Bloody Queen Bess - The Real Story of England’s Protestant Revolution

Power rarely moves quietly, and our tour through the English Reformation proves it. We start with a young, athletic Henry VIII whose dynastic panic collided with fragile Tudor legitimacy and recent civil war. From Wolsey’s velvet control to Cromwell’s hard-edged dissolution of the monasteries, the story isn’t a popular uprising against Rome—it’s a top-down refit of a living church under the pressure of succession, money, and law.

Zooming out, Europe hums with end-times energy: printing stokes polemics, the sack of Rome shatters illusions, and theological debates double as statecraft. We revisit Mary I without the propaganda haze—her measured governance, her duty to crush rebellion, and the way her reign got rewritten by enemies. Then Elizabeth I tightens the bolts: supremacy oaths, recusancy fines, and an intelligence apparatus that turns conscience into evidence. The result is a church that keeps the silhouette of altars while changing the crown above them.

Underground Catholicism adapts with nerve and nuance. Jesuit missions like Edmund Campion’s draw hard lines, house chapels encode the Mass into Byrd’s music, and priest holes become the country’s hidden cathedrals. We unpack the Gunpowder Plot as either interception or invention and track how it cements “Catholic equals treason” in the English mind. From Laudian “beauty of holiness” to the civil war backlash, from Jacobite hopes to the Quebec Act and Wellington’s push for emancipation, we follow the long arc that shaped modern Britain—and its American echo in how nations sacralize power. Subscribe, share this episode with a history-loving friend, and tell us: which Tudor moment most changed your view of the Reformation?

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening, Fundraiser Update, Guest Arrival
• 3:10 Dickens Course Plug And Format
• 8:10 Setting The Stage: Europe In Upheaval
• 11:00 Henry VIII: Politics, Papacy, And Wolsey
• 16:20 Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, And Monasteries
• 23:45 End Times Fever And The Sack Of Rome
• 28:20 Mary I: Myths, Rebellions, And Policy
• 36:30 Elizabeth I: Acts, Oaths, And Recusants
• 44:00 Underground Catholicism And Jesuit Missions
• 50:30 Gunpowder Plot: Spycraft And Narrative
• 56:30 Mary Queen Of Scots And Succession Strategy
• 1:03:00 Beauty Of Holiness: Laudian Reforms
• 1:09:30 Civil War, Episcopalians, And Transatlantic Effects
• 1:14:20 Catholic Emancipation: Quebec To Wellington
• 1:20:30 Q&A: Mary’s Numbers, Elizabeth’s Statecraft
• 1:26:00 Closing Plugs And Course Details

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:31

So we were supposed to have Ryan Grant on tonight, but like apparently he just doesn't show up for things.

SPEAKER_02: 0:38

Bloody desk got him.

SPEAKER_03: 0:40

Ghost. I apologize. Okay, so Ryan wanted to uh get on to discuss the English Reformation. We talked about it for two weeks. Oh, perfect. Here's Ryan. It's about time. Punctual. Very, very punctual, Ryan. We are on air. Definitely late. Yeah, we're late. I'm letting you know. I mean, feel free, but okay. So two two things before we get started, though. One is um my brother, uh, for anybody that watched our last episode, we did a fundraiser for my brother. We raised uh$21,000 to get to get my brother to get my brother a new oil burner, and there should be plenty of money left over to get him a car. I went and told him about it Friday after work. Um, I was going to record it, but I I just felt like recording it, especially to post on social media. It just I just something felt so wrong about it, and I wanted to allow my brother to just react without having a camera in his face or anything. Um it was of it was a pretty emotional thing, and it it I was just so happy to do this for my brother. They went today and started the project, it should be done by Thursday, Friday, the latest.

