Episode 085 is Melita Thomas of Tudor Times talking about Mary Queen of Scots and the research that went into piecing together this woman who is still, 500 years later, an enigma.
For reference, you may want to listen to Episode 029 on Mary Queen of Scots from back in 2015.
Book Recommendation:
Dr. Linda Porter’s Crown of Thistle (Amazon affiliate account – you pay the same price, but the podcast gets a commission. hooray!)
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Episode Transcript:
Heather:
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our connection to our own humanity. This is Episode 85. It’s another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times on Mary Queen of Scots. Just a quick note that the Renaissance English History Podcast is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. You can discover lots of great new podcasts at Agorapodcastnetwork.com. The Agora podcast of the month is Tiny Vampires. Tiny Vampires is a show about insects that transmit disease and the scientists that are fighting them. So if you are interested in mosquitoes, the Zika and diseases, this is a really good one for you. Learn more at tinyvampires.com.
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So now let me introduce you to Melita Thomas. Melita is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at tudortimes.co.uk. Melita who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970 series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson, also contribute articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
Mary Queen of Scots, she had such a tumultuous life. And it’s so hard to just try to talk about everything in just a couple of minutes because there was so much, but what can you tell us? Like kind of the highlights of her life just to get started.
Melita:
She was a queen in her cradle. Her father died when she was about a week old. So there was no time in her life when she could remember not being a queen. And she was actually the first woman to be a queen in in the British Isles, predating both her cousins Mary and Elizabeth, as well as being Queen of Scotland. She was Queen Consort of France. And there were a lot of people who thought she actually ought to be Queen of England as well. So she had a very exalted idea of her own status as a queen.
I think the most fascinating thing about her is what is partly the level of fascination she still exerts after 500 years. People debate furiously as to whether she was very badly treated, a martyr, wrongly accused of murder and adultery, or whether in fact, the accusations at the time that she was behind the assassination of her husband so that she could marry her lover. Debate continues to rage. I think she was one of those people who had personal charisma, which is something that you can’t put your finger on. You can’t see it in the paintings of her because she was said to be very beautiful, but the paintings, I mean, standards of good looks change. But she doesn’t say many things, special to modernize. But people talked of her as enchanting and charming and full of grace and so that she must have had that whole personal aura that very, very occasionally people have which made people totally devoted to her. There weren’t many people who weren’t charmed by her, but there were a few and perhaps because she was used to charming everybody, she thought she could do it all the time, and perhaps didn’t pay enough attention to some of the other political skills that she perhaps failed to develop as well as she might have done. So very early on at the start of her life, she became queen when she was what, six days old? And it looked as if she was going to lead a really kind of normal life and go to France and be queen there and then her husband died and it all kind of started to go wrong for her.
In some ways it went wrong almost from the day she was born because Scotland was a bone of contention between England and France. Both countries were bigger, more powerful, and they both wanted to control Scotland. Scotland and France had been an alliance for 300 years. There were many Scots people who wanted to continue that alliance and France was really only interested in Scotland to provide a threat to England if England were to invade France. So that that was the idea of England invaded France, then France would pay the Scots to invade England. And that kind of the deal. But in the 1540’s, when Mary was born, England, in the person of Henry VIII thought that a young female queen was the best opportunity he would ever have to dominate Scotland and he wanted Mary brought to England and married to his son, Edward, and there were a number of Scots people who thought this was actually a good plan as the Reformation was beginning to unfold in Scotland, but there are an awful lot who preferred the old French alliance.
So throughout Mary’s childhood, there was an ongoing war, though they called it the war of the Rough Wooing. And the south of Scotland was devastated, Edinburgh was burnt. It was huge, huge misery. And the upshot was that it was agreed by most of the Scots that Mary will be safer in France. So she was sent there when she was only five years old, and brought up and married the young king Francois, but he died young. They have been married not even 18 months, I don’t think. So after a brief hiatus, which one of her biographers thinks was one of the most damaging things she ever did -not returning to Scotland immediately when she was widowed, suggested that Mary was not actually that interested in Scotland and was far more interested in either being Queen of France or in promoting her claims to the throne of England. But at any rate, she did come back after 18 months and took up the rule. But she was she was only 18, and I think we have to bear in mind that some of the mistakes she made, you know, how many of us would be wiser at the age that she was?
