call it a straitjacket. "The strait waistcoat was taken off from his majesty at morning yesterday, but was put on again soon after two o'clock & was not taken off till nine this morning." Goodness me, so he was kept in his strait waistcoat for the whole of this particular night. -Nowadays, we use drugs, and that's a chemical restraint. -Yeah. -Sometimes that's not appropriate, either, because it's just treating the symptom. It's not allowing your brain to rebalance and sort itself out. -That's really interesting, that you're using the word rebalance the brain. That's the language that Francis Willis used in the 18th century. Now, even if Francis Willis had the best intentions in the world, I do feel sorry for the poor king because it says here, "They beat me like a madman." ♪♪ -The king doesn't escape the brutal remedies of purges and ice-cold baths, but there were also new ideas at play. Willis is clearly picking up on the progressive approach of William Battie. While Margaret, in Bethlem, is chained and left to rot, Willis is encouraging George, at Kew, to take the air. [ Birds chirping ] And even though George does try to scale the giant pagoda, a 50-meter structure, Willis is confident his strategy is having some success. ♪♪ If you leave it untreated, an episode of mania can last between days or months and, to this day, doctors don't really know why they come to an end. But, on the 26th of February 1789, a bulletin appeared on the gate of Kew Palace. Three months after he'd arrived, Dr. Willis has able to announce the entire cessation of his majesty's illness. ♪♪ Assuming he had bipolar disorder, it could simply be that this episode had run its course. But it appears that Dr. Willis has cured the king. And not a moment too soon. The government bill that would hand power to his son is only days away. After months of political uncertainty, George is, once again, ready to be king. ♪♪ [ Chorale plays ] ♪♪ On St George's Day, there was a huge celebration of the king's recovery, here at St Paul's Cathedral in Central London. Now, the Archbishop of Canterbury recommended that George himself shouldn't attend. He thought the excitement might bring on a relapse. But George had other ideas. He said, "No, I'm going." "My Lord," he said to the Archbishop of Canterbury, "I have twice read over the evidence of the physicians on my case and, if I can stand that, I can stand anything." [ Suspenseful music plays ] Thousands lined the route to St Paul's and medals were struck to commemorate the occasion. And here is one of them. They're not actually that hard to find because so many of them were made. This one came off eBay. And on one side we've got George's little face. There he is, looking alive and well. And, on the back, the exciting story of what's happened. It says, "Lost to Britannia's hope but to her prayers restor'd." ♪♪ George's illness appears not to have destabilized the nation, after all. If anything, it humanized him in the eyes of his people. The irony is that King George III was virtually the only monarch left standing in Europe by the end of the 18th century. ♪♪ But the story doesn't end there. There's another medal. ♪♪ Dr. Willis had his own medals struck. He paid for these himself. They're a different grade. This is the cheaper, copper, version and this is the deluxe, shiny, tin model. You've got a picture of Dr. Willis on the front and, on the back, it says, "Britons rejoice your king's restored." The message is, "I'm Dr Willis. I restored him." It's the most fantastic bit of self-promotion, a bit like an advert, really, for this man you might almost call a psychiatrist. And I think the significance is that this profession of psychiatry is coming out of the shadows. It's getting respectable. This is its moment of triumph, if you like, captured in tin. ♪♪ George may be restored to health, but Margaret gets no medal and no redemption. ♪♪ It would be 25 years before the British government began to tackle the horrific conditions inside public asylums. ♪♪ During that time, the king had further episodes of illness, both in 1801 and 1804. ♪♪ He convalesced for a time in the home of a friend, an MP, called George Rose. ♪♪ Witnessing the king's illness gave Rose real insight and, in 1815, he led a government investigation at the Bethlem asylum. ♪♪ These are the minutes of this parliamentary committee that's looking into "the Better Regulation of Madhouses in England." They're calling all sorts of witnesses to give evidence and a very dark picture's being painted of existing conditions. This part's really distressing. We've got a witness who's seen unfortunate women locked up in their cells, naked and chained on straw, with just one blanket for a covering. Now, George Rose clearly suspects that there have been male keepers looking after female patients, which is inappropriate. Power could've been abused here. And he's really going after Dr. Monro, who's in charge of the Bethlem Hospital. Dr. Monro says, "In Bethlem, the restraint is by chains. There is no such thing as chains in my private mental hospital." And he's asked about this. "Why? Why the difference in standard?" And Dr. Monro says, "Well, it's because chains are fit only for pauper lunatics." Isn't that shocking? He says, "If a gentleman was put in irons, he would not like it." Too right! I don't think Dr. Monro realized how much he was going to damn himself by this statement. It caused a scandal! People were offended by this idea of a double standard for rich and for poor. The fallout of this was so bad that Dr. Monro had to resign. ♪♪ This committee exposed the sexual abuse and excessive restraint that had been rife for decades. It was a watershed moment. A process of reform had begun. ♪♪ Fearing further censure, Bethlem started