Margaret Beaufort
Lady Margaret Beaufort was Henry VII’s mother, so in a sense, she gave birth to the Tudor Dynasty. She has a reputation and is often seen as this dowdy old lady who worked hard to have her son become King, and then had a hard time taking a back seat to his wife, and others who may have outranked her (Elizabeth Woodville as a former Queen versus Lady Margaret as the Mother of a King, for example. Or her daughter in law, who was Queen.)
In Episode 42, Melita Thomas, co-founder of Tudor Times, a leading repository of Tudor and Stuart information, talked about Margaret, a woman with great wit, charm, grace, and love for family. It’s not the picture I’ve had of her, and I’m happy to re-share it here, for your listening enjoyment.
Bess of Hardwick
Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury is popularly known as Bess of Hardwick. She was a phenomenal woman who made her own luck, played her cards brilliantly, and went from being born into a yeoman farmer’s family to becoming the second wealthiest woman in England, just after the Queen.
In this episode with Tudor Times’ Melita Thomas, she talked about how interesting of a woman Bess was. A social climber of the Elizabethan age and a woman of enormous drive and intelligence and great business sense. She made money out of her land and she made money out of her estates in a way that a number of her male counterparts at the time just failed to do.
Mary Tudor (Mary I)
Mary Tudor was the first daughter of Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. She was the first woman to successfully reign on her own in England as Mary I. She’s popularly known as “Bloody Mary”. Much of her reputation has suffered because she’s been compared with her half-sister, Elizabeth, who was born into much different circumstances than Mary and benefited from some of the mistakes that Mary made in her reign.
In this episode, I talked about the years before Mary was born, her childhood, her hormonal issues, her father’s treatment of her, her “pregnancies” and her views on religion among others.
Mary Tudor (The French Queen)
Mary Tudor was Henry VIII’s younger sister who famously married for love which was very unusual in those days. She secretly married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk without Henry’s consent after the death of her first husband King Louis XII of France.
In this episode with Melita Thomas, she talked about Mary’s sunny, early childhood and her doting parents, their somber life after the family tragedies that came one after the other, what happened after Henry VII’s death, how the Castiel marriage fell apart and how she became the French Queen. And of course, her second marriage.
Katherine of Aragon
Catherine was a Spanish princess, the youngest child of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castiel whose marriage brought together the various kingdoms of Spain. She married two (yes, two) Tudor princes, becoming the Queen of England as Henry VIII’s first wife.
In this episode, we get deeper into Catherine’s life as a woman, as a mother and as a wife to Henry VIII.
Honor Grenville
Episode 50 is about Honor Grenville, a woman who rose from obscurity to marry the uncle of Henry VIII, had a whirlwind decade living an amazing life in Calais, amassed a huge cache of letters that are a wonderful peek into daily life for Tudor women, and then went back to her life in Cornwall, disappearing from the record.
Margaret Tudor
Episode 53 is about Margaret Tudor who was Henry VIII’s sister, a Princess, a Queen, and a prolific letter writer who had a very interesting and turbulent life, particularly after she was widowed very young.
Bessie Blount
In Episode 56, James Felton, writer, producer and host of the Queens of England podcast talked about Henry VIII, how he looms large in British history, like very few others, what elevated him to historical rock star status among women and mostly about Bessie Blount who was Henry’s most famous mistress (at least one that he never married) who bore him his only recognized illegitimate son.
Anne of Cleves
Episode 121 is all about Anne of Cleves. She’s remembered as the 4th discarded wife of Henry VIII, but there’s more to Anne of Cleves than that. This episode looks at her life, the foreign policy decisions that led up to the marriage, and how she handled life after being divorced.
Anne Boleyn
Episode 76 is all about the famous Anne Boleyn. New York Times bestselling author Alison Weir shares a few new aspects to Anne Boleyn and some new theories that are emerging. Weir mentioned how the most striking thing about her is the fact that you could call her a feminist of her time.
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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.