One of my favorite podcasts is James Boulton’s Queens of England Podcast, which goes through chronologically from the Conquest talking about the women who were Queen. He was gracious enough to do a guest episode for me last year on Henry VIII’s mistresses, which you may recall (listen here!). He’s moving into the Tudor period now, so we had a little chat about Katherine of Aragon.
Follow James Boulton here:
Website: Queens of England Podcast
Twitter: @QueensPodcast
Facebook: Queens of England Podcast
Alison Weir historical fiction biography I mentioned (it’s really great!) (Amazon affiliate link)
Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen: A Novel (Six Tudor Queens)
Review from the Guardian:
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Transcript: James Boulton on Katherine of Aragon
Heather:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. This is Episode 69 with the joint podcast – a chat episode with James Boulton of the Queens of England Podcast. It’s a fantastic podcast. If you haven’t discovered it yet, you totally should check it out. He’s moving into the Tudor period now.
So we had a little chat about Katherine of Aragon. It was really great to speak with him, I really appreciated that. So this is our conversation about Katherine. We mostly agree, so it might be a bit boring just listening to us agree with each other, but it was a fun chat.
Just a quick reminder that this show is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. For more information on the Agora Podcast Network, check out agorapodcastnetwork.com.You can go there to discover all the great podcasts that are part of the network and find a new favorite.
Also, all of the links to things we talked about, links to James’s podcasts, everything like that are available on Englandcast.com, where you can also sign up for my mailing list, which gets you book giveaways and all kinds of fun things like that. Do go to Englandcast.com and check that out.
So now we’ll jump right into the conversation with James. And we started in a very British way by talking about the weather.
James:
Cool. So I’m here with Heather Teysko of the Renaissance English History Podcast. Heather, how are you today?
Heather:
I am great. How are you doing James?
James:
It could be better. It’s all gray outside, damp, wet, English.
Heather:
Well, it’s snowing here in Pennsylvania. I’m in Pennsylvania right now with my family and it’s snowing, so we can both complain about being cold.
James:
Yeah, well, the thing is, it’s never cold when it rains here. It’s warmer. It’s when the weather’s beautiful, it freezes your butt off. It’s never great. It’s always something to complain about.
Heather:
Yeah well, that’s very British, isn’t it?
James:
Yeah. So we’ve got the nice British introduction of talking about the weather out the way. Let’s move on to the history.
Heather:
All right. Well, poor Katherine of Aragon having raised in Spain, she probably would have been complaining about the weather quite a lot as well, ha?
James:
Yeah well, you’ve already got me sidetracked. I used to study Scottish history. The number of times you get a foreign princess sent over to Scotland and she dies within like eight weeks, I’m sure just because of the weather.
But as you say, we’re here to talk about Katherine. As my listeners will know, I just spent an exorbitant amount of time talking about her more than anyone in my entire life. I tried to keep my own sort of views, my opinions, my own wild theories of the queens stuff to myself, try not to be too crazy. But I thought now’s the time to be crazy. And who better to go be crazy with – the foremost podcasting expert in Tudor history.
So my first question is, what do you think of her? What is she ranked for you in Tudor queens…?
Heather:
Where does she rank? She’s not my favorite of Henry’s wives, I have to say. Anne of Cleves is my absolute favorite of Henry’s wives. But in terms of who she is, I think you mentioned it one time, there’s this, I think with Anne Boleyn too, there’s this idea of either villainizing her or making her into a victim of some sort. Like she was this hot-headed person who should have given in, but poor her. Or at the same time turning her into this feminist hero.
I think we look at these spectrums, we put her on either side of things. People either say, “Oh, poor Katherine.” She was sent away to this cold, damp castle in Norfolk or wherever she was sent or they say, “Yeah, she was a warrior. Go, her!” I think she’s probably somewhere like all of us, like all humans. We have those sides to us. But if you really look at us, we’re somewhere in the middle there.
So, I think she would have been deeply affected by her lack of being able to have a son, which was the main duty that she was brought up to do, she was meant to do. But she loved her daughter and wanted to protect her daughter, and was looking out for her daughter.
