Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents. It was an occupation. And then the economy collapsed, the guilds shut women out, and the word became something else entirely. In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyers whose labor underpinned the most important industry in the country. We're talking about the guild system that excluded them from legal protections while depending entirely on their work, the enclosure crisis that pulled the floor out from under their livelihoods, and the Statute of Artificers that gave magistrates the power to imprison women who weren't working hard enough. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 3 June 2026

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

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2026

The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her husband's. But the moment he died? She got it all back. And some of these women knew exactly what that meant. In this episode we're looking at three Tudor women who used widowhood as a strategy... whether they meant to or not. Bess of Hardwick turned four marriages into one of the greatest fortunes in England. Catherine Willoughby turned down a king to marry her servant. And Mary Howard just looked at every remarriage proposal and said no, flatly, repeatedly, forever. Lady in Waiting episode I referenced: ⁠https://youtu.be/W8BgrU76hwc⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 1 June 2026

In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available. She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter. We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 May 2026

In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabella de Fortibus, was on her deathbed to get it. And even then, she made him pay for it. Isabella de Fortibus was a 13th century countess who became one of the wealthiest people in England after a series of family tragedies left her controlling Devon, the Aumale estates in Yorkshire, and the strategically crucial Isle of Wight. Two kings, Henry III and Edward I, spent years trying to force her to remarry and hand over her lands. She said no. Repeatedly. Legally. One suitor actually tried to abduct her, and she bribed a prior and fled to Wales to escape him. She also owned her own personal copy of the statutes of the realm. In the 13th century. A laywoman. And she used it to win dozens of legal battles protecting what was hers. I found Isabella in Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer -highly recommend it if you love this kind of deep dive into the medieval world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2026

It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anything like it at all. The answer is more interesting than I expected. In 1485, when Henry VII takes the throne after the Battle of Bosworth Field, England is basically a collection of feudal relationships. Loyalty runs to your lord, your family, your region -- not to some abstract idea of "England." There's no standing army, no national church, no real sense of a shared national identity. And then the Reformation happens. And everything changes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 May 2026

London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday. The plague is back. Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners. We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record. Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2026

Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I looked, the stranger it got. Here's the surface version. Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner for nineteen years. Elizabeth kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then said she didn't mean it. Then threw her secretary William Davison in the Tower for sending it. And Mary lost her head anyway. The real version involves a beer barrel, a forged postscript, a council that may or may not have acted behind the queen's back, and a secretary who somehow kept his salary the entire time he was imprisoned for treason. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 20 May 2026

Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old girl had no idea her mother had just been beheaded on her father's orders.That little girl grew up to be Elizabeth I. And she never - not once in more than four decades on the throne - spoke publicly about her mother. We're looking at what happened to Elizabeth in the immediate aftermath of Anne's execution, how she grew up in the strange in-between space of illegitimacy and royal favour, and how Anne's fingerprints are all over Elizabeth's reign - the religion, the image-making, the famous refusal to marry - even though Elizabeth never said her name out loud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2026

Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and leave a mess. He made choices. Theologically driven, politically sophisticated choices. From his deathbed. At fifteen. This week's What If looks at the Devise for Succession, the document Edward drafted in his own hand that bypassed both his sisters and put Lady Jane Grey directly in line for the throne. We look at the pressure campaign he ran on his terrified council, and then ask: what if he'd backed down? Spoiler: the cruel irony is that his plan failed completely and the thing he was trying to protect probably survived because of that failure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 18 May 2026

Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity and changed the course of Western history. And he had receipts. Made-up receipts, courtesy of a 12th century Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth, but receipts nonetheless. In this minicast, we look at where this claim came from, why it mattered so much in the 1530s specifically, and why Henry wasn't even close to the only king playing this game. Turns out "I'm descended from a really impressive historical figure" was basically a whole genre of medieval and Tudor political propaganda, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 17 May 2026

In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode, where we slow down and live inside 1509, not just at court but in the guild halls and households of ordinary Londoners who had nowhere to run when the sweating sickness arrived while Henry VIII fled to Windsor. Thomas More wrote some of the most joyful poetry of his life about a king who would later execute him. A Cornish servant woman rode through London on a blue velvet saddle. And a Scottish baby named Arthur was a political provocation in swaddling clothes. This is Henry VIII at seventeen, before everything went wrong. The 2027 Tudor Planner crowdfunder preorder link is here: https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 13 May 2026

