Vulgar History - The Tudors Take America

00:00:00.000 so hello and welcome to vulgar history feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is ann

00:00:15.480 foster i'm a historian and an author and i've been curious about the tudor era since i was a

00:00:20.840 little girl this season on the podcast we will be talking about the notorious tudors who they were

00:00:25.700 the times they lived in and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time

00:00:30.000 In this episode, we are talking about what's happening in England and also what's happening

00:00:34.580 across the Atlantic in the Americas. This week, we're talking about the collision between the

00:00:40.180 Tudor era and exploration and colonization of the Americas and what sorts of things were shared

00:00:47.600 between the two and what people in Tudor era England thought about the Americas and what was

00:00:52.140 going on there and what people in the Americas thought about the English people who were showing

00:00:55.580 up on their shores. Our guest today is Loren Working. She's the author of a new book called

00:01:01.260 A Golden World, How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Steward England. And I mean, she's

00:01:08.000 going to explain everything. It's such an interesting point of view. And I think it's

00:01:12.120 something that hasn't really been considered this way in a major book of this kind. And I think it's

00:01:16.980 really worth considering the effect that the Americas had on the Tudor world and vice versa.

00:01:21.980 so enjoy this chat between myself and author Lorraine Working.

00:01:29.880 So I'm joined today by Lorraine Working, author of the new book, A Golden World,

00:01:34.360 How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England. Welcome, Lorraine.

00:01:38.820 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:40.920 Can you explain the premise of your book to everybody?

00:01:44.800 Really what it comes down to is the book is kind of grappling with and kind of pushing back against

00:01:51.980 the traditional way of thinking about Tudor and Stuart travel to the Americas.

00:01:57.940 I think often we think about this period as a time of explorers and privateers,

00:02:06.400 quote unquote, discovering parts of the Americas and really kind of having an impact

00:02:11.080 on the Americas rather than the other way around. So what I really wanted to think about was not

00:02:19.800 how the Tudors kind of imprint themselves on various parts of the Americas, but really how

00:02:27.040 the Americas, its resources, its people's imprints onto Tudor and Stuart London.

00:02:37.940 And your book is arranged in an interesting way. Can you explain kind of each chapter is

00:02:41.680 almost like a certain object? And then you sort of delve into that. Can you explain sort of the

00:02:46.460 way it's set up. Yes. Yeah. So it's a kind of object based history. And this was so that I

00:02:54.360 could really think about that idea of traveling objects and how those might help us connect

00:02:58.600 the indigenous Americas with Tudor and Stuart London. There's relatively few, I mean, there are

00:03:05.940 numbers of indigenous peoples who come to London in the 16th and 17th centuries, but they're not

00:03:11.680 huge numbers compared to places such as Paris or Madrid. And yet English travel narratives are

00:03:21.660 full of all kinds of encounters and adventures between the English and indigenous peoples. And

00:03:28.720 so for me, the objects are this kind of way of thinking about like how those encounters in the

00:03:32.780 Americas can kind of be felt and can be seen to impact Renaissance culture. So I had a lot of fun

00:03:40.380 kind of choosing what objects to include in the book. There are kind of natural goods or resources

00:03:46.300 as well as indigenous made artifacts or cultural belongings as I call them. So there are chapters

00:03:53.920 on emeralds, on silver mining, on tobacco, but also chapters on featherwork or Algonquin canoes

00:04:02.780 for example. And so could you set the scene for people who may not have any knowledge about this

00:04:10.380 at all in terms of when England, because it wasn't Britain at that point, when they started

00:04:18.920 colonizing, like in the context of Western Europeans coming to, quote unquote, the new

00:04:24.960 world, sort of Spain and Portugal got there first, right? And they got to like what we would now

00:04:29.680 consider Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean. And what they found was like gold, for instance.

00:04:35.860 So England is sort of like they're slower. So kind of what's left for them is further north, right?

00:04:43.080 Yeah. So England is in a bit of a bind because they want what Spain and Portugal have.

00:04:49.880 But also Spain and Portugal are Catholics, right? And they're the enemy in this period. 0.96

00:04:54.980 England is at war with Spain. And so as a Protestant nation, they have to kind of grapple with like,

00:05:02.080 How do we legally justify our intervention in the Americas and also kind of ideologically justify it?

00:05:09.240 So as you say, the English are late to the game.

00:05:12.420 Colonization has been going on for about a century before the English really start to attempt to colonize various regions.

00:05:19.940 They've seen the way that Europe has been enriched and transformed by all the gold and silver flooding in from South America.

00:05:31.040 And in his account of the Amazon, Walter Raleigh in the 1590s writes that, as he calls it,

00:05:38.420 Indian gold lays at the heart of Renaissance politics for princes which abound in treasure

00:05:43.960 have great advantages over the rest. So in this moment of war with Spain that's reaching its

00:05:51.120 height in the 1570s, 80s, the English try to settle in places that Spain and Portugal have

00:05:59.060 not laid claim to because they don't want to violate international law. And as you say,

00:06:04.120 those tend to be places in North America. So the first real kind of colonial attempt

00:06:09.480 is Walter Raleigh's project in Roanoke off the coast of North Carolina in the mid-1580s.

00:06:17.100 Then Virginia, which is kind of officially established in 1607. Bermuda in 1609.

00:06:24.180 and Newfoundland, 1610, and then New England in the 1620s. In the 1620s, we get a little bit of

00:06:32.600 colonial attempts in the Caribbean. So St. Kitts in 1623 and Barbados, which the English

00:06:38.660 claim in 1625. So it's really interesting that by the end of the Elizabethan era, when Queen

00:06:45.460 Elizabeth dies in 1603. There are no real kind of English colonies kind of claims to Atlantic lands

00:06:54.380 beyond Ireland. I always think of the movie, is it Shakespeare in Love, I think, where at one point

00:07:01.640 there's this kind of reference to like the colonies in Virginia. And I'm like, this is

00:07:06.820 taking place in the Elizabethan era. There are no colonies in Virginia yet.

00:07:10.160 Sorry, can I just say I we talked about that movie on this podcast and what what there's a reference to is a plantation in Virginia.

00:07:21.280 That's yeah.

00:07:22.940 Doubly incorrect and insane.

00:07:24.900 Yes, exactly. 1.00

00:07:28.040 So it's yeah, there's there's there's not a lot that the English have yet.