Having grown up at the Alhambra, in the shadow of this warrior queen for a mother, and then everything she went through during the time after Arthur‘s death before she married Henry, I think all of these very traumatic sorts of events would have really shaped who she was and made her someone who was both very strong and perhaps prone to seeing herself as a victim. I don’t know that that’s necessarily either side of her more than the other. Does that make sense?
James:
Yeah, it does definitely to me. I think you’ve sort of said a lot of the reasons why I find it… And for me, I mean I’ve only covered her so far. I never really find I have a true opinion or truly know a lot of these queens that I cover, until I’ve actually gone into the library and read all the books. So I haven’t got a fully formed opinion of any otherwise, except maybe Anne Boleyn.
But for me, she seems like a normal queen to me. She reigns for 20 years. She does all normal queenly things. And she does very well. I think in the second episode, I said something along the lines of if it wasn’t for this massive, perfect storm of four or five things all piled up at the same time, she would have been a successful queen, even with the problems. We’ll get into it later on the problems of her giving birth.
But even without that, I mean, England has had, I don’t wanna use the word “barren”, but queens who have not had children or queens that only gave daughters, that has happened before. That hasn’t necessarily led to divorce, to everything that happened.
For the other queens, it’s difficult to tell because most of them reigned for a very short amount of time. Even Anne Boleyn was only queen for like, what? About three years? But Katherine was queen for over half of Henry’s reign, just about. Even if you stop when she effectively stopped being queen, if you don’t count it from the divorce. I mean, if you count it even from the mid-late 1520’s, it’s still a lot.
I’m not even sure if I said anything, I just did a bit of a splurge of consciousness. But I didn’t want to rank them yet, because I think I’m gonna sort of do a big episode at the end where I’m gonna do that.
So you mentioned her family, growing up in the Alhambra, having Isabella of Castile for a mother. She grew up in a nice place. So unlike most of Henry’s queens, barring Anne of Cleves, they were domestic, which is very unusual. But actually, in the previous decades, the sort of marrying domestically became a bit more common.
What do you think, being Spanish being from an incredible family of these two incredibly strong monarchs in Ferdinand and Isabella, how do you think that affected her when she came to England and had to deal with the various problems she had with her first husband dying? Being sort of left to rot by Henry VII? Do you think that had a big influence? Or do you think it was just kind of how any queen would have reacted?
Heather:
I think it affected her later with protecting her daughter’s rights. To me, it’s interesting that both her and her sister Joanna, well Joanna was put aside and wasn’t allowed to get her inheritance. It’s interesting to me that both of these daughters had a mother who was an independent sovereign, reigned on her own, not through her husband, and they would have seen that it wasn’t that big of a deal for a woman to reign on her own.
It wasn’t like in England. It was different because as you said, the only time this was tried before was with Matilda and Stephen. And it all went very, very badly when Matilda was trying to press her claim in the 12th century. It’s interesting for me, seeing how I think for Katherine, it wouldn’t have been that outrageous to think “Well okay, I haven’t given a son but he has an heir. He has Mary and she can reign on her own. What’s the big deal with that?”
I think that would have probably shaped her having seen her mother successfully reigning on her own and more than successfully, recapturing Spain and uniting Spain and finally expelling the Moors and everything like that. At the same time, I think, unlike some of the domestic wives, well, unlike really any of the domestic wives, she was bred to be a queen. So she knew her role. She had a sense of her own importance and her own kind of worth as a queen. There was always that sense of being regal.
It’s funny because I have this other podcast Watching the Tudors where my husband and I rewatch The Tudors and we talk about what was true and what wasn’t. And there’s all these scenes in The Tudors where Katherine, early on when Anne’s first rising, she says things to her and calls her a whore and all this. I don’t think Katherine would have stooped to that level.
Katherine was the daughter of Isabella. She’s not gonna stoop to making petty conversation with a lady-in-waiting, like that’s just, I don’t see that very much in her character, I don’t know. So, to me, she was very proud. That would have come from being raised with this warrior personality around her and just realizing that she was bred to be a queen.