Heather:
Can you walk me through for people who aren’t familiar with her lineage? Where her claim to the English throne comes from and why she started to proclaim herself potentially and a lot of that was down to her relatives kind of pushing that on her in France, wasn’t it? Or can you tell–
Melita:
Yeah, it certainly was her father-in-law, Henry II of France who pushed the claim, because obviously, if he had the legitimate Queen of England in his hands that would open up a whole world of possibilities to him. So the claim came from Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, had various children amongst whom were Henry VIII of England, and Margaret, who married King James the IV of Scotland. James IV and Margaret Tudor had a son James V, who married twice, and by his second, Mary of Guise, he had Mary, they had had two little boys who very sadly died within a few days of each other, which is obviously heartbreaking for the parents. So therefore, Mary was the great niece of Henry VIII.
Now, Henry, as we know, has all sorts of matrimonial escapades, which resulted in three children who survived him. He had another illegitimate son who died young. Now, Edward VI was generally reckoned to be a legitimate child and a male, so no, no contest there about him inheriting the throne. Henry’s older daughter, Mary was viewed by the vast majority of people as legitimate, although Henry had claimed that his marriage to their mother was illegal and that Mary was therefore illegitimate, and she was only permitted to inherit the throne by Act of Parliament. Then Henry’s third child, Elizabeth, Catholics thought was illegitimate. So therefore, when Queen Mary of England died, her nearest adult heir was Mary, Queen of Scots,
Heather:
Elizabeth would have been considered illegitimate because when she was born, Catherine of Aragon was still alive, right? That’s like the key part of that. So there she is, and didn’t she at one point have to actually or they had her put the coat of arms, match England with hers, and she was kind of pushing it for a while there, wasn’t she?
Melita:
Yeah, so what happened when Mary I of England died, Henry II of France immediately proclaimed that his daughter-in-law, Mary, Queen of Scots was Queen of England. And yes, her the royal arms of England were quartered with Mary’s own and it was engraved on her plate and so forth. And this became a real bone of contention, and was probably one of the things again that led much more trouble for Mary in the future. Because when her husband dies, and once he had died, Mary stopped overtly claiming the crown of England. So one can question whether she actually thought that it had been a good idea or whether she really believed that she had those claims at that time. All she ever demanded personally from Elizabeth was that she should be acknowledged as Elizabeth’s heir. The very fact that the claim had been made a number of Elizabeth’s ministers who were Protestants, very, very wary of Mary. And there was a treaty that had been agreed between the Scottish lords and the English government, and a very complex civil war that was being fought while Mary was still in France. And by this treaty, the Treaty of Edinburgh, they wanted Mary to agree that she was not the rightful Queen of England. And Mary refused to ratify the treaty unless Elizabeth agree that she was the legitimate heir. So it all got very argumentative, and that remained a bone of contention. But Mary herself, was contented to be considered the heir. But she did pursue a policy that was very much geared towards that recognition, perhaps to the exclusion of other more sensible policies that she might have pursued.
Heather:
So okay, so there she is, in France, her husband dies, she’s back in Scotland. And can you just kind of give us the synopsis of what the situation was like that she found herself in Scotland, and then kind of what happened with her personal decisions–
Melita:
Well she came back to Scotland that had in her absence, and during this period that this historian Dr. Wormald thinks was so vital. The Scottish Parliament had passed an act that made Protestantism the official religion of Scotland. Now Mary herself was a Catholic. And although in her youth, she doesn’t seem to have been more than conventionally religious like those people at the time, she became more interested in religion as she grew older. She agreed with the Protestant lords who were effectively in… to Scotland, that she would return from France, she wouldn’t interfere with Protestantism as the official faith of Scotland provided she personally could continue her Catholic worship. And that was agreed. And she was true to her word. She never at any time tried to reinstate Catholicism, even though there were plenty of people who would have supported it both in Scotland and abroad, and …effort to ensure that the Protestant church flourished in Scotland.
