Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise.

Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

The notion of crime causing a media sensation is nothing new. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower

orders, wrote Oscar Wilde. I don't blame them in

the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring

extraordinary sensations. If you travelled back 400 years or so to Stuart Britain in the years following 1615 and picked up a broadside,

much like a newspaper, or perhaps a printed play or poem,

you would find the sensational true crime story of the death of Thomas Overbury.

A courtier in the reign of King James 6th and 1st,

Thomas Overbury was a lawyer, poet and essayist,

who died in the Tower of London in 1613.

As rumours of the circumstances of his death began to swirl,

they caused a sensation, leading to a scandal that rocked the monarchy to its core. Think of the

Ferorri surrounding the British royal family in recent times when its members have been accused

of certain misdemeanors and you'll have some small sense of the shock that Overbury's death

alleged to be a murder caused. All this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm delving into our archives

to revisit some of the extraordinary true crimes that shook England in the early modern period.

...