She was bred differently than normal people. She was raised to go away from her family and leave her family and go rule another country. You see that very early on with her stepping into taking control when Henry was in France and was at 1513 Battle of Flodden. She didn’t necessarily lead an army, but was a very successful regent and he trusted her like that. I don’t think he would have trusted Anne Boleyn or Katherine Howard in the same sort of way.
That was a long answer to a short question. What do you think?
James:
Well, I think when I first went into this, I mean, all English school… who did history a lot, and bred on education of Tudors and Nazis, covered Katherine and Anne a lot. All of them really. The one thing you don’t tend to do in a normal… because I think most countries, they tend to be quite parochial with their history, they tend to think that their countries are in a…. So you’re sort of study only English history in England.
You think Katherine of Aragon kind of was born when she came over to England and so you don’t sort of study where she was born, how she was born. So I find it really interesting studying that. You’re right, she was bred to be a queen. Her mother was a regnant queen.
I tend to go with the English as well, Juana or Joanna as I tend to call her was a regnant-ish, Queen of Spain. Really her husband I think was really in charge. I think she had two other sisters who were both Queen of Portugal, I think, if I recall. You have this, I mean, Castile a bit like England is, because Castile has been around for a long time. It isn’t quite Spain yet. But it’s kind of this sudden new dynasty in a way. But it is this incredibly dignified sort of crown on the up, whereas the Tudors are very much sort of starting from the bottom, from the very beginning.
You have this incredibly noble family. I think that the word that I keep thinking of with Katherine is dignified. She has this dignity. I think it’s interesting what you were saying with her seeing Anne Boleyn as beneath her or at least believed beneath her dignity. I think it’s very, that kind of sense of honor, of a sense of her own place, her own importance, it’s not something very easy to identify with. This sort of very hierarchical sense of that.
I called her the word “obstinate” a lot, which I’m not totally wild about ‘cause I think it’s a little bit gendered in a way. It’s a bit like using the word “bossy.” Yeah, no one calls a man bossy and I think obstinate is a bit the same. But she was a blocker, and it’s very easy to get very frustrated with her. Because you think if she just lost a little bit of that sense of self-importance that… see, it might have all worked out well.
But I definitely agree with you and it’s getting very boring for them I’m sure. We’re both just agreeing on everything. She had this sense of she was meant to be a queen. She was born to be a queen. She has this sense from all her family. And then you have this sense of later on she was the queen. Everyone’s agreed. She was the queen, and then it all went horribly wrong.
And speaking of all going horribly wrong, Without wanting to get too graphically into the details, I want to talk about her virginity. Because again, I didn’t really want to, basically, when you read the …literature, the books, you find often the main, the biggest story, they tend to kind of avoid it because it’s entirely speculative and unknowable.
Then you get some more of the popular authors, some of the more readable books sort of either hedge their bets as well, or decide that they’re gonna go for it and have an opinion. So I’m going to ask you to put your neck on the line here. Then I’m going next right there with you, but you first.
Heather:
Okay, all right. My neck is, I think she was a virgin, do you?
James:
Yes, I do. I think it’s a certain bias, I’m studying it from her perspective. So I kind of want to believe her. I think it also comes from dignity. It was an untenable position if she had been with him, been with Arthur in the strongest sense of the word been. But I just don’t think, it was so against her interests to keep arguing this point. Unless you think she was the most stubborn woman in history. Her argument came from the sense of dignity, the sense of she knew she was. So that for me, makes me believe her.
Heather:
Yeah and I agree with you there. Also just the things that she said to priests, she was a very devout person. Making those kinds of confessions, we’re kind of in our 21st-century post-enlightenment kind of thinking doesn’t put as much credence if somebody says something in confessional, oh, who knows if it’s true or not. But at that time, like that was your “eternal soul in peril”.
I love that word “peril” when I talk about it like that, because it reminds me of Monty Python. “Let me have just a little bit more peril. No, it’s too perilous!” Again, I can’t say the word peril without saying that. But you know, I feel like, I don’t think that she would have taken that risk with her soul. If it wasn’t, I don’t think she would have lied about that being as devout as she was.
