Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Episoder

• 
  How the Tudors Decided Who Deserved to Eat 22.07.2026 28min

  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 They repealed it in two years.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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  What If Elizabeth I Had Married Robert Dudley? (The Decision That Nearly Broke Her) 21.07.2026 26min

  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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Priest Hunter's Nightmare: Nicholas Owen and the Hiding Places No One Could Find 20.07.2026 22min

  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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Women Who Hid Priests in Their Walls 17.07.2026 25min

  FREE ILLUMINATION WORKSHOP Royal Letters: How to Paint a Tudor Rose Initial, with illuminator Julia Bangert. Tuesday. Free, total beginners genuinely welcome, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording. https://page.co/kxj56n Somebody is knocking on your door. You know who it is. And upstairs, folded into a hole in the wall behind your fireplace, is a man whose presence in your house can get you killed.Last time I told you about John Gerard, the Jesuit who escaped the Tower of London on a rope. But Gerard had to sleep somewhere. He had to say Mass somewhere. He had to hide somewhere. And house after house after house, the person answering the door was a woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Priest Who Escaped the Tower of London 14.07.2026 24min

  In 1588, a tall, well-dressed gentleman rode through Norfolk talking about hawks with anyone who'd listen. He had a gilt-handled rapier, excellent French, and impeccable manners. He also had a Mass kit hidden in his saddlebags and a hair shirt under his doublet, because he was a Jesuit priest in a country where that was a capital offense. John Gerard spent seventeen years running an underground network across Elizabethan England. He built safe houses, ran couriers, sent at least thirty men abroad to train for the priesthood, and stayed one step ahead of Walsingham's intelligence apparatus. When they finally caught him in 1594, they hung him by his wrists in a Tower of London dungeon to make him give up the head of the Jesuit mission. He fainted eight or nine times in a single day. He never gave them a name. Then he wrote to his friends in invisible ink made from orange juice, and escaped from the Tower on a rope strung across the moat, with hands so ruined by torture he could barely grip it. And then he went straight back to work for another eight years. This is his story, and almost all of it comes from his own account, which he wrote as a field manual for the young men who'd be following him into England. FREE ILLUMINATION WORKSHOP Royal Letters: How to Paint a Tudor Rose Initial, with illuminator Julia Bangert. Monday, July 21, 12pm Eastern. Free to attend, total beginners welcome, and if you can't make it live, register anyway and we'll send you the recording.https://page.co/kxj56n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Henry VIII Got Six Tries. Could His Wives Get One? 08.07.2026 19min

  Sign up for the weekly newsletter here: https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up Everyone knows Henry VIII's divorce saga. He wanted out, the Pope said no, he invented a new church. Problem solved, if you're the king. But what about his wives? What about any Tudor woman trapped in a terrible marriage? Could she leave? The answer is technically yes. There were legal mechanisms: annulment, formal separation, informal arrangements. The Church courts were open for business. The catch is that the system was designed to be so narrow, so expensive, and so humiliating that most women couldn't use it. Life-threatening cruelty wasn't enough. Even proving your husband was impotent required a process so invasive it makes modern divorce paperwork look like a spa day. And then there's Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's own sister, who wrote him a desperate letter in 1518 saying she knew her husband didn't love her, as he showed her daily. Henry wrote back telling her marriage was divinely ordained and sent her a nice dress. He would later break with Rome rather than stay in a marriage he didn't want. But that's different. He was the king. This week we're looking at what leaving actually meant for Tudor women: the options, the obstacles, and the staggering gap between what the law technically allowed and what was practically possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Edward VI vs. The Dragon: A Protestant Boy King Who Tried to Rewrite England's Most Elite Knighthood 07.07.2026 21min

  In 1552, England's teenage Protestant king decided that St. George, patron saint of England, had to go. Not from one town, or one church. From the statutes of the Order of the Garter itself, the most prestigious knighthood in the country, the one his grandfather had endowed with a jewel-encrusted gold statue and his father had basically built his entire personal brand around. The manuscript still exists. Edward VI's own handwriting is in the margins, correcting his chief minister's draft. He was fifteen. This is the story of a boy king who believed he was saving souls by rewriting a 200-year-old institution, the nine days that upended everything after his death, and a queen who found the evidence and ordered it sponged from the historical record so thoroughly that "no memorial might be transmitted to posterity." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Constable of the Tower, Then Its Prisoner: The Wild Life of Eleanor de Clare 06.07.2026 25min

  Want to test the new Tudor Scrolls app? Email me at heather@englandcast.com. She was the granddaughter of a king, married off at thirteen to settle a debt, and somehow ended up as the only woman to ever run the Tower of London. And then, a few months later, she was a prisoner inside the same walls she used to command. But this isn't just one woman's unbelievable life. Eleanor had two sisters, and once you line all three of them up next to each other, you stop seeing bad luck and start seeing a pattern. This is the story of what actually happened to rich women in medieval England, and why the question at the center of Eleanor's life never really went away. Come for the Tower, stay for the part where two different men show up claiming they married her at the same time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Forgotten Welfare State: How the Dissolution of Monasteries Devastated the Poor and Sick 02.07.2026 20min