So she came back and her main supporter at that time was her illegitimate half-brother, Lord James Stewart, to whom she afterwards made Earl of Moray. Now he was a very talented politician, Moray, and she was, as I said before, considered attractive and charming. And many people became very infatuated with her as a personality. And she and half-brother got on well, and all went quite smoothly. She perhaps put more trust in her half-brother than he necessarily merited. She became involved in factional fighting that really, when you stand back, was more for his benefit than for the benefit of the crown. But then as time passed, she wanted to exert her own authority more. And she also wanted to marry because she wanted, like every monarch, she needed to leave an heir.
The difficulties were choosing a right husband without aggravating the Queen of England, because Mary’s policy was still her desire to be acknowledged as Elizabeth heir. But all Elizabeth would do was tell her who she couldn’t marry, she wouldn’t tell her who she could marry or who the English would approve of. And eventually, Mary got tired of this. And she married her cousin, Lord Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was another descendant of Henry VII; again, the complicated Tudor-Staurt family tree.
Now a lot of her nobles disliked Darnley, in particular her half-brother, Moray, and very quickly after marrying, Mary realized that she made a huge mistake because Darnely was well, it’s sad to say, but the poor man, he died when he was 21. And there’s not a single soul who’s ever said a good word about him apart from his mother. Maybe he would have grown out of it. But at 19, 20, he was spoiled, he was arrogant, he treated Mary very disrespectfully. He demanded all the trappings of power but didn’t really want to do any work. He drank heavily. He humiliated her by consulting with prostitutes. It was a terrible decision, even though on paper, it looked quite good. So, the culmination of that their failing relationship was when he got involved in a plot to assassinate her secretary.
So every everybody dislikes Darnley. He was trouble. Everybody wanted to see the back of him and a group of nobles and Mary discussed the problem of Darnley. And Mary was assured by her nobles that they would find a way out of the situation. Mary said to them that, yes, she wants to find a way out of the marriage with Darnley. She didn’t want her honor impugned in any way. She and Darnley had a child, so she didn’t want any suggestion that the marriage hadn’t been valid, because it would affect the legitimacy of her son. So she left them to cook up an idea to get rid of him without impugning her honor. Now, whether she herself thought this through, or whether, you know, it’s difficult to imagine what anybody could have had in mind, other than assassination, though Mary said that she had no thought of such a thing.
Anyway, the upshot was that there was an explosion in Darley’s house, and he was found dead in the garden, probably strangled. In fact, he tried to escape, and debate has raged for centuries as to whether Mary actually was involved, whether it was a complete shock and surprise to her. It’s very hard to know, because I mean, I’ve been debating it in my own mind, you think, okay, if she knew that they were going to murder Darnley and you know, there was a whole group of the minute, why didn’t she act as any other sensible monarch would have done as Elizabeth wrote to her urgently, her mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici wrote to her, urged her and said, “Find the perpetrators! Hang the perpetrators!” And, it sounds harsh, but there were plenty of other monarchs who’d, you know, dispatched a few unlucky underlings and rounded up a few innocent people and hanged them and pin the blame on them. So, if she was involved, why didn’t she do that, you know, find a scapegoat?
But on the other hand, if she wasn’t involved, again, she made no real efforts to actually find the perpetrators. And it was very, very soon decided that the main perpetrator was the Earl of Bothwell, who was distinctly unpopular with some of his fellow nobles. So it’s possible that the rest of them had got together and decided that he was going to be the fall guy, you know, that the whole thing? It’s very, very hard to disentangle why Mary didn’t proceed against Bothwell. And the explanation that was given at the time was that she and Bothwell were in it together and that they were lovers. But there doesn’t really seem to be any contemporary evidence that is that can’t be questioned, that she and Bothwell were having any kind of relationship at that time.
So the whole thing’s a mystery. Matters got worse because as Mary paid little attention to actually finding the murderers, a private prosecution was actually brought by Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox against Bothwell, who turned up with a large body of men, frightened Lennox’s men off so Linux didn’t turn up to the trial and Bothwell was acquitted.
And the next thing we know is, Bothwell abducted Mary. And again, people said, was she in it? Was she part of it? Or was it a shock and a surprise to her? He took her off to Dunbar Castle, and either he raped her or they, you know, continue their love affair. The whole thing, just no matter which, is why of course after 500 years, people still debate it because it’s very difficult to find a logical answer that covers everything that happened, at any rate, because she then married Bothwell, and that was the end.