00:07:32.460 But I think what's important is that the English are what I call kind of imperially minded. 0.85

00:07:39.020 You know, they're kind of developing this ideology of imperialism very much in this period. 0.99

00:07:44.460 And also one that I think gets sidelined a bit with this emphasis on kind of, you know, the founding of the American nation is about like the godly colonies in New England and things.

00:07:53.340 But actually, the English are implicated in and benefit from colonial economies for a long time, even when they themselves are not colonizing regions.

00:08:02.360 So my chapter on silver, for example, really shows how the kind of burst of silver and kind of banquets and on dining, you know, dining tables in Tudor England.

00:08:14.200 A lot of that is silver that's coming from what is now Bolivia.

00:08:19.260 And so those kind of implications in colonial economies, even before the English themselves lay claim to indigenous territories.

00:08:26.300 Well, I think that's a good point, too, because, you know, at the time that your book is coming out, it's the 250th anniversary of signing up Declaration of Independence in America. And a lot of that history traces back what people celebrate. I'm in Canada, but what people celebrate in America tends to be, yeah, like the Puritans and Mayflower and stuff.

00:08:46.760 But what we're talking about are more of these, I don't know if capitalists, but like business, like Virginia, it's, it's a business. It's the people going there weren't just like suffering religious. It's the Puritans came over because they felt they're suffering religious persecution. They wanted to start this quote unquote godly colony. But Virginia was England coming over being like, let's make some money. Let's get some crops. Let's pillage some stuff like that.

00:09:11.080 the context of these first yes and there's the and that's kind of what i'm getting at in in my

00:09:18.220 title as well with a golden world and playing on the idea of the golden age and kind of how you

00:09:23.140 know how this this golden age is actually funded um hopes for gold are always kind of there even

00:09:32.000 when the english are like oh this is a very commercial project that that's going to just

00:09:35.820 establish industry and trade and things like that but but the accounts that are written

00:09:39.900 often in kind of secret intelligent reports for Elizabeth and then James, the sixth and first

00:09:45.680 secretaries of state. They always have some kind of promise of gold, some harebrained scheme to

00:09:52.240 bring some metallurgists to kind of go off and find gold mines. Sadly, I had to cut this chapter

00:10:00.460 out of the book, but I had an instance, for example, when the English travel to St. Lucia

00:10:06.400 in the Caribbean in the early 17th century, a few years after the death of Elizabeth.

00:10:11.380 And everything starts to go wrong on the island as soon as English start insisting on finding

00:10:16.880 a gold mine that they're convinced is there, that isn't there. So that kind of story is there from

00:10:21.260 the very first chapter of the book, which looks at Martin Frobisher's obsession with gold that

00:10:27.220 turns out to be false gold in the 1570s, all the way through to these later colonial projects as

00:10:32.540 well well and it's just to me as somebody who I grew up on in the east coast of Canada and just

00:10:39.220 imagining people going there looking for gold or going further north in Canada just it's guys

00:10:45.780 you're not gonna it's that's not what you're gonna find here that's not no I know it's and the fact

00:10:51.640 that Frobisher actually conducts three voyages before this is kind of definitely found out that

00:10:56.860 this is maybe not the the way to to find gold um it really does show how much they they are afraid

00:11:03.620 of kind of treading on spanish controlled territories that they are searching for gold

00:11:11.460 in none of a in an arctic region yeah no you mentioned in your book there's one chapter but

00:11:18.120 you mentioned yeah like the far north and i thought oh my gosh like that's first of all

00:11:24.400 not going to find gold there but second of all English explorers don't have the

00:11:28.060 clothing to survive that climate no no and I think that's part of why they're so fascinated by

00:11:36.440 indigenous material culture from that region is they are really impressed by the technology and 0.99

00:11:42.120 the skill of indigenous women who are making these garments because it's so foreign to to

00:11:48.560 their own sense of how to deal with the extreme elements well and mentioning the indigenous women

00:11:54.860 too i think is this is what i found really interesting your book too is when you're talking

00:11:58.160 about craft crafted goods coming back to england you look at well who are the people who made these

00:12:04.220 things like these things didn't they didn't just find them lying on the ground like people would

00:12:08.500 have made them can you give examples of some of the fashion trends they kicked off in england

00:12:13.460 from some of these things that were found? Yes. Yeah. So it was a lot of fun, not least because

00:12:18.440 I, I kind of love clothes. I love textiles even now. Um, I'm really interested in ideas of,

00:12:25.000 you know, commodity chains and kind of where things come from. Um, so how do I even choose?

00:12:32.560 I mean, I guess speaking of indigenous women's work, one really big example is feather work.

00:12:37.400 and by feather work I mean various kind of garments or methods of adornment that are made

00:12:45.200 with feathers there's also an idea of feather work in circulation which is about a specific

00:12:52.560 technique of making in Mesoamerica where like the feathers of hummingbirds are used to make

00:12:58.020 images tapestries and things like that but the my feather work chapter is more about the kind of

00:13:04.360 headdresses, as the English call them, or kind of what they call aprons or kind of coverings

00:13:10.380 that come from the Americas, from various communities ranging from the Tupi in Brazil

00:13:16.640 to the Wampanoag or Algonquins in what they call Donland or New England and the Chesapeake.

00:13:23.380 And so there's lots of evidence of featherwork appearing in cabinets of curiosities in Tudor

00:13:28.680 Stuart England and also kind of fakes and imitations used in court performances such as

00:13:35.520 court masks. And so for me, this was a really great example of thinking about something that

00:13:41.720 is so clearly a marker of indigeneity, both kind of among indigenous peoples who use featherwork

00:13:50.880 in ceremonies and for sacred purposes. And then in a different way, the way that that's used to

00:13:57.220 kind of stereotype Indigenous peoples in England at the time. But it's a place where we really see

00:14:05.020 Indigenous women's hands and expertise at work. And for this chapter, I really learned a lot by

00:14:15.020 listening to interviews and looking at the artwork of the contemporary artist and activist

00:14:22.100 Glyceria Tupinamba, who's a Tupinamba artist. She was at the Venice Biennale a few years ago,

00:14:30.360 and she made a mantle based on observing surviving 16th century mantles, basically,

00:14:38.840 because none of these, until one reparation case that happened a few years ago,

00:14:43.740 there were no surviving 16th century Tupi mantles actually in Brazil.

00:14:48.420 What's a mantle? What would that be?

