Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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 boys, two teenage dukes of Suffolk who died of the sweat on the same morning in 1551, and their mother Katherine Willoughby, trying to make sense of it through her new Protestant faith. We look at what people lost when the Reformation took away purgatory, plague saints and prayers for the dead, right while the plague kept coming. And we meet Bartholomew Steer, who planned a rising in the hungry 1590s and had four men show up.

I made this one because so many of us are feeling a low hum of dread about big things we can't control right now. The Tudors don't have all the answers, but they have some surprisingly useful ones, and a bit of plague comedy too.

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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 inside the old faith, where the monks went when their homes were pulled down, and why the sonnet turned out to be the perfect way to tell this story. Our friend Gerry joined us live with some great questions about the manuscripts lost when the monasteries fell.

Find Richard at richardsmithwriting.com and on Instagram @richardsmithwriting.

Get Beyond Where Words Can Go:Bauhan Publishing: https://bauhanpublishing.com/shop/beyond-where-words/Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/beyond-where-words-can-go-a-novel-in-200-sonnets-richard-smith/7f97cae4082d4972Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beyond-where-words-can-go-richard-smith/1148428273?ean=9780872334007Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Where-Words-Can-Go/dp/0872334007/
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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 his little daughter were in the house, and a teenage Philip Sidney was sheltering with them while refugees came to his door.

We'll also follow the news back to England, including the refugees who landed at Rye, and look at how quickly grief turned into a demand for safety, both in 1572 and in 2001.

Take care of each other this week, and if you want to, tell me in the comments where you were.
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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 expenses recording him losing twenty crowns at a game called Pope Julius to "my lady Marques," which is Anne Boleyn, on the road home from Calais in November 1532. Possibly during their first week of marriage, if you believe Edward Hall.

But nobody was reading cards. Not tarot, which was a card game in Italy and never really crossed the Channel, and not ordinary playing cards either, at least not in any way we can evidence before the middle of the seventeenth century. Tarot divination was invented in 1781 by a French pastor who decided the deck was secretly ancient Egyptian, at a time when nobody alive could read a hieroglyph.

What Tudor England had instead was stranger and much more practical. Two acts of Parliament in the same session, one banning cards for labourers on the grounds that it was ruining English archery, the other making witchcraft a felony and naming as its chief targets treasure hunters and people who found your stolen property. A countrywide trade in divination using a sieve balanced on a pair of shears. And one Kentish gentleman who sat down to argue that witches weren't real and accidentally wrote the first book in English explaining how card tricks work.

Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by Context Travel, who took me round Hampton Court Palace this summer in a group of six with a guide who actually knows the historiography. The on-location video from that day is coming to the channel soon. contexttravel.com
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