Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

Renaissance England was a bustling and exciting place...new religion! break with rome! wars with Scotland! And France! And Spain! The birth of the modern world! In this weekly podcast I'll explore one aspect of life in 16th century England that will give you a deeper understanding of this most exciting time.

  1. 1d ago

    The Women Who Hid Priests in Their Walls

    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 Women Who Hid Priests in Their Walls

  2. 4d ago

    The Priest Who Escaped the Tower of London

    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

    The Priest Who Escaped the Tower of London

  3. Jul 8

    Henry VIII Got Six Tries. Could His Wives Get One?

    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

    Henry VIII Got Six Tries. Could His Wives Get One?

  4. Jul 7

    Edward VI vs. The Dragon: A Protestant Boy King Who Tried to Rewrite England's Most Elite Knighthood

    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

  5. Jul 6

    Constable of the Tower, Then Its Prisoner: The Wild Life of Eleanor de Clare

    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

  6. Jul 2

    The Forgotten Welfare State: How the Dissolution of Monasteries Devastated the Poor and Sick

    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

  7. Jul 2

    What If Mary Queen of Scots Was Never Executed?

    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

    What If Mary Queen of Scots Was Never Executed?

  8. Jun 30

    The Invention of You: How the Renaissance Discovered the Self

    📬 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

    The Invention of You: How the Renaissance Discovered the Self
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Renaissance England was a bustling and exciting place...new religion! break with rome! wars with Scotland! And France! And Spain! The birth of the modern world! In this weekly podcast I'll explore one aspect of life in 16th century England that will give you a deeper understanding of this most exciting time.

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