00:14:50.440 So a mantle is basically like a cape of feathers and they're, they are absolutely stunning. I mean,

00:14:57.940 yeah, I highly recommend people just kind of Googling and searching for these and seeing them

00:15:03.080 because they're used from the feathers of all kinds of different kinds of tropical birds in

00:15:10.800 beautiful hues of red and yellow, blue. You know, you can imagine in Tudor England in the, in

00:15:19.380 candlelight what this must have looked like to kind of hold something like this and so it's

00:15:27.080 interesting to hear a contemporary artist talk about how the you know the process of making

00:15:31.600 these that often they're women in the community who made them together that they might have had

00:15:36.880 their children kind of around them or helping them gather feathers they would often take feathers

00:15:44.200 that have fallen off birds so it's not like birds are being kind of killed just to take their

00:15:48.880 feathers. They're kind of gathered and viewed as kind of gifts from the birds to create these

00:15:54.040 material belongings. And so I really wanted to bring in kind of that aspect of like women's

00:16:00.620 skills in making and the fact that mantles are very closely tied to Indigenous homelands and

00:16:08.000 territories, because obviously you're making these mantles within the context of your community

00:16:12.500 with the resources that are around you and so in that context of colonialism and kind of

00:16:19.700 indigenous dispossession that becomes harder for indigenous peoples to do and so I kind of wanted

00:16:25.960 to bring in that story of how indigenous peoples view mantles make mantles and bring that into the

00:16:36.960 story of Tudor aesthetics. Another example that I thought was really interesting that you talk

00:16:44.580 about in your book is pearls, because those are so, when you look at portraits of Queen Elizabeth

00:16:50.580 I, especially from later in her reign, she's always just draped in pearls. You see people

00:16:56.080 with pearls pinned in their land. I never considered the connection between the Americas

00:17:01.540 and all these pearls that they're wearing.

00:17:03.580 But can you explain that?

00:17:05.360 Yes.

00:17:06.040 Pearls are a great example because, as you say, 1.00

00:17:08.340 women are just dripping in them, right? 1.00

00:17:10.800 In almost any portrait of an elite person in this era 0.99

00:17:14.400 or even a kind of middling person like a merchant. 0.98

00:17:18.300 They're so fitting for the court of Elizabeth

00:17:20.280 because of their associations with luminescent whiteness 0.51

00:17:24.320 that she's kind of concerned with in her image making as a virgin queen.

00:17:27.980 and they were long acquired from the Indian Ocean especially the Persian Gulf

00:17:34.900 via trade networks with Asia and they could also be found on a much smaller scale in freshwater

00:17:41.300 streams in Scotland or in Sweden for example but Columbus and Vespucci's voyages flood the market

00:17:50.940 with millions of pearls from what was kind of known as the Pearl Coast, especially islands off

00:17:58.860 the coast of what is now Venezuela. And I think I cite a statistic in the book that I got from

00:18:05.620 Molly Warsh's book, American Baroque, where she says that over the course of his reign,

00:18:11.340 The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was a contemporary to Henry VIII, received 34 and a half million pearls from Central and South America during his reign.

00:18:25.340 So, I mean, I think this is really the context where we kind of, yeah, think about that insane amount of pearls that proliferate at the Tudor court.

00:18:35.880 Um, I think that's really the context for reading even things like, um, the portraits of Mary the

00:18:42.240 first that survive of the time where she often is wearing the same, uh, pearl jewel, um, which has

00:18:50.100 this very large dangling, um, kind of baroque shaped pearl. And she marries Charles the fifth

00:18:57.720 son, Philip, who becomes Philip the second of Spain. Um, and he gives her this table cut diamond

00:19:04.020 with the large pearl pendant um and for a long time the pearl was believed to be a very specific

00:19:11.880 gem um called la peregrina and i think eventually la peregrina ended up in the hands of elizabeth

00:19:19.600 taylor at in an auction um whether or not that's actually the pearl that mary herself

00:19:27.600 wares in all these portraits. I think it does suggest her interest in marrying into this kind

00:19:38.900 of imperial dynasty that has claims to vast stretches of land in the Atlantic and that her

00:19:44.900 access to something like such a huge pearl is making a bold statement about her political 0.92

00:19:51.720 ambitions. But I, yeah, I had so much fun just researching all the pearls that were circulating

00:20:00.340 at the Elizabethan court and then trying to find instances where we could maybe trace

00:20:04.020 some of those pearls to the Americas in kind of more concrete ways. So in a single year in 1586,

00:20:12.680 for example, there's a document in the state papers that accounts for all the pearls delivered

00:20:19.040 to Queen Elizabeth um and in a single year she received pearls to the value of 644 pounds which

00:20:28.240 is basically more than a wage laborer might make in a lifetime um and so yeah it's it seems that

00:20:37.520 this pearl mania that we get even from portraits are kind of matched by this material circulation

00:20:43.300 of pearls coming from the Atlantic.

00:20:45.820 There's a great incident where a snarky courtier

00:20:49.000 complains in the aftermath of Raleigh's execution

00:20:53.120 about how Raleigh had cheated him and his family

00:20:56.980 out of their rightful prophet of a ship

00:20:59.560 coming back from the West Indies.

00:21:01.840 And Raleigh basically just shrugs it off

00:21:03.880 and blames the Queen and just says,

00:21:05.600 well, Queen Elizabeth was so obsessed with pearls

00:21:08.080 that I didn't even see anything from the shipment.

00:21:10.780 Like she took everything

00:21:11.560 and she didn't share even a single pearl with me um so i i don't want to suggest that kind of all

00:21:17.580 pearls are coming you know definitely from an atlantic context to the tudor court but it does

00:21:23.740 seem that especially in the 1580s and the 1590s with the war in spain that wearing pearls is a

00:21:31.300 little bit of a a conscious declaration by the english of like their own ability to source these

00:21:38.740 materials from the Atlantic, even while they're at war with Spain. And this kind of continues on

00:21:47.120 into the early 17th century, even when war with Spain ends. But Anna of Denmark, James, the sixth

00:21:53.060 and first wife, you know, inherits lots of pearls from Elizabeth. So those might even be some of her

00:21:57.680 pearls that she's now wearing. And so I think the association of pearls with the sea and with

00:22:04.720 seafaring kind of really works for, for those associations. And so in terms of, of women in,

00:22:13.040 in Tudor and Stuart England, you have a chapter where you're talking about sort of, I like the

00:22:18.600 way that he phrased it in the book and I'll paraphrase my memory of it, but it's basically

00:22:22.560 how much did these women know about what was actually happening in the, in the Americas? 0.87

00:22:28.540 Cause there was women there who were receiving letters about it. There's women there who were 1.00

