Hello, friend, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network, and the original Tudor history podcast telling stories of

Tudor England since 2009.

I am your host, Heather, and 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.

This is episode 257, and we are going to talk about the almost wives of Henry the 8th.

Everybody knows the six wives, right?

Divorce Beheaded, Die, Divorce Beheaded, Survived.

Actually, I just put a really cool new t-shirt up on my merch shop at Tudorfair.com that has that

divorce-beheaded dye, divorce-beheaded, survived thing. Super cool. I ordered one for myself. Super

excited to wear it. Anyway, I digress. But we remember the wives. But there are also, at least six

almost wives, who you could say got lucky and escaped marriage to Henry.

So we are going to talk about them today.

These almost wives also all tell us something new about Henry, his ambitions, his shifting priorities, and his

evolving view of marriage as he grew older and more frustrated in his attempts to secure an air.

So we're going to talk about six women who Henry seriously considered marrying but didn't.

We're going to talk about Eleanor of Austria, the diplomatic powerhouse who could have replaced Catherine of Aragon.

Marie of Gies, a towering presence in every sense of the word.

Christina of Denmark, famous for a quip that stung Henry's ego.

Anna of Lorraine, whose fate was tied up with the Dutch Revolt, Amelia of Cleves, sister of Henry's fourth wife, and Catherine Willoughby,

who might have been Henry's last queen, had fate and death not intervened. So let's get right into it.

We're going to start with Eleanor of Austria. We're going to talk about this in relation to Henry

...