Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In the 1530s, a little paper book was passed around Anne Boleyn’s household. Her ladies and their friends copied poems into it, wrote their own, and argued about them in the margins. And it still exists!

It’s called the Devonshire Manuscript. In this episode I’m telling the story of the people who wrote in it. Mary Shelton gets a love poem with her name hidden in it, and her friend Margaret Douglas scribbles “forget this” next to it.

Margaret, Henry VIII’s niece, secretly marries Thomas Howard, and the two of them end up in th...

In August 1588, England beat the Spanish Armada. Weeks later, the sailors who did it were dying in the streets of Margate, sick and unpaid, with nowhere to go. So did the Tudors do anything for their veterans?

It's Veterans Day, so I went looking, and the answer surprised me. We'll get into why Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries left wounded soldiers with nowhere to turn, why villagers were scared of the men walking home from Elizabeth's wars, and how England ended up with one of the first pension schemes for disabled servicemen. Along the way there's...

Pour yourself a cup of tea (or a mug of hot cider) and settle in for a cozy Tudor autumn romance. It’s Michaelmas, 1576, and Cecily Fenn has come down from London to buy an orchard’s apple crop for as little as she can. She’s allowed four days. Five if it rains. She did not plan on a runaway goose, a very stubborn orchard keeper, a charming rival with a lovely hat, or a storm that puts the whole harvest at risk. After you all enjoyed my Halloween audio story so much, I wanted to make another one, a...

It’s November 5th, and I’ve told the Gunpowder Plot before, but never like this. This time I’m telling it as the thriller it really was.

Secret oaths sworn in a London inn. A soldier who renamed himself Guido and spent months guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. An anonymous letter delivered in the dark, a midnight raid, and a gallop across the Midlands on stolen horses. And a final standoff where the conspirators managed to set their own gunpowder on fire. I could not believe some of this when I read it.

In the summer of 1546, Henry VIII signed a warrant for the arrest of his sixth wife. Katherine Parr found out because somebody dropped it on the floor. Today we're spending time with the queen who's usually remembered as Henry's nurse, and I think that does her a real disservice. Before she ever married the king, Katherine had been held hostage by rebels in a Yorkshire castle. As queen, she ran England as regent while Henry was at war in France, and she became the first woman to publish a book in English under her own name. She also turned...

It’s the Wednesday after TudorCon and I’m finally coming up for air! I’m so excited to share Nathen Amin’s keynote with you. This was Nathen’s first ever talk in America, and it only took us six years to get him here. Nathen walks us through how Henry VII, the great-great-great-grandson of a king (through a female line with a whiff of illegitimacy, no less), convinced an entire country he was supposed to be on the throne. And the man put his message on EVERYTHING. Red dragons and Welsh prophecy, the Tudor rose, a fertility-themed bed of sta...

Long before anyone in England was hanged as a witch, ordinary women had a magic of their own. They wrapped parchment girdles covered in prayers around their bellies in labor. They borrowed holy relics from the parish like library books. They baked cakes in total silence on St Agnes’ Eve, hoping to dream of the man they’d marry. Nobody called them witches. It was just how you got through life.

In this audio episode, I follow what happened to that magic from the 1400s to the Pendle trials of 1612. You’ll meet Eleanor Cobham, who went to the...

This summer I travelled around the south of England staying in historic inns, and stop number three was the White Horse in Dorking, Surrey. There's been a building on this spot since at least 1278, when it belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, and it later became one of the big coaching inns on the road from London to Horsham.

We got there way too early to check in, so we played board games at Game N Play (a board game café AND a ukulele shop). Then I fell in love with St Martin's Church, spent far too long i...

Henry VIII didn't dismantle the Church in England. He took it over, one step at a time, and the plan looks an awful lot like a hostile corporate takeover. Squeeze the leadership, take the board, cut off Rome, audit everything, find some dirt, close the small houses first, and then come for the big ones.

In this episode I walk through the whole playbook, from the 1531 fine on the clergy to the abbot of Glastonbury being dragged up the Tor in 1539. And I make the case for the people it was run on, the monks, nuns and...