keeping individual patient notes. ♪♪ Now, these books are from after 1815, when they had to keep fuller records, so I'm really hoping these might shed some more light on Margaret. ♪♪ Because of the king's illness and the reform that followed, I can now, at least, find her in the records. ♪♪ Oh, look at this! It's progress reports in 1816, 1817, 1819. By this time, she's been in the hospital for nearly 30 years. It says here, "She is now in an advanced stage of her life and is perfectly deaf... She's decent in her appearance and quiet and civil in her demeanor." It sounds to me like she's better. And then the records stop. It's really fantastic to get a glimpse of a real person here. And she doesn't seem like either a criminal or a patient anymore. She's just a quiet old lady. Do you know what? I've got a little tear in my eye. ♪♪ Reform really came too late for Margaret Nicholson. She was incarcerated in Bethlem for 42 years and died on the 14th of May 1828. ♪♪ George III was suffering from chronic mania and dementia when he died, on the 29th of January 1820. ♪♪ This encounter between George and Margaret happened at -- in fact, it fed into -- this key moment of change for the science of psychiatry and for the reform of psychiatric asylums. There's still so much more to learn about the complexities of mental illness, but this was the starting point. -"Lucy Worsley Investigates" is available on am*zon Prime Video. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
    
   

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   Bloody Mary from L…

   
   

   22 May 2026

   This event began 05/22/2025 and repeats every year forever

   
   

   Bloody Mary from Lucy Worsley 
   https://www.pbs.org/video/bloody-mary-eldwhl/
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   https://www.pbs.org/video/bloody-mary-her-earliest-portrait-ngd8gk/
   TRANSCRIPT
   ♪ Lucy Worsley, voice-over: London, the 1st of October, 1553. The next monarch of England is preparing to be crowned. For the first time, the country will be ruled by a woman-- Mary I... [Thunder] ♪ but this monarch will be remembered not as a pioneer, but as a monster. ♪ In her 5-year reign, hundreds are killed in the name of religion, earning her the label Bloody Mary, but does England's first queen really deserve her reputation as one of Britain's most evil tyrants? ♪ In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history. Oh, yes. Here we go, Man: And now you're face to face with William the Conqueror. Woman, voice-over: They know that sex sells and that violence sells. Worsley, voice-over: These stories form part of our national mythology. They harbor mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries... Worsley: It turns very dark here. Clearly showing us-- Refugees. There's such graphic images of religious violence. Worsley, voice-over: but with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock their secrets using scientific advances and a modern perspective. He was what we would now call a foreign fighter. Worsley, voice-over: I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses. I'm going to reexamine old evidence and follow new clues... The human hand. Worsley, voice-over: to get closer to the truth. It's like fake news. Worsley: You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Hampton Court Palace-- family home of England's original Tudor queen, daughter of Henry VIII-- Mary I. She walked these cloisters and lived in these rooms. There are echoes of Mary's presence here, but the real Mary seems lost in history. Worsley: Mary was England's first crowned female monarch, and this meant she had to create a whole new role-- the role of queen regnant, or ruling queen-- and Mary created a blueprint that all the queens to come would follow, from Elizabeth I to Victoria to Elizabeth II. I think of Mary as a female trailblazer, but she's all too often remembered as a bloody tyrant. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: During Mary's 5 years in power, more than 280 people were killed for their faith. Her reputation seems sealed, but Mary lived in a divided time, and, as a historian, I know there's always more than one side to a story, so I want to look at Mary afresh through different eyes-- her supporters', her enemies', and Mary's own-- to examine how she navigated ruling as a woman and if Bloody Mary is really how she deserves to be remembered. ♪ I'm starting my investigation with a very rare glimpse of Mary as a child. Worsley: "Special Collections." Worsley, voice-over: In the stores at the National Portrait Gallery, I'm hoping to be able to come face to face with the young princess. Here are some exciting-looking little boxes. Worsley: voice-over: I'm here to see what's thought to be the earliest portrait miniature produced in England. The art form's intended to give a sense of intimacy. It's an image of Mary dating to 1522. There she is. There she is. Can I touch? Yeah. Ah. Ah, thank you. You're very welcome. Yeah. It's Mary. Yeah. Incredible level of details. She's got really red hair, hasn't she... Yeah. She does. like you'd expect from Henry VIII's daughter. It's such a precious-feeling little thing, and it's 500 years old. Yes. Worsley, voice-over: I'm interested in what this painting reveals about Mary's status. The gallery's state-of-the-art microscope might give me an even closer look. Worsley: It's just fantastic. You can see the individual flakes of the paint. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: When this portrait was made, Mary was a much-loved 6-year-old. ♪ Worsley: This was painted for a special reason, and the clue to what that was-- there it is--it's down here. You can see that on her dress, she's wearing a brooch, a golden brooch, and it says on it in tiny letters, "The Emperor," so this is one of the European rulers. It's the Emperor Charles V, and the picture's been painted because Mary's just been engaged to him. This is the fate of a princess. She's like a little chess piece that her father is using to play the game of European politics. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: The Mary I'm seeing here had her whole future mapped out, but then in her teens, everything changed. ♪ Here we have Henry VIII... and he's married to Catherine of Aragon from Spain, a very devout Catholic. Poor Catherine had a whole series of miscarriages, stillbirths, children who died young. Their daughter Mary was the only one of their children to survive. Worsley, voice-over: But Henry was desperate for a male heir. He and Catherine had not had the all-important son, so he wanted a divorce to marry Anne Boleyn. In 1533, he got his way by splitting from Rome and the Catholic Church, opening the door to the English Protestant Reformation and dividing the country. ♪ Mary was now declared illegitimate. At 17, she was stripped of her royal title and threatened with death as a traitor for her beliefs. ♪ She would come to define her life by her Catholic faith and her right to the throne. ♪ This sounds like a woman with immense self-confidence, and I'm curious about her journey from outcast to queen. I'm heading to Framlingham in Suffolk, where Mary would make some crucial decisions 6 years after her father's death. ♪ Mary had been Henry's eldest child. Then came Elizabeth, followed by Henry's longed-for son Edward. On Henry's death, 9-year-old Edward inherited the throne, but he would die as a young teenager. Aged 37, Mary could now claim her right to the crown. ♪ Now, there'd never been a ruling queen in England before. There had been queens, but they'd been the wives of kings. Unlike some of the countries of Europe, though, there was nothing in English law to stop there being a female ruler. Technically, at least, Mary could go right ahead and take the throne. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: But King Edward had been influenced by powerful Protestant nobles. On his deathbed, he bypassed Catholic Mary and declared a distant cousin, the Protestant Lady Jane Gray, as his successor. To win her crown, Mary would need to fight, and on the 12th of July, 1553, she came here to her castle at Framlingham to rally support for her cause. ♪ Worsley: The stakes couldn't have been higher for Mary at this moment. If her attempt to seize the throne failed, she'd either have to go into exile or if, they caught her, she'd be executed as a traitor. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: I'm meeting a specialist in Tudor relationships who believes that applying modern analysis to old evidence might reveal Mary's tactics. Melita, we're sitting on the spot of what was once the Great Hall of Framlingham Castle. There's bits of Tudor walls up there. I think we can imagine Mary spending some anxious hours in here thinking, "Who's on my side?" Can you tell me a bit more about your research into Mary's network? Yes. I've been doing what's called social network analysis, so I've put together--and I'm still working on it-- it's a massive database of all of the connections that Mary had to different people. My goodness, it looks like a Spirograph. Yes. Is that Mary right in the middle? It is Mary, right in the center. So, Melita, are we looking at the Tudor version of LinkedIn? That's it, absolutely. Yes. Now, the different colors of connection represent different things. OK. Green represents an award, so it's a grant of office. We've got also purple lines, and that's gifts in a more tangible sense, so jewelry or quite often clothing or fruit. We've got quite a lot of records from her Privy Purse expenses from in the 1530s and '40s. She's given an awful lot of gifts, hasn't she? Mary was very generous. And is this how you build up a following if you want to be a powerful Tudor person? Exactly, yes, because the trick is, you always wanted them to be slightly grateful to you. Oh, there's a Framlingham filter in the program. Yes, and we can see who supported Mary immediately. Now, two in there you can see with little red spots, they were actually members of Edward's Privy Council, and yet they were immediate supporters of Mary. And if you click on Richard Southwell, we can see-- That over a period of years, he and Mary have exchanged gifts... Yes. Oh. and she's given him more than he's given her. Oh, yes, so she has kind of... Cultivated. cultivated him. Oh, you've got a filter that's actually called Defected to Mary, brilliant. Look at it doing its thing. It's amazing. So one of the people who defected to her was Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. His first wife had been one of her ladies in waiting, and of the men who support her in 1553, you can often see that there are relationships through their wives and their sisters. So it's interesting that she's built up friendships with the females of this family and they bring over their male relatives. Yes. I think we can definitely see a connection between family pressure through women's networks. Was it presumably Catholics who were the fastest in coming forwards? Catholics were definitely amongst her core supporters, but she also had Protestants because she was the legitimate heir. The Mary you're talking about sounds like she's friendly. She's generous. She's well-connected. She's somebody who knows how to build loyalty. I think she had the gift of friendship, and Mary's a lot more fun than people give her credit for. Really? She loved to dance. She loved to hunt. She did archery. She knew in her heart that she was a queen, and I think that was another element, her self-belief and her determination. She said, "I'm queen, and I'm gonna be queen, and I'm gonna absolutely insist on my rights." She was a politician to the tips of her royal fingers. Absolutely. Worsley, voice-over: It strikes me that Mary had no hope of seizing the throne without her quite considerable emotional intelligence. She needed to win hearts and minds to her side. There's no sign of the cold-hearted tyrant here. Worsley: This was a woman who was sociable. She was generous. This was a leader who people wanted to follow, and follow Mary they did. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: In July 1553, Mary gathered hundreds of her supporters here, ready and willing to fight for the throne. ♪ In the end, no battle was needed. ♪ The tide of support had turned in Mary's favor, so the Protestant nobles conceded defeat. Mary had thrown off years of bitter persecution and rallied a country behind her to win the throne, but she would now have to deal with the rituals of royalty, which were, until this moment, made for men. [Bells ringing] ♪ Nearly 500 years ago, on the 1st of October, 1553, Mary walked down this very aisle in Westminster Abbey to be crowned. Mary was at the front of this whole long procession of her knights and her counselors and her dukes. She did have some ladies with her, but the focus was all on Mary herself. For the first time at a coronation, a woman was leading the men. [Men singing Gregorian chants] Worsley, voice-over: But a coronation designed for kings presented some problems for the first queen. Her coronation regalia included the spurs of a knight, but, unlike kings before her, Mary didn't put them on. She did receive the sword, a symbol that she was now defender of the realm. ♪ Worsley: It seems to me that Mary had a very difficult line to tread here. She almost had to blur the genders. She had to portray herself as a king for legitimacy and authority, but she also had to tear up the rule book and make the ritual suitable for a woman, and what she did would set the pattern for all the female monarchs who followed. [Choir singing] Worsley: This area up here is off limits because that mosaic is over 750 years old. It's much too fragile to be walked on, but that's the exact spot where Mary was crowned, and it's still the exact spot where monarchs are crowned to this day. At the actual moment of crowning, Mary was on the Coronation Chair-- it was placed on a platform-- and the Crown Imperial was put onto her head. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: The coronation service was a full Catholic Mass. Mary couldn't officially restore the Catholic faith until Parliament reconvened... ♪ so she was crowned Supreme Head of the Protestant Church of England. [Cheering and applause] Worsley, voice-over: The country celebrated, and there were parties in the streets of London, but within just 5 years, hundreds of ordinary people would be killed in Mary's name. ♪ The new Queen's Catholic beliefs would make her rule hugely polarizing. ♪ Naturally, as a historian, I want to interrogate this period from different angles, so I wonder what I can learn from the experience of someone living on the other side of the religious divide. This is a copy of a page from "Foxe's Book of Martyrs." Worsley, voice-over: It's an account of Mary's reign by a strongly Protestant critic. It's very one-sided-- I've got to be wary of that-- but it does give the story of a Protestant woman who found Mary's rule horrifyingly harsh. Worsley: She's referred to here as "Drivers wyfe," meaning the wife of a man called Driver. She's presented very much as his property. She was "about the age of 30 yeares," and she "dwelt at Grosborough...in Suffolke." It says that, "[h]er husband did use husbandry," which means a subsistence farmer. Then we get quite a lot more detail about what happens to her, and then here, her name was Alice. Alice Dryver. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: This young farmer's wife lived just 10 miles from Framlingham Castle, the site of Mary's triumph, but under the new regime, her faith put her at risk of execution. ♪ To get a sense of why a woman like Alice might become a threat to the Queen of England, I've come to Grundisburgh in Suffolk, where Alice lived. ♪ Here's a piece of 16th-century evidence that I think might give an insight into Alice's life here. This is Fitzherbert's "Booke of Husbandry" from 1523, and here's a section called "The Duties of Wyves." Presumably, this is the sort of thing that Alice was expected to do. "It is a wyves occupacyon to winow all manner of corne..." ♪ "in tyme of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke wayne," the muck wain being the "dounge carte"... [Rooster crows] ♪ and she also has to "dryve the plough," which sounds quite masculine, actually-- a bit surprised about that-- and she also has "to go...to the markette to sell the butter, "the chese, the mylke, the egges, the chekens, the hennes, the pygges." That sounds like a pretty hard life with a lot of hard labor in it, long hours, I guess. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: At the heart of village life when Alice lived here was the church, and Alice would likely have worshiped in this very building nearly 500 years ago. ♪ Look at these amazing angels on the roof with their big wings. ♪ Now, Alice, extraordinarily, would have been here in the service with them up above her. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: This church building would have been a constant in Alice's life, but the religion practiced here varied. She was just 5 when Henry VIII turns this from a Catholic church to Church of England. Alice grew up in the Protestant faith, but 20 years later, it would change back again. ♪ Worsley: It was maybe here at the church that Alice learned that Queen Mary had come to the throne and that this church would once again become Catholic. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Mary's restoration of Catholicism meant Alice would no longer be allowed to worship in here as a Protestant. She would now need to convert or risk getting into trouble. ♪ Mary herself had experienced pressure to convert. She had fought hard for her Catholic faith. Now as Queen, her drive to make the whole country Catholic set her on a collision course with Protestants across England... ♪ but those who supported Mary must have had a very different view of her reign, so I've come to Cambridge University Library in search of a source that should offer a much less familiar take on Bloody Mary-- a Spanish one. Mary was half Spanish on her mother's side. I've enlisted a Spanish historian to help me decipher this perspective. ♪ This is quite exciting, isn't it? Oh, look how dinky it is. It's like a little toy book. So there's his name, which I fear I'm going to make a terrible job of pronouncing. Will you say it for me? His name is Pedro de Ribadeneira. And he was a Spaniard who came to England? Yes. He did. He came to England in 1558. He was a Catholic priest, and he stayed in the kingdom for a few months. I am reading this. I think it says, "The virtues of the Queen." So "Delas virtudes de la Reina dona Maria" is, as you very well said, "On the virtues of Queen Mary." What are they? What are the virtues? Take me through it. Well, Ribadeneira thinks that Mary is a good Catholic who's leading her kingdom towards salvation. She respects the primacy of the Pope. She cares for her people. May I just say, he would say that, though, wouldn't he, with his Catholic perspective. Of course he is going to be seeing her in such a good light, which contrasts a lot with what other Protestant historians were writing about Mary in the 16th century. Does he give any comment about her performance once she's in the role as queen? Yes. He does indeed. The economic situation that Mary inherits is not an easy one, but from the very beginning of her reign, she decides that she's going to make changes and reforms. According to Ribadeneira, she reforms the Court of the Exchequer, and she creates a new book of rates that increases the Crown's income. So she cuts taxes, she reforms bureaucracy, and she increases crown revenues. She's doing a great job. She is indeed. We usually tend to see the beginning of Elizabeth's reign and the prosperity as something that is achieved by Elizabeth... It was achieved by Mary. but she is the one achieving it. She's the one that is setting base for that future prosperity. And how does she go about restoring Catholicism? How does she actually do that in practice? Now, she's cautious at the beginning in the sense that she doesn't want to force people. She understands that there has been a lot of upheaval, and she is very pragmatic. On this page, she is talking about how those who had acquired church land during the dissolution of the monasteries of her father's reign are being allowed to keep that land, and over, here we see that she allowed all marriages that had taken place through the Protestant rite to remain valid. You're talking as if Bloody Mary the tyrant was actually quite reasonable and sensible and pragmatic. Compared to other rulers of her time, I would say absolutely. ♪ Wasn't that fascinating to get a Spanish perspective on Mary, one that sees her as a pretty effective ruler? Now, I do concede that Ribadeneira is a partial witness. He's very pro-Catholic, pro-Mary, but he does admit that she has some flaws. There's a bit of balance there, almost as if Mary wasn't entirely good or entirely bad, almost as if she was a human being. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: According to this side of the story, at the start of her reign, Mary wanted to restore Catholicism but didn't want to use force. Protestants like Alice Dryver were left in peace for now. ♪ So if this is true, why did Mary change direction? ♪ In the summer of 1554, about 9 months into her reign, Mary got married. She needed a husband because she needed an heir... Hi there. Hey, madam. Could we go to the Spanish Embassy, please? Certainly. Belgrave Square. Thanks. Worsley, voice-over: but a man at her side could potentially undermine Mary's position as queen. ♪ Her new husband was a devout Catholic and a cousin on her mother's side-- Philip of Spain. ♪ Mary and Philip married in July 1554. Philip was the son of the emperor Charles V, ironically the very man Mary had been betrothed to as a child. ♪ Philip was heir to the Spanish throne and an enormous European empire. ♪ Even before the wedding took place, a group of Protestants mounted a rebellion to try to stop the marriage and overthrow the queen... ♪ so how does a married woman rule with authority in a traditional society where men dominate? ♪ To find out, I'm meeting an expert in 16th-century marriage treaties. ♪ Worsley: Alexander, we've got a completely unprecedented situation here. We've got Mary, a female ruler, with a male consort, and he's a foreigner, as well. Yes. How are they going to rule in practice? How's she going to make sure that he doesn't boss her about? Well, one of the key, key ways of doing that is through the stipulations that they have in their marriage contract, and here we have the copy from the National Archives of the English draft that formed the basis of the document that they both eventually went on to sign. So this is like a prenup. Exactly, yes, setting out all of the kind of legal limitations on his power and also settling her position constitutionally. This is one of my favorite clauses down the