Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

A woman is found at the bottom of a staircase in 1560. And the one person who benefits most from it is the Queen of England.

This week I'm digging into one of the wildest what-ifs in Tudor history. Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, dies suddenly at Cumnor Place, right when the rumors were already swirling that Dudley meant to get rid of her so he could marry Elizabeth I. The obstacle is gone. The queen could have married the man she loved. And she said no anyway.

I wanted to know what would have happened if she'd said yes. Turns out it touches everything, her entire approach to foreign policy, the Mary Queen of Scots plots, even whether she'd ever have had to sign that execution warrant. There's no clean answer here, and that's what makes it such a good one.

Also, quick note, I've built an app called Tudor Scroll. Daily Tudor puzzle, all your favorite Tudor creators in one feed, and more. Android testers are in now (thank you all so much) and iPhone is about to go into final App Store testing. Want in early? Email heather@englandcast.com.

Related episodes:

Jill McCracken on her murder mystery podcast

https://youtu.be/yplUI7pbEWY

Janet Wertman on the woman who had Robert Dudley's baby: https://youtu.be/2UEyw4q_dto

Tudor Times' Melita Thomas on Robert Dudley: https://youtu.be/Bot35V6CPCo
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There is a Catholic saint whose actual job, canonized and everything, is patron of magic tricks. Escapologists. Illusionists. And he earned it the hard way: by spending nearly twenty years building hiding places so good that people still can't find them today, standing right next to them, with a guidebook in hand.

Nicholas Owen was a small, injured, entirely unremarkable-looking carpenter. He was also the most important man in Elizabethan and Jacobean England's Catholic underground, a one-man counter-surveillance operation who broke a priest out of the Tower of London, built hides that beat the hunters' own measuring tricks, and kept every single location locked in his head so it could never be tortured out of anyone else.

This is his story, the arms race he ran against the state, the night at Hindlip Hall when the escape artist chose to appear instead of vanish, and what happened to him in the Tower afterward.

Plus: a heads up on a free live illumination workshop I'm doing tomorrow with the wonderful Julia Bangert, teaching you to paint a Tudor rose in true medieval style. Link below.

🌹 Free illumination workshop w/ Julia, tomorrow 12pm ET: https://page.co/kxj56n
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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.

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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
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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.
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