00:22:32.540 sponsoring some of these trips can you explain some examples of who they were yes yeah I really

00:22:37.860 grappled with this because um as I'm sure you know you will know and your listeners will know

00:22:42.840 from thinking about women's history in all kinds of different ways you have to be quite creative

00:22:47.660 about how you reconstruct the lives of women in the past often because there's so little evidence

00:22:54.000 compared to you know the lives of men um and so I was really kind of wanting to move away from the

00:23:01.240 idea that women are just passive consumers or recipients of colonial materials and knowledge

00:23:09.540 and so as you say there's a couple ways that we can kind of think about this one is to see

00:23:15.400 when women's names appear in accounts of investors and voyages so they're kind of concretely

00:23:22.260 helping to finance ships that are crossing the Atlantic and another big way I think is as

00:23:29.420 patrons of kind of colonial literature as well um so martin frobisher which which we mentioned

00:23:38.220 earlier his voyages to to none of it in 1576 1577 and 1578 um had a few women investors

00:23:49.600 queen elizabeth um but also the poet philip sydney's sister mary sydney the countess of

00:23:57.840 Pembroke, um, and also a woman named Lady Anne Dudley, um, Countess of Warwick. Um, and so in

00:24:06.440 a 1577 book of, of travels to, uh, uh, the Americas, there's a specific reference to

00:24:16.720 Frobisher arriving on what's, what's known as Kudlunar and Island and renaming the island,

00:24:23.360 the Countess of Warwick's Island. So it kind of gets you thinking, you know, you're like,

00:24:26.820 why is he renaming this island after this English woman unless, you know, she is seen as this kind

00:24:32.240 of important patron or particularly interested? Like he kind of says in the account, please refer

00:24:40.100 to the other report I sent you with more details because you inquired after them or that kind of

00:24:44.320 thing. So we get those little statements that really show us that women are interested and 0.98

00:24:49.460 kind of actively asking questions, sending out maybe servants or agents to pursue colonial

00:24:55.400 interests um in terms of financing projects i think really a large reason behind that is is

00:25:03.680 just hopes for money right and gain like they're projecting like like um men might be and in the

00:25:09.420 hopes of kind of getting good returns on the investment so in some ways we could almost see it 0.63

00:25:14.080 in like a form of gambling or something like that so we have kind of women investors and we get them

00:25:21.900 later on as well um so really uniquely we get the countess of bedford who's this big literary

00:25:30.320 patron in the early 17th century um on the official charter which is really um unique

00:25:38.440 that she's listed on the charter alongside really prominent male investors in 1612 on the charter

00:25:45.660 for Bermuda. So again, kind of really, you know, what her role is there exactly, it's really hard

00:25:52.680 to tell, but women are there. They're there in the Virginia Company records too. So definitely 0.97

00:26:00.100 this kind of financial interest that they have, which is maybe tied up also to religious, you

00:26:04.660 know, interests and desires to piously bring English Protestantism to England. But we don't

00:26:12.720 We don't have a lot of really obvious evidence that that is their primary motivation. 1.00

00:26:19.420 How would these women have money? 0.94

00:26:23.300 Like, why wouldn't it be the husband of these women whose name is on there? 1.00

00:26:26.980 Would these be like heiresses? 1.00

00:26:28.860 Yeah, I mean, some of them are super elite. 0.99

00:26:31.660 They're very, very wealthy.

00:26:33.900 And so how exactly they use it or justify it, I don't know.

00:26:38.900 I think there probably is a way for them to kind of, this could be a way of aligning themselves to their husbands' interests as well.

00:26:47.560 You know, so for example, Lady Raleigh, who's Walter Raleigh's wife, she helps Raleigh kind of sell off parts of their own land in order to fund the voyages to Guyana.

00:27:02.920 So in some ways, sometimes they might be kind of working in tandem with their husbands.

00:27:08.900 or possibly kind of brothers or other kin.

00:27:14.500 That's probably the case also with Mary Sidney,

00:27:18.220 because her brother, Philip, is like really interested

00:27:21.160 in Martin Frobisher's voyages.

00:27:23.160 And he writes a letter to his mentor in France,

00:27:26.180 just saying like, people have found gold.

00:27:29.580 And, you know, in this voyage,

00:27:31.340 and this is going to be really lucrative.

00:27:33.360 But I think it also gives us an insight 0.99

00:27:34.920 into the kind of relative or sometimes financial independence of women, such as merchants' wives

00:27:44.060 and things as well, that they are often entrusted with taking care of their husband's affairs,

00:27:51.340 especially if they're off traveling. And so I think we get little glimpses and maybe ways in

00:27:56.160 which women are able to make decisions about kind of where they want to put their money. 0.82

00:28:00.660 it's so interesting to me to think about the the women some of the the history that you found is

00:28:09.580 you think you were able to link the women to these voyages because there were records that

00:28:14.360 were dedicated to them like the the records of these trips like for instance um john smith who

00:28:20.880 is famous from the story of pocahontas etc he was funded by and so he dedicated his writing about

00:28:28.640 this to uh to his patroness who was uh francis howard the double duchess yes yes yeah exactly

00:28:36.060 um i i really don't think this gets acknowledged much at all right that like john smith's account

00:28:43.700 of um his general history of virginia um new england and the summer isles is one of the

00:28:50.020 canonical texts for understanding some of the earliest english colonial projects um

00:28:58.640 It's, you know, I've spent some time doing research at the Jamestown archaeological site,

00:29:02.820 for example, and just how much the early decades of the Jamestown colony is understood through

00:29:12.440 both the archaeological record, but alongside John Smith's text. And yeah, it's so intriguing

00:29:19.660 to think that this, you know, he says in his preface that this work, and I know some of it

00:29:24.580 is kind of typical rhetoric and kind of flattery and things, but he kind of says like you're

00:29:28.640 your patronage is what has made it possible for me to write this book. And it is a huge book and

00:29:34.440 it would have been very expensive to publish. Um, and so he dedicates this work to her. And

00:29:43.480 I think there, if, if there's any acknowledgement that she has kind of funded it,

00:29:48.360 it's that typical assumption that again, she's just maybe not that interested or like she happens

00:29:54.420 to kind of fund this thing, but isn't that important to directing how it's written or,

00:30:01.180 you know, what's kind of included in it. But there's multiple accounts in the early 17th

00:30:08.360 century of writers saying things like, if it won't interest men, it will interest our women

