London, 1450.

The air stinks of smoke and sweat and fear.

Angry crowds fill the narrow streets around Westminster,

shouting for justice and blaming the Queen's favorite for everything that's gone wrong.

England's armies are collapsing in France.

Normandy is lost.

The coffers are empty and the king says, like almost nothing.

At the center of the rage stands one man, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset.

Handsome, charming, and proud, he's said to hold more than just the Queen's confidence. Margaret of Anjou, the fiery

young wife of Henry VI, trusts him above every other Lord in the kingdom, and that trust has become

poison. The Londoners hiss his name like a curse. Pamphlets and rumors paint him as the Queen's lover,

the man who sold out England's glory for French peace treaties and royal favors.

But was Edmund Beaufort truly the Queen's secret passion?

Or simply the scapegoat whose reputation lit the fuse of civil war?

Music whose reputation lit the fuse of civil war. Hello, friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History podcast, the original Tudor

history podcast, telling stories of Tudor England since 2009. I am your host, Heather, and I am, as always,

delighted that you are here with me to talk about Tudor history. Today we're talking about

another member of the Beaufort family. We've talked about kind of tracing their history from the

beginning under John of Gaunt and Catherine Swinford, what happened to them through the medieval period and into the tutor period. But today we're

going to focus on one specific Beaufort. And that would be Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of

Somerset. As always, a huge thank you and shout out to patrons and members who support this podcast.

If you would like to get extra content this week, depending on which level you're at, there's the audio course.

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