Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In 1525, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V broke off his engagement to the young Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and married his cousin Isabella of Portugal instead. The reason? Isabella came with a dowry of 900,000 ducats, and Charles needed the money more than he needed the alliance.

That one financial decision may have changed everything.

In this alternate history, we ask: what if Charles had waited and married Mary? What happens to the English Reformation? To Catherine of Aragon? To Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and the Spanish Armada?
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**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! ***

When I picture Tudor England, I used to picture... white people. Portraits. Ruffs. Henry VIII being grumpy. And then I read Miranda Kaufmann's book Black Tudors.

Because it turns out there were around 200 free Africans living in England during the Tudor period (probably more, but that's what we know for sure). Working, raising families, going to church, getting buried with full rites. And we almost completely forgot about them.

In this episode we're looking at the stories of John Blanke, Jacques Francis, Reasonable Blackman, and Cattelena of Almondsbury. And then I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about: scientific racism, the Enlightenment, Darwin, eugenics, and the strange human pattern of taking progress and using it to build a hierarchy.

Miranda Kaufmann's Black Tudors: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Tudors-Miranda-Kaufmann-audiobook/dp/B076ZS1K75/
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What if one man had never existed? William Tyndale was a scholar, a fugitive, and a martyr who died in 1536 strangled at the stake for committing what his government considered a capital crime: translating the Bible into English. But in doing it, he accidentally invented a huge chunk of the English language. "The powers that be." "Let there be light." "The salt of the earth." "Eat, drink, and be merry." All Tyndale. The King James Bible is 90% his words. Shakespeare grew up reading him. And Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century, called the Tyndale/King James synthesis timeless.

This episode covers the history of the Bible in English before Tyndale, what he actually did and why it was so dangerous, the words and phrases he gave us that we still use today, and the What If: what would English, Shakespeare, the Reformation, and our whole cultural inheritance look like if he had never done it?

Also, the comparison of the Beatitudes comes directly from the book Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer where he spoke about the comparison and showed how well they lined up.
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Did the Tudors steal the throne? Did they brush their teeth? Did they smell? I typed "did the Tudors" into Google and answered every single autocomplete suggestion with actual history. Some answers are surprising, some are horrifying, and at least one involves people deliberately blackening their teeth to look rich. Tudor history is wild and I love it here.

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Someone asked me this from their pool. They were floating around listening to the podcast and thought, "did the people I'm obsessed with ever do this?" And it sent me down a rabbit hole, because the answer is so much more complicated and class-loaded than I expected. In this episode we cover: Why Tudors avoided hot baths (and why that was actually logical given what they believed about disease) Who could swim in Tudor England, and it's the opposite of what you'd expect The first swimming manual ever published in England, written by a Cambridge academic who was simultaneously being expelled for blowing a horn around the college grounds The Thames, which was exactly as bad as you're imaginingThe superstition sailors swore by to protect themselves from drowning, and why it made complete sense Tudor history isn't about dirty people who didn't know any better. It's about people with a completely different framework for understanding the world. Water was essential, deadly, and magical to them all at once.
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