Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

What if Thomas More had just signed the Oath of Supremacy? He could have. Plenty of people did. Cranmer signed it. Cromwell signed it. So why didn't More, and what would have changed if he had?

In this week's What If Thought Experiment, we're looking at one of the Tudor period's most interesting counterfactuals.

Henry VIII didn't need More's signature legally, he wanted it because More was the gold standard of European humanist credibility. Getting More to sign meant something. And More refused to give him that.

We talk about what a living More might have meant for the trajectory of the English Reformation, whether Mary I's reign might have looked different without the brutal martyrdoms of the 1530s setting the tone, and the woman at the center of it all: Margaret Roper, who bribed a guard, lied to the King's Council, and was buried holding her father's pickled head nine years later.

I have complicated feelings about Thomas More. Come have them with me.

🔗 Links mentioned:My Katherine of Aragon video, where I talk about similar frustrations: https://youtu.be/WDF3Cs3P3IY

More What If Thought Experiments: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyxR5N2MPwbxZEmGg22jn-da5cpCIJ2Qt
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Before it was an insult, "spinster" was a job title. It meant a woman who spins thread. It appeared in tax rolls, court records, and legal documents. It was an occupation. And then the economy collapsed, the guilds shut women out, and the word became something else entirely.

In this episode we're looking at the women who quite literally kept Tudor England running -- the spinners, weavers, and dyers whose labor underpinned the most important industry in the country. We're talking about the guild system that excluded them from legal protections while depending entirely on their work, the enclosure crisis that pulled the floor out from under their livelihoods, and the Statute of Artificers that gave magistrates the power to imprison women who weren't working hard enough.
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You think office politics are bad? Imagine your entire career depending on whether the queen liked how you handed her a towel.Lady in waiting sounds like a decorative job. It wasn't. The women of the Tudor privy chamber controlled physical access to the most powerful person in England, and in Tudor political life, controlling the door meant controlling everything. A quiet word at the right moment, a letter passed along or strategically delayed, an introduction made or withheld. These women were intelligence assets, political operators, and the invisible machinery behind some of the biggest decisions of the era.

Today we're going inside the system: the org chart nobody wrote down but everyone understood, the dramatic power shift that happened when the privy chamber went from Henry VIII's court to the queens regnant, and what happened to the women who got it spectacularly wrong. Including Lady Katherine Grey, who secretly married a man with no royal permission and triggered a political crisis that landed multiple people in the Tower. And Lettice Knollys, who married Elizabeth I's favorite and was reportedly told there was but one sun in the sky and one queen in England.

And then there's Blanche Parry, who had been with Elizabeth since she rocked her cradle, and who figured out the only blueprint that actually worked: be so indispensable that removing you was unthinkable.If you want to go deeper, pick up Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game, which is linked below. It's fantastic.

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The moment a Tudor woman got married, she legally ceased to exist. No property, no contracts, no rights - her entire legal identity absorbed into her husband's. But the moment he died? She got it all back. And some of these women knew exactly what that meant.

In this episode we're looking at three Tudor women who used widowhood as a strategy... whether they meant to or not. Bess of Hardwick turned four marriages into one of the greatest fortunes in England. Catherine Willoughby turned down a king to marry her servant. And Mary Howard just looked at every remarriage proposal and said no, flatly, repeatedly, forever.

Lady in Waiting episode I referenced: ⁠https://youtu.be/W8BgrU76hwc⁠
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In early June in Tudor England, one woman was already up before sunrise. She had roughly four months to produce everything her household needed to survive the next twelve months. Medicine. Preserves. Cosmetics. Cleaning products. The entire household pharmacy. All of it, from scratch, while the plants were available.

She had no name in the history books. But without her, the household didn't make it through winter.

We follow a Tudor stillroom mistress through a day at the start of summer, from the early morning herb harvest before the dew burns off, through the hours of distilling rose water and filling the medicine chest, all the way to the evening ledger by candlelight. Along the way we get into the dissolution of the monasteries and why it made her job dramatically higher stakes, the cosmetics she was producing that were slowly poisoning the people she was trying to care for.
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