If you wander into St. Francis of a Seasy Church at Badgley Clinton, the place where the

Farah's family once sheltered so many hunted priests, you will find a fresco of Anne Vox.

Her face is soft, almost serene, but the expression is unmistakably alert.

It's a look of someone who understands secrets, someone who has spent a lifetime managing danger.

And what makes Anne so interesting is that she didn't spring out of nowhere.

She was the product of a family that had been weaving itself through English politics

since the tail end of the Middle Ages, always tied to the losing side and somehow always managing to survive the fallout.

Today, we are going to talk about the Vox family.

Hey, 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 delighted,

as always, that you are choosing to spend this time with me today to talk about the Vox family.

I've been wanting to talk about them for some time. A couple of years ago, gosh, maybe 10 years

ago, actually, there was that BBC drama gunpowder about the gunpowder plot and the boxes,

of course, were prominent in that. And it really made me want to dig into them. But now as we're doing

this kind of survey of noble families this past year, they pop up more

and more being married to different people, of course, and so I thought, it's time that we did

an episode just on them. So let's dig in. Before we get to Anne, we need to back up a little bit,

about a century before Anne was slipping messages written in

orange juice into the Tower of London, to a woman named Catherine Peniston, or Panazone, depending

on which chronicler you're trusting. Catherine was the daughter of a Piedmontese gentleman connected

to King René of Anjou. That alone already tells you she didn't come from some

quiet country family. She grew up in the orbit of two courts, the European world of Provence and

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