Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tesco. And happy autumn,

everybody. Well, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, happy spring to those for whom it's

appropriate. So I was going to do this whole episode on the soap opera that was Queen Elizabeth's early

life. But I realized that when we left off the story back in December, Henry's son, King Edward,

had only just passed away.

We have the whole tragic story of Lady Jane Gray that we need to talk about first, plus

marry the first.

I don't know why I thought we'd already progressed to Elizabeth.

So for those of you who were hoping to hear some juicy Thomas Seymour gossip, you'll just have to wait a little bit longer, I'm afraid.

So let's go back and recap a bit where we were. Henry VIII dies with a son by Jane Seymour, his third wife.

He also has a daughter, Mary, by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and he has a daughter, Elizabeth,

by Anne Boleyn. So when Edward dies, still a child, we have a bit of a conundrum. Well,

in particular, the Protestants have a conundrum, because Mary, you see, is still ardently Catholic,

and she has vowed to make the religion of her mother the state religion again,

and to persecute all the Protestant heretics. This makes the Protestants, who had gained

significant ground during the short reign of Edward, very nervous. One particular Protestant,

who was also particularly power-hungry, was John Dudley, Edwards' chief minister,

and he thought himself up quite the clever plan.

Well, it would have been clever if it would have worked.

With the benefit of hindsight, it now looks pretty stupid.

But at the time, he must have thought quite highly of himself for devising it.

So John Dudley knows about the Gray family.

...