00:30:14.980 readers. Or I'm including this detail about Indigenous women in the Chesapeake because

00:30:21.160 because English women in London will be really interested by these facts of their lives and

00:30:27.980 things like that. So I try to do this a bit in the book and it's kind of work I want to continue to

00:30:34.480 do is just really think about how women's patronage is shaping the literature that

00:30:43.180 comes down to us as kind of really key pieces of information that we have about colonial projects

00:30:48.980 in this period. Another example is William Strakey's account of the shipwreck of the sea

00:30:58.120 venture onto Bermuda in 1609. And this is a text that's seen as one of the main sources behind

00:31:10.460 Shakespeare's The Tempest. But the whole text is written to a woman and she's not just kind of

00:31:17.360 mentioned at the start and then just left out of the account it's like the whole account is

00:31:21.840 constantly straky coming back to this woman reader whoever she is and we don't know who she is

00:31:27.900 but he'll say like oh illustrious lady know that this happened on this day or um noble lady if you

00:31:35.820 want more details check out you know some of these other publications that have come out about

00:31:39.980 Virginia so it really seems that there is this relationship between the writer and the patroness

00:31:46.500 in some of these sources

00:31:48.920 that we've never really given much credit

00:31:51.180 to what we're thought about.

00:31:52.780 And now for a quick advertising break.

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00:34:21.940 Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement and modern leadership.

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00:35:26.660 and we're back and it's interesting too to think about phrases like you know this this might 0.97

00:35:36.920 interest the ladies so just thinking well there weren't any women on these voyages but they're

00:35:43.380 back in england and they're so curious like everybody probably is anyone who's not involved

00:35:48.100 in these voyages to know what was it actually like what did you actually see because it's just

00:35:52.300 it's all brand new the way that we today like you want to hear about news from other parts of the

00:35:57.880 world but back then you were relying on these voyages so it's interesting you mentioned like

00:36:02.040 Shakespeare's The Tempest because I you talk about this in your book as well but the how these

00:36:08.820 explorations affect theater so like people are so interested to know what it's like so maybe you

00:36:14.800 have a portrayal you're talking your book about like a mask that people put on where they're sort

00:36:19.040 of dressed up like indigenous people um and maybe wearing some of the featherwork and stuff like

00:36:26.420 because people in England just want to vicariously experience what it was like right yeah I think I

00:36:33.320 mean this is something that I'm just so intrigued by and it's kind of a challenge but it's also part

00:36:38.320 of the exciting aspect of of doing this research but is how much people know about the kind of

00:36:45.740 geopolitics and the realities of different indigenous groups and what life is like in the

00:36:51.860 Americas. But then also the fantasy and the appropriation and the kind of imaginative

00:37:01.840 filling in the gaps that the English kind of are engaged in at the same time. And as you say,

00:37:08.540 a really intriguing example is The Memorable Mask, which is from 1613. And it is written by

00:37:16.280 George Chapman, who is the one to write a poem to endorse Walter Raleigh's journey to South America

00:37:22.160 in the 1590s. And all the way into 1613, he's writing this mask about the stage direction,

00:37:31.700 say, Virginian priests and princes. And they're supposed to be these indigenous peoples who are

00:37:36.400 kind of arriving in England from an island off the Virginia subcontinent, as they call it in the

00:37:44.680 text. And it's the first performance that really stages this kind of imagined sense of Indigenous

00:37:53.180 peoples on such a large scale in England. This is only kind of, you know, five, six years after

00:37:59.760 Jamestown is established. So as you say, the knowledge is very patchy about, you know,

00:38:05.540 the realities of life. And the descriptions of these like feathered ruffs and feathered

00:38:13.380 headdresses that are spangled with gold and glittering with little embroidered pearls

00:38:18.580 everywhere, I think really collapses kind of different indigenous groups. You can see that 0.98

00:38:23.260 they're kind of influenced by South American featherwork here as well. And I was really

00:38:28.420 intrigued to think, you know, this performance is actually performed at court around the same time

00:38:32.880 as The Tempest is as well. They're both performed for the marriage of James I and Anna of Denmark's

00:38:40.220 daughter, Elizabeth Stewart, to Frederick of Bohemia. And so even though many of the performers

00:38:47.120 were men, they were gentlemen from the ins of court, so kind of teenagers and gentlemen in

00:38:52.520 their early 20s, doing this kind of elaborate fancy dress for the royal family. I was really

00:38:59.740 intrigued by thinking like what are women in the room thinking about this you know like when they're

00:39:03.620 watching this performance and when these um quote-unquote virginian priests and princes

00:39:10.580 end the performance and stream into the crowd and take the hands of the court ladies and like

00:39:16.060 draw them into a dance you know like what must that been like for them to kind of think about

00:39:20.860 like what kind of associations might they might have had and it it takes a little bit of

00:39:26.640 speculation, I think, but we can have informed speculation. We can kind of, you know, based on

00:39:32.600 kind of what we know and what women are collecting and things, I think we can kind of think about how

00:39:36.460 they might have responded to those performances in a way that would make them more interested

00:39:42.740 in finding out more and maybe, you know, collecting other goods from the Americas

00:39:46.660 and that kind of thing. I think it's also really interesting. There's several examples in your book

00:39:51.000 that you talk about where trying to understand the culture of the indigenous groups that are

00:39:56.880 being encountered the understanding and having to like trying to explain it back to people in

00:40:02.380 England it does involve a lot of like well this is their king and this is their priest where it's

00:40:06.560 just kind of like taking the concepts of how society works in England and applying it to a

00:40:11.620 group where it's like well it's not quite that but this is maybe the best way you can understand it

00:40:17.400 you can explain it like and quote unquote best but I mean just trying to wrap their heads around

00:40:23.560 a culture that there's okay well this must be the king well this must be the princess like

00:40:28.100 they must surely have the same kind of culture that we do so that's interesting when you explain

00:40:33.280 like oh the Virginia priests like okay well they don't really have priests but yeah okay yeah yeah

00:40:39.240 yeah totally um the English are in some ways really informed about the politics like you do

00:40:47.080 read some of the early accounts of places like the Chesapeake and the English are using Algonquin

00:40:54.420 place names and you know they're using terms like werewants which is the kind of Algonquin

00:41:01.820 Powhatan word for the the regional ruler so they're they're kind of they are learning

00:41:08.860 indigenous languages as they write these accounts and and trying to make sense of these really

00:41:15.480 complicated geopolitics in the Americas, but they are also interested in these places ultimately

00:41:24.320 as conquerors, right? So they also have to make it kind of easy to latch onto and understand

00:41:30.740 to induce people to kind of go out and have the confidence to kind of wage wars and battles for

00:41:37.760 various lands. So yeah, you get this really complicated kind of mix of attempting to

00:41:43.100 understand cultures and attempting to kind of assimilate them or make them kind of easily

00:41:47.860 digestible at the same time. I think a good example is, as you mentioned earlier,

00:41:54.280 Matoica was also known to us as Pocahontas. And if listeners can imagine, you know, this,

00:42:01.340 the one surviving portrait of her from the time period is an engraving of her in-court dress.