By All Saints' Day in Tudor London, the sun was down by quarter past four. In the final episode of our autumn series, we find out how the Tudors got ready for the long dark, in their bodies, in their homes, and in their hearts. We start with the health books. Sir Thomas Elyot warned that autumn was "dangerous to all ages, all natures, and all countries," and Andrew Boorde had a whole diet for melancholy people (no red wine, sorry!). Then we light the mutton-fat candles with Thomas Tusser, find out why one doctor thought the smell of...

Every September, all of Tudor England was on the move. In episode 3 of our autumn series, we climb the social ladder one rung at a time, from a seventeen-year-old farm servant looking for next year's job all the way up to Queen Elizabeth watching sea gods row across a lake that was dug just for her. On the way, we find out why quitting your job without a written testimonial could land you in prison in 1563, wander through Stourbridge Fair (one of the biggest fairs in Europe, right outside Cambridge), peek into Sir William Petre's household accounts at Ingatestone...

The harvest is in. Now what? In episode 2 of our autumn series, we head out into the Tudor village with the best guide I could possibly have found: Thomas Tusser, a former choirboy and court musician who walked away from court, became a Suffolk farmer, and wrote an entire farming manual in rhyme.

We crash a harvest home celebration spotted near Windsor by a German traveller in 1598, follow the gleaners into the stubble and the pigs into the woods, and find out why "mast fats up swine, mast kills up kine." Then we spend time with the...

September 29th was one of the biggest days of the Tudor year, and most of us have never heard of it. Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael and All Angels, was when rent came due, farm servants' contracts ran out, London chose its Lord Mayor, and the lawyers and students all headed back to town. It was also goose day, and the reason tenants turned up at the landlord's door with a goose under their arm is funnier (and a little sadder) than you'd think. This is episode 1 of a four-part series on how the Tudors got ready for...

The rebellion is over in three weeks. Wat Tyler is dead, the charters are revoked, John Ball is executed, and by every measure that historians usually use, the Peasants' Revolt failed completely. Except that the tax that started it was never levied again in the same way for a hundred and thirty two years.

The next general poll tax in England comes in 1513, under Henry VIII, and even then the government moved carefully. For four generations, the memory of 1381 sat in the room every time Parliament talked about taxing ordinary people.

In this final part...

In two weeks in June 1381, English peasants drove a Chief Justice out of Essex, took Rochester Castle, walked into Canterbury Cathedral, camped outside London, burned the richest palace in the country, and then walked into the Tower of London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. And a fourteen-year-old king rode out to meet them and said yes to everything they asked for.

This is Part 3 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, told day by day, from Brentwood on 30 May to the night of 14 June with the rebels holding London. We cover Wat Tyler, who has no...

In 1377, England counted about 1,355,000 adults for a new poll tax. In 1381 it counted again and found about 896,000. There was no great plague, no famine and no invasion. So where did a third of the country go?

They were at home. Village after village sent in tax lists with far more men than women, because families had simply stopped telling the government their daughters, sisters and widowed mothers existed.

In Part 2 of my series on the Peasants' Revolt, I look at the 30 years that pushed England to breaking point. We cover the labour laws that fined...

In June 1381, rebels broke into John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, the wealthiest house in England. They smashed the gold plate, crushed the jewels with hammers and threw the silver in the Thames. According to one chronicler, when a man was caught stealing, his own side threw him into the fire.So how do ordinary villagers get to that point?

In Part 1 of a four-part series on the Peasants' Revolt, I go back to the beginning. That means the rain of 1315, a famine so bad the king couldn't buy bread, a cattle plague that took the milk away...

Every year in Tudor England, the weather warmed up and people wondered if this would be a plague year. On top of plague there was the sweating sickness, which could kill you between dinner and supper, plus a flu pandemic and years of failed harvests when bread prices tripled. So how did ordinary people live with that constant hum of "something terrible might happen"?

In this episode we go outbreak by outbreak, from the first sweat in 1485 to the plague that greeted James I in 1603, and ask how people coped at every stop. We meet the Brandon...

What happens to your whole world when the king decides your faith is wrong? Richard Smith's new book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, follows two young Benedictine monks, a lord's youngest son and a foundling left on the monastery doorstep, through Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and all the back and forth of the English Reformation. And it's told entirely in sonnets. Two hundred of them!

Richard is a clinical psychologist in Washington, DC who started writing sonnets for his dog (yes, really), and I loved talking with him about what it felt like to live...

