Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base for her divine visions. Caterina Sforza was annotating her alchemical recipes with "proven and certain." They never met, but they were solving the same problem. One manuscript was found in a ping-pong cupboard in 1934. The other is still missing. Lea...

What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to midnight. Anne served five queens across two decades and survived all of it, which was not guaranteed. We know the details of her life because her mother wrote constantly from Calais asking whether the smocks fit, reminding her to practice her lute in...

It's April 1st, and I'm not going to trick you. Instead, let's ask a genuine question: did the Tudors even DO April Fools' Day? The answer is no, not really. But what they did instead is so much more interesting. We dig into the murky origins of April Fools' Day (the most popular origin story is probably itself a myth, which is perfect), the Tudor tradition of licensed misrule, and the story of Wi...

History has a word for queens who had opinions and refused to be managed. Today we're looking at three of them across three centuries - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Matilda, and Isabella of France - and asking whether "scandalous" means what history wants us to think it means. Eleanor governed, went on crusade, backed her sons against her husband, and got locked in a tower for sixteen years. Henr...

In the 1550s, Tudor England created exiles going both ways. When Mary I came to the throne, Protestants fled. When Elizabeth came to the throne, Catholics fled. Today we're looking at two women caught on opposite sides of that chaos: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who endured poverty and Lithuania rather than pretend to be Catholic for one single day, and Jane Dormer, Mary I's closest f...

Thomas Cranmer spent twenty-five years mastering the art of Tudor survival. He was useful, he was careful, he understood exactly how to stay on the right side of the most dangerous king in English history. And it worked, right up until it didn't. Today we're using Cranmer as the ultimate Tudor survival case study: what the rules were, how he followed them, and why he broke every single one of them...

Katherine Parr survived Henry VIII -- no small feat -- only to die in childbirth at 36 after rushing into a marriage with Thomas Seymour, the charming, reckless, deeply ambitious man she'd wanted before Henry got in the way. The obvious "what if" is that she lives longer. But the more interesting question is what her survival means for Elizabeth Tudor -- the teenager living in that household, expe...

Syon Abbey was founded in 1415 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. The community refused to scatter. They waited, came back under Mary, went into exile again under Elizabeth, survived a Calvinist mob in Flanders, 200 years in Lisbon, a 9.0 earthquake, and Napoleon. They finally closed in 2011 -- not because anyone shut them down, but because there were three elderly nuns left and they couldn't ma...

Anne of Cleves is always called the lucky one. She survived Henry VIII, kept her head, and walked away with Hever Castle and a generous income. But in July 1540 she actually had legal grounds to contest the annulment, a brother with diplomatic leverage, and Katherine of Aragon's playbook sitting right in front of her. So why did she say yes? And was it luck, or was it strategy? This week I'm looki...

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, roughly 2,000 nuns lost everything overnight. Their homes, their communities, their vocations, and in many cases the only life they had ever known. We talk endlessly about the monks and the land transfers. We almost never talk about the nuns. In this episode I'm looking at what actually happened to them after the dissolution. Some went home to families. S...

The last Beguine died in 2013. Her name was Marcella Pattyn, she was 92 years old, and she was the final link in an 800-year chain of women who refused to be nuns or wives and built something entirely their own instead. The Beguines lived in community, supported themselves, and wrote theology in languages ordinary people could actually read, all without answering to any bishop, abbot, or husband....

Everyone knows the image: the pearls, the sieve, the impossible gown. Elizabeth I as Gloriana, timeless and untouchable. But someone paid for that image. A lot of someones. Today we're following the money behind Tudor image-making, from the Norwich aldermen who spent months of public funds on five days of royal pageantry, to Robert Dudley bankrupting himself at Kenilworth, to Nicholas Hilliard pai...

Under Tudor law, a married woman didn't legally exist as a financial person. Everything she owned became her husband's the moment she married. She couldn't sign a contract, collect a debt, or run a business in her own name. And yet the account books survive. And they are full of women. Today we're looking at how Tudor women actually managed money in a world that officially pretended they weren't —...

Before Katherine Parr became Henry VIII's sixth wife, she spent eight years at Snape Castle in North Yorkshire as Lady Latimer. In January 1537, armed rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace showed up while her husband was away, took her and her stepchildren hostage, and ransacked the place. I think that moment explains everything about who Katherine became. Play the game here: https://www.englandcast...

What if Mary I's phantom pregnancy in 1555 had been real? In this episode, I trace what happens to Elizabeth, the Church of England, the Spanish Armada, Mary Queen of Scots, and even English-speaking America if one baby had actually arrived. Spoiler: almost nothing about the modern world looks the same. Related "What if" - what if Elizabeth had married early? https://youtu.be/Al8K_oLHEIY Learn mor...

Related episode on Isabella Whitney: https://youtu.be/JoSeTYE22SE Before newspapers, before coffeehouses, Tudor England had its own chaotic information ecosystem, and it reached further down the social ladder than most people realize. In this episode we're looking at who could actually read, what ordinary people were reading (broadside ballads, almanacs, monster news), and how the Crown kept losin...

When Bridget of York, youngest daughter of Edward IV, chose a life at Dartford Priory over marriage to a Scottish prince, most people assume she had no better options. They're wrong. The Tudor convent wasn't a consolation prize. It was the only institution in England that offered women real governance experience, education, community, and a life that didn't depend on surviving childbirth or a husb...

The Tudor court was one of the most glamorous, exciting, and genuinely terrifying places in the world. And the people who lost their heads there were not stupid. Thomas More was a legal genius. Cromwell basically invented modern bureaucracy. Wolsey ran England for fifteen years. So what went wrong? Today we're building the actual survival guide. The real unwritten rules that separated the people w...

In 1419, Joan of Navarre, dowager queen of England and stepmother to Henry V, was arrested for witchcraft and necromancy. There was no trial. Her income was seized immediately. And Henry V, the king she supposedly tried to murder with wax figures and dark magic, freed her on his deathbed and wrote that he feared for his soul because of what he had done to her. So what actually happened? Joan's sto...

Margaret Pole was 67 years old when Henry VIII had her executed. She wasn't plotting. She wasn't scheming. She was an old woman in the Tower whose son kept writing angry letters from Rome calling Henry a heretic. So today we're playing a game. What if Reginald Pole had kept his opinions to himself? Could Margaret have survived to see Mary on the throne? I think the answer is yes, and the story of...

We think of the Tudor period as velvet and poetry and dramatic executions. We do not think of it as siege warfare. That's a mistake. In this episode I'm looking at three Tudor sieges that completely wrecked my assumptions about this era: - Henry VIII personally showing up to besiege a French city (and having to be hoisted onto his horse to get there), - a Protestant reformer who ended up as a gall...

Katherine Howard is remembered as the tragic teenager who lost her head at seventeen. But what if she didn't have to? In the winter of 1541, everyone at the English court thought Henry VIII was dying. They were just waiting him out. All Katherine had to do was survive a few more months. And then Cranmer slipped that letter under Henry's door, and everything fell apart. But what if two things had g...

In 1538, a man named Geoffrey Pole was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. He hadn't plotted against Henry VIII. He hadn't raised an army. He'd written letters to his brother and said, once, that he wished he could see him. That was enough. What followed was one of the most psychologically devastating interrogations of the Tudor period, and one of the least talked about. Over seven sessions...

Everyone knows the Princes in the Tower, but what happened to their sisters? After Bosworth, five daughters of Edward IV faced a new Tudor king who needed one of them and feared the rest. This is the story of how Henry VII solved the problem of Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Catherine, and Bridget of York... and what each solution cost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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