Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her husband's. But the moment he died? She got it all back. And some of these women knew exactly what that meant.

In this episode we're looking at three Tudor women who used widowhood as a strategy... whether they meant to or not. Bess of Hardwick turned four marriages into one of the greatest fortunes in England. Catherine Willoughby turned down a king to marry her servant. And Mary Howard just looked at every remarriage proposal and said no, flatly, repeatedly, forever.

Lady in Waiting episode I referenced: ⁠https://youtu.be/W8BgrU76hwc⁠

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In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available.

She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter.

We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for.

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In 1293, King Edward I finally got what he wanted: the Isle of Wight. He'd been trying to take it for decades. He had to wait until its owner, Isabella de Fortibus, was on her deathbed to get it. And even then, she made him pay for it.

Isabella de Fortibus was a 13th century countess who became one of the wealthiest people in England after a series of family tragedies left her controlling Devon, the Aumale estates in Yorkshire, and the strategically crucial Isle of Wight. Two kings, Henry III and Edward I, spent years trying to force her to remarry and hand over her lands. She said no. Repeatedly. Legally. One suitor actually tried to abduct her, and she bribed a prior and fled to Wales to escape him.

She also owned her own personal copy of the statutes of the realm. In the 13th century. A laywoman. And she used it to win dozens of legal battles protecting what was hers.

I found Isabella in Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer -highly recommend it if you love this kind of deep dive into the medieval world.

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It's Memorial Day, and I've been thinking about patriotism -- where it comes from, why people feel it so strongly, and whether Tudor people felt anything like it at all.

The answer is more interesting than I expected. In 1485, when Henry VII takes the throne after the Battle of Bosworth Field, England is basically a collection of feudal relationships. Loyalty runs to your lord, your family, your region -- not to some abstract idea of "England."

There's no standing army, no national church, no real sense of a shared national identity.

And then the Reformation happens. And everything changes.

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London, summer 1563. The city sounds wrong. The market stalls have gaps. And then you notice the door across the street — a blue cross painted on it, and a man standing outside who wasn't there yesterday.

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Someone in the comments asked me to do a deep dive on whether Elizabeth I actually gave the order for Mary Queen of Scots' execution. And the closer I looked, the stranger it got.

Here's the surface version. Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner for nineteen years. Elizabeth kept refusing to sign the death warrant. Then one day she signed it. Then said she didn't mean it. Then threw her secretary William Davison in the Tower for sending it. And Mary lost her head anyway.

The real version involves a beer barrel, a forged postscript, a council that may or may not have acted behind the queen's back, and a secretary who somehow kept his salary the entire time he was imprisoned for treason.

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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.

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Edward VI gets overlooked. He's usually just the boy between Henry and the interesting women. But here's what people miss: Edward didn't just die and leave a mess. He made choices. Theologically driven, politically sophisticated choices. From his deathbed. At fifteen.

This week's What If looks at the Devise for Succession, the document Edward drafted in his own hand that bypassed both his sisters and put Lady Jane Grey directly in line for the throne. We look at the pressure campaign he ran on his terrified council, and then ask: what if he'd backed down?

Spoiler: the cruel irony is that his plan failed completely and the thing he was trying to protect probably survived because of that failure.

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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.

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In 1509, England went from a dying paranoid king to a golden coronation to a deadly plague in about eight months. This is a Year in the Life episode, where we slow down and live inside 1509, not just at court but in the guild halls and households of ordinary Londoners who had nowhere to run when the sweating sickness arrived while Henry VIII fled to Windsor. Thomas More wrote some of the most joyful poetry of his life about a king who would later execute him. A Cornish servant woman rode through London on a blue velvet saddle. And a Scottish baby named Arthur was a political provocation in swaddling clothes. This is Henry VIII at seventeen, before everything went wrong.

The 2027 Tudor Planner crowdfunder preorder link is here:

https://tudorfair.com/products/2027-tudor-planner-crowdfunder

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