Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

The Tudor court was one of the most glamorous, exciting, and genuinely terrifying places in the world. And the people who lost their heads there were not stupid. Thomas More was a legal genius. Cromwell basically invented modern bureaucracy. Wolsey ran England for fifteen years. So what went wrong?

Today we're building the actual survival guide. The real unwritten rules that separated the people who died in their beds from the people who died on Tower Hill. Spoiler: it is more complicated than "don't annoy the king."

Topics covered: why being the most powerful person in the room will get you killed, how information could be currency or a death sentence, why your religion was a political decision you had to remake every few years, and why loyalty was sometimes the most dangerous thing you could offer.
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In 1419, Joan of Navarre, dowager queen of England and stepmother to Henry V, was arrested for witchcraft and necromancy. There was no trial. Her income was seized immediately. And Henry V, the king she supposedly tried to murder with wax figures and dark magic, freed her on his deathbed and wrote that he feared for his soul because of what he had done to her.

So what actually happened? Joan's story takes us from the court of her father Charles the Bad, through two marriages and a regency, to one of the most cynical financial scams in medieval English history. Henry V needed money for his French campaigns. Joan was sitting on roughly ten percent of the entire Crown's annual revenue. And someone, somewhere, found a way to make that a treason charge.

This is the story of a woman history forgot, and the king who made sure she'd be forgotten.
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Margaret Pole was 67 years old when Henry VIII had her executed. She wasn't plotting. She wasn't scheming. She was an old woman in the Tower whose son kept writing angry letters from Rome calling Henry a heretic.

So today we're playing a game. What if Reginald Pole had kept his opinions to himself? Could Margaret have survived to see Mary on the throne? I think the answer is yes, and the story of why is one of the most infuriating what-ifs in all of Tudor history.

We're talking about a man who had every possible advantage, chose righteousness over his mother's life, and then got a whole second act anyway.

Margaret didn't.
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We think of the Tudor period as velvet and poetry and dramatic executions. We do not think of it as siege warfare. That's a mistake.

In this episode I'm looking at three Tudor sieges that completely wrecked my assumptions about this era:

- Henry VIII personally showing up to besiege a French city (and having to be hoisted onto his horse to get there),

- a Protestant reformer who ended up as a galley slave after one of the most dramatic castle standoffs in Scottish history,

- and a massacre on an Irish headland that the Elizabethan golden age narrative tends to skip past.

Gunpowder was changing everything in this period. The Tudors were living in a world of constant violence and instability that the pretty portraits don't show us. And some of the most consequential moments of the 16th century happened not in a court or a council chamber, but outside a set of walls.

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Katherine Howard is remembered as the tragic teenager who lost her head at seventeen. But what if she didn't have to?

In the winter of 1541, everyone at the English court thought Henry VIII was dying. They were just waiting him out. All Katherine had to do was survive a few more months. And then Cranmer slipped that letter under Henry's door, and everything fell apart.

But what if two things had gone differently? What if Katherine had gotten pregnant during her secret meetings with Thomas Culpepper? And what if Henry had died when everyone expected him to?

Today we're following that thread all the way to the ending Katherine Howard never got.

I've also been reading Philippa Gregory's newest book, The Boleyn Traitor, and it gave me a lot to think about regarding Jane Boleyn's role in all of this. Links below!
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