Now her reason that she gave for marrying him was that he produced a bond, which had been signed by many of her nobles, saying that they’d be very happy if she married Bothwell, but again, you’ve got to ask the question, “Why did she accept that? Why didn’t she think about it and say, no, this man has forced me?” You can’t imagine Elizabeth letting somebody rape her and not ending up in a bad way. It’s very strange, however, she decided to marry Bothwell for good or bad reasons.
And I’ve wondered whether she had Stockholm’s Syndrome. You know that thing that they’ve identified that hostages sometimes get, they start to identify with their captor and are almost mesmerized by them. Perhaps that’s what happened to Mary. About 10% of hostages develop it, so she may have been one of them. Anyway, the two of them, they raised an army and they confronted the nobles, who now were in open revolt at Carberry Hill. But rather than fighting, Mary agreed that she would surrender, if Bothwell had a safe conduct to leave the country. And she adamantly refused to hand him over, which again, if you had raped and abducted her, do you think she’d be glad to do? But you know, she didn’t.
Anyway, she thought that by surrendering to the lords she would be reinstated and everything would carry on as normal. But they had very different ideas. The locked her in a castle at Loch Leven. And she was in appalling health. By this stage, she had a miscarriage, she was depressed, she was ill and you know, not surprising, she was, physically bullied and terrorized into abdicating. She got better and clever and charming as ever. She managed to persuade the brothers of the man who were in the castle to help her escape, so she really did have a silver tongue. Raised another army and but was on her way to Dumbarton castle. Now had she reached Dumbarton Castle in Glasgow, the whole thing would have been very, very different, because Dumbarton was impregnable. It’s the oldest continuously inhabited fortress in the British Isles, dates from the 500’s, and has never, no, I think it fell twice to the Vikings, I think. But other than that, pretty much once you’re in there, you’re safe. But she was intercepted by Moray and his army and heavily defeated at the Battle of Langside. Although she had more men, she didn’t have such good commanders. And then she made another mistake, instead of going to ground in the highlands, and perhaps raising another army, certainly a possibility, or even going back to France, she elected to go to England.
Heather:
And so then she becomes Elizabeth’s.. I can imagine Elizabeth must have thought like “What luck that this is blown up on my shore.” Talk to me a little bit about the relationship between her and Elizabeth, because in some ways, it seems like Elizabeth was insecure and jealous of her, like the reports that she would ask things like who’s prettier and who’s taller, and who’s the better dancer and things like that of the ambassador. And at the same time, she held so much. She held Mary’s life in her hands then as it turned out, they never actually met, but they exchanged letters. So tell me a little bit about kind of how that relationship was.
Melita:
Yeah, it’s a very interesting. Despite all of the Hollywood efforts to envisage a meeting, it never did occur. Mary had wanted a meeting since she returned to Scotland. And at one time, it did look as though Elizabeth would agree. But Elizabeth very often appeared to agree to things that never actually happened. Yeah, you’re right. She was very jealous of, or envious of Mary’s. As I mentioned before, Mary was considered exceptionally attractive and beautiful and all those things. And Elizabeth, clearly was attractive to a degree, but she was very vain of her appearance. And she certainly never wanted to hear that the Queen of Scots was better looking than her. And Mary also had something that Elizabeth didn’t have, which was a much more secure position as a queen, because as we were discussing before, there were many people who thought Elizabeth was illegitimate. So there was always a fundamental insecurity in Elizabeth’s claim to her throne, which was not the case for Mary. No one could ever question Mary’s right to be Queen of Scotland.
Although in some ways it was lucky that Mary came to England and went to France but it did put Elizabeth in a very difficult position because she couldn’t really be seen to be supporting rebels against a lawful monarch. As soon as you start supporting rebels against one monarch, you’re just opening the door to the same thing happening to you. So throughout this whole period, Elizabeth never wanted to admit that the noble of Scotland had been right to depose Mary. But at the same time, she preferred a Scottish government led by Mary and the subsequent regions, because it was more formally Protestant, although as I said before, Mary had never interfered with religion in Scotland. And, of course, Elizabeth could play on the insecurities of a scarcely legitimate government to control what was going on in Scotland much more. So she was very much in a cleft stick about being seen to support rebels.
