In the early modern period, belief in fairies was quite commonplace. But put all thoughts of Tinkerbell aside!  These fairies were altogether more dangerous beings - troublemakers, child-snatchers, seducers and changelings. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb finds out more from Prof. Diane Purkiss, author of Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories.  This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg. Discover the past with...

King James VI and I, the first monarch to reign over Scotland, England and Ireland, has a mixed reputation. To many, he is simply the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovereign who never washed, the colourless man behind the authorised Bible bearing his name, or the drooling fool whose speech could barely be understood. For too long, he has paled in comparison to his more celebrated Tudor and Stuart forebears. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor...

In the early modern period, it was patently clear to everyone that supernatural beings, foremost among them the devil, were at work in the world, intervening in human affairs.  Can we find the origins of beliefs in vampires, zombies and revenants in this age too?  How exactly did such beings manifest themselves?  And how do we make sense of this in an age in which people believed they were living under a providential God?  Joining Professor Suzannah Lipscomb to kick off a month of special Not...

Henry VIII was termed "by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland.”  Ireland was England’s oldest colony.  But what bloody events and brutal actions led to the English conquest of Ireland?  How did the relationship between the two countries change over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?  And how did the Irish respond to such subjugation?  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, author of the...

History books rarely make much reference to the impact of climate and the natural environment on people, and vice versa.  Yet volcanic eruptions and storms, droughts and cyclical pressures have shaped human history, both in raising up civilisations and bringing them to their knees.  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to acclaimed historian Professor Peter Frankopan - who has adopted this revolutionary new way of looking at history - to examine the impact...

Reginald Pole has been styled as both the nemesis of Henry VIII and as Mary I's bloody accomplice. Pole was related to the English royal family through the Plantagenets and was himself implicated in a plot against Henry VIII in 1538. So how did he rise to become the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, and then use his position both for and against the Tudor monarchs?  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr. Frederick Smith to discuss this...

The public fascination with true crime is nothing new. Four centuries ago, the sensational story of the death in the Tower of London of Thomas Overbury, a lawyer in the court of King James I, led to a scandal that rocked the monarchy to its core.  In this episode of Not Just The Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb finds out more from Professor Alastair Bellany, about the death of Overbury and why it threatened the Stuart throne. This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg. Discover the past...

In 1621 the Virginia Company of London put out a call for young, handsome and honestly educated women to become wives for the planters in its new colony in Jamestown. Hopeful husbands were supposed to pay for their English brides in best leaf tobacco. But who were the women who made the Atlantic crossing? And what became of them when they arrived?  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets author Jennifer Potter to find out more about the lives of these...

Girolamo Savonarola was a late 15th century Dominican friar who rose to become a preacher, prophet, and politician. He took on the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church and despotic rulers including the powerful Medicis. He was both progressive - helping to lay the foundations of the Reformation and the Enlightenment - but also fundamentalist and deeply unsettling.  In this episode, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to award-winning author Denise Mina, whose novel Three Fires tells the...

Life in Tudor England was risky. In addition to the outbreaks of plague, the threat of poverty and the dangers of childbirth, there were social risks - of not fitting in, of social death. How was a person supposed to behave? And what were the dangers involved?  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb finds out about the art of surviving by 'blending in', with teacher and writer Toni Mount, author of How to Survive in Tudor England.  This episode was produced by Rob...

For anyone studying the politics of the 1570s-80s, it would be hard to avoid Elizabeth I’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham, who seemingly rose from nowhere to become one of the most important men of his time.  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb finds out more from Dr. Hannah Coates, who has reappraised Walsingham's political practice, religious outlook and role as a councillor to the Crown. Drawing on new and underused sources, she's created a fresh,...

The unsolved mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower - Edward V and Richard, Duke of York - is possibly English history’s greatest cold case. Were they murdered by their paternal uncle Richard III? Or were two plotters to take the Tudor throne of King Henry VII - Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck - connected to, or in reality, the Princes who had survived? Recent findings have raised new questions about the 540-year-old mystery and in this episode of Not Just the Tudors,...

From Henry VIII declaring himself as the ‘loyal and most assured servant’ of Anne Boleyn to the poems lavished on Elizabeth I by her suitors, the dramas of courtly love have captivated readers and dreamers for centuries.  In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, first released in September 2021, Sarah Gristwood tells Professor Suzannah Lipscomb how the Tudors actually re-enacted the roles of the devoted lovers and capricious mistresses first laid out in the romances of medieval literature -...

In the cut-throat world of Renaissance Florence, Alessandro - the illegitimate son of a Duke and a mixed-race servant - attempts to reassert the Medicis’ faltering grip on the city state. But after just six years in power, Alessandro is murdered by his cousin while anticipating an adulterous liaison. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, first released in August 2021, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Catherine Fletcher, author of The Black Prince of Florence, about one man's...

To this day, the presence of angels is synonymous with the Christmas story and the momentous events associated with the Nativity. For the Tudors and Stuarts, widespread belief in angels brought a touch of the miraculous to life, but so too did ghosts, although it was sometimes hard to distinguish them from angels - or demons. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, first released on 23 December 2021, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb summons up the spirits of times past with historian Dr Laura...

We think of Shakespeare as a man out of time. His stories and characters, his capturing of human nature, and his exquisite use of language, continue to speak to us today - and will endure for the centuries to come. But he was born in a rural market town in the early years of Elizabeth I's reign, and was formed by the social, religious, and political worldview of the period.  In this special episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb reflects on the world that shaped...

Have you ever wondered how and where our Christmas tradition of pantomime originated?  In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb finds out from Dr. Oliver Crick, who traces pantomime’s origins to Commedia dell’arte - Italian travelling players who adapted their performances to other cultures and senses of humour.  This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg. Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts...

The Coventry Carol and In Dulci Jubilo are songs that are still sung at this time of the year.  Curiously, despite their medieval roots, these tunes remained popular throughout Protestant Elizabethan England, a period when there was a complete overhaul of music in church and what it was expected to do.  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr Jonathan Willis to explore the complex effects of the Reformation on music in England. This episode was produced...

How we visualise the Tudors largely comes from their portraits painted by Hans Holbein the Younger.  Between 1526 and 1543, he captured the elite of the Tudor court and beyond - Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Thomas Cromwell, politicians, courtiers, soldiers and countless others.   Every Holbein portrait seems to have begun with a drawing taken at a live sitting. An exhibition of these drawings in now on at Buckingham Palace and allows us to see Holbein’s process at work.   In this...

Life in the 16th and 17th centuries was brutal - the development of warfare technology made conflicts catastrophic for civilians as well as soldiers, there were regular epidemics, and famines both man-made and natural.  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets Professor Ole Peter Grell, who co-wrote The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe with Dr. Andrew Cunningham. Today's discussion focuses on just three of...

Centuries before Proust's Remembrance of Things Past took us on a tour of memory and James Joyce played with stream of consciousness, a 16th century nobleman - Michel de Montaigne - developed a wholly new style of reflective prose that examined his place in the world. His thoughts, questions and worries appear on the page as though they are your own, at once intensely personal to his own life yet somehow universal.  In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks...

For the Tudors, tapestries not only brought warmth and colour to a room, but they were magnificent demonstrations of artistic skill and of moral messages. A campaign is now under way to save a vast golden tapestry – Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books - personally commissioned by Henry VIII around 1535, at the time he broke with Rome. If the campaign is successful, the tapestry will go on display to the public in the Faith Museum, Bishop Auckland in County Durham, in Spring...

On 17 November 1558, Queen Mary I died. But how would history have turned out differently if Mary had lived another 30 years? Where would her Roman-Catholicism taken England? Would Mary have patched up relations between England and the rest of Europe?  In this counterfactual special to end her Tudor Dynasty series, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb asks a panel of experts to speculate on the reign that might have been. Suzannah is joined by Dr. Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, Prof. Alexander Samson and...

For centuries, Hampton Court has been a stage for monarchy, revolution, religious fundamentalism, sexual scandals, and military coups. In his new book The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court, Gareth Russell moves through the rooms and the decades, each time focusing on a different person who called Hampton Court their home. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Gareth to find out more about the many sovereigns...

Anne Boleyn is usually considered in the context of her marriage to - and demise at the hands of - King Henry VIII. But ultimately, the memory of Anne eventually triumphed, and her death was avenged, through the reign of the daughter she barely knew, Queen Elizabeth I. Piecing together evidence from original documents and artefacts, historian Tracy Borman - in her new book Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History - shares compelling evidence that Anne exerted...