00:42:08.340 but it is interesting because she is introduced there not as Matoaka in the there's a kind of

00:42:17.140 circle around her portrait and inside that circle is written her name so Matoaka and also that she

00:42:24.820 is coming from Tsenokomaka so they acknowledge these kind of indigenous territories even as

00:42:33.020 it's being kind of subsumed and packaged within a Jacobean aesthetic.

00:42:39.500 I think that's a lesser known part of the star of Matoaca, aka Pocahontas, is that she actually

00:42:44.960 went to England. I don't know if you've ever watched Disney's Pocahontas 2.

00:42:49.800 Oh, oh my gosh. Not in a while, but a student mentioned it to me the other day and I was just

00:42:55.240 like, I need to see this again, but also it's going to be, it's going to be painful. Yeah.

00:43:00.300 It's bananas. I haven't, I haven't watched it. I've seen clips of it, but I do know that that involves her going to England. And so you see her meeting, um, James and Anna of Denmark and just kind of, I'm, I'm not sure how they kind of make that be a heartwarming story for children, um, because it does end with her death, um, from various diseases.

00:43:23.560 but yeah so just the fact that she went there we don't need to get into it in this conversation but

00:43:30.020 you do listeners for when you read the book like you have several examples of like indigenous

00:43:33.780 people who come over to England to sort of often just to be like look a person like just to sort

00:43:40.740 of be on display um some people come over themselves to try and make uh for political

00:43:47.020 diplomatic reasons but it's just it doesn't go well for any of them really no um and a part of

00:43:56.400 that is just diseases like going from a place like two cultures meeting each other like the germs are

00:44:02.760 just so different you can't really get past it but it's yeah so just thinking to me in my you know

00:44:11.300 as someone who's like always been sort of interested in the tutor and steward period

00:44:15.000 it feels so separate to me from colonialism but actually there's so much back and forth just of

00:44:22.420 goods and even of people like it's not it's not separate it's like these the cultures were

00:44:29.280 thinking about each other a lot yeah and I say in the introduction to my book that this isn't

00:44:35.640 a story of settlement it's a story of unsettlement you know that that we tend to think of like the

00:44:40.600 settlers going out and establishing these colonies as if everything was really static.

00:44:47.500 And it's why, again, I think objects are a good way of thinking about the fact that there's so

00:44:52.420 much kind of mobility and exchange and trafficking that's going on. And it's going both ways. I tell

00:45:01.420 a couple, I tried to pick out the happier stories where I can. So there's a couple stories of

00:45:06.340 indigenous visitors who then go home and make it back to their homelands including Epineau who I

00:45:14.200 discuss in the same chapter as the chapter about the the court mask but sadly as you say they're

00:45:21.620 also just really heart-wrenching stories about those who who are forcibly brought here and

00:45:30.340 don't find a way home. And yeah, the travelers are important to look at. But what I also try

00:45:38.020 to make clear is that the object focus in the book is a way of telling stories about people

00:45:43.740 as well. It might not be that loads of people from the Americas travel to London, but their

00:45:49.860 lives, their expertise, their labor can be very much felt and kind of traced back to so many

00:45:58.120 renaissance um objects and kind of fashions as well well I think even like tangibly the way that

00:46:05.720 you talk in the book about things like some of the indigenous women that who create crafts like

00:46:11.000 up in Nunavut like in the far north like they're using like their mouths to like to to craft some

00:46:17.200 of these things it's like you couldn't be more intimate and then to think of those things being 0.73

00:46:20.680 in England like yeah of course like this isn't just an object that exists like a woman like 0.97

00:46:25.240 physically created this with her mouth like yeah yes and with um you know with with thread made of 1.00

00:46:34.380 sinew and you've got animal guts right mate like um mate creating used to kind of create

00:46:42.120 parkas and things um Inuit canoes come back to Tudor London as well um and yeah I really like

00:46:50.160 that idea of this you know this is a really kind of intimate process of kind of women's bodies

00:46:54.640 and natural resources, animal bodies that come to England.

00:46:59.640 There is concern in England as well about how assimilating

00:47:04.840 or showing interest in objects made by indigenous peoples

00:47:08.400 might lead to corruption, you know,

00:47:12.640 or kind of moral decay in some way as well.

00:47:15.620 So the Jacobean's, you know, love to complain about savage,

00:47:21.460 foreign, barbarous influences. And I mean, the Jacobean period is really misogynistic period as

00:47:28.920 well. So, you know, James I does not say very nice things about women. There's a lot of concerns

00:47:33.840 about cross-dressing and women kind of, you know, adopting the styles and fashions of men.

00:47:41.220 So I talk about all the hate that's kind of thrown onto someone like Maul Frith,

00:47:46.340 who is this independently minded kind of cross-dressing woman who's the character who

00:47:52.440 becomes the character in a Thomas Middleton play as well who's kind of known for her tobacco smoking

00:47:58.040 so it gets kind of wrapped up in in questions around morality and gender kind of in London as

00:48:03.640 well well and tobacco speaking of I think that would be that's another really interesting example

00:48:08.420 i like the detail that um james the first did not like it he is not a fan of it but do you know

00:48:16.580 there's a really old like um comedy bit that bob newhart did in like the 60s where he's trying to

00:48:23.140 explain tobacco he's like as though he's an explorer explaining and he's just like and the

00:48:27.360 preposterousness of just kind of like oh no well what you do it and you smoke it like what what do

00:48:31.780 like so the fact that tobacco comes from the new world and it just really takes off in this way

00:48:39.540 like can you explain some of what you talk about in your book about tobacco crops yeah tobacco is

00:48:44.960 a really big one for me because it is the first intoxicant of mass consumption in england that

00:48:55.540 isn't from europe and so it's such a key example for me in the book of of in terms of kind of

00:49:01.360 thinking about transformations or impacts of the Americas on Tudor and Stuart life,

