(slow music) - Oh, the king sent for me this morning.
- What did he want?
- A son, the king wants a son.
- Everyone around him believed that you needed a king 'cause you were gonna go to war at times.
- And a woman on the English throne flies in the face of nature.
- The 15th century in England was a period of almost constant war.
The new dynasty, the Tudor dynasty, had one matter very much uppermost in their mind, and that was to restore calm.
And the best way to achieve that was providing a clear male heir so that there would be no dispute about who should follow him on to the throne.
- How long am I supposed to wait?
- And his increasing fixation on getting a son is what I think drove him and drove him increasingly irascible, paranoid, irrational at times, explosive.
- I see that God will not give me male children.
- And as we know famously, he went to the ultimate lengths to get one.
- If a king cannot have a son, if he cannot give stability to his realm, it doesn't matter what else he can do.
- Ironically of course, his daughter did become queen and she was one of our greatest ever monarchs and it was Elizabeth I, so he needn't worried.
(slow music)