And the way she dealt with it was to effectively say, well she couldn’t possibly put Mary back on her throne until Mary had demonstrated that she was innocent of these charges of murder and adultery. So what happened were, Elizabeth set up a commission to investigate the charges, and after a good deal of toing and froing and discussion and the appearance of those documents known as the casket letters, which may or may not have been forgeries, but appeared to implicate Mary in in the assassination, Elizabeth decided that nothing had been proved against her. But on the other hand, now, she couldn’t really be said to have completely exonerated herself. So while Elizabeth thought about what to do, Mary was her honored guest. And that’s what happened.
So she wasn’t going to help Mary get back to Scotland, but she wasn’t going to send Mary back hand and foot tied to the Scottish Government who would have executed her. So there was Mary for 19 years drifting about the castles of the midlands under increasingly severe restrictions, as she tried to escape, who can blame her? She did warn Elizabeth she said, “If you hold me, I will, you know, you have no right to hold me. I’m a sovereign queen, I’m not a subject of England, and I will do everything I can to escape.”
Heather:
And it’s interesting because we talked about her earlier in the context of Bess of Hardwick, and how her being there impacted their marriage. And it’s just interesting, all the different people who were impacted by what was happening with Mary, Queen of Scots. And it just, it’s just an interesting kind of side effect of it that she sort of destroyed Bess of Hardwick’s marriage, I suppose–
Melita:
She did. The poor old Earl of Shrewsbury, he was driven demented by it. And Elizabeth was never very keen on handing over the money, but she was determined that Mary had to be kept at quite strictly, partly because Mary had already shown that she could talk her way out of quite a few situations. And there was a great deal of concern that she would talk her way out of one of Elizabeth’s castles as well, and as time passed, the Catholic-Protestant divide in England became stronger. In 1569, the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland rose up against Elizabeth and tried to reinstate the Catholic religion. The Pope having not said anything about Elizabeth really in the 1560’s then excommunicated her and freed her Catholic subjects from allegiance to her. And all of this made perhaps of Elizabeth herself so much but certainly her ministers absolutely paranoid. Her chief ministers Cecil and Walsingham were Puritans, certainly Walsingham was perhaps, Cecil wasn’t quite a Puritan. But the very idea of a Catholic Queen just made their hair stand on end. So they assumed she was behind every Catholic plot. And, in a way the thought became farther to the deed because Walsingham certainly entrapped Mary, the whole the final plot, which came at the end, the Babington Plot, it was very largely set up by Walsingham. I mean, clearly you can’t inveigle somebody into treason who isn’t interested. But there was definite entrapment there, but they thought they were doing the right thing, I suppose.
Heather:
And so then she was executed. That whole, it was just such a massive thing to have one Queen execute another Queen, and it really plagued on Elizabeth. I read something that when she died, she was still like, her last words were Mary or something like that. Can you talk about the decision of how they chose to execute her and how that played out and then kind of the lasting effects of it. I mean, it kinda was the pretext that Philip used to invade with the Spanish Armada then, right?
Melita:
Well yeah, that was certainly part of it. And that was part of the reason why relationships between England and Spain deteriorated quite seriously in the 1580’s. In the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign, Philip was inclined to maintain the traditional Anglo-Spanish alliance against the Scottish-French Alliance. So it was sort of the two sides sort of drew up like that. But England became involved not necessarily with Elizabeth’s wholehearted approval, but she was drawn into supporting the rebels in the Netherlands. Now, Elizabeth, by and large, was more interested in supporting her fellow monarchs and supporting her co-religionists but she was sort of driven into a position where she had to give support to the Protestants of the Netherlands against the Spanish overlord king Philip. And so again, the whole Catholic-Protestant thing started to get more and more polarized.
So Philip, obviously angry at Elizabeth’s interference in the Netherlands, now started to think that actually he needed to interfere in England and potentially put Mary on the throne. So that was those part of the lead up to the Spanish invasion in 1588 and the whole plethora of plots that either real or manufactured that occurred in the 1580’s. So, Elizabeth was persuaded eventually, that as long as Mary lived, these plots will continue. Because with Mary dead, her heir would then be, Mary’s son James of Scotland, who had been brought up as a Protestant. So Elizabeth was eventually persuaded that Mary should die.