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Twenty-five years ago today, I was at my desk in Soho, emailing my friends about Thanksgiving plans, when one of them told me to open Yahoo because something big was happening in New York. For the anniversary, I wanted to tell you where I was that day. Then I want to take you back to another morning that started out completely normal: Paris, August 1572.

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre began just days after a royal wedding that was supposed to bring peace. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's ambassador, was right in the middle of it. His pregnant wife and...

In 1540, a printer in Venice published a beautiful, enormous book that let you tell your fortune with a deck of cards. The same year Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves, annulled it, and married Catherine Howard on the day Thomas Cromwell was executed.

So I went looking for the English version of that book. There isn't one. And working out why turned into a much better episode than the one I set out to make.

The Tudors were obsessed with cards. Henry gambled at them constantly, and there's an entry in his own Privy Purse...

In August 1532 a charcoal burner named Robert Grame was murdered in a wood in Surrey. He worked alone, he carried a checkered board so he could count his money out there among the trees, and half the county seems to have known it.

What happened next is why we can still tell this story. The local justice of the peace, Sir John Gaynesford, was an old man who had no obligation to do any of this well, and he did it beautifully. He examined the body, checked for signs of suicide because a widow's survival depended on...

There is a written recipe for Henry VIII's perfume. It's in a 1608 book called A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and it's rosewater, sugar, musk, ambergris, and civet, boiled down softly for an entire day. I had no idea that existed until I sat down with Jen Siems of Immortal Perfumes, who has spent 14 years building fragrances out of archival research.

Jen is a self-taught perfumer and a former English teacher, which means she talks about rare book rooms the way most people talk about their favorite TV show. She also has Elizabeth's recipe, which includes marjoram...

In July 1549, a crowd in Norfolk showed up to tear down Robert Kett's fences. Instead of stopping them, he agreed with them, helped pull down his own hedges, and led them to Norwich. What followed was seven weeks of about 16,000 people running the county from a camp on Mousehold Heath, with a court, a supply system and a signed list of demands. It ended at the Battle of Dussindale on 27 August 1549.This one has been on my list for seventeen years and I somehow never made it. Fixing that today.

Related video on Tudor...

Join me for Taste of TudorCon, a free online preview of this year's conference, on August 29th: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/

A skilled craftsman in early Tudor London earned sixpence for a day's work. I've been staring at that number for ages, because on its own it tells you nothing. Sixpence out of what? Buys what? Compared to whom?So I went digging, and it turns out if you follow that one coin up and down the Tudor social ladder you end up seeing the whole society. The housemaid on a pound a year. The brewer...

I just watched Nolan's Odyssey and went down a rabbit hole: did the Tudors even know this story? Turns out, not the way you'd think.

For most of the dynasty, England's version of the Trojan War came from a completely different, largely invented medieval tradition, one that literally cut the gods out of the story. The real, translated Homer didn't arrive in English until the dynasty was basically over.

In this one: two forged "eyewitness" accounts of the Trojan War, the first book ever printed in English, the Tudors' fake Trojan ancestor Brutus, Cambridge's Greek...

I got on a Zoom call with two Blue Badge guides from Context Travel, and by the end of it I had a list of about a dozen places in London I've never been and now desperately need to see.

Sean spent almost 30 years in financial services before deciding life was too short not to spend it obsessing over history and art instead.

Caroline taught history at a girls' school and specialized in Edward VI, the Tudor everyone skips past on the way from the six wives to Elizabeth I.

We talked about...

So I recently went to England to sleep in historic places. This is the first episode of a mini series I'm calling Heather Stays in Olde Inns, because England is full of medieval places to stay, and I wanted to stay in them. First stop: The Mermaid Inn in Rye.

The cellars here date back to 1156. The building you see today went up in 1420, after the French burned the whole town to the ground in 1377 (yes, really). A very organized gang of 18th century smugglers used the place as one of their bases. There are still tunnels...

In 1513, Charles Brandon knelt in front of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and lifted the ring right off her finger. Twice. The gossip reached all the way to her father, the Holy Roman Emperor, and for a minute, Henry VIII was actually pushing for his best friend to marry one of the most powerful women in Europe.It never happened. But what if it had?

In this episode I dig into the real story behind the ring, why the marriage was never actually going to happen, and what it would have meant for England, the...

This conversation totally rearranged some things in my brain. I sat down with Tracy Borman, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces, to talk about her new novel The House of Boleyn, and it flips the whole family on its head.

