Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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?

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**Note - I gave Cattalena's death date wrong - it's 1625 and I said 1525! So sorry!!! ***

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/

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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.

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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.

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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 imagining
The 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.

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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.

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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

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What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't More, and what would have changed if he had?

In this week's What If Thought Experiment, we're looking at one of the Tudor period's most interesting counterfactuals.

Henry VIII didn't need More's signature legally, he wanted it because More was the gold standard of European humanist credibility. Getting More to sign meant something. And More refused to give him that.

We talk about what a living More might have meant for the trajectory of the English Reformation, whether Mary I's reign might have looked different without the brutal martyrdoms of the 1530s setting the tone, and the woman at the center of it all: Margaret Roper, who bribed a guard, lied to the King's Council, and was buried holding her father's pickled head nine years later.

I have complicated feelings about Thomas More. Come have them with me.

🔗 Links mentioned:My Katherine of Aragon video, where I talk about similar frustrations: https://youtu.be/WDF3Cs3P3IY

More What If Thought Experiments: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyxR5N2MPwbxZEmGg22jn-da5cpCIJ2Qt

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In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyers whose labor underpinned the most important industry in the country. We're talking about the guild system that excluded them from legal protections while depending entirely on their work, the enclosure crisis that pulled the floor out from under their livelihoods, and the Statute of Artificers that gave magistrates the power to imprison women who weren't working hard enough.

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You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment, a letter passed along or strategically delayed, an introduction made or withheld. These women were intelligence assets, political operators, and the invisible machinery behind some of the biggest decisions of the era.

Today we're going inside the system: the org chart nobody wrote down but everyone understood, the dramatic power shift that happened when the privy chamber went from Henry VIII's court to the queens regnant, and what happened to the women who got it spectacularly wrong. Including Lady Katherine Grey, who secretly married a man with no royal permission and triggered a political crisis that landed multiple people in the Tower. And Lettice Knollys, who married Elizabeth I's favorite and was reportedly told there was but one sun in the sky and one queen in England.

And then there's Blanche Parry, who had been with Elizabeth since she rocked her cradle, and who figured out the only blueprint that actually worked: be so indispensable that removing you was unthinkable.If you want to go deeper, pick up Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game, which is linked below. It's fantastic.

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