In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, described their techniques, and basically wrote the world's first true crime series. The problem is that he was also personally acquainted with most of the criminals he was writing about. Today we're spending 24 hours with a Tudor cony-catcher. A cony is a rabbit. Easy prey. And the operation these people ran was so organized they had job titles, a professional hierarchy, and their own secret language. Every trick they used still works today. The rabbit just changed shape. The Tudor Planner crowdfunder is here! https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2026

It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn. In this What If episode, we play out three scenarios from that single moment of decision: what Cromwell actually chose and why it signed his own death warrant four years later, what happens if he removes Anne without killing her and she becomes a Protestant cause célèbre in exile, and what happens if he does nothing and bets on her survival. None of the roads end well. But they end very differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 11 May 2026

In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had been locked up since he was ten years old. And the King and Queen of Spain wouldn't send Catherine of Aragon to England until both of them were dead. This is History as an Empathy Machine, a new thought experiment where we lay out the real options historical figures had and ask: knowing only what they knew, what would YOU have done? Today: Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck, the Earl of Warwick, and Elizabeth of York, who grew up with the man in the Tower and was never allowed to see him again. Tell me in the comments what you would have done. Two questions at the end of the episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2026

What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole system, and it was more coherent than you'd expect. We dig into the four humors as a complete theory of the mind, Timothy Bright's 1586 Treatise of Melancholie (the first English book on mental illness), music as formally prescribed medical treatment, and the social structures that made room for people who thought differently. We also look at Will Somers, Henry VIII's jester, what Bedlam actually was in the Tudor period, and why the Henry VIII personality change story is more complicated than it first appears. The Tudors were trying to make sense of suffering with the tools they had. Some of those tools were wrong. The impulse behind them is completely recognizable. Music of the Spheres episode is here: https://youtu.be/SPlfSROH4TU Will Sommers episode is here: https://youtu.be/Xs8SwqZXPxc It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and people care about you and your health. If this episode touched something personal: Call or text 988 (US) to reach the Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. You don't have to figure it out alone. Sources: Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), free on Internet Archive. Andrew Boorde, The Breviary of Healthe (1552). Peter Andersson, Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man (2023). Susana Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII. Historic England's overview of mental illness in the 16th and 17th centuries at historicengland.org.uk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 6 May 2026

Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd said no? We explore what Mary's reign might have looked like without a Protestant figurehead to rally around, whether Wyatt's Rebellion would even have happened, and why the answer has less to do with Jane's courage than you might think. Sign up for the Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt here: https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2026

Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character in Tudor history. She is absolutely not. We're covering her daily work, the surprising economic independence the dairy gave women in a world designed to give them none, and why the phrase "as smooth as a milkmaid's skin" is actually encoding centuries of accumulated medical knowledge that eventually gave Edward Jenner the lead for the smallpox vaccine. She woke up before dawn, milked the cows, made the cheese, sold the butter, saved her money, and changed the world in ways no one thought to write her name next to. 🔎 Join the free Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt at englandcast.com. 15 days, 15 clues, ending May 19 on the anniversary of her execution. https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2026

You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that. In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians rely on have a serious bias problem, and what a remarkable piece of recent research from Trinity College Dublin found when they actually reconstructed Tudor beer from 16th century records. And then coffee arrives in England around 1650, and everything changes. Link to the two-sleeps video is here: https://youtu.be/x1Q4tYhLRvA TudorFair.com for the mug! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 April 2026

Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed, badged, opinionated, and completely indispensable. In this episode we spend 24 hours on the river: shooting London Bridge, ferrying Shakespeare's audience to the South Bank, and watching the coaches arrive and take everything away. Plus: John Taylor, the Water Poet, who was furious about all of it and wrote pamphlets to prove it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2026

Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, she outranked duchesses, performed sacraments no other woman was allowed to touch, and knew every secret in the neighborhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 22 April 2026

Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France in 1567 instead of marrying Bothwell? We walk through the real history, then imagine how one different decision might have changed the Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the entire trajectory of the British monarchy. Plus: come join us at TudorCon, October 23-25 in Richmond, Virginia. tudorcon.englandcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 21 April 2026

