Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

I got on a Zoom call with two Blue Badge guides from Context Travel, and by the end of it I had a list of about a dozen places in London I've never been and now desperately need to see.

Sean spent almost 30 years in financial services before deciding life was too short not to spend it obsessing over history and art instead.

Caroline taught history at a girls' school and specialized in Edward VI, the Tudor everyone skips past on the way from the six wives to Elizabeth I.

We talked about the pieces of Tudor London hiding in plain sight: a tennis court wall tucked behind Buckingham Palace, a portrait of Edward VI you can only see properly through a spy hole, a single rose that's been paid as rent since 1381, and why Henry VIII's waistband tells you basically his entire biography.

I've been doing this for over 15 years and I did not know most of this going in. Keep a notebook handy, you're going to end up with a list.

Context Travel does small private tours led by working historians (not flag tours!) all over London and beyond. Link to check them out: https://www.contexttravel.com/

TudorCon 2026 is October 23-25 in Richmond, VA. In-person tickets are almost gone (less than 10 left), or join virtually with TudorCon From Home: https://tudorcon.englandcast.com

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This video was made in partnership with Context Travel.

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So I recently went to England to sleep in historic places. This is the first episode of a mini series I'm calling Heather Stays in Olde Inns, because England is full of medieval places to stay, and I wanted to stay in them. First stop: The Mermaid Inn in Rye.

The cellars here date back to 1156. The building you see today went up in 1420, after the French burned the whole town to the ground in 1377 (yes, really). A very organized gang of 18th century smugglers used the place as one of their bases. There are still tunnels running under the building to another inn down the street, because apparently that's just what you do when you're moving contraband and don't want the authorities noticing.

I got to sleep in a building that has survived fire, smugglers, and about 600 years of English history going about its business upstairs from a bar. Come stay with me.

Book your own stay at The Mermaid Inn: https://www.mermaidinn.com/

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In 1513, Charles Brandon knelt in front of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and lifted the ring right off her finger. Twice. The gossip reached all the way to her father, the Holy Roman Emperor, and for a minute, Henry VIII was actually pushing for his best friend to marry one of the most powerful women in Europe.It never happened. But what if it had?

In this episode I dig into the real story behind the ring, why the marriage was never actually going to happen, and what it would have meant for England, the Habsburgs, and the entire Tudor succession, including a very direct line to Lady Jane Grey never existing at all.

Join us for TudorCon 2026, October 23-25 in Richmond, VA. About 20 in-person tickets remain: tudorcon.englandcast.com

Can't make it in person? Join us for TudorCon From Home, and for a limited time get early bird pricing on the Privy Council tier (ends September 15): tudorcon.englandcast.com

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This conversation totally rearranged some things in my brain. I sat down with Tracy Borman, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces, to talk about her new novel The House of Boleyn, and it flips the whole family on its head.

Thomas Boleyn, the guy we all love to hate as the scheming dad pimping out his daughters? Tracy did the research and found basically none of that. He comes across as actually protective, terrified of what Henry could do to Anne.

And Jane Boleyn, who Wolf Hall (and basically everyone else) paints as the ultimate betrayer? Tracy found letters of her BEGGING Henry to spare her husband.

We also get into Anne's grandmother Lady Margaret Butler, who Tracy compares to the Maggie Smith character from Downton Abbey (I'm obsessed with this comparison), plus the Duke of Norfolk, who might be one of the most legitimately villainous people in Tudor history, no rehabilitation needed there.

And Tracy tells this incredible story about inventing a plot line for the book, and then finding actual historical evidence afterward that proved she'd accidentally landed on the truth. Chills.

Tracy also gives her take on whether Anne actually loved Henry (spoiler: she doesn't think so), and where she thinks Anne's heart really was.

Huge thanks to Tracy for coming back on the channel; and also a shoutout for her talk at Tudorcon a few years back (tickets for October 23-25 still available, by the way - https://tudorcon.englandcast.com for details!).

Grab The House of Boleyn here: https://www.amazon.com/House-Boleyn-Novel-Tracy-Borman/dp/0802167853/

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Okay so today's episode is a blast from the past, but stick with me because it's a good one. Back in 2016 I had James Bolton from the Queens of England Podcast on to talk about Bessie Blount, and it completely changed how I think about Henry VIII's love life.

Here's the thing everyone gets wrong: we've all heard "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" a thousand times, but almost nobody talks about his mistresses. And there's this whole historian debate about whether Henry only had two affairs his entire life, which, come on. James makes a really compelling case that he had way more, we just don't have the paper trail because writing about royal mistresses was basically taboo.

But Bessie is the one who mattered. She's the one who proved to Henry that he could actually father a healthy son, years before Anne Boleyn ever showed up. And what happened to that son, Henry FitzRoy, is wild. The king elevated him so high in the peerage that some historians think he was being groomed as an actual backup heir to the throne. A Duke, an Earl, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the works, for an illegitimate kid.

There's even a mystery second child that might change the whole timeline of the affair. It's a great one, enjoy the rewind.

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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.

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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 [email protected].

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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