Probably the last straw was a letter that was written to Mary and smuggled in a beer barrel to the house where she was living in, being held at Chartley Hall in Staffordshire. And Walsingham knew everything that was going in and everything that was going out because the whole thing was a setup. And Mary received a letter saying that six gentlemen would assassinate Elizabeth, and they would then come and free her, and she would have a glorious future as Queen of England. And Mary, in her response to this letter, did not say, “Do not assassinate Elizabeth.” She didn’t explicitly say go ahead and do it. But the way she worded her letter, it was clear that she accepted that was what was going to happen. So once Walsingham had this letter in his hand, and his secretary threw little gallows on it when he received it, because effectively Mary had hanged herself. They persuaded Elizabeth that the Queen should be tried. She was tried and found guilty. And it was a while before Elizabeth could bring herself to sign the death warrant. Because once again, as you say, once the monarchs killed another monarch, you know, you’ve opened the floodgates. Elizabeth, she was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
Heather:
Interesting. And then the story of Mary, Queen of Scots when she died and her tiny little puppy–
Melita:
Yeah hiding under her skirts, yes. She actually died very bravely. As I said before, she didn’t while she was in Scotland, show a lot of interest in religion other than her personal faith, but she seemed to become more genuinely religious as she grew older and, her life would have been a lot easier if she’d converted to Protestantism, when she went to Scotland. Things might have turned out very differently. But she was, she wouldn’t do that. And by the end, she did see herself as a martyr for her religion.
Heather:
So where can we learn more about her?
Melita:
Well, there are so many books about Mary, and so much debate. And the most well-known of the great biographies of her is by Lady Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots. It’s a little dated now in some ways. Some of the sort of gender politics we would be surprised by now, but I mean, it is a very, very comprehensive and detailed work. Dr. Jenny Wormald, a very well-known Scottish historian, wrote in the late I think, the late 80’s, so about 20 years after Antonia Fraser, a book called Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure, and it’s her contention that Mary was a completely useless queen, regardless of whether she had anything to do with Darnley’s murder. You know, she made so many other mistakes that she brought it on herself. So it’s interesting, a breath of fresh air compared with some of the very positive biographies. Dr. Linda Porter’s Crown of Thistles is excellent. Very, very nice, very balanced, very beautifully written. So highly recommend that one. Rosalind Marshall, who’s a Scots historian, she’s written a rather nice one about Queen Mary’s Women it’s called and it has little pen portraits, as well of Mary herself, of her mother, Maria de Guise, her grandmother Antoinette of Borbon, her mother in law, Margaret Lennox. So that’s very interesting for some background, and there are numerous, some clubs and societies and all the rest of it, who talked about Mary, Queen of Scots. And when you go to Scotland, I mean it’s, it’s taught and it’s read, and Mary Queen of Scots, she is perhaps more popular now than she was in the 1560’s.
Heather:
Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to explain to us and she’s such an interesting person.
Melita:
Yeah, I mean, I still can’t decide about her, whether she was guilty or whether she was not guilty. But actually, I think there is a very nice quote that perhaps to end on. This was written by by one of Cecil’s men who went to visit her, and they were all terrified that she would charm everybody into letting her go. Anyway, this was in the 1570’s or early 80’s.
“She has withal an alluring grace, a pretty Scotch accent and a searching wit, clouded with mildness. Fame might move some to relieve her and glory joined with gain might stir others to adventure much for her sake.”
Heather:
Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to tell us about Mary Queen of Scots. For more information go to Tudortimes.co.uk or you can also see the resources available on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com. Remember, if you like this show, the biggest way you can help it is to leave a review on iTunes. That’s the best thing you can do and it’s free. So leave a review on iTunes. Or if you have any Tudor loving friends, you can also tell them about it. Chances are they probably haven’t heard about it. So go on and tell your friends. The next episode in about two weeks is going to be the second episode on food and table manners. And then we are getting into reformation month which is in October. It’s to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the 95 theses. I’m doing a lot of episodes on the Henrician reformation and ecclesiastical history in England. So if you’re nerd like me, you will love it. That’s October. Talk with you again soon. Bye bye!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