bottom-- "That the said noble prince shall nothyng do, "whereby anything be innovate in the state and right publique." So he's not allowed to make new laws or anything like that. He's not allowed to make new laws or to change anything, effectively, constitutionally particularly... Stay in your lane, Philip. so I think we can see that in this first clause here that he "shall not promote, admit, or receive "to any office, administration, "or benefice in the said realm of England "anyone who is not a natural born subject of the Queen of England." So he's not going to be allowed to put any of his own people into English jobs and positions and offices. Exactly that. He is excluding specifically powers of patronage, taking them away from Philip, ensuring that Mary retains complete control of who is in the key offices of state. There were people who saw the Spanish marriage as very dangerous. People in England did not want England to become a satellite state of this broader Hispanic monarchy, this broader European empire. For Mary, it's obviously really important that her subjects and parliament know that power will be not given away to Philip too much. Yeah. Yeah. How does she circulate that news? She has the terms declared and proclaimed to all the people of England, and in addition to this, the English Parliament passes in 1554 the Act for the Queen's Regal Power, which essentially settles constitutionally her right to rule in her own right, and so the name of king and queen are kind of made equivalent so that all legislation which refers to kings now applies to queens, and, in fact, it's the constitutional basis for Elizabeth's authority in the Elizabethan period which follows on straight from this one. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: On paper, Mary had successfully managed the power dynamic with Philip, but I've got proof that she still had something of a PR problem. ♪ For the first time in the English coinage, we've got two people on the money. There's Philip, there's Mary, and a little floating crown to show that they rule together, but you can also see the scale of the problem that she had because the person on the left in a double portrait is the person who's more dominant, and in this case, that person is Philip. A craftsman who would earn a shilling as his day's wages would get this in his hand, and he'd think, "Oh, yes, Philip and Mary. They are our rulers now." Our queen has given away her power. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Mary's marriage had reignited anti-Catholic feeling, and, for me, Mary's marriage raises questions about her persecution of Protestants. Did her husband influence her to take a harder line, or did she feel she had to assert her authority in the face of religious division? Either way, she tightened her grip. ♪ [Bell tolls] ♪ In December 1554, Mary reintroduced heresy laws. Protestant beliefs were now punishable by death. It was an act that would come to define her reign, in large part because of a book which claims to tell us what happened next-- "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," the book where I found the story of the farmer's wife Alice Dryver. Thank you. Ooh, it's heavy. Worsley, voice-over: I wonder if seeing an original copy at Trinity College, Cambridge, can help me understand this book's power. Worsley: This is "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," and it's a history of the church going from the first century right up until the reign of Mary I. Worsley, voice-over: But this is a history book with a clear bias because John Foxe was a prominent Protestant. Worsley: What John Foxe doesn't like about Mary is her Catholicism, and at the start of her reign, he and his family went to live in exile. He was out of England when he was writing this. Let's go to the part of the book where Mary appears. Here it is, "The comming in of Queene Mary," and the whole of the rest of it, 700 pages here, are basically about the terrible things done to Protestants in her name. ♪ What makes the book so powerful, I think, are the images, the woodcuts. They're such graphic images of religious violence. This one shows a man being burnt alive at the stake, the most horrible, long-drawn-out, painful death imaginable, and you can tell he's alive, although the flames are all around him, because he's saying, "Lorde, receive my spirite," and there's a crowd, and the crowd are visibly distressed. [People screaming] ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Looking at Foxe's account, it's easy to believe that Mary was a queen on the rampage... ♪ but I think it's time for more of Mary's side of the story. ♪ There's an intriguing source from 1555 that gives some insight into her thinking at the time. ♪ This is a report to the church authorities recording the opinion of the Queen of England, "which she has written out with her own hand," so it's a record of Mary's actual words, and she says that, "Touching the punishment of heretics"-- by "punishment," she does mean burnings and executions-- she says, "[I]t would be well to inflict punishment... without much cruelty or passion," so she's emphasizing moderation. She says that she wants to target the people who deceive the simple, by which I think she means clever preachers who are out there actively spreading the Protestant message, and the punishments are to be an "example to the whole of this kingdom," so they're supposed to be a deterrent, so that's quite surprising when it comes to the burning of Protestants. Mary seems to want quite a targeted approach. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: If this is to be believed, Mary was aiming to make an example of the leaders of the faith in the hope the rest would submit, but Alice Dryver wasn't a powerful leader, just a Suffolk farmer's wife. ♪ We don't know who betrayed Alice... ♪ but "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," our main source on Alice, tells us that she and another Protestant were hiding from the authorities when they got caught. ♪ Alice was taken to the local town and imprisoned to await trial and her fate. ♪ [Gate opens] From the summer of 1555, the number of burnings across the country were ramping up. Records show they more than doubled between the first half of the year and the second. ♪ I want to understand how Mary was feeling at this point. I suspect it's not a coincidence that this was happening during a moment of personal upheaval. ♪ In the spring of 1555, Mary withdrew to her private chambers at Hampton Court. She believed she was pregnant. This child would secure Mary's line of succession and the future of Catholicism in England. ♪ These are copies of ambassadors' letters from court-- this lot are in French-- and the hot topic is the Queen's pregnancy. He's talking about "the size of her stomach and the hardening of her mamelles"-- he must mean her breasts-- "and they are distilling a liquid." I guess that might mean lactating. Poor Mary. These are really intimate details being shared, seems completely inappropriate, but I guess it's her job. She's supposed to produce the heir to the throne, so her body is public property. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Documents from this time that Mary herself had a hand in add to the sense of joyful anticipation. ♪ Worsley: These cards-- pre-prepared, ready to be sent out to dignitaries across Europe announcing the birth when it happens-- they've been signed by "Mary the Queen"... ♪ and they announced the birth of a prince at Hampton Court... ♪ and then a gap's been left blank here just for the date to be popped in when it actually happens. The reason they're still blank is that 9 months went past and no baby came. Mary was actually experiencing a phantom pregnancy. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: To delve into this mysterious condition and the impact it would have had on Mary, I'm hoping a psychiatrist can give me a modern medical perspective. Mary I has had a phantom pregnancy. Can you tell me what that actually is in medical terms? Phantom pregnancy means false pregnancy, pseudocyesis, so it means you think you're pregnant because you see the signs and symptoms, but actually, you're not. Do you ever see this today in your practice? It doesn't seem like it's a very common condition. In Western medicine, you wouldn't typically get a case of phantom pregnancy because if you think you're pregnant, you will have a urine test to check your pregnancy. You will have a Doppler scan, ultrasound scan, a blood test, so automatically right at the start, you would know you're not pregnant. I've got something to show you. This is a medical paper from America, 1951, of a variety of cases of pseudocyesis. Oh, "A Psychosomatic Study in Gynecology," and there are "[b]reast changes...enlargement, tenderness; secretion of milky or cloudy fluid." They've mentioned here a case study where there were 27 patients who presented as pregnant, and this was confirmed in 9 of the cases by doctors. The doctors were taken in, so in relatively recent times, people were still having phantom pregnancies, 1951... Mm. and what causes it? If we like to categorize, we might think psychological or hormonal, so the psychological side, there's a variety of risk factors-- so if someone has had emotional abuse, if someone's longing to be pregnant, if someone's had difficulty getting pregnant. There's a variety of reasons. There's quite a few things that you just listed that do apply to Mary. She did have a difficult childhood. She wasn't taken care of. People threatened her with death and a huge, huge, huge amount of pressure to bear a child. Is it possible for you to speculate as to what might have happened to her after the phantom pregnancy was over, then? I imagine a great deal of distress. It must be quite frightening, actually, because she would have had a distended abdomen and she would have had these bodily changes but no understanding why that's happening. And I suppose she's lost a whole imagined future. I mean, if we think, you know, you're longing for a child, you've created a bond, and that's suddenly taken away, so I can imagine she must have felt very anxious, very low in mood, and emotionally, psychologically, it must have been absolutely dreadful to go through it. ♪ [Crying] ♪ Mary must have felt like her body had failed her, and she was 39 years old, which, in 16th-century terms, meant that her chances of getting pregnant again were diminishing very fast. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: As a woman, this would have been a huge personal trauma, but as a queen, it was a crisis. With no heir, the future of Catholic England hung in the balance. ♪ Tensions were rising. ♪ Troops were brought into London to maintain order. By 1556, a major plot against the queen was uncovered, an attempt to replace her with her Protestant sister Elizabeth. Mary was now living in fear. She was sleeping only 3 hours a night. Worsley: Mary was clearly struggling on a personal level with her mental health, her physical health, and I'm left wondering what that might have meant for her as a ruler. Was her authority still intact? Was she really able still to govern the country in the same way? ♪ Worsley, voice-over: In places like rural Suffolk, it was local authorities who wielded the power. They could decide how to enforce religious policies. ♪ The Protestant source, "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," contains a detailed account of how Alice Dryver's trial