Also, Arthur was quite sick. I don’t know, to me, him coming out and boasting in the morning that he’d been to Spain, he was very thirsty, because he’d been to Spain the night before. That’s just what teenagers do. That doesn’t say anything. That just means he was boasting.
In fact, that would actually, being a pop psychologist of a 16-year-old boy, which I have absolutely no experience of, so I really am just talking out of my head here, but it seems like that might be a little bit more trying to prove something. It would actually lean more in favor of her not having had sex with him, because he had to go out and make that boast about it.
I don’t know we’re really getting deep. But that to me, I don’t think that boast he made means anything. He was quite ill. I don’t know if he would have been able to. I don’t know. So yeah, I’m not buying it. I don’t know.
James:
Well, I mean, unlike you, I have great experience of being a 16-year-old boy and I entirely agree with you. But it’s not even unusual to have marriage not consummated immediately. You get this with Henry and Anne of Cleves as well. They were married for about what? Six or nine months? I mean, he changed his mind pretty quickly. There is at least a theory that part of the problem was that he couldn’t perform for lack of a better word, on the wedding night. Obviously he blamed Anne of Cleves for being a bit of a… and not being his own problems.
I think it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Arthur either couldn’t because of illness or couldn’t perform because he didn’t want to or something like that. I don’t think it’s not that unusual to be delayed. I think, Eleanor of Aquitaine if my memory serves, but with her first husband, you get this as well. Her husband is not that interested in the whole thing.
Arthur was supposed to have sex with her and so he made this boast which appears in a couple of sources, I think this is on contemporary. A lot of our sources are written later on when it becomes in their interest, to say one thing or the other.
Heather:
So we kind of agree here. We agree on a lot, don’t we?
James:
I think we read the same book.
Heather:
Alison Weir is doing the series the Six Tudor Queens where it’s historical fiction. But it’s Alison Weir, so she knows a lot. Obviously, she is the grandmother of Tudor queens. Her first book on Katherine of Aragon came out last year, and it was really, really an interesting view of things from Katherine’s perspective. It wasn’t like kind of “normal historical fiction” that’s just kind of romanticized everything. It was really based on solid work. It was really interesting. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve read it.
James:
I’ve read her book, it’s called something like The Six Wives yeah, something like that. So I used her a lot, because I find sometimes she can sort of move away from the cold, hard facts into a bit of wild speculation every now and again. She’s very, very good. I tend to use her books a lot for picking out sources, because her books are huge.
So she likes to list all the sources and I love to read a good long quote. I try not to read too much historical fiction outside of work, because I spend my actual job and then my podcasting job reading history. And so I tried to mix it with something else or else I just think my fiancée might punch me in the face if I spent all my time just talking about history. She’s more of an art historian.
So I’m gonna ask you another question now, and I’m pretty sure we’re gonna agree on this one as well. Katherine did have one surviving child with Henry, and was Mary. It’s obviously a 50/50 shot more or less, give or take that Mary turned out to be a girl and not a son. She did have many stillbirths, and she had one son who lived, I think, for a few hours, and then had Henry, Duke of Cornwall who lived for a little bit longer, but not very long at all, really. Just a few weeks.
What do you think would have happened both at the time and sort of now, this is wild speculation now, had the Duke of Cornwall or another one of the sons survived? Do you think that the whole Anne Boleyn thing would have even happened?
Heather:
No, I don’t think it would have. Do you agree? I mean, I think Henry might have met Anne Boleyn and might have wanted to find another way to put aside his wife, but he would have really thought out a different method of it. His whole reasoning was the Leviticus quote and the fact that he didn’t have children.
I think, this is getting into Henry, but I really think that Henry convinced himself of that as time went on, I think Henry had this tendency to see himself as a victim as well. I think that he really, I don’t know, believed it at first. But I think by the end, he really believed, that he tricked himself into thinking it. I think so.
I also think if Katherine had a son that had lived, she wouldn’t have necessarily needed to be as defensive. I think her position was always going to be a little bit insecure until she had that and she probably knew that. That if she had had a son, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need. Maybe she could have worked something out with Henry. Maybe Henry would have been willing to even if he put her aside, to recognize the son’s rights to rule before.