  Before Henry VIII, if you were sick, old, or starving in England, there was a place you could go. Monasteries ran almshouses, hospitals, free lodging for travelers, even schools for poor kids, all as a normal, unglamorous part of just existing. Then in about a decade, almost all of it was gone. In this episode I dig into the side of the Dissolution of the Monasteries that usually gets skipped over in favor of Henry and Anne Boleyn and the break with Rome, what actually happened to the people who relied on that system, how long it took England to build anything to replace it (spoiler: over sixty years), and why the gap in between is a story worth sitting with. Newsletter sign up link: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  What If Mary Queen of Scots Was Never Executed? 02.07.2026 20min

  Mary, Queen of Scots was executed on February 8th, 1587, on the strength of a decoded letter and a forged postscript that Elizabeth's spymaster slipped into her own secret code. But what if that letter never got decoded at all? In this episode I pull that one thread and follow it all the way out. No execution means no closure for Elizabeth, a murkier justification for the Spanish Armada, and a genuinely messier road to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the moment that eventually gives us the United Kingdom as we know it. One coded letter in a beer barrel, and everything after it tips sideways.This is part of my ongoing What If series, where I take real Tudor history and nudge it just slightly off its actual path to see what breaks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Invention of You: How the Renaissance Discovered the Self 30.06.2026 21min

  📬 Free newsletter (Tudor news, vocab, treasures, behind the scenes): ⁠https://englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up⁠ We talk about the Renaissance as the time people rediscovered the ancient world. But they were also discovering themselves, for the first time. For most of human history, nobody really knew what they looked like. Then a mirror, a chimney, a printing press, and a blank book arrived within about 150 years of each other, and together they invented something brand new: the interior life. The private self. In this episode: Venetian glass mirrors that once cost as much as a naval ship, the rise of private heated rooms, the explosion of diary keeping, and why Hamlet might be the most "online" character in literary history. 🔔 Subscribe for more Tudor and medieval history Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Before Samuel Pepys, There Was This Devon Farmer Buying Velvet Shoes 29.06.2026 15min

  A Devon farmer records buying velvet shoes and 30 gold buttons. A London astrologer hides his affairs in Latin. Shakespeare puts a soliloquy on stage and an audience recognizes something true about themselves. Something was happening in late Tudor England, and it changed how human beings understood their inner lives forever. In this video we trace the invention of the personal diary, from medieval spiritual confession to the first people who just wrote things down because their life felt worth recording. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Body for Body: The People Who Ran the Tower of London 23.06.2026 18min

  Did you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abseiled out of a window on a rope smuggled in via a wine barrel, realized the rope was twenty feet too short, dropped anyway, and sailed to Normandy with his elderly mother. And the Constable responsible for him lost the job's hereditary rights immediately. This is the story of the people who ran the Tower of London for nearly a thousand years, from that first catastrophic escape all the way to the Duke of Wellington draining the moat and fuming about tourists. It is a wild ride. Tower Menagerie episode: https://youtu.be/cG1E0LkhzkgNewsletter signup: https://www.englandcast.com/newsletter-sign-up/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Emperor Who Dropped Mary Tudor For a Better Dowry (And Changed History Forever) 22.06.2026 21min

  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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  The Black Tudors History Forgot 19.06.2026 23min

  **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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  What If Tyndale Had Never Translated the Bible? The Man Who Invented English (and Died For It) 17.06.2026 27min

  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Answering the Internet's Most Googled Questions About the Tudors 16.06.2026 22min

  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Did Tudors Actually Swim? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think) 15.06.2026 16min

  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Tudor Laundresses: Three Very Different Lives Doing the Dirtiest Job at Court 10.06.2026 20min

  What did it actually take to keep Tudor England clean? Before dawn, before the court woke up, before Henry VIII put on his famous doublet, someone was already up to her elbows in lye, urine, and other people's laundry. That someone was the Tudor laundress, and her story is one I have been wanting to tell for a long time. In this episode we follow three very different women doing the same essential work: the royal laundress at Hampton Court, who washed the king's most intimate linen and had to pretend she knew absolutely nothing about what those sheets revealed; the household laundress in a noble family, including the remarkable story of Bess Holland, who went from washer in the nursery to mistress of the Duke of Norfolk; and the independent washerwoman working on her own, building a business in a world that viewed her very existence with suspicion. Plus: the Tudor hygiene experiment that will completely change how you think about cleanliness, the Flemish refugee who arrived in London and built an empire out of a bucket of starch, and why the most fashionable accessory in Elizabethan England was basically a laundress's worst nightmare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Medieval Women Couldn't Hold Power? Meet the Two Female Sheriffs Who Ran Entire Counties 09.06.2026 14min

  Everything we think we know about women and power in the medieval world is missing a few key details. Like the fact that there were exactly two female sheriffs in medieval England, and that their lives were directly tangled together in the most dramatic way possible. Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle through multiple sieges, was appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John in one of his final acts, and helped turn the tide of a French invasion in 1217, all while in her sixties. A French chronicler called her "a very cunning, bad-hearted and vigorous old woman." She won anyway. Ela of Salisbury inherited one of the greatest titles in England at age nine, used a clause from Magna Carta to refuse remarriage, paid the king to serve as Sheriff of Wiltshire, showed up at the exchequer in person to do the job, and eventually founded Lacock Abbey before becoming its Abbess. Oh, and their husbands knew each other. Ela's husband is literally the man who tried to steal Nicholaa's castle. The history of women doing so-called men's work is not a modern story. It's just a story we haven't been told loudly enough. Katherine Fenkyll episode I linked to at the end: https://youtu.be/QggqaYpPbe4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices