Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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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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 the answer, found a broken knife handle, took depositions from witnesses more than twenty years before the law required it, and eventually hauled his suspect in front of the Privy Council in Westminster. When that went nowhere, he wrote nine folio pages to Thomas Cromwell and told him he would rather leave the county than keep living like this.

And then the case vanishes from the record entirely.

This episode is about who Robert Grame was, what Gaynesford did, what probably happened to Anastasia Grame, and how much of the past is missing from the documents we have left.

Follow the show so the next one turns up on its own. The autumn collection is up at TudorFair.com, including Bonfires and Boleyns and Sweater Weather and Sovereigns.

Source: William B. Robison, "Murder at Crowhurst: A Case Study in Early Tudor Law Enforcement," Criminal Justice History. The underlying document is Gaynesford's report to Cromwell, State Papers 1/72/76-87, at The National Archives.
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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 for headaches and a truly unreasonable amount of sugar. If you know anything about Elizabeth's teeth, that tracks.

We get into:

Where ambergris actually comes from, and why a kid walking on an English beach can stumble onto $50,000 worth of it

Whether the Tudors really stank, and how much of that reputation we've made up

Miasma theory, and why smelling magnificent was a health strategy and a PR strategy at the same time

Catherine de' Medici, perfumed gloves, and how French perfume as we know it started with a Florentine bride

Mary Queen of Scots' golden pomanders, and the violets-and-sparkling-wine legend that got misattributed to Anne Boleyn for years

What Jude Law wore on the set of Firebrand to play a dying Henry, and why Alicia Vikander couldn't stand to be near him

Fair warning, Jen explains how civet gets harvested and it involves a comparison to taking your dog to the vet. I was not ready.

GIVEAWAY: Jen is giving away a vintage Avon Queen Elizabeth bottle (her torso lifts off, it's wonderful) filled with the Immortal Perfumes scent of the winner's choice. Enter here: https://www.englandcast.com/immortal-perfumes-giveaway/. Closes September 14, US shipping, 18+.

Find Jen: immortalperfumes.com | Immortal Perfumes on Instagram and TikTok | the Immortal Perfumes Substack
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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 Vagrancy laws that I mentioned:

https://youtu.be/q4Gku_0H_kg

📅 TASTE OF TUDORCON, THIS SATURDAY

Free online event, Saturday 29 August, 1pm ET, about two hours. Eight TudorCon speakers each share a piece of their talk: Henry VIII and head trauma, John Dee, the history of English, a dress that took seven years to make, and more. Drop in and out, and there's a replay if you can't make it live.

Register: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com/tasteoftudorcon2026/
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