I think that’s part of why she was as stubborn as she was trying to protect Mary’s rights. If she had a son, she might not had to have protected the son’s rights as much because that would have just been a given. I don’t know. But I don’t think it would have played out the same at all. What do you think?
James:
I think it’s difficult. I asked this question, it seems like a super, super stupid question. But the reason is because a queen’s position is secured by having a healthy son. Anyone who knows any period of sort of world history knows that.
But the reason why I ask is I don’t want to talk too much about Anne Boleyn as I want to keep this fairly focused on Katherine, but you have this view that people tend to have of Anne Boleyn. We get this a lot of times in TV shows, The Tudors, is Anne Boleyn is this seductress. This unstoppable sexual force of nature that Henry never stood a chance once she got her claws on him.
I don’t particularly like this image, because it rather speaks to a rather unpleasant thing, the male psyche I think. But you could argue that Anne Boleyn perhaps would not have seen an opportunity to become queen had Katherine not been in a difficult position. But she might still have tried her best.
There are queens, even with sons who found themselves completely sidelined by mistresses. Even other problems would still be there. Katherine’s position wasn’t just hurt by not having a son, she was also hurt by the changing diplomatic system on the continent with Charles repudiating her daughter Mary as a wife and then becoming this big scary monster of Europe. You still have that. You still have Wolsey as well. Wolsey wasn’t as anti-Katherine as Katherine thought. He said he didn’t want to sideline her.
So the reason I asked is, do you think it was almost purely the son issue that that tipped him over?
Heather:
Well, no, I guess my question then is like, even had all that happened, I guess my thinking is, would Katherine have reacted differently if she had a son whose rights she knew was going to be protected? Because I could see Henry sidelining her and saying, like whatever reason, Charles did this, and Woolsey says this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and trying to set her aside.
If she knew that her son’s rights were going to be protected as the heir, I could see her perhaps having a different reaction than she had. I think a lot of her reaction was protecting Mary. But I don’t know. What do you think?
James:
I think it seems a combination of protecting herself as well not so much herself in terms of her own life or anything that actually was so much a concern, but protecting her own position, no protecting the fact that she was married before God. She was made queen in a religious ceremony. So she was kind of protecting that in as much as anything, and also protecting Mary’s legitimacy.
But I do think it’s very easy to say if she just had a son, everything would be hunky-dory. I don’t think that is the case. I think, I think if she’d had a son, I think she probably would have died, if she had died at the same time, died a queen, and died as Henry’s wife.
But I don’t think she would have been the same queen she was in 1510, ruling England while Henry was abroad, sending troops to Flodden, serving alongside the actual ambassadors as her father and then her nephew’s representative. Of course, she did actually serve as an ambassador very early on. I don’t think Katherine would have had a particularly great time in the 1520’s and 30’s even if she’d had one or two sons. I guess it’s my view.
Heather:
Yeah, I can see that.
James:
Finally, we’ve already touched on this already, because all things are connected. I mentioned earlier that I find Katherine sometimes to be an incredibly frustrating woman, because she is so so set, she’s an immovable object. She won’t give in on anything, she won’t compromise and it did hurt her very much in the long term. If she had given into Henry’s demands in the first or second time of asking, she could have lived out a very comfortable life.
Mary would have been disinherited, but she would have been I imagine been given a title, given a nice marriage, and lived a very nice life. And the obvious comparisons to make here is with Anne of Cleves who you’ve already mentioned is your personal fave.
So do you wanna sort of maybe sort of compare the two? The two different reactions to being rejected by Henry?
Heather:
Well, I think you couldn’t really. Katherine was experiencing it for the first time while Anne had Katherine’s experience to look at and to learn from. So she was able to recognize very early that she was not going to win this battle. I don’t think that Katherine knew that even until the end.
But something that I would like to talk about, I would like to hear your opinion about as well is, I feel like until the very end, Katherine didn’t blame Henry. She blamed all of his advisors, the people who were telling him this, and Anne Boleyn and Wolsey, and all the different people.
In her last letter to him that says, “This above all else, my eyes desire to see you before anything else,” in her letter on her deathbed that she wrote to him. Even if that’s not completely 100% true, it does seem like she was almost blind to him and his faults. I think that’s something that can happen when you marry somebody.
I’ve been married for 10 years. And I still see my husband as the 26-year-old guy he was when I met him, and hopefully, he still sees me as the 20 something that I was when he met me. I think you can, after you’re with somebody for that long, you can be blinded to their faults and to the changes that have happened to them. And it’s easier for yourself from a psychological perspective to blame somebody else. I think that she blamed his advisors until the end.
Anne I think, was able to look at things without that emotional baggage. And just look at things much more pragmatically and see “Okay, this is how this is, and I’m not going to win this one.” So I think it made it a lot easier for her emotionally. She had less to lose, really. But I think also the Anne example does show that Henry could be very generous if he got his way. Like, if you didn’t challenge him, he was fine. It was her obstinacy that drove him so crazy.
So I’m interested to hear what you think about how she felt about him until the end, and what may have been different?
James:
Well I think also Anne of Cleves, she had the example of Katherine but I think almost more importantly, she had the example of Anne Boleyn, so kind of a bit of both. The example of Katherine shows that Henry was not above kind of neglecting his wife to death, whereas Anne Boleyn showed he had no objection to killing his wife to death.
I’m always verily suspicious when people you see in the sources, people will say these people were blaming the king though, blaming advisors. You see this with the Peasants’ revolt. You see it in the Russian Revolution. You see it all through history when you have a monarch. Everyone’s always blaming the advisors and never the monarch. Because if you want the king to do something, you don’t say, “I think you made a terrible decision. I think you are killing us.” You say, “You’re great. You’re great. You’re really great. You’re like god great.” But it’s your advisor–
Heather:
Well the Pilgrimage of Grace wasn’t against Henry, it was against the Protestant advisors who were advising him and stuff. So yeah, I get that.
James:
But having said all of that, usually I’m very suspicious. But on this occasion, I think you’re right. I think Katherine seems to be someone who was very quick to blame. She was very quick to blame people who weren’t the real people to blame.
You see this with the fact that she got along with none until Chapuys came along as the Imperial ambassador. You see with all the other ambassadors that came, right back to when she first married Arthur, she hated them all. She thought they were all terrible people who were just getting in her way. She did reserve some sharp words for her father as well. But she tended to blame them for her problems.
Then you see this again, even before the whole divorce problem started. You get this problem with, she never got on with Wolsey, and I think with Wolsey, it was more of a power struggle, because Wolsey sort of represented the France faction and Katherine was the head of the pro-Spain, pro-Empire faction. So I think she was very quick to blame.
Generally, people were easy for her to blame because I think it’s very difficult for her to blame Henry, a man who she, I think you can say that she loved him in a sort of Renaissance, medieval, early modern sense rather than kind of the more modern sense. I think she couldn’t believe that a king would treat a queen this way.
You see it again with Henry, he has these elements he loved to portray himself as this big, virile masculine man. He loved to be this man of action, sporting manners Renaissance prince. Yet you read the sources and again, you can’t believe everything you read.
But you see this man, browbeat by these two incredibly forceful, strong women very, very different women, Katherine and Anne Boleyn, but you can’t really compete with them. Because he’s kind of enthralled to them both and I think intimidated by them both, he comes across sometimes as very, very weak. So I can see why Katherine would think that Henry was being misled, because he often comes across as being someone who didn’t, who could be persuaded of things. So I think that would be my answer to the question before I spend five minutes more.
Heather:
It’s interesting. We agree on quite a lot about her, don’t we?
James:
I think to be honest, unlike with Anne Boleyn, there’s quite a historical consensus nowadays on Katherine. I think the modern trend not wanting to get too deep into historiography, ‘cause I know that bores people and it should. It bore me when I studied history, but now where in this, you don’t have this big debate over her.
We definitely see the feminist school have sort of… like, true nerdy, academic historical discourse, which was talking about this 10, 15 years ago, as popular history is usually about 10 years behind. I think it’s gone almost too far sometimes in that we’d like to see everything that the queen does, or the woman does as this positive, strong thing.
So even when they make a bad decision, we praise it and say that was a great decision that was just that she was thwarted by the man. I think we’re in this school now where we’re kind of recognizing that this view of Katherine the victim is not really satisfactory, just thinking of her as the classic jilted woman. Because it’s a really easy caricature. It’s so ubiquitous in culture, that have the wronged woman, by the powerful husband and his mistress.
It’s such an easy thing to put in a box and say, “This is what happened.” I think now, the general consensus amongst people who’ve done like you and I have spent a lot of time reading about this and the people who spent a lot of time writing about it, is this more complete, holistic view of Katherine and then you start to pick everything out and you say, “Oh, actually, she was pretty extraordinary.”
Heather:
Yeah, it’s easy with history to want to look back and put things in easy to understand. It’s easy with anything, it’s what we want to do is take something and put it in the box that we know and we know the narrative of the wrong jilted woman and we also know the narrative of the really strong woman and nobody fits any one box or any two boxes perfectly. We’re all a spectrum. And from 500 years later, it’s easy to go back and say, “Okay, well this is the narrative.” But I think you’re right. More and more people now are seeing it as a spectrum.
James:
The question I have not asked, which I’ve heard asked before is, was Katherine of Aragon a feminist? I always say you can’t really use that word “feminism”. I think you can’t even start to use that word until about the 20th century because it’s a word that you won’t have understood. It’s a concept you would not have understood, the broad sentiments of it maybe.
But the notion of female equality is something completely, as we would understand it, which we even now don’t have is, is something completely foreign to you. You have to, I can’t remember who said this. But there’s a famous quote that I’ve seen in a few books now, which is “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
It’s something a lot of my teachers have always said to me, is you can’t think of these people as like you. Because they’re not. They thought completely differently. It’s almost like talking about a different species to a certain degree. Now, they are all human. They all had two legs, two arms and we would recognize them and probably could have a conversation with them, Although I think they’ll think we talk kind of weird and dressed kind of weird.
But it’s just like it’s a foreign country, it’s a completely foreign mindset. I think with that, because I’ve officially run out of things to say, I think, I think we’ll wrap it up there. Thank you very much for coming on for being my first ever interviewee.
Heather:
Thank you for coming on for me, too, because I’m going to put this out to my listeners. So this is great. I love your show. I think I first emailed you about a year and a half ago when you were still somewhere in the 1300, I think. And I love your show. So I’m really happy that we’re doing something together finally.
James:
Cool. So do you want to quickly say for my listeners where they can find you in your what, three podcasts now?
Heather:
No, I just have two. So the Renaissance English History Podcast is my main podcast, and that’s Englandcast.com. Then I just started this Watching the Tudors because I am shamelessly capitalizing on the popularity of The Tudors. So every week or every couple of weeks, my husband, who knows nothing about the Tudors at all, he and I watch an episode of The Tudors, and then I talk about what was true, and he asks me questions about what was true and what wasn’t true.
That’s also on the Englandcast.com site as well. So you can get all the links and everything there. So tell me about where to find you then.
James:
For now, I only have one. I’m not as prolific as Heather. I do the Queens of England Podcast. It’s my one and only. It’s my baby. We got the website, which is www.QueensofEnglandPodcast.com. I’m also all over social media. Just type Queens of England Podcast into Facebook and Twitter. You’ll find me there.
I’m currently …through The Tudors, I’ve just spent four episodes on Katherine. After this I’m about to do I’d say maybe because I’m supposed to only do three on Katherine and then spend an entire episode really just covering about 1529 to about 1533, because I never know how much it’s going to be. But it’s going to be about three on Anne. Then I’m going to keep the very late 17th century.
Heather:
Exciting! Well, thank you so much for this. It’s been so fun to talk to you.
James:
Thank you very much. We’ll definitely try and do this again soon.
Heather:
Hey, James, that was so much fun. Thank you. I really enjoyed that. So for more information on James’s podcast and Alison Weir’s book, anything like that, go to Englandcast.com. There’s show notes for this episode. Thanks so much. I will 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, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 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. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.