Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Sign up for the weekly newsletter here: https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up Everyone knows Henry VIII's divorce saga. He wanted out, the Pope said no, he invented a new church. Problem solved, if you're the king. But what about his wives? What about any Tudor woman trapped in a terrible marriage? Could she leave? The answer is technically yes. There were legal mechanisms: annulment, formal...

In 1552, England's teenage Protestant king decided that St. George, patron saint of England, had to go. Not from one town, or one church. From the statutes of the Order of the Garter itself, the most prestigious knighthood in the country, the one his grandfather had endowed with a jewel-encrusted gold statue and his father had basically built his entire personal brand around. The manuscript still...

Want to test the new Tudor Scrolls app? Email me at heather@englandcast.com. She was the granddaughter of a king, married off at thirteen to settle a debt, and somehow ended up as the only woman to ever run the Tower of London. And then, a few months later, she was a prisoner inside the same walls she used to command. But this isn't just one woman's unbelievable life. Eleanor had two sisters, and...

Before Henry VIII, if you were sick, old, or starving in England, there was a place you could go. Monasteries ran almshouses, hospitals, free lodging for travelers, even schools for poor kids, all as a normal, unglamorous part of just existing. Then in about a decade, almost all of it was gone. In this episode I dig into the side of the Dissolution of the Monasteries that usually gets skipped over...

Mary, Queen of Scots was executed on February 8th, 1587, on the strength of a decoded letter and a forged postscript that Elizabeth's spymaster slipped into her own secret code. But what if that letter never got decoded at all? In this episode I pull that one thread and follow it all the way out. No execution means no closure for Elizabeth, a murkier justification for the Spanish Armada, and a gen...

📬 Free newsletter (Tudor news, vocab, treasures, behind the scenes): ⁠https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up⁠ We talk about the Renaissance as the time people rediscovered the ancient world. But they were also discovering themselves, for the first time. For most of human history, nobody really knew what they looked like. Then a mirror, a chimney, a printing press, and a blank book arrived wit...

A Devon farmer records buying velvet shoes and 30 gold buttons. A London astrologer hides his affairs in Latin. Shakespeare puts a soliloquy on stage and an audience recognizes something true about themselves. Something was happening in late Tudor England, and it changed how human beings understood their inner lives forever. In this video we trace the invention of the personal diary, from medieval...

Did you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abseiled out of a window on a rope smuggled in via a wine barrel, realized the rope was twenty feet too short, dropped anyway, and sailed to Normandy with his elderly mother. And the Constable responsible for him lost the job's hereditary rights immedia...

In 1525, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V broke off his engagement to the young Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and married his cousin Isabella of Portugal instead. The reason? Isabella came with a dowry of 900,000 ducats, and Charles needed the money more than he needed the alliance. That one financial decision may have changed everything. In this alternate history, we ask...

**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! *** When I picture Tudor England, I used to picture... white people. Portraits. Ruffs. Henry VIII being grumpy. And then I read Miranda Kaufmann's book Black Tudors. Because it turns out there were around 200 free Africans living in England during the Tudor period (probably more, but that's what we know for sure)...

What if one man had never existed? William Tyndale was a scholar, a fugitive, and a martyr who died in 1536 strangled at the stake for committing what his government considered a capital crime: translating the Bible into English. But in doing it, he accidentally invented a huge chunk of the English language. "The powers that be." "Let there be light." "The salt of the earth." "Eat, drink, and be m...

Did the Tudors steal the throne? Did they brush their teeth? Did they smell? I typed "did the Tudors" into Google and answered every single autocomplete suggestion with actual history. Some answers are surprising, some are horrifying, and at least one involves people deliberately blackening their teeth to look rich. Tudor history is wild and I love it here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Someone asked me this from their pool. They were floating around listening to the podcast and thought, "did the people I'm obsessed with ever do this?" And it sent me down a rabbit hole, because the answer is so much more complicated and class-loaded than I expected. In this episode we cover: Why Tudors avoided hot baths (and why that was actually logical given what they believed about disease) Wh...

What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was already up to her elbows in lye, urine, and other people's laundry. That someone was the Tudor laundress, and her story is one I have been wanting to tell for a long time. In this episode we follow three very different women doing the same essential...

Everything we think we know about women and power in the medieval world is missing a few key details. Like the fact that there were exactly two female sheriffs in medieval England, and that their lives were directly tangled together in the most dramatic way possible. Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle through multiple sieges, was appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John in one of his fi...

What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't More, and what would have changed if he had? In this week's What If Thought Experiment, we're looking at one of the Tudor period's most interesting counterfactuals. Henry VIII didn't need More's signature legally, he wanted it because More was the gol...

Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents. It was an occupation. And then the economy collapsed, the guilds shut women out, and the word became something else entirely. In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyer...

You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel. Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment...

The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her husband's. But the moment he died? She got it all back. And some of these women knew exactly what that meant. In this episode we're looking at three Tudor women who used widowhood as a strategy... whether they meant to or not. Bess of Hardwick turned...

In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available. She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make...

In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabella de Fortibus, was on her deathbed to get it. And even then, she made him pay for it. Isabella de Fortibus was a 13th century countess who became one of the wealthiest people in England after a series of family tragedies left her controlling Devon, t...

It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anything like it at all. The answer is more interesting than I expected. In 1485, when Henry VII takes the throne after the Battle of Bosworth Field, England is basically a collection of feudal relationships. Loyalty runs to your lord, your family, your r...

London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday. The plague is back. Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three...

Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I looked, the stranger it got. Here's the surface version. Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner for nineteen years. Elizabeth kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then said she didn't mean it. Then threw her secretary William...

Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old girl had no idea her mother had just been beheaded on her father's orders. That little girl grew up to be Elizabeth I. And she never - not once in more than four decades on the throne - spoke publicly about her mother. We're looking at what happened to...