SPEAKER_02: 2:04

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_03: 2:05

He I all I can tell you is um the the one thing he just he just he was just like, I can't believe I got good news. I'm just so used to getting bad news. Like he was just very overwhelmed. It was an amazing thing everybody did. I shut the fundraiser down, no more money is coming in. We have plenty of money to do what we're going to do. He wants to come on and thank everybody, so we'll figure that out. But I just it just man, you see everybody recording everything. And if like Rob even said, he's like, I mean, if you record it, it's gonna get a ton of views, and it'll be one of those things. But I just not everything has to be that repeat what I said after that.

SPEAKER_02: 2:45

You make me sound terrible.

SPEAKER_03: 2:46

No, no, no, oh, yeah, no, no, no. Rob said, but yeah, you may not want to record it because it's like allow he literally what I'm saying right now, Leia. Rob, Rob, that was actually what Rob said. He was like, Yes, it'll get a ton of views, but you might want to allow for just a touching moment between you and your brother. So that that's what we wound up doing. My brother does want to come on and um and say thank you to everybody, so we'll figure that out. Um, but uh, so Ryan wanted to discuss the English Reformation, but this is Kale's like favorite subject, but also Kale is about to do a course on Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol, and I'm going to be joining the course and doing it with him, and I wanted to give him a little chance to promote it uh for anybody that wants to do it.

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

It's an online course, so Kale, take it away. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks, Anthony. Thanks, Rob. Good to meet you, Ryan. Uh, but we're starting, I'm doing a four-part course on Charles Dickens. Everybody knows the story, but few of us have actually read the book. It's a really fantastic um it's a classic, and it's sort of an opportunity to kind of do a deep dive into what exactly makes this thing a classic. It's four parts, it starts on November 25th, and then each Tuesday for four weeks for four weeks. And so I'm kind of pitching it as sort of this first part of a two-part series I'm doing. The first one is gonna be for Advent, the season of preparation, the Christ child is coming. And so, how do you get yourself prepared for it? And then the second part, which will be a separate course unto itself, is gonna be oddly enough, I know it might sound strange, but uh the great story, Sir Gowan and the Green Knight, because Sir Gowan and the Green Knight wanna do that one too. And it takes place in Christmas tide, the you know, the 15-day full season. And I think that's very significant that it takes place uh during Christmas tide. So that's gonna be a real banger, too. But first, we're gonna do Charles Dickens, the classic Christmas Carol, um, Scrooge and all that, and then we'll do the the the the second part of the deep dive after um after Christmas and into the news and what an awesome time to do, and what a way to do it during Advent to go through this story, guys.

SPEAKER_03: 4:48

Let's pump this thing out. Everybody joined this class, let's do it together. I'm excited for it. He just did Dante. How did that class go?

SPEAKER_01: 4:56

It was great, man. I so I kind of just did it on a whim because I'm kind of sitting around like, all right, I gotta do something and uh put it out there. And uh my sort of what I was thinking is like honestly, if I could just get 10 people to sign up at like a hundred bucks, you know what I mean? Like it'll be a nice sort of thing, anyway. So I did it. I got my 10 within about a week, and then the second week I had 20 and 30, 40. I got up to 60 people signed up for the class. It was awesome, it was a great time. That is so great. Yeah, so it did that, I did that one in six um, you know, six blocks because it's a longer book. Um, and it's it's pretty darn complicated and complex. But uh man, had a great time doing it. So for me, it's kind of like proof of concept. It's it's ultimately it's the kind of thing, you know, that I think we can be doing in addition, you know, all four of us pay attention to what's going on and in the church and in politics and all that kind of stuff. But this sort of helps us build out a kind of broad base, kind of reconnect us to that that knowledge base that many of us did not get, you know, and and I'm sort of playing catch up like everybody else. So that's really the idea. Touching on some of the classics.

SPEAKER_02: 5:59

Where and how do we sign up?

SPEAKER_01: 6:00

Yeah. So um, I guess I could put a link on here, and I can I'll put the link in the chat. Does that work, Rob?

SPEAKER_02: 6:06

Yeah, then I'll put it in the description.

