Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

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.

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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.
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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.

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A Devon farmer records buying velvet shoes and 30 gold buttons. A London astrologer hides his affairs in Latin. Shakespeare puts a soliloquy on stage and an audience recognizes something true about themselves. Something was happening in late Tudor England, and it changed how human beings understood their inner lives forever. In this video we trace the invention of the personal diary, from medieval spiritual confession to the first people who just wrote things down because their life felt worth recording.

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Did you know the very first person ever imprisoned in the Tower of London also became the first person to escape from it? He got his guards drunk, abseiled out of a window on a rope smuggled in via a wine barrel, realized the rope was twenty feet too short, dropped anyway, and sailed to Normandy with his elderly mother. And the Constable responsible for him lost the job's hereditary rights immediately. This is the story of the people who ran the Tower of London for nearly a thousand years, from that first catastrophic escape all the way to the Duke of Wellington draining the moat and fuming about tourists. It is a wild ride.

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