Hey friend and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network, and the original Tudor History Podcasts telling stories of Tudor England since

2009. I am your host, Heather. I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe

it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply

in touch with our own humanity. So this is episode 237, I think. And it was around this

time of year, of course, May 1536, when Anne Boleyn was being held in the Tower of London,

awaiting her fate, which would, of course, come to her on May 19.

So I've been doing a couple of different episodes. Members and patrons will have seen a couple of

episodes on the timeline of Anne's downfall. Members and patrons got an episode yesterday

on whether or not there really was a romance with Thomas

Wyatt, the evidence against him because he was also one of the men accused, although he

was not formally indicted and he was freed. Hillary Mantell has some interesting

thoughts on that in the Wolf Hall series as well. So in this episode, I've been reading

Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower, which is something I kind of come back to at this time

a year or every year. It chronicles the plot against Anne and basically what happened

Anne's final month of life, how Anne was reacting,

how the people around her were reacting.

And I want to talk today about the early period in her imprisonment.

So the period before her trial, when things were still kind of uncertain,

when news was still spreading, when people weren't sure what was happening. So if you want to really

dig deep, I mean, Alison Weir's book, I have the e-books. I don't know exactly how many pages it is, but it's a full book. It goes into huge amounts of detail on this. So I obviously

cannot do that in a 20-minute podcast episode. But we're going to talk about, you know, the period

from Anne's arrest, kind of up to around her trial time and what

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