History says medieval women were powerless. Some of them knew exactly where the power was and went and got it. In this episode I'm looking at four women who built careers, won lawsuits, and left things behind that still exist today, all inside a legal system that was stacked against them. Katherine Fenkyll ran one of the most active cloth businesses in Tudor London for thirty years, negotiated with guilds and cardinals, and took people to court over bad silk. Rose de Burford chased Edward II for an unpaid debt five times while simultaneously producing embroidered vestments for the Pope. Alice Chester took over her late husband's international shipping operation and donated the first crane to the Port of Bristol. And Joan Bradbury founded a school in Saffron Walden that is still open today. None of them were rebels. They were just very good at finding the gaps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 20 April 2026

The story of how a respected Elizabethan botanist looked at a tomato, applied perfectly logical medical reasoning, and concluded that English people shouldn't eat one, and why it took two hundred years for anyone to prove him wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 17 April 2026

Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court occupied 55 rooms, employed 200 men, and burned six tons of wood every single day. This episode spends 24 hours inside that operation, from the scullions lighting fires before dawn to the leftover food going to the poor at the end of the day. We cover the kitchen hierarchy, the staggering food quantities, the spit boy and his very specific idea of a holiday, who ate what and where, and the theft problem that required a royal decree to address. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 14 April 2026

In Tudor England, a dream wasn't private. It was medical evidence, potential divine communication, and possibly a message from Satan. This video explores the three frameworks Tudor people used to understand their dreams, and the story of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, whose visions made her famous across England and then got her executed in 1534. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2026

The Tudor royal nursery wasn't a cozy domestic space. It was a department of state, with its own hierarchy, its own politics, and sworn oaths of loyalty just to rock a cradle. This week we're going inside it: the Lady Mistress running the show, the wet nurses who gave up their families and their freedom to feed someone else's baby, the swaddling operation that occasionally involved hanging an infant on a wall, and the extraordinary lengths Henry VIII went to in order to keep his precious son Edward alive. Plus the women who made all of this work, and whom history mostly forgot to name. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 8 April 2026

In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base for her divine visions. Caterina Sforza was annotating her alchemical recipes with "proven and certain." They never met, but they were solving the same problem. One manuscript was found in a ping-pong cupboard in 1934. The other is still missing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 7 April 2026

What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to midnight. Anne served five queens across two decades and survived all of it, which was not guaranteed. We know the details of her life because her mother wrote constantly from Calais asking whether the smocks fit, reminding her to practice her lute instead of gambling, and scheming about how to keep her in the king's good graces. The Lisle Letters are essentially a Tudor-era helicopter parenting archive, and they are extraordinary. In this episode: the sleeping arrangements that would genuinely shock you, the pearl girdle rule that got women turned away at the queen's door, why French fashion was politically dangerous in 1538, what they actually ate and when, the May Day beauty ritual involving hawthorn dew that was completely real, and how Anne managed the very complicated situation of catching Henry VIII's eye at sixteen. She came to court asking for thicker smocks and a little money for her devotions. She left with land grants and a royal wedding Mary I organized personally. One ordinary Tuesday at a time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 6 April 2026

It's April 1st, and I'm not going to trick you. Instead, let's ask a genuine question: did the Tudors even DO April Fools' Day? The answer is no, not really. But what they did instead is so much more interesting. We dig into the murky origins of April Fools' Day (the most popular origin story is probably itself a myth, which is perfect), the Tudor tradition of licensed misrule, and the story of Will Sommers, Henry VIII's court jester, the only person in England allowed to call the king "Harry" to his face and tell him he was being robbed by his own advisors. He also occasionally had to flee the palace for his own safety. It was a complicated job. No tricks. Just Tudor history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 1 April 2026

History has a word for queens who had opinions and refused to be managed. Today we're looking at three of them across three centuries - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Matilda, and Isabella of France - and asking whether "scandalous" means what history wants us to think it means. Eleanor governed, went on crusade, backed her sons against her husband, and got locked in a tower for sixteen years. Henry II never divorced her because Aquitaine went with her. That one fact tells you everything. Matilda had a legitimate claim to the English throne, backed by three sworn oaths from the English nobility. She fought a civil war for six years, won the decisive battle, and came within weeks of her coronation before London rioted and drove her out. History called her arrogant. The chronicles used language for her they would never use for a king doing the same things. Isabella spent twenty years being publicly humiliated by Edward II, had her lands confiscated, watched her children taken from her household -- then went to France on a diplomatic mission and simply didn't come back. She raised an army, removed a failing king, and installed her son on the throne. History called her the She-Wolf of France. That label was borrowed from Shakespeare, applied originally to a completely different queen, and stuck on Isabella by a single poem written four hundred years after her death. Three queens. Three centuries. One verdict: too much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 31 March 2026