SPEAKER_01: 6:07

Yeah. Um, and uh, so uh it'll be I'll be doing it's it's live streamed, right? It'll be like a webinar type thing. Uh you'll get a link, you'll get show notes, uh reading guides and all that kind of stuff. And then um uh, but if you can't show up like on a Tuesday night, you've got something going on. Um, everybody who signs up for the course has um rights, you know, you get the recordings right away, so you can kind of watch it on your own time. But there really is something if you can make it during the live sessions, it's like that's where I like I feel it. It's like a it's a good it's a good jam.

SPEAKER_03: 6:37

So so wait, you're doing it on Tuesday nights?

SPEAKER_01: 6:40

Yeah, is that bad?

SPEAKER_03: 6:42

Yeah, we might have to we might have to shift our show for the for advent because I want to be in that class, so we'll figure that out.

SPEAKER_02: 6:48

No, but he said that's why I didn't do Dante because it was on Tuesday nights, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 6:51

Now, yeah, it and it partly sorry, I apologize about the conflict, but like my I work at a boarding school, so my schedule is pretty darn tight. Uh, I put the link in the description, Rob. I don't know if you you you got that, but uh not the link in the description, in the notes in the chat.

SPEAKER_02: 7:06

Um, but um but again that's that's only your notes. Oh, that's in private chat or in comments.

SPEAKER_01: 7:14

Oh, okay. I'll do it in private chat. I'll send it to you and then you can uh you can do it. Um, but uh like I said, you'll have access to the recordings. You'll get you know, I'll give you reading guides and all that kind of stuff, and uh it should be great, it's a good time. And and the chat, I gotta say, the chat during the dot date classes was kind of distracting for me because uh I kept looking at the case. Great, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, that's exactly right. I know at a certain point I had to like just block it out because I had to get through the cantos, you know. But um, but you do it to say the the Dickens thing, it's like everybody knows this story, but man, there's something about reading a story like that and kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of the language. Of course, it's written in English, it's it's Victorian, so there's a little bit of you know, it's a little bit difficult at first, but you get into it really quickly and you really see why this story is enduring. You know, it's it's just really good stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 8:06

Okay, so uh Ryan, you had reached out. This is this is like your your uh your your um your uh well I don't know what the hell I'm looking for, like your thing, the the English Reformation. You would you had told us like a couple times like if we ever wanted to do a deep dive into a subject, this was this was your specialty. Uh in preparation for this, I uh the rest is history, Tom Holland's podcast. They did like a four-part series on Twitter. Yeah, so I I watched all four of those yesterday to try to catch a little bit of so I could add something to the discussion, but I'm I'm gonna imagine you and Kale are gonna take Rob and I on a bit of a journey because Kale loves this uh time period as well. Um now um I'm gonna leave it to you guys where you think we should start off on this subject. Should we start with Henry the Eighth, or should you have you have a different point where you'd want to jump off?

SPEAKER_00: 9:01

Well, actually, I've got an image below Rob, and if you want to put it up, I just added it. Um, so this is Henry VIII's will. And so at his death, so Henry VIII, of course, had broken from Rome to get a son. Uh his daughter was very popular, but within his living memory, he had to hide in the tower. Well, the Perkin Warbeck's rebellion, pretending to be the princess in the tower, had you know threatened his father's throne, and he would have been killed too. So the lack of a male heir with the backdrop of the disastrous Wars of the Roses, this, you know, Henry's just not sure a woman could could make it on the throne. And then, you know, in then add on the dynastic situation. Go ahead. I just want to jump in.

SPEAKER_01: 9:46

I think this is an important point that we have we think of monarchies through the lens of like the French monarchy, which is sort of absolute and total. Yeah, but when you look at real monarchy, it was as much of a political balancing act than anything we see in in politics today. And I think people have a tendency to think, oh, well, he's Henry VIII, he can kind of do whatever he wants.

