Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Today is May 19th. On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. And in a royal nursery somewhere in Hertfordshire, a two-year-old girl had no idea her mother had just been beheaded on her father's orders.That little girl grew up to be Elizabeth I. And she never - not once in more than four decades on the throne - spoke publicly about her mother. We're looking at what happened to Elizabeth in the immediate aftermath of Anne's execution, how she grew up in the strange in-between space of illegitimacy and royal favour, and how Anne's fingerprints are all over Elizabeth's reign - the religion, the image-making, the famous refusal to marry - even though Elizabeth never said her name out loud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry VIII wasn't content to just be King of England. He needed you to know he was descended from Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity and changed the course of Western history. And he had receipts. Made-up receipts, courtesy of a 12th century Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth, but receipts nonetheless. In this minicast, we look at where this claim came from, why it mattered so much in the 1530s specifically, and why Henry wasn't even close to the only king playing this game. Turns out "I'm descended from a really impressive historical figure" was basically a whole genre of medieval and Tudor political propaganda, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1591, a Cambridge-educated writer named Robert Greene published a pamphlet exposing London's professional con artists. He named their roles, described their techniques, and basically wrote the world's first true crime series. The problem is that he was also personally acquainted with most of the criminals he was writing about. Today we're spending 24 hours with a Tudor cony-catcher. A cony is a rabbit. Easy prey. And the operation these people ran was so organized they had job titles, a professional hierarchy, and their own secret language. Every trick they used still works today. The rabbit just changed shape. The Tudor Planner crowdfunder is here! https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1499, Henry VII had two men in the Tower of London. One claimed to be his wife's long-lost brother. The other was an innocent young man who had been locked up since he was ten years old. And the King and Queen of Spain wouldn't send Catherine of Aragon to England until both of them were dead. This is History as an Empathy Machine, a new thought experiment where we lay out the real options historical figures had and ask: knowing only what they knew, what would YOU have done? Today: Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck, the Earl of Warwick, and Elizabeth of York, who grew up with the man in the Tower and was never allowed to see him again. Tell me in the comments what you would have done. Two questions at the end of the episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What did a Tudor lady in waiting actually do all day? We're spending 24 hours with Anne Basset at Greenwich Palace in 1538, hour by hour from 5am to midnight. Anne served five queens across two decades and survived all of it, which was not guaranteed. We know the details of her life because her mother wrote constantly from Calais asking whether the smocks fit, reminding her to practice her lute instead of gambling, and scheming about how to keep her in the king's good graces. The Lisle Letters are essentially a Tudor-era helicopter parenting archive, and they are extraordinary. In this episode: the sleeping arrangements that would genuinely shock you, the pearl girdle rule that got women turned away at the queen's door, why French fashion was politically dangerous in 1538, what they actually ate and when, the May Day beauty ritual involving hawthorn dew that was completely real, and how Anne managed the very complicated situation of catching Henry VIII's eye at sixteen. She came to court asking for thicker smocks and a little money for her devotions. She left with land grants and a royal wedding Mary I organized personally. One ordinary Tuesday at a time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History has a word for queens who had opinions and refused to be managed. Today we're looking at three of them across three centuries - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Matilda, and Isabella of France - and asking whether "scandalous" means what history wants us to think it means. Eleanor governed, went on crusade, backed her sons against her husband, and got locked in a tower for sixteen years. Henry II never divorced her because Aquitaine went with her. That one fact tells you everything. Matilda had a legitimate claim to the English throne, backed by three sworn oaths from the English nobility. She fought a civil war for six years, won the decisive battle, and came within weeks of her coronation before London rioted and drove her out. History called her arrogant. The chronicles used language for her they would never use for a king doing the same things. Isabella spent twenty years being publicly humiliated by Edward II, had her lands confiscated, watched her children taken from her household -- then went to France on a diplomatic mission and simply didn't come back. She raised an army, removed a failing king, and installed her son on the throne. History called her the She-Wolf of France. That label was borrowed from Shakespeare, applied originally to a completely different queen, and stuck on Isabella by a single poem written four hundred years after her death. Three queens. Three centuries. One verdict: too much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices