Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

I'm in the UK this week, so I dug into the archive and found this gem from way back when approximately six people were watching my channel. It's an interview with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times about her book The King's Pearl, and honestly, it wrecked what I thought I knew about Mary I.

We get into how Henry VIII was building Mary a whole fancy apartment at Whitehall years before Catherine Parr ever showed up, which blows apart the story we usually hear about how Mary got back in her dad's good graces. Turns out Mary was also a serious gambler, gave money to Welsh strangers on the street to hang onto her old title as Princess of Wales, and played some savvy political games with Cromwell and the imperial ambassador while everyone thought she was just quietly enduring her fate.

She was not the tragic, broken figure we've been sold. She was scheming, charming, funny, and a lot more in control than history gives her credit for. Lots of new stuff coming your way soon once I'm back from my UK travels, but I promise this old episode holds up.
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This is a throwback from the very first Tudor Summit back in 2017, the little online conference that eventually grew into TudorCon. I'm digging through the archives while I'm traveling in the UK, and I found this one with art historian Roland Hui, and it's just as fascinating now as it was then.

Roland walks through the six wives one by one and it's honestly wild how much detective work goes into figuring out who's actually in these paintings. Catherine of Aragon has tiny roses and Ks hidden in her jewelry to show off her new Tudor loyalty.

Anne Boleyn's most famous portrait wasn't even painted until Elizabeth's reign, decades after Anne died, so we're not even 100% sure it looks like her. And that whole "Flanders mare" story about Anne of Cleves? Roland explains why that's probably more about Henry's ego than her actual portrait.

We also get into how historians use things like jewelry inventories to figure out who's really in a painting (the Catherine Parr one that used to be labeled as Jane Grey is a great example), plus a preview of Roland's research into why Anne Boleyn got saddled with a "witch" reputation that didn't even show up until centuries after she died.

Roland Hui is the author of "The Turbulent Crown: The Story of the Tudor Queens" and has written for Renaissance Magazine and Tudor Life Magazine.
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In 1547, Parliament passed a law saying that if you refused to work, even for nothing but food, you could be branded and handed over as a slave for two years. Your children could be taken.

They repealed it in two years. Not because anyone softened toward the poor, but because barely anybody would enforce it.

This episode is about how England spent the sixteenth century building a welfare system and a punishment regime at exactly the same time, out of exactly the same panic, and usually in the same paragraph of the same statute. It's about a country whose money was getting worse and whose food was getting dearer, with no concept of inflation to explain any of it. It's about the parish accounts where the same neighbours who paid for a dying woman's shroud also paid to have a sick stranger carried over the boundary before he could die on their books.

And it's about Thomas Harman, a Kentish magistrate who in 1566 published a bestselling exposé of fake beggars, complete with a dictionary of their secret criminal slang, and more or less invented a character we are still arguing about today.

The law they finally landed on in 1601 stood until 1834. Two hundred and thirty three years.

📬 I write a free newsletter with Tudor words of the week, games, news stories, behind the scenes, and the bits that don't fit in a video: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/
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A woman is found at the bottom of a staircase in 1560. And the one person who benefits most from it is the Queen of England.

This week I'm digging into one of the wildest what-ifs in Tudor history. Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, dies suddenly at Cumnor Place, right when the rumors were already swirling that Dudley meant to get rid of her so he could marry Elizabeth I. The obstacle is gone. The queen could have married the man she loved. And she said no anyway.

I wanted to know what would have happened if she'd said yes. Turns out it touches everything, her entire approach to foreign policy, the Mary Queen of Scots plots, even whether she'd ever have had to sign that execution warrant. There's no clean answer here, and that's what makes it such a good one.

Also, quick note, I've built an app called Tudor Scroll. Daily Tudor puzzle, all your favorite Tudor creators in one feed, and more. Android testers are in now (thank you all so much) and iPhone is about to go into final App Store testing. Want in early? Email heather@englandcast.com.

Related episodes:

Jill McCracken on her murder mystery podcast

https://youtu.be/yplUI7pbEWY

Janet Wertman on the woman who had Robert Dudley's baby: https://youtu.be/2UEyw4q_dto

Tudor Times' Melita Thomas on Robert Dudley: https://youtu.be/Bot35V6CPCo
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There is a Catholic saint whose actual job, canonized and everything, is patron of magic tricks. Escapologists. Illusionists. And he earned it the hard way: by spending nearly twenty years building hiding places so good that people still can't find them today, standing right next to them, with a guidebook in hand.

Nicholas Owen was a small, injured, entirely unremarkable-looking carpenter. He was also the most important man in Elizabethan and Jacobean England's Catholic underground, a one-man counter-surveillance operation who broke a priest out of the Tower of London, built hides that beat the hunters' own measuring tricks, and kept every single location locked in his head so it could never be tortured out of anyone else.

This is his story, the arms race he ran against the state, the night at Hindlip Hall when the escape artist chose to appear instead of vanish, and what happened to him in the Tower afterward.

Plus: a heads up on a free live illumination workshop I'm doing tomorrow with the wonderful Julia Bangert, teaching you to paint a Tudor rose in true medieval style. Link below.

🌹 Free illumination workshop w/ Julia, tomorrow 12pm ET: https://page.co/kxj56n
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