unfolded. Alice is brought to her trial at Ipswich. She would have been quite likely the only woman present. ♪ Then a lengthy theological debate begins, and during it, Alice shows that she's more than capable of standing up for herself intellectually. As she says here to the courtroom-- it's amazing, this; she just goes off onto this speech of her own-- she says, "I was an honest poore man's daughter, "never brought up in the universitie as you have bene..." ♪ ...but I have driven the plough before my father many a tyme, and I thank God. In defense of God's truth and in the cause of my master Christ, by his grace I will set my foote against the foote of any of you. Worsley, voice-over: She's standing up for herself, answering back. She will set her foot against the foot of any of these men sitting in trial upon her. It's an extraordinary moment of courage. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: Alice staunchly defended herself and her faith. ♪ She was found guilty of heresy. What strikes me reading this is that Alice and Mary weren't so very different. They were both of them women who broke the rules. They were women who did things that women weren't supposed to do, and they also had such a deep religious faith that they defended it at enormous personal cost... which is why it's so very painful that it's now in Mary's name that Alice is condemned to die. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: There's no paper trail linking Mary to Alice's fate. It was the church authorities who chose how extreme the punishment should be. ♪ On the 4th of November, 1558, Alice Dryver was burnt alive at the stake. [Alice screaming] She was one of the last people to be killed under Mary's regime because only two weeks later, on the 17th of November, Queen Mary herself died. ♪ She'd been struggling with ill health ever since her phantom pregnancy. ♪ The likely cause of death was cancer. She was 42 years old. Now her Protestant sister Elizabeth I would succeed to the throne, and I believe Mary would become the victim of a smear campaign. ♪ There's no denying the brutal religious persecutions of Mary's reign. Those Protestant accounts are based on real deaths, but at this time, Europe was bitterly divided between Catholic and Protestant, with mass killings on both sides. Henry VIII had thousands put to death in the name of religion. In Edward's reign, around 900 were killed and an estimated 600 under Elizabeth. Approximately 284 deaths are attributed to Mary. Obviously, her reign was shorter, but the numbers are pretty comparable, but it's Mary who has been vilified and dubbed a bloody tyrant, and I believe that's thanks to her enemies. This pamphlet was published in 1558. This little book by John Knox is called "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women." John Knox really makes me see a kind of red mist because he's so massively misogynistic. He says that women, queens like Mary, are unfit to rule, "made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him," and he thinks that women are "weake, fraile, impaciet, feble, foolishe, and cruell." Now, this isn't just about Mary's gender. John Knox was a very fiery Protestant. He was against Mary as a Catholic queen, and the way Knox sees the burning of Protestants is as a punishment to everybody for having put Mary, a woman, on the throne in the first place. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: This Protestant pamphlet was a catalyst for more vicious attacks on the reputation of the Catholic queen. It was soon after that "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" was published. In 1571, it was ordered that copies be put in every cathedral and church in the country alongside the bible. Foxe's graphic imagery and unflinching, one-sided stories of what he called the bloody time of Queen Mary now came to be seen as the gospel truth, the definitive history of the period. I wouldn't describe him as a historian. I would describe him as a propagandist and an incredibly good one. It's this book that has given Mary her reputation as a bloody tyrant. Worsley, voice-over: The long reign of Elizabeth I firmly established England as a Protestant country, and it surely suited Elizabeth that her sister be remembered as a Catholic monster. I think the smear campaign against Mary has clouded out all that was achieved by our first queen. ♪ As well as having to navigate all the problems of being a female leader in a world made for men, she was also ruling at a time of brutal religious division, and she had physical health problems and such traumatic experiences of her own to overcome, I'm just left astounded by Mary's courage and her completely underestimated political skills. She really redefined what it means to be a monarch. ♪ Worsley, voice-over: There's one final telling footnote to Mary's story here at Westminster Abbey. This is Mary's tomb, but it's shared with her sister Elizabeth, and it's Elizabeth whose effigy is on top and whose initials adorn the monument. There's an inscription right down here like a footnote, and it says that there are two queens here-- Elizabeth and Mary, "et Maria." ♪ Worsley, voice-over: But this tiny reference is the only mention of Mary on the whole tomb. Worsley: I think the tomb says a lot about how we remember Mary today. Here, she's literally overshadowed by her sister, the mighty Elizabeth I, but I think that Elizabeth was mighty not least because of what she learned from her big sister Mary. Worsley, voice-over: For too long, Mary has been misunderstood, overlooked, vilified. ♪ I think it's time we restored England's first ruling queen to her rightful place in history as a female trailblazer. ♪ ♪
    
   

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