Thomas Boleyn, the guy we all love to hate as the scheming dad pimping out his daughters? Tracy did the research and found basically none of that. He comes across as actually protective, terrified of what Henry could do to Anne.

And Jane Boleyn, who Wolf Hall (and basically everyone else) paints as the ultimate...

Okay so today's episode is a blast from the past, but stick with me because it's a good one. Back in 2016 I had James Bolton from the Queens of England Podcast on to talk about Bessie Blount, and it completely changed how I think about Henry VIII's love life.

Here's the thing everyone gets wrong: we've all heard "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" a thousand times, but almost nobody talks about his mistresses. And there's this whole historian debate about whether Henry only had two affairs his entire life, which, come on. James makes a really...

I'm in the UK this week, so I dug into the archive and found this gem from way back when approximately six people were watching my channel. It's an interview with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times about her book The King's Pearl, and honestly, it wrecked what I thought I knew about Mary I.

We get into how Henry VIII was building Mary a whole fancy apartment at Whitehall years before Catherine Parr ever showed up, which blows apart the story we usually hear about how Mary got back in her dad's good graces. Turns out Mary...

This is a throwback from the very first Tudor Summit back in 2017, the little online conference that eventually grew into TudorCon. I'm digging through the archives while I'm traveling in the UK, and I found this one with art historian Roland Hui, and it's just as fascinating now as it was then.

Roland walks through the six wives one by one and it's honestly wild how much detective work goes into figuring out who's actually in these paintings. Catherine of Aragon has tiny roses and Ks hidden in her jewelry to show off her new Tudor loyalty. <...

In 1547, Parliament passed a law saying that if you refused to work, even for nothing but food, you could be branded and handed over as a slave for two years. Your children could be taken.

They repealed it in two years. Not because anyone softened toward the poor, but because barely anybody would enforce it.

This episode is about how England spent the sixteenth century building a welfare system and a punishment regime at exactly the same time, out of exactly the same panic, and usually in the same paragraph of the same statute. It's...

A woman is found at the bottom of a staircase in 1560. And the one person who benefits most from it is the Queen of England.

This week I'm digging into one of the wildest what-ifs in Tudor history. Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, dies suddenly at Cumnor Place, right when the rumors were already swirling that Dudley meant to get rid of her so he could marry Elizabeth I. The obstacle is gone. The queen could have married the man she loved. And she said no anyway.

I wanted to know what would...

There is a Catholic saint whose actual job, canonized and everything, is patron of magic tricks. Escapologists. Illusionists. And he earned it the hard way: by spending nearly twenty years building hiding places so good that people still can't find them today, standing right next to them, with a guidebook in hand.

Nicholas Owen was a small, injured, entirely unremarkable-looking carpenter. He was also the most important man in Elizabethan and Jacobean England's Catholic underground, a one-man counter-surveillance operation who broke a priest out of the Tower of London, built hides that beat the hunters' own measuring...

FREE ILLUMINATION WORKSHOP Royal Letters: How to Paint a Tudor Rose Initial, with illuminator Julia Bangert. Tuesday. Free, total beginners genuinely welcome, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording. https://page.co/kxj56n

Somebody is knocking on your door. You know who it is. And upstairs, folded into a hole in the wall behind your fireplace, is a man whose presence in your house can get you killed.Last time I told you about John Gerard, the Jesuit who escaped the Tower of London on...

In 1588, a tall, well-dressed gentleman rode through Norfolk talking about hawks with anyone who'd listen. He had a gilt-handled rapier, excellent French, and impeccable manners. He also had a Mass kit hidden in his saddlebags and a hair shirt under his doublet, because he was a Jesuit priest in a country where that was a capital offense.

John Gerard spent seventeen years running an underground network across Elizabethan England. He built safe houses, ran couriers, sent at least thirty men abroad to train for the priesthood, and stayed one step ahead of Walsingham's intelligence apparatus. When they...

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Everyone knows Henry VIII's divorce saga. He wanted out, the Pope said no, he invented a new church. Problem solved, if you're the king.

But what about his wives? What about any Tudor woman trapped in a terrible marriage? Could she leave?

The answer is technically yes. There were legal mechanisms: annulment, formal separation, informal arrangements. The Church courts were open for business.

The catch is that the system was designed to be so narrow, so expensive, and so humiliating...