00:49:08.780 tobacco is such a big one because it's until these voyages, it is kind of unknown to the

00:49:14.320 English. And yet, as you say, it gets adopted so quickly. I mean, people just really like the

00:49:18.260 effects of it. It was also a lot stronger back then than it is now. So I think historians have

00:49:24.040 estimated that it was maybe about, I don't know how they figured this out, but apparently a kind

00:49:29.160 of seven times stronger than it is now. And you can really imagine how this did change

00:49:36.740 the social landscape that suddenly people are taking these clay pipes out, lighting little

00:49:44.520 fires in public spaces. There's little puffs of smoke appearing everywhere. And what's intriguing

00:49:51.940 to me is the difference between kind of smoking and just using tobacco leaves and medicine,

00:49:57.520 because I think a lot has been written about, and there were a lot of debates in the time about

00:50:03.260 the benefits of tobacco and whether or not tobacco harms the body or can heal the body in various

00:50:09.480 ways. But often when Elizabethan physicians are recommending taking tobacco, what they mean is

00:50:16.620 like infusing it in water to make a tea or a kind of herbal to sip. And so when it gets to kind of

00:50:24.940 Smoking, this is when this fear of the influence of indigenous practices really comes in because this is how, you know, the English only know how to smoke tobacco because they are learning from different indigenous groups who have been taking tobacco in this way, you know, for millennia at this point.

00:50:44.620 And so there's this kind of desire to use tobacco in a kind of pharmacological sense, but at the same time, there's this real concern that tobacco is kind of unbefitting good, decent, honest English subjects, especially because we know that women widely smoke tobacco as well as men.

00:51:05.680 And it wasn't just a pastime that men engaged in.

00:51:08.940 Women were smoking, children were smoking.

00:51:12.180 So everyone was smoking

00:51:15.000 while they were having their beers and everything.

00:51:17.540 So yeah, it really was a kind of revolution.

00:51:20.320 And even just in terms of tobacco pipes,

00:51:23.180 we find so many tobacco pipes

00:51:26.000 strewn around archeological sites in England.

00:51:29.700 Even now, I have a friend who's an artist 1.00

00:51:32.960 And she she met with her mudlarking friend and they collected 17th century tobacco pipe fragments. 0.96

00:51:39.120 And she actually made me like a necklace from these pipes, which is so nice of her as a gift for a collaboration we did. 0.99

00:51:45.600 And so you can kind of find them everywhere.

00:51:48.240 And it's so intriguing to me that these pipes are directly modeled on indigenous cultures.

00:51:57.340 And that's why it's just sort of, I don't know, I'm just remembering this old Bob Newhart bit.

00:52:02.760 But just like trying to like imagining the English people coming to the Americas, seeing people smoke and just like, what are you what is this like to have never seen or experienced smoking?

00:52:12.260 Like, why? Like what? Why? And then for them to realize, oh, actually, this is great to bring it back.

00:52:19.120 And the fact that people were like, oh, yeah.

00:52:21.320 So, you know, they didn't find gold, but they found tobacco and that becomes their crop.

00:52:25.880 Yeah, exactly. I mean, tobacco is what makes English imperial ambitions in the Americas possible in a lot of ways because they're not finding gold. They're not finding silver. They're even desperately looking for copper mines in places like Florida. They're not having luck with that.

00:52:43.040 um and james the first really gets to the point where he's like you know what is the point in

00:52:50.460 kind of sending all these funds and things to virginia the colony has been around for a while

00:52:55.740 now nothing's really taking off like um and virginia company investors really and and kind

00:53:02.700 of members of parliament who support the colonial project really have to convince him okay we know

00:53:07.260 you hate tobacco, but actually investing in this tobacco crop is the thing that's going to actually

00:53:13.260 make this a lucrative business. And with that money, we can then turn to other colonial projects.

00:53:18.520 And so James eventually is like, OK, I'll support the tobacco industry as long as you promise that

00:53:25.400 once you get enough capital and things stabilize, you'll move away from that and you'll move to,

00:53:30.460 you know, silk weaving and things like that instead. And of course, the history of Virginia,

00:53:34.120 it tells a very different story. No, that's interesting, just because I'm currently doing

00:53:39.300 research on, on James and Anna. And so your book had some interesting, interesting bits that I'm

00:53:44.960 sure I'll be returning to when I get into my research as well. But I just, I love that about

00:53:48.780 James. Just, he's just like the original anti-smoker. I know. And rereading his, in 1604,

00:53:55.720 he publishes A Counterblast to Tobacco. And like with a lot of his writing, because he's such a

00:54:01.920 prolific author. You know, he's kind of putting his foot in it because he's like, I'm the king

00:54:06.000 and I'm telling you not to smoke. And then obviously no one listens to him. And then it's

00:54:10.140 just like, you know, this is undermining your authority a little bit because you don't actually

00:54:13.780 have the power to stop it. Yeah. But I do find it really intriguing that his reasons against

00:54:21.320 smoking are kind of are social and kind of he draws on medicinal tracks that talk about the

00:54:27.540 dangers of smoking but for him this tract is really political as well you know he's kind of

00:54:33.100 interested in like going back to that idea of corruption from the americas he's kind of thinking 0.74

00:54:37.880 like how are we going to be the ideal colonizer if we're inviting the the drugs of the people

00:54:45.360 we're trying to colonize into our bodies like that's just not going to end well so he's he is

00:54:49.620 kind of thinking through not just the the physical body but the kind of political body and what it

00:54:55.100 might mean to accept different resources and technologies and things from the Americas. So

00:55:02.860 it's something I grapple with a lot in the book with the different objects is when the English

00:55:09.500 are making really obvious associations between the Americas and the objects they have, which

00:55:14.140 there is a lot of evidence of them doing that at various points. And then at other points,

00:55:18.580 the objects that come from the Americas get subsumed into other stories and fantasies and

00:55:24.240 don't become as explicitly about the Americas. And so this came out of your research that you

00:55:31.620 do like in your job at a university. What sorts of courses do you teach? I'm just curious to know

00:55:37.940 if people want to learn more about this. Yeah. I mean, I've been researching this for about 10

00:55:43.260 years now, I think. So it's kind of the culmination of a lot of work. And I try to bring it in when I

00:55:51.520 hand to things even like we've got our big survey modules on the renaissance and we'll look at

00:55:57.400 things like the fairy queen and i'll be like what is this reference to tobacco and the fairy queen

00:56:01.180 happening you know how is this influencing our ideas of elizabethan knightly culture and romance

00:56:09.460 um but i teach a module on renaissance global travel and it has a big object focus in it so

00:56:19.040 I actually got some funding to hire some student interns. I think it was last summer now.

00:56:27.400 And we basically purchased a 17th century cabinet and filled it up with lots of 17th and 18th century

00:56:35.680 objects. And so part of the module is kind of thinking about that relationship between

00:56:41.420 objects and literature in the Renaissance. And then they get to kind of incorporate

00:56:48.060 various objects from this cabinet that we have into their essays and their literary analysis,

00:56:56.020 which I think is really fun for them. I've just been marking the essays now and they've been

00:57:00.080 doing a great job. I love, I love what you do in this book and clearly what you're doing in

00:57:07.240 your teaching as well which is just re thinking about these objects thinking about like why do

00:57:12.080 you mention tobacco in this play like just to it's not as I often not thinking about it but

00:57:18.940 just how I've experienced reading books you can read a whole book about Tudor and Stuart England

00:57:22.520 and it never mentions colonization or but it's like but it was such a integral part but like

00:57:29.100 you said some of it just sort of like dissolves into the culture so you don't really think about

00:57:33.080 you just mentioned oh this person and she had this feather we're like okay but like where was

00:57:37.860 this feather work from so just like drawing that out again I think is really important and really

00:57:42.560 interesting work to do thanks yeah I kind of end with the image one of the closing images in the

00:57:50.020 book is of the the typical Elizabethan or Jacobean courtier and the fact that they might have a beaver

00:57:58.540 hat on, right? Those like kind of classically Jacobean canonical pointy hats that are often

00:58:06.180 made out of beaver pelts from the Americas. They might be wearing beaver hat, have a pearl earring

00:58:12.860 with a pearl from Venezuela. They might be wearing clothes that are dyed with cochineal dye,

00:58:18.720 which is also coming from the Americas. And so I think so much of what we have come to associate

00:58:27.920 with this really quintessential Tudor-Stewart style

00:58:32.860 are made up of components that we can trace back

00:58:39.360 to colonial encounters and to budding kind of imperial aspirations

00:58:45.180 that the English have in the Atlantic.

00:58:48.260 Yeah, and I think that sort of thing is so interesting,

00:58:50.460 like fashion history and stuff like that,

00:58:52.640 where it's just these trends didn't come out of nowhere.

00:58:55.540 like they really represent what people were talking about in society what access they had

00:59:00.300 to new sorts of things and so I love that sort of digging into it a bit it's really interesting

00:59:06.280 thank you so much for for writing this book but also thank you for for joining me for this

00:59:10.160 conversation today thank you and my pleasure it was it was lots of fun to to talk about with you

00:59:15.480 and hopefully readers will be able to draw other connections find other objects that I've kind of

00:59:23.020 overlooked as well and if they do I would love to hear about them absolutely well actually and

00:59:27.820 if people do want to follow your work or get in touch with you do you have a website or what's

00:59:31.700 the best way for people to do that probably blue sky I would say I've got I've got an official

00:59:37.900 university website where they can find um my my articles and academic work as well um they might

00:59:45.620 not want to read an academic book but my academic book is open access so you don't have to purchase

00:59:50.220 it. It's free to read online, but for the kind of newest finds and just an excuse to share lots of

00:59:57.560 beautiful images of Tudor and Stuart art. Yeah, I'm on blue sky.

01:00:03.440 Fantastic. Well, thank you again for this wonderful conversation.

01:00:06.780 Thanks so much.

01:00:11.900 So Lauren's book is called A Golden World, How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England.

01:00:17.300 And it's such a fascinating book.

01:00:18.860 We only had time to talk about a few of the objects and things that she discusses in her

01:00:23.280 book, but it's so readable, it's so interesting, and it's so valuable to me, especially as

01:00:27.520 a person who's living in modern day Canada and researching the Tudor era just to see

01:00:33.380 the way that the cultures came together when everybody thought of each other.

01:00:37.440 So you can pick up Loren's book, A Golden World, wherever you get your books from.

01:00:42.240 And I also want to mention that if you want to keep up with me and my work and get ad

01:00:46.840 free versions of these episodes, you can do so by joining my Patreon as a paid member.

01:00:52.380 So if you pledge at least $1 a month, you'll get early ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar

01:00:58.400 History. And or for $6 or more a month, you can also get bonus episodes featuring me and some of

01:01:04.780 my friends. Like we had a recent episode discussing the Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus and what

01:01:10.640 that has to do with Tudor history and why it's my favorite play of all time. We've also got an

01:01:15.280 episode coming up soon where my friend Lanoa Johnson is going to explain the plot of one of

01:01:19.900 her favorite books A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett we also talk about costume dramas

01:01:24.680 and other things basically bonus episodes if you join my patreon at that six dollars or more a month

01:01:29.400 level there's also an episode you can hear there where I talk with my friend Gina Berry about the

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01:01:39.960 chat, which is an elite place to just chat about people from history and share memes and have a

01:01:45.360 good time. Honestly, like I talk about the traders there a lot, which is like the only show I have

01:01:50.080 time to watch and I'm obsessed with it. Anyway, you can also get access to my Zoom live events

01:01:55.100 if you're at that $6 a month level. But again, you can join for as low as a dollar a month to

01:01:59.720 get the ad-free access. And I appreciate every single person who's a member of my Patreon.

01:02:04.640 Go to patreon.com slash annfosterwriter to get a free trial or to join as a paid member.

01:02:09.960 And if you like hearing me talk and you're like, but what's she like as a writer? I have written a book. It's called Rebel of the Regency. It's a biography of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain's queen without a crown, and it is now available to buy wherever you get your books. Go to rebeloftheregency.com for all the links to buy a copy.

01:02:28.040 and the Tudor era is up and running here on this podcast next week's episode we're gonna get into

01:02:37.920 a bit of what was happening in another country not England but next to England we're gonna be

01:02:43.300 talking about Scotland during this era and what were they up to at that period of time and why

01:02:49.500 was it putting women on trial as witches we're gonna talk about that next week with some very

01:02:55.260 special guests I think you'll be really excited about. But until next time, everyone, keep your

01:02:59.480 pants on and your tits out. Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Anne Foster. 1.00

01:03:06.520 Editor is Christina Lumagi. Theme music is by The Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karen

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01:05:58.480 Could we get something a little bit lighter,

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Vulgar History - August 19, 2026

The Tudors Take America

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