Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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.

The plague is back.

Today we're going street level into the Tudor plague years. What it actually felt like to live in London when the epidemics hit, what ordinary people did to survive, and three specific summers — 1563, 1593, and 1603 — that each killed somewhere between one in eight and one in three Londoners.

We also get into what the Tudor government actually did about it (more sophisticated than you'd think), the plague doctors and their beaked masks, the quacks selling dried toads and unicorn horn, and the parish searchers — older women whose job was to examine bodies and determine cause of death, and who are almost entirely invisible in the historical record.

Oh, and Elizabeth I had a gallows erected at Windsor to hang anyone who followed her from London. Very her.

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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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