Not Just the Tudors

March 2022 marks the 500th anniversary of Anne Boleyn's first recorded appearance at the English court. To celebrate, Hever Castle - Anne's childhood home - has staged an exhibition charting her earl…

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb explores the story of a shipwreck that led to the creation of a city and a nation. Exactly 375 years ago, on 25 March 1647, a Dutch…

The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII ended almost a millennium of monastic life in England, resulting in a dislocation of people and a disruption of life not seen since the Norman Conq…

No one represented the complexities of the court of Henry VIII better than Sir Thomas Wyatt, a skilled diplomat who was forced to live with the moral and mortal consequences of his shifting allegianc…

One of the world's much loved stage and screen characters has just returned to the cinema in a new film version starring Peter Dinklage. But what may not be generally known is that Cyrano de Bergerac…

As a contribution to International Women's Day last Tuesday, this episode of Not Just the Tudors is a tribute to one of the great - but largely forgotten - Queens of the Early Modern period.

Elizabeth…

Born in Exeter in 1547, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard left to posterity some of the most famous and enduring images of Queen Elizabeth I. But who was this man? How did this brilliant artist rise …

How time passes - or how it is understood to pass - itself has a fascinating history. For the Tudors, the uneven hours of the Medieval reckoning were cast aside for an age of mechanical clocks and wa…

All this month on the History Hit family of podcasts, we've been marking LGBT+ History Month. To round off the month, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb investigates an extraordinary episode, long denied by…

How can women be reinstated into the narrative of history when their presence is only faintly attested to in the remaining sources? How can fiction help us in imagining their lives? Is it legitimate …

In 1655, White Londoners began advertising in newspapers to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped. Groundbreaking research is bringing to light for the first time these stories of resistance by en…

In the late 17th century, young women arrived in London to earn their own living, with mistresses setting up shops and supervising female apprentices. Recent groundbreaking research reveals the exten…

In the early hours of 13 February 1692, in the rugged and beautiful mountains of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands, some 30 members and associates of Clan MacDonald were massacred by the Scottish arm…

Kateryn Parr - as she herself wrote her name - is often portrayed as a colourless, prudish figure, known mainly for surviving her marriage to King Henry VIII. But Parr's life reads like a Renaissance…

Around the same time as the Mayflower was landing at Cape Cod, on the other side of the world tourism was thriving in China, giving rise to a fascinating genre of travel writing.

To mark the start of …

Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, became King of England at the age of nine. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use him to further their own ends. Edward was the only Tudor monarch who was g…

Antwerp during the Renaissance was as sensational as nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules - religious, sexual an…

475 years ago, on 28 January 1547, King Henry VIII died at the age of 55. Just hours before his passing, his last will and testament had been read, stamped, and sealed. Historians have disagreed ever…

In the world of King Henry VIII, the paramount place to demonstrate physical strength and manly courage was the joust - and Henry excelled at it.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suza…

Kate Mosse is the multimillion-selling author of the Languedoc Trilogy - Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel. With her new novel The City of Tears, the second in her series The Burning Chambers, just ou…