SPEAKER_00: 10:09

Well, that's not exactly right, he does, but he has to do right in a very certain way, and he always does it with parliament, using parliament. He learns this from his father. His father had done largely the same thing, he had controlled parliaments, he had stacked parliaments when he needed to, uh, much against the the Yorkist uh aristocracy who very much hated him. Yes, and of course, Henry has a very weak claim to the throne, Henry Tudor, because they descend from the Beaufort line. The Beauforts are descended from John of Gaunt, just as the uh the um the valid, the legitimate lines of the aristocracy did, but through his mistress, Catherine Swinford, who was the au pair who then later became wife after a few illegitimate children. So the uh the bastard children from that marriage they get legitimized in the Beaufort line. Beaufort's marriage, you know, Margaret Beaufort marries Owen Tudor. He dies just before she gives birth to Henry Tudor. So the idea that he would ever get to the throne, it's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_04: 11:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

Except for the the final end of the the Wars of the Roses, which when they seem to have ended, right, in the Yorkist house and everything. So and then that could be a a show in itself. But needless to say, that the tutor line is weak. Um when Mary marries Philip, for example, Philip II of Spain, he's not Philip II of Spain yet, he has a greater claim to the throne legitimately than either Mary or Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_03: 11:34

Which is why they were which is why they were so worried about him, they thought like England would then be just become Spain, right? Like right.

SPEAKER_00: 11:42

We'll get to that. Uh there's there's more dynamics in that particular arrangement. But so ultimately, so the tutor line is weak, and so Henry, of course, he breaks from Rome to Mary Anne Boleyn. That doesn't actually turn out to work for him. And and the the general scuttle butt in the 1520s, late 1520s, is Anne is a witch and she's cast a spell on Henry. By about 1535, Henry starts to believe it. Maybe she is a witch. They fall out very badly. Anne does not transition from mistress to queen, and on top of that, uh she miscarried with twin sons. The only thing she had produced was Elizabeth. So she again, like Catherine, she fails at royal baby maker, which is essentially what a queen is supposed to be. She didn't give him that legitimacy. So falls out badly, and then there's a conf confluence of things that lead to Anne Boleyn's fall. One of those things is actually Mary Tudor, uh, who becomes Mary the First, Henry's oldest daughter, and her supporters who want her restored, so they see that with Henry and Ann falling out, they approach Cromwell, Nicholas Carew, the groom of the stool, uh, what a Henry's grooms of the stool, very good friend of Henry's for a long time. Henry ends up killing him in a few years. Um, he works with Mary and their other supporters to work with Cromwell. Now they think they're playing Cromwell, they don't realize that Thomas Cromwell is a master politician and a guy who knows Machiavelli practically by heart. Right. And so he sees an opportunity to advance his own position. He's fallen out with Anne Boleyn because you know he he's much more radical than she is on religious reform questions. And she's challenging what he wants to do with the dissolution of the monasteries. He wants to use that to enrich his friends and other, you know, his squires, other people, and lesser aristocracy. Anne wants to put this to use for schools and other foundations, and crumb was like, Well, she does that. Man, I'm toast. Uh, it's the end of this dissolution bill. It's not gonna do what I want it to do. So he's already fallen out with her, and then he then now he's in a position like Woolsey was with Anne, where he's like, All right, well, she doesn't like me, and she's with Henry. Um, I'm I'm toast here. I'm gonna end up like Wolsey unless I do something. Enter uh, you know, Mary Tudor's supporters, Nicholas Crew, uh, Margaret Um Bradley.

SPEAKER_03: 14:03

Well, you're you're also flying over little details that are um probably a little bit important, like like Wolsey.

SPEAKER_00: 14:10

Wolsey is well, that's kind of in the background from where we're at. Well, we can get into Wolsey because Wolsey now he was the son of an Ipswich uh innkeeper, is usually on the wrong side of the law. The the records in Ipswich have him you know show his Wolsey's father being fined twice a year for keeping an unclean house. In other words, operating uh a brothel on the side.

