Not Just the Tudors

Throughout this month, every episode of Not Just the Tudors is honouring Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee by focussing on some aspect of Queenship in the Early Modern period.  In this first exploration, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb looks at Queens Consort - those wives of Kings so well-known to us - to whom we tend to ascribe a passive role. Today's guest Dr. Michelle Beer wants us to ret...

From the early Middle Ages to the present day, travellers have been bewitched by the peerless beauty of Granada. From 1230 until 1492, it was ruled by the Nasrids - Spain's last Islamic dynasty - from their fortress palace of the Alhambra. After capturing Granada to complete the Christian Reconquista, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court. But what bec...

Pietro Torrigiano is credited with introducing Renaissance art to England in the early years of the 16th century and designed the tomb of Henry VII, but he is best remembered for breaking the nose of Michelangelo in a fight. Torrigiano's tumultuous life took him from Florence to Rome, through Mechelen and London, to Seville, where he finally died in an Inquisition jail. In this episode of Not Just...

Facing persecution in Elizabethan England, some Catholics chose exile over conformity. Some even cast their lot with foreign monarchs rather than wait for their own rulers to have a change of heart. These so-called “Spanish Elizabethans,” used the most powerful tools at their disposal — paper, pens, and printing presses — to incite war against England, from the years leading up to the Grand Armada...

There are so many myths about Anne Boleyn - among them that she had six fingers, that she was a murderess, even that she was Henry VIII's own daughter. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, released on 19 May to mark the anniversary of the day of Anne Boleyn's execution in 1536, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb sets out to bust some myths with Natalie Grueninger, founder and editor of the On the Tudo...

The Civil War was the most traumatic conflict in British history, pitting friends and family members against each other, tearing down the old order. Award-winning historian Jessie Childs plunges the reader into the shock of the struggle through one of its most dramatic episodes: the siege of Basing House. To the parliamentarian Roundheads, the Hampshire mansion was a bastion of royalism, popery an...

415 years ago this month, 104 English men and boys landed in North America and established a settlement they called Jamestown in Virginia. Over the course of the 17th Century, a third of a million people left England for the "New World". But in Virginia, it all started from very small beginnings and there was every chance that this venture - like every previous attempt to settle in America wo...

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, Not Just the Tudors casts a 21st century eye over "one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance" - melancholy - and how it was addressed in "largest, strangest and most unwieldy self-help book ever written": Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621.  So what did people in the 17th century think were...

There’s not an infinite number of ways that humans can act on sexual desire. Human bodies haven’t changed, but the cultural landscape around sex has. What people believed about it, the morality surrounding it, and the paraphernalia concerning it have all changed a lot. Sex has a history, and History Hit has launched a new podcast to explore it called Betwixt the Sheets. In this episode of Not Just...

Sir Walter Raleigh remains one of the enduring names from the Elizabethan era. He was a true Renaissance man - a statesman, soldier, writer, explorer and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1594, Raleigh heard about the legendary golden city of El Dorado and the following year, explored what is now Guyana and eastern Venezuela in search of it. In his account of the expedition The Discovery of Gui...

The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I - known as "Suleyman the Magnificent" in the West - was the most feared and powerful man of the sixteenth century. His journey to power was built on brutal choices and intimate relationships - with the Greek slave who became his closest friend, the Venetian plutocrat who sold him gems and won him allies and the Russian consort who stole his heart. Within a decade, Sul...

Many of the private and public dramas in the life of Henry VIII took place at Hampton Court Palace. Begun in 1514 for Cardinal Wolsey, Hampton Court became one of Henry VIII's favourite residences. Set in 60 acres of magnificent gardens, much of the Tudor building was destroyed during King William III's massive rebuilding and expansion work, as he sought to create a residence to rival the Pal...

In 1667 - 355 years ago this month - a young London publisher called Samuel Simmons printed a very important book - John Milton's Paradise Lost . Milton had come to the fore in radical politics and, for a time, was considered an enemy of the state.  Paradise Lost was published as his dream of a Godly republic became a reality and then crumbled, and as he himself turned blind and experienced t...

The recently released film Lapwing is set during the Tudor period, one year after the Egyptian Act of 1554 effectively criminalised Romani people and others - generically labelled "Egyptians" - and those who harboured them. Lapwing tells the story of one such family who are exploited by a vengeful salt farmer on the Lincolnshire coast. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Li...

The Dudleys were the most brilliant, bold and manipulative of power-hungry Tudor families. Every Tudor monarch made their name either with a Dudley at their side - or by crushing one beneath their feet. With three generations of felled family members, what was it that caused the Dudleys to keep rising so high and falling so low? In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb...

Francesca Caccini (1587-c.1641) is one of the forgotten women of classical music. She was an exceptional singer and instrumentalist, but above all, an immensely talented composer. Working full time at the Medici court from the age of 20, Caccini became one of its best paid employees. Many of her compositions have been lost, but her only surviving stage work, La liberazione di Ruggiero , is conside...

Visitors to the Holburne Museum in Bath are having a close encounter with the most familiar faces in English history. A stunning exhibition, The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics , includes some of the most iconic Tudor portraits, evoking that torrid era of religious conflict and political intrigue. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb walks round the exhibit...

The Taj Mahal was commissioned 390 years ago by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. But what can we know about the king from the exquisite love temple he built? What do its inscriptions tell us about Shah Jahan's life, love and faith? In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Father Michael D. Calabria, who h...

François I of France not only introduced the Renaissance to France, he became the perfect Renaissance king - an inspiring military leader, a charismatic diplomat, an art collector and a lover of literature. But he was also intensely human and flawed. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to author Leonie Frieda, whose biography of François I brings to life...

March 2022 marks the 500th anniversary of Anne Boleyn's first recorded appearance at the English court. To celebrate, Hever Castle - Anne's childhood home - has staged an exhibition charting her early life, and exploring the factors that moulded her character. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb goes to Hever Castle to talk to Dr. Owen Emmerson and Kate McCaff...

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb explores the story of a shipwreck that led to the creation of a city and a nation. Exactly 375 years ago, on 25 March 1647, a Dutch cargo ship Nieuw Haarlem foundered in Table Bay’s shallow waters. While 58 crew members were taken back to the Netherlands, 62 remained at the southern tip of Africa. If they had not stayed...

The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII ended almost a millennium of monastic life in England, resulting in a dislocation of people and a disruption of life not seen since the Norman Conquest. Yet newly published research shows that the buildings were not immediately demolished, as was previously imagined. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors , Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks...

No one represented the complexities of the court of Henry VIII better than Sir Thomas Wyatt, a skilled diplomat who was forced to live with the moral and mortal consequences of his shifting allegiances. He was also an outstanding and pioneering poet, who penned the first English sonnets. His satires covertly speak truth to power, alluding to events that it would have been treasonous to talk about...

One of the world's much loved stage and screen characters has just returned to the cinema in a new film version starring Peter Dinklage. But what may not be generally known is that Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person who was sharper, funnier and more modern than the romantic hero he inspired. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Cyrano's biographer Ish...

As a contribution to International Women's Day last Tuesday, this episode of Not Just the Tudors is a tribute to one of the great - but largely forgotten - Queens of the Early Modern period. Elizabeth Stuart may only be vaguely recalled today as the sister of King Charles I, the grandmother of King George I, and thus a direct ancestor of our current Queen. But in her lifetime, as the deposed and e...