The economist John Maynard Keynes bought hundreds of Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts on spec at an auction and concluded that they were in fact detailed notes on the great 17th century mathematician and scientist’s reading and experiments in alchemy. He described Newton as ‘the last of the magicians.’ We look at the case for and against… [Two episodes]

On the evening of 4 November 1605 Guy Fawkes was found ready to blow Monarch and Parliament to Kingdom Come. But what reliable evidence is there, once we exclude the confessions extracted under torture? Was he a victim of the common practice of framing political enemies? [Seven episodes]

313 people were killed for their beliefs in England and Wales between 1555 and 1558, during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor. Most of them were burned at the stake.
But like almost all episodes in England’s Catholic history, modern scholarship shows that this one’s been badly misunderstood. We’ve been investigating it, not in any way in order to excuse what happened, but to try to understand it. We feel we owe it to the victims to get the story straight. [Five episodes]

A ménage a trois: was Henry more interested in the Pope and the Frenchman he called his ‘brother’, than either Anne Boleyn or Queen Katharine? We discover that Henry’s foreign policy has a lot more to answer for than we thought. [Eight episodes]

The Wars of the Roses never happened – or certainly not in the way Henry VII’s propaganda told it. Even the roses are an invention. Which is why we ask What wars? What roses? But the real question is, what on earth was going on in fifteenth century England? Or, more seriously, could this really have been the end of medieval England and the start of the modern? Well, the intriguing thing is, that when you peep over the edge of the fifteenth century, you discover that something very profound did in fact change. [Five episodes]