Today in 1556 Richard Chancellor died. He was a navigator and explorer who is remembered for piloting the boats that were sent to find a northeast passage. Yes, northeast, not northwest. The idea was that the Spanish and Portuguese largely had a lock on the trade routes to the west, so it worth it to try heading east, over Russia, and to try to come down from that direction. The first ships set out in 1553, and while they didn’t discover a faster route to Asia, they did discover a trade route to Moscow.
Trade relations quickly blossomed, with a company – the Muscovy Company – forming to fund exploration and trade. Ivan the Terrible even proposed marriage to Queen Elizabeth. In 1556 an ambassador was coming back to England and the ships hit a storm off the Scottish coast.
Richard Chancellor, the captain, drowned while saving the life of the ambassador.
That’s your Tudor Minute for today. Remember you can dive deeper into life in 16th-century England – I did an episode on the northeast passage – through the Renaissance English History Podcast at englandcast.com.
Suggested links:
Richard Chancellor appears in my novel Sideways and Backwards, where a modern woman winds up stuck in 16th-century Cambridge!
Episode 114: Richard Hakluyt, England’s first travel writer
Episode 22: The Northeast Passage
From the shop:
Old Map Collection
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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).