In the 1550s, Tudor England created exiles going both ways. When Mary I came to the throne, Protestants fled. When Elizabeth came to the throne, Catholics fled. Today we're looking at two women caught on opposite sides of that chaos: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, who endured poverty and Lithuania rather than pretend to be Catholic for one single day, and Jane Dormer, Mary I's closest friend, who left England in 1559 and never came back. Both women refused to compromise. Both held onto who they were no matter what it cost them. But one always knew she was going home, and one quietly stopped thinking of England as home at all. This is part of an ongoing series on Tudor women who did things their own way despite what authority was telling them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 March 2026

Thomas Cranmer spent twenty-five years mastering the art of Tudor survival. He was useful, he was careful, he understood exactly how to stay on the right side of the most dangerous king in English history. And it worked, right up until it didn't. Today we're using Cranmer as the ultimate Tudor survival case study: what the rules were, how he followed them, and why he broke every single one of them at the last possible second, on purpose, in the most dramatic way imaginable. If you've ever wondered what it actually took to survive the English Reformation, this is the episode for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 March 2026

Katherine Parr survived Henry VIII -- no small feat -- only to die in childbirth at 36 after rushing into a marriage with Thomas Seymour, the charming, reckless, deeply ambitious man she'd wanted before Henry got in the way. The obvious "what if" is that she lives longer. But the more interesting question is what her survival means for Elizabeth Tudor -- the teenager living in that household, experiencing things no teenager should experience, and then losing the closest thing she had to a mother, all before her sixteenth birthday. In this alternate history episode we look at who Tom Seymour really was, what actually happened at Chelsea, and what a different outcome might have meant -- for Katherine's intellectual and religious work, for the Elizabethan religious settlement, and for whether the woman who became Elizabeth I might have carried a little less armor into her reign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 24 March 2026

Syon Abbey was founded in 1415 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. The community refused to scatter. They waited, came back under Mary, went into exile again under Elizabeth, survived a Calvinist mob in Flanders, 200 years in Lisbon, a 9.0 earthquake, and Napoleon. They finally closed in 2011 -- not because anyone shut them down, but because there were three elderly nuns left and they couldn't maintain the building. This is their story, including the nun who grabbed the abbey seal to stop Henry's officers, the abbess who confronted a mob and died six weeks later, and a community that carried the keys to their original home for 366 years. 👕 The "Sturdy Dame and a Wilful" t-shirt is here: https://tudorfair.com/products/a-sturdy-dame-and-a-wilful-unisex-t-shirt Agnes Smythe would have wanted you to have it. 📚 Sources and further reading: Virginia Bainbridge, "Nuns on the Run: The Sturdy and Wilful Dames of Syon Abbey and their Disobedience to the Tudor State ca. 1530-1600" -- this is the research that recovered the three incidents of nun resistance and is genuinely worth tracking down. The University of Exeter Special Collections has the entire Syon Abbey archive online and it is a wonderful rabbit hole: https://specialcollectionsarchive.exeter.ac.uk/exhibits/show/syon-abbey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 23 March 2026

Anne of Cleves is always called the lucky one. She survived Henry VIII, kept her head, and walked away with Hever Castle and a generous income. But in July 1540 she actually had legal grounds to contest the annulment, a brother with diplomatic leverage, and Katherine of Aragon's playbook sitting right in front of her. So why did she say yes? And was it luck, or was it strategy? This week I'm looking at the decision Anne faced, what refusing might actually have cost her, and the moment after Katherine Howard's execution when Anne apparently decided she wanted back in after all. She wasn't the lucky one. She was the smart one. And I think we've been underselling her for about 500 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 20 March 2026

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, roughly 2,000 nuns lost everything overnight. Their homes, their communities, their vocations, and in many cases the only life they had ever known. We talk endlessly about the monks and the land transfers. We almost never talk about the nuns. In this episode I'm looking at what actually happened to them after the dissolution. Some went home to families. Some married. Some kept living together informally, maintaining their communities without officially calling it a convent. And some, like the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey, went into exile on the continent and refused to stop existing for the next five centuries. The Syon community, dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, was still going in Devon in 2011. We'll also look at what the dissolution really meant for women's options in England long-term, because for roughly three hundred years afterward, there was no structure in England that allowed women to lead communities and exercise real authority. That's not a footnote. That's a seismic shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 18 March 2026

