Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In the 1530s, a little paper book was passed around Anne Boleyn’s household. Her ladies and their friends copied poems into it, wrote their own, and argued about them in the margins. And it still exists!

It’s called the Devonshire Manuscript. In this episode I’m telling the story of the people who wrote in it. Mary Shelton gets a love poem with her name hidden in it, and her friend Margaret Douglas scribbles “forget this” next to it.

Margaret, Henry VIII’s niece, secretly marries Thomas Howard, and the two of them end up in the Tower. A run of love poems in the book seems to pass between them while they’re locked up. And Lord Darnley signs a poem in his mother’s book years later, before the whole thing ends up at Chatsworth as a library book that never got returned.

Want to read it yourself? The full edition is free online: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript

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Sources

Raymond Siemens, Karin Armstrong and Constance Crompton, eds., A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add 17,492) (2014)

Elizabeth Heale, ed., The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (2012)

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In August 1588, England beat the Spanish Armada. Weeks later, the sailors who did it were dying in the streets of Margate, sick and unpaid, with nowhere to go. So did the Tudors do anything for their veterans?

It's Veterans Day, so I went looking, and the answer surprised me. We'll get into why Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries left wounded soldiers with nowhere to turn, why villagers were scared of the men walking home from Elizabeth's wars, and how England ended up with one of the first pension schemes for disabled servicemen. Along the way there's a fund the Armada sailors paid into out of their own wages, and a home for old soldiers founded by Robert Dudley (yes, that Robert Dudley) that still houses veterans today.
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Pour yourself a cup of tea (or a mug of hot cider) and settle in for a cozy Tudor autumn romance.

It’s Michaelmas, 1576, and Cecily Fenn has come down from London to buy an orchard’s apple crop for as little as she can. She’s allowed four days. Five if it rains. She did not plan on a runaway goose, a very stubborn orchard keeper, a charming rival with a lovely hat, or a storm that puts the whole harvest at risk.

After you all enjoyed my Halloween audio story so much, I wanted to make another one, and this time it’s a cozy one. The people are invented, but the world around them is real. Henry VIII’s own fruiterer, Richard Harris, really did plant orchards at Teynham in Kent in the 1530s. Michaelmas really was the day rents fell due, and eating goose on Michaelmas was supposed to keep you from wanting for money all year. And yes, the Tudors really did drink hot spiced ale with roasted crab apples bobbing in it.

A note on how this was made: I used AI tools for the character voices, music, and the sound effects. It let me make a full-cast, immersive story as a one-person show, and I hope it adds to the experience for you. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.
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It’s November 5th, and I’ve told the Gunpowder Plot before, but never like this. This time I’m telling it as the thriller it really was.

Secret oaths sworn in a London inn. A soldier who renamed himself Guido and spent months guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. An anonymous letter delivered in the dark, a midnight raid, and a gallop across the Midlands on stolen horses. And a final standoff where the conspirators managed to set their own gunpowder on fire. I could not believe some of this when I read it.

We’ll also meet Robert Catesby, the charismatic man who actually dreamed up the whole thing. I want to understand how a group of men who’d lost so much talked themselves into something this terrible, and why the people they thought they were saving shut their doors on them.
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In the summer of 1546, Henry VIII signed a warrant for the arrest of his sixth wife. Katherine Parr found out because somebody dropped it on the floor.

Today we're spending time with the queen who's usually remembered as Henry's nurse, and I think that does her a real disservice. Before she ever married the king, Katherine had been held hostage by rebels in a Yorkshire castle. As queen, she ran England as regent while Henry was at war in France, and she became the first woman to publish a book in English under her own name. She also turned her rooms at court into a study circle for reform-minded women, which is exactly what put her in danger.

We'll look at Anne Askew, who was racked in the Tower by the Lord Chancellor himself and still wouldn't give up the queen's ladies. We'll get the plot from Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley, the paper on the floor, and the night Katherine went to Henry's bedchamber and gave the performance of her life. And then there are the secret letters she wrote to Thomas Seymour after Henry died, and the book she'd been sitting on the whole time.

I also make the case for the villains, because Gardiner and Henry had their reasons too.

Do you think Henry ever meant to go through with it, or was the whole thing a test? Tell me in the comments!

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#KatherineParr #HenryVIII #TudorHistory

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