The Tudor Women Who Controlled Access to the Queen (And Paid the Price)

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment, a letter passed along or strategically delayed, an introduction made or withheld. These women were intelligence assets, political operators, and the invisible machinery behind some of the biggest decisions of the era. Today we're going inside the system: the org chart nobody wrote down but everyone understood, the dramatic power shift that happened when the privy chamber went from Henry VIII's court to the queens regnant, and what happened to the women who got it spectacularly wrong. Including Lady Katherine Grey, who secretly married a man with no royal permission and triggered a political crisis that landed multiple people in the Tower. And Lettice Knollys, who married Elizabeth I's favorite and was reportedly told there was but one sun in the sky and one queen in England. And then there's Blanche Parry, who had been with Elizabeth since she rocked her cradle, and who figured out the only blueprint that actually worked: be so indispensable that removing you was unthinkable.If you want to go deeper, pick up Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game, which is linked below. It's fantastic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, ready?
0:02.0	We're going to get it right. First time. I'll say hello, and then you say hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. No. And then the billowing hilltop. We are the billowing hilltop. I hadn't worked anything. You have been after? Have you? You've only got 45 seconds. No, no, I know what we did. We play Tabletop role-playing games. Currently we're playing Pathfinder. Second edition, we're playing The Outlaws of Alkenstar and Venture Path by Paiso. And there's hundreds of episodes of us playing D&D. Yep. We just sit around the table, playing games and having fun, and you can hear us wherever you're hearing this. Search Billowing Hilltop.
0:38.5	We hope you join us. Yay. Thank you.
0:44.7	Okay, we're going to talk today about the most powerful job in Tudor England. It didn't really
0:53.7	come with the title, and it didn't come with a salary to brag about.
0:57.9	It came with a schedule and dress code and a very specific number of pearls that you were required to own and absolutely zero job security.
1:06.3	It was a lady in waiting. And yes, I know we've talked about this before even recently.
1:10.8	If you saw my video on Anne Bassett's 24-hour day, you know what the job looked like from the inside. But today, thanks to some of the requests in the comments from that video, I want to pull back and look at the machine as a whole because there absolutely was a machine,
1:28.6	a very complicated, ruthless, deeply political machine.
1:32.7	And the women running it were some of the most strategically brilliant operators in all of
1:38.1	Tudor England.
1:39.2	And almost nobody wrote that down explicitly.
1:41.9	They didn't have to because everybody just knew. So get comfy,
1:46.7	grab a beverage, settle in. We're going to talk today about the machinery, the political machinery
1:52.2	behind the role of Lady in Waiting. Let's get started.
2:08.2	Hey friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I am your host, Heather. I've been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009 with my show, which of course makes me the original
2:13.2	Tudor History podcaster. I am, as always, delighted that you have joined me here today to talk about
2:20.0	the role of lady in waiting and machinery behind it. I know you have a lot of choices on YouTube.
2:24.9	I open up YouTube and I'm just overwhelmed. There's not enough hours in the day for all the stuff I want
2:29.0	to watch on YouTube. And yet here you are with me spending this time together and I could not
2:34.0	be more grateful.
2:34.9	I hope that it's worth your time.
	...

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