The last Beguine died in 2013. Her name was Marcella Pattyn, she was 92 years old, and she was the final link in an 800-year chain of women who refused to be nuns or wives and built something entirely their own instead. The Beguines lived in community, supported themselves, and wrote theology in languages ordinary people could actually read, all without answering to any bishop, abbot, or husband. The medieval Church had no category for them, and that uncertainty turned dangerous fast. This episode follows the Beguines from their origins in 13th century Belgium and the Netherlands through the trial of Marguerite Porete, a mystic who wrote a book the Church burned twice, sat before the Inquisition in silence for eighteen months, and was executed in Paris in 1310. Her book survived. It's still in print. The begijnhofs her community built are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They were not waiting for permission. They just kept going. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 17 March 2026

Everyone knows the image: the pearls, the sieve, the impossible gown. Elizabeth I as Gloriana, timeless and untouchable. But someone paid for that image. A lot of someones. Today we're following the money behind Tudor image-making, from the Norwich aldermen who spent months of public funds on five days of royal pageantry, to Robert Dudley bankrupting himself at Kenilworth, to Nicholas Hilliard painting the most iconic portraits of the age while struggling to pay his own debts. The Gloriana myth was brilliant. It was also built on a foundation of panicking town councils, bankrupt earls, and poets who never quite got what they were owed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 17 March 2026

Under Tudor law, a married woman didn't legally exist as a financial person. Everything she owned became her husband's the moment she married. She couldn't sign a contract, collect a debt, or run a business in her own name. And yet the account books survive. And they are full of women. Today we're looking at how Tudor women actually managed money in a world that officially pretended they weren't — from Bess of Hardwick knowing to the penny what her glazier charged her, to the mercer's wife who knew cloth better than her husband and they both knew it. The math was never the problem. They had the math covered. Sources and further reading: The Lisle Letters, ed. Muriel St. Clare Byrne Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady Mary S. Lovell, Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth Katherine Fenkyll episode: https://youtu.be/QggqaYpPbe4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 12 March 2026

Before Katherine Parr became Henry VIII's sixth wife, she spent eight years at Snape Castle in North Yorkshire as Lady Latimer. In January 1537, armed rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace showed up while her husband was away, took her and her stepchildren hostage, and ransacked the place. I think that moment explains everything about who Katherine became. Play the game here: https://www.englandcast.com/choose-your-path-snape-castle/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 11 March 2026

What if Mary I's phantom pregnancy in 1555 had been real? In this episode, I trace what happens to Elizabeth, the Church of England, the Spanish Armada, Mary Queen of Scots, and even English-speaking America if one baby had actually arrived. Spoiler: almost nothing about the modern world looks the same. Related "What if" - what if Elizabeth had married early? https://youtu.be/Al8K_oLHEIY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 10 March 2026

Related episode on Isabella Whitney: https://youtu.be/JoSeTYE22SE Before newspapers, before coffeehouses, Tudor England had its own chaotic information ecosystem, and it reached further down the social ladder than most people realize. In this episode we're looking at who could actually read, what ordinary people were reading (broadside ballads, almanacs, monster news), and how the Crown kept losing the information war no matter how hard it tried. Turns out the Tudor relationship with fake news, spin, and banned texts looks a lot more familiar than you'd expect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 9 March 2026

When Bridget of York, youngest daughter of Edward IV, chose a life at Dartford Priory over marriage to a Scottish prince, most people assume she had no better options. They're wrong. The Tudor convent wasn't a consolation prize. It was the only institution in England that offered women real governance experience, education, community, and a life that didn't depend on surviving childbirth or a husband's political fortunes. Abbesses ran estates and managed finances.Nuns elected their own leaders based on merit. When Cromwell's commissioners showed up before the dissolution and asked every single nun if she wanted to leave, virtually none said yes. Then Henry VIII closed all of it down. Over 800 houses, gone in four years. And for women, it wasn't just a religious change. It was the elimination of the only exit option they had. Today we're talking about what the convent actually was, who chose it and why, and what it meant when it disappeared. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 6 March 2026

