A Galley Slave, A Massacre, and Henry VIII Being Winched Onto A Horse

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2026

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 galley slave after one of the most dramatic castle standoffs in Scottish history, - and a massacre on an Irish headland that the Elizabethan golden age narrative tends to skip past. Gunpowder was changing everything in this period. The Tudors were living in a world of constant violence and instability that the pretty portraits don't show us. And some of the most consequential moments of the 16th century happened not in a court or a council chamber, but outside a set of walls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Centuries ago, a war was fought, and Rigoria was destroyed.
0:06.0	But in a last-ditch effort, there was one elf who buried a little bit of magic.
0:12.0	So I'm guarantee anyone will find it.
0:15.0	That's hope someone does.
0:16.0	One young man...
0:18.0	Pops, what is this?
0:19.0	We'll have to end a war started long before his time.
0:23.6	Can't run. This spell has taken hold. This is the last possible chance this world may have.
0:29.8	Echoes of Rigoria. Now available wherever you listen to your podcasts.
0:35.7	Okay, so I want you to think about the word siege for a second.
0:39.9	What do you picture?
0:41.3	Because I'm going to guess that it's not the Tudors.
0:43.9	I'm going to guess it's something earlier, like maybe catapults or knights in full armor.
0:49.7	People dumping boiling oil over the battlements while someone blows a horn dramatically. Very medieval.
0:57.2	Very definitely not the world of Henry VIII and his six wives and all of that velvet.
1:03.9	And here's the thing. That's what I thought too. I had this mental filing system where Siege went in one drawer and Tudor went in a completely different
1:14.0	drawer and they just didn't overlap. However, they very much did overlap. There's a lot of overlap.
1:22.3	I fell down this rabbit hole recently and I can't stop thinking about it. So naturally, I'm going to make that your
1:28.1	problem now, too, because what I found is that the Tudor period was absolutely full of siege warfare.
1:35.6	And some of them are actually so strange and dramatic and disturbing that I have no idea why we
1:41.6	don't talk about them more. Gunpowder is changing everything during this period.
1:46.4	The whole nature of warfare is shifting, and the tutors are right in the middle of it.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Heather Teysko, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Heather Teysko and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.