Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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