Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and leave a mess. He made choices. Theologically driven, politically sophisticated choices. From his deathbed. At fifteen. This week's What If looks at the Devise for Succession, the document Edward drafted in his own hand that bypassed both his sisters...

Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity and changed the course of Western history. And he had receipts. Made-up receipts, courtesy of a 12th century Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth, but receipts nonetheless. In this minicast, we look at where this claim came from, w...

In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode, where we slow down and live inside 1509, not just at court but in the guild halls and households of ordinary Londoners who had nowhere to run when the sweating sickness arrived while Henry VIII fled to Windsor. Thomas More wrote some of the most joyf...

In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, described their techniques, and basically wrote the world's first true crime series. The problem is that he was also personally acquainted with most of the criminals he was writing about. Today we're spending 24 hours with a Tudor cony-catcher. A cony is a...

It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn. In this What If episode, we play out three scenarios from that single moment of decision: what Cromwell actually chose and why it signed his own death warrant four years later, what happens if he removes Anne without killing her and she becomes a Protestant cause célèbre in exi...

In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had been locked up since he was ten years old. And the King and Queen of Spain wouldn't send Catherine of Aragon to England until both of them were dead. This is History as an Empathy Machine, a new thought experiment where we lay out the real options histo...

What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole system, and it was more coherent than you'd expect. We dig into the four humors as a complete theory of the mind, Timothy Bright's 1586 Treatise of Melancholie (the first English book on mental illness), music as formally prescribed medical treatment,...

Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd said no? We explore what Mary's reign might have looked like without a Protestant figurehead to rally around, whether Wyatt's Rebellion would even have happened, and why the answer has less to do with Jane's courage than you might think. Sign up for...

Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character in Tudor history. She is absolutely not. We're covering her daily work, the surprising economic independence the dairy gave women in a world designed to give them none, and why the phrase "as smooth as a milkmaid's skin" is actually encoding centurie...

You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that. In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians r...

Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed, badged, opinionated, and completely indispensable. In this episode we spend 24 hours on the river: shooting London Bridge, ferrying Shakespeare's audience to the South Bank, and watching the coaches arrive and take everything away. Plus: John Taylor...

Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, she outranked duchesses, performed sacraments no other woman was allowed to touch, and knew every secret in the neighborhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France in 1567 instead of marrying Bothwell? We walk through the real history, then imagine how one different decision might have changed the Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the entire trajectory of the British monarchy. Plus: come...

History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it. In this episode I'm looking at four women who built careers, won lawsuits, and left things behind that still exist today, all inside a legal system that was stacked against them. Katherine Fenkyll ran one of the most active cloth businesses in Tudor London for thirty years, negotiated wit...

The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people shouldn't eat one, and why it took two hundred years for anyone to prove him wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court occupied 55 rooms, employed 200 men, and burned six tons of wood every single day. This episode spends 24 hours inside that operation, from the scullions lighting fires before dawn to the leftover food going to the poor at the end of the day. We cover the kitchen hierarchy, the staggering food quantities, the spit boy and his very specific idea of a holiday,...

In Tudor England, a dream wasn't private. It was medical evidence, potential divine communication, and possibly a message from Satan. This video explores the three frameworks Tudor people used to understand their dreams, and the story of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, whose visions made her famous across England and then got her executed in 1534. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

The Tudor royal nursery wasn't a cozy domestic space. It was a department of state, with its own hierarchy, its own politics, and sworn oaths of loyalty just to rock a cradle. This week we're going inside it: the Lady Mistress running the show, the wet nurses who gave up their families and their freedom to feed someone else's baby, the swaddling operation that occasionally involved hanging an infa...

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...