Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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.
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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.
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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
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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/
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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

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