The Tudor court was one of the most glamorous, exciting, and genuinely terrifying places in the world. And the people who lost their heads there were not stupid. Thomas More was a legal genius. Cromwell basically invented modern bureaucracy. Wolsey ran England for fifteen years. So what went wrong? Today we're building the actual survival guide. The real unwritten rules that separated the people who died in their beds from the people who died on Tower Hill. Spoiler: it is more complicated than "don't annoy the king." Topics covered: why being the most powerful person in the room will get you killed, how information could be currency or a death sentence, why your religion was a political decision you had to remake every few years, and why loyalty was sometimes the most dangerous thing you could offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 4 March 2026

In 1419, Joan of Navarre, dowager queen of England and stepmother to Henry V, was arrested for witchcraft and necromancy. There was no trial. Her income was seized immediately. And Henry V, the king she supposedly tried to murder with wax figures and dark magic, freed her on his deathbed and wrote that he feared for his soul because of what he had done to her. So what actually happened? Joan's story takes us from the court of her father Charles the Bad, through two marriages and a regency, to one of the most cynical financial scams in medieval English history. Henry V needed money for his French campaigns. Joan was sitting on roughly ten percent of the entire Crown's annual revenue. And someone, somewhere, found a way to make that a treason charge. This is the story of a woman history forgot, and the king who made sure she'd be forgotten. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 3 March 2026

Margaret Pole was 67 years old when Henry VIII had her executed. She wasn't plotting. She wasn't scheming. She was an old woman in the Tower whose son kept writing angry letters from Rome calling Henry a heretic. So today we're playing a game. What if Reginald Pole had kept his opinions to himself? Could Margaret have survived to see Mary on the throne? I think the answer is yes, and the story of why is one of the most infuriating what-ifs in all of Tudor history. We're talking about a man who had every possible advantage, chose righteousness over his mother's life, and then got a whole second act anyway. Margaret didn't. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 2 March 2026

We think of the Tudor period as velvet and poetry and dramatic executions. We do not think of it as siege warfare. That's a mistake. In this episode I'm looking at three Tudor sieges that completely wrecked my assumptions about this era: - Henry VIII personally showing up to besiege a French city (and having to be hoisted onto his horse to get there), - a Protestant reformer who ended up as a galley slave after one of the most dramatic castle standoffs in Scottish history, - and a massacre on an Irish headland that the Elizabethan golden age narrative tends to skip past. Gunpowder was changing everything in this period. The Tudors were living in a world of constant violence and instability that the pretty portraits don't show us. And some of the most consequential moments of the 16th century happened not in a court or a council chamber, but outside a set of walls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 28 February 2026

Katherine Howard is remembered as the tragic teenager who lost her head at seventeen. But what if she didn't have to? In the winter of 1541, everyone at the English court thought Henry VIII was dying. They were just waiting him out. All Katherine had to do was survive a few more months. And then Cranmer slipped that letter under Henry's door, and everything fell apart. But what if two things had gone differently? What if Katherine had gotten pregnant during her secret meetings with Thomas Culpepper? And what if Henry had died when everyone expected him to? Today we're following that thread all the way to the ending Katherine Howard never got. I've also been reading Philippa Gregory's newest book, The Boleyn Traitor, and it gave me a lot to think about regarding Jane Boleyn's role in all of this. Links below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 February 2026

In 1538, a man named Geoffrey Pole was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. He hadn't plotted against Henry VIII. He hadn't raised an army. He'd written letters to his brother and said, once, that he wished he could see him. That was enough. What followed was one of the most psychologically devastating interrogations of the Tudor period, and one of the least talked about. Over seven sessions, Geoffrey gave evidence that brought down his entire family: his brother Lord Montagu, his cousin Henry Courtenay the Marquess of Exeter, and eventually his 67-year-old mother Margaret Pole, the last surviving Plantagenet. He survived. He was pardoned. He spent the next twenty years in exile carrying what he'd done. This is not really a spy story. It's a story about what surveillance states actually run on, not information, but fear. And about the brother who burned the family from a safe distance in Rome and somehow came out of it as Archbishop of Canterbury. Tudor history has been calling Geoffrey Pole weak for five centuries. I want to make the case that we don't get to say that from here. 📧 Join 13,000+ Tudor fans on my email list: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter 🏰 TudorCon 2025 — tickets and info: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com #TudorHistory #HenryVIII #Tudor #HistoryYouTube #BritishHistory #MedievalHistory #RenaissanceHistory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 February 2026