Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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

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It's April 1536 and Thomas Cromwell has gone home sick. Except he's not sick. He's deciding what to do about Anne Boleyn.

In this What If episode, we play out three scenarios from that single moment of decision: what Cromwell actually chose and why it signed his own death warrant four years later, what happens if he removes Anne without killing her and she becomes a Protestant cause célèbre in exile, and what happens if he does nothing and bets on her survival.

None of the roads end well. But they end very differently.

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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.

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What happened in Tudor England when someone's mind turned against them? There was no therapist, no diagnosis, no prescription. But there was a whole system, and it was more coherent than you'd expect.

We dig into the four humors as a complete theory of the mind, Timothy Bright's 1586 Treatise of Melancholie (the first English book on mental illness), music as formally prescribed medical treatment, and the social structures that made room for people who thought differently. We also look at Will Somers, Henry VIII's jester, what Bedlam actually was in the Tudor period, and why the Henry VIII personality change story is more complicated than it first appears.

The Tudors were trying to make sense of suffering with the tools they had. Some of those tools were wrong. The impulse behind them is completely recognizable.

Music of the Spheres episode is here: https://youtu.be/SPlfSROH4TU

Will Sommers episode is here:

https://youtu.be/Xs8SwqZXPxc

It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and people care about you and your health. If this episode touched something personal: Call or text 988 (US) to reach the Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. You don't have to figure it out alone.

Sources: Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), free on Internet Archive. Andrew Boorde, The Breviary of Healthe (1552). Peter Andersson, Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man (2023). Susana Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII. Historic England's overview of mental illness in the 16th and 17th centuries at historicengland.org.uk.

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Jane Grey wasn't just a pawn. She was a fierce Protestant intellectual who made a real choice when the crown landed at her feet in 1553. What if she'd said no? We explore what Mary's reign might have looked like without a Protestant figurehead to rally around, whether Wyatt's Rebellion would even have happened, and why the answer has less to do with Jane's courage than you might think.

Sign up for the Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt here: https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/

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Someone left a comment asking about Tudor dairymaids, and I went down a rabbit hole I did not expect. The dairymaid looks like a background character in Tudor history. She is absolutely not.

We're covering her daily work, the surprising economic independence the dairy gave women in a world designed to give them none, and why the phrase "as smooth as a milkmaid's skin" is actually encoding centuries of accumulated medical knowledge that eventually gave Edward Jenner the lead for the smallpox vaccine.

She woke up before dawn, milked the cows, made the cheese, sold the butter, saved her money, and changed the world in ways no one thought to write her name next to.

🔎 Join the free Anne Boleyn Scavenger Hunt at englandcast.com. 15 days, 15 clues, ending May 19 on the anniversary of her execution. https://www.englandcast.com/anneboleynscavenger/

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You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that.

In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians rely on have a serious bias problem, and what a remarkable piece of recent research from Trinity College Dublin found when they actually reconstructed Tudor beer from 16th century records. And then coffee arrives in England around 1650, and everything changes.

Link to the two-sleeps video is here:

https://youtu.be/x1Q4tYhLRvA

TudorFair.com for the mug!

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Before bridges, before coaches, before passable roads, if you needed to get anywhere in Tudor London you needed him. The Thames waterman was licensed, badged, opinionated, and completely indispensable.

In this episode we spend 24 hours on the river: shooting London Bridge, ferrying Shakespeare's audience to the South Bank, and watching the coaches arrive and take everything away.

Plus: John Taylor, the Water Poet, who was furious about all of it and wrote pamphlets to prove it.

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Before hospitals, painkillers, or germ theory, the Tudor midwife was the most powerful person in the room. Licensed by the Bishop, sworn to secrecy, she outranked duchesses, performed sacraments no other woman was allowed to touch, and knew every secret in the neighborhood.

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Scotland in the 1560s was chaotic even by Tudor standards. In this thought experiment episode, we ask: what if Mary Queen of Scots had fled to France in 1567 instead of marrying Bothwell? We walk through the real history, then imagine how one different decision might have changed the Catholic plots against Elizabeth, the Spanish Armada, and the entire trajectory of the British monarchy. Plus: come join us at TudorCon, October 23-25 in Richmond, Virginia. tudorcon.englandcast.com.

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