Episodes

  • #71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

    #71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?
    Jan 29 2025
    Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any potential causes of unrest – including any remaining shreds of die-hard Protestantism - and promptly. We also discover, that the majority of those who were burned were not Protestants at all, but followers of much older, rural religions. (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    42 mins
  • #70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

    #70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?
    Jan 22 2025
    Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No, again. Cranmer was tried by the pope and Mary had no power to spare him. As for Mary’s Privy Council, they turn out to have been more interested in pirates than heretics. Much more important was Bartolomé Carranza, a Spanish friar, King Philip’s trusted eyes and ears at the English Court, but he was later accused of heresy by the pope for being too lenient. Finally the campaign in England was distinctively English, not Spanish. That points the finger for responsibility at Philip’s own select council of veteran English courtiers. But almost all of them had for years been Protestants. What was going on? (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    39 mins
  • #69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

    #69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?
    Jan 15 2025
    England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism. (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    38 mins
  • #68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?

    #68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?
    Jan 8 2025
    Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians, mainly using Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ written by an Elizabethan Protestant. We look at why Foxe exclusively blames Mary and why he’s wrong. (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    40 mins
  • #32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

    #32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness
    Dec 31 2024
    In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction. (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    36 mins
  • #79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

    #79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers
    Dec 25 2024
    A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R)

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    29 mins
  • #107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

    #107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
    Dec 18 2024
    We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    31 mins
  • #106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

    #106 Dark make-believe - Ep 6 Lunatics take over the asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
    Dec 11 2024
    Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show more Show less
    29 mins