Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

In 1538, a man named Geoffrey Pole was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. He hadn't plotted against Henry VIII. He hadn't raised an army. He'd written letters to his brother and said, once, that he wished he could see him.

That was enough.

What followed was one of the most psychologically devastating interrogations of the Tudor period, and one of the least talked about. Over seven sessions, Geoffrey gave evidence that brought down his entire family: his brother Lord Montagu, his cousin Henry Courtenay the Marquess of Exeter, and eventually his 67-year-old mother Margaret Pole, the last surviving Plantagenet.

He survived. He was pardoned. He spent the next twenty years in exile carrying what he'd done.

This is not really a spy story. It's a story about what surveillance states actually run on, not information, but fear. And about the brother who burned the family from a safe distance in Rome and somehow came out of it as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Tudor history has been calling Geoffrey Pole weak for five centuries. I want to make the case that we don't get to say that from here.

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Everyone knows the Princes in the Tower, but what happened to their sisters? After Bosworth, five daughters of Edward IV faced a new Tudor king who needed one of them and feared the rest. This is the story of how Henry VII solved the problem of Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Catherine, and Bridget of York... and what each solution cost.

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What makes someone dedicate their life to a country that isn't their own? Jonathan Thomas, founder of Anglotopia, has spent 19 years building a community for Americans obsessed with British history, culture, and travel. We talk about how he started the site in a closet in Chicago, what turns a casual Anglophile into a lifelong devotee, the best places to visit in Britain beyond the tourist trail, and his plans to walk Hadrian's Wall this summer. Plus we swap notes on what it actually takes to build a business around something you love.

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We talk a lot about living through uncertain times, especially now. New technology nobody fully understands. Institutions that keep changing the rules. A world that feels like it's shifting faster than anyone can keep up with.The Tudors would have recognized that feeling immediately.Between 1485 and 1603, England went through changes that were, by any measure, total: the printing press, the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the literal discovery of unknown continents. And unlike us, they didn't get to look back at it from a safe distance. They were living inside it, without knowing the outcome.This video looks at how ordinary people actually experienced that upheaval — and what it might tell us about our own.
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If you emptied the pockets of a Tudor woman in 1535, what would spill out?

In this episode, we’re opening the drawstring purses, apron folds, and girdles of 16th-century women to see what they actually carried. Not the romanticized version. The practical one.

From gold pomanders packed with ambergris and spices…
To iron keys tied on fraying string…
To bread wrapped in linen because there was no such thing as “grabbing something later.”

We’ll look at:

• The scented luxury of court life
• The devotional habits that traveled at the waist
• The money, keys, and tools women kept on their bodies
• The stark differences between noblewomen, merchants’ wives, and servants
• And what everyday objects quietly reveal about class, privacy, and control

This is a “What’s In My Bag” video: Tudor edition.

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