SPEAKER_03: 14:31

Is is he is he Bishop of Canterbury?

SPEAKER_00: 14:34

No, no, he's he's Archbishop of York, but he's Cardinal Alaterra. He he is the Pope's personal representative from the 1517 through uh until it's stripped from him in the late 1520s. Um, and what happens with Wolsey? He he gets into the free grammar schools, he goes the ecclesiastical route, and um, you know, and so he becomes Henry's mover and shaker. He gets things done for Henry, and that's why he maintains the position he has. He's able to banish factions from court by controlling who's at court and to keep you know Henry's favorites out hunting or doing other things or ousting with knights in France or whatever, and he's able to control court. And Boleyn's arrival undoes his control of court, like the beginning, and on top of it, she hates Wolsey. And at the risk of uh, you know, get I depends that we we might never get to Marianne Elizabeth, I guess. If we want to get into more of that, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_03: 15:30

I want to I want to make sure we do get there because I know my whole job tonight is to make sure Ryan doesn't go off on too crazy of tangents or no be on you literally just kind of asked him to go off on more tangents. No, I I know Ryan now by this point.

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

Like Ryan will actually purposely gone through my old PowerPoints to curate what I've been saying for things.

SPEAKER_03: 15:51

Well, the the the thing I want to I wanna lay lay out is like Henry is uh originally before before he's uh while while he's still looking for his divorce and he's still officially with Catherine of Aragon, he's writing a defense of the papacy, right? Like he received the title Defender of the Faith again against Luther, like and and then even towards the end of Henry's life, like he starts to revert back to his Catholicism, like he doesn't like some how some of the reforms have gone.

SPEAKER_00: 16:22

Yes, and no, there's a mix in that, and I guess we could approach that, but in 1522, he had written his book, uh Sertios Septum Sacramentorum, where he defends the seven sacraments against the Martin Luther. And in the preamble, he writes this very powerful defense of papal authority. Now, Thomas More and Moore looks over this in horror and he says, Uh, my liege, perhaps you should leave all this out because Henry believed in what we believe about the papacy, but more did not. Moore um had not read Latter in V's Condemnation of Conciliarism, so he was convinced that actually a council was above a church. It wasn't until working with Fisher on how to address heretics in England that he read that. He realized, wow, I've been wrong about this.

SPEAKER_03: 17:11

Wow, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 17:12

I didn't also because Moore's not a great theologian, brilliant thinker, devout man, pious man, right? Right. Right in the fathers and everything, but he's not, he doesn't make theology his provenance in practice. He he's you know, law, obviously, and also philosophy and Greek. That's that's where his interests are. He lectures in in uh Anglo-Norman French, formerly in the law schools, like at Vernables in and whatnot, he's also sits as a sheriff, he's a judge, and you know, and then as a privy counselor as well. His favorite pastime is Greek, not theology. So even though he's a brilliant writer, and so he but he followed Erasmus in this idea that the papacy was merely a human institution. So in the aftermath of uh Luther's reply to Henry, uh Fisher writes a letter because Henry can't acknowledge Luther's reply diplomatically, because it is all these insults to Henry, and a king has to be seen as above this kind of childish and abusive language. So uh, however much he might use it in private or whatever. So Fisher writes this outstanding treatise, which um I actually didn't mean to do shameless plugs, but I do publish it. Uh the only English uh translation has ever been done of it, uh, The Defense of the Royal Assertion Against Martin Luther, uh, which is on the Mediatrics Press website, it's very much in stock. I got lots of copies of it. Great book. He just shreds everything about Luther, 100%. So Fisher now uh sorry, Moore takes an interest in Fisher. And you know, previously they had they had only been vaguely aware of each other, and they start writing more as Moore is more concerned about the in the influx of heresy into England. Fisher's writing more works against Luther, and then as Moore is reading it, he realizes wow, the fathers are absolutely clear that the papacy is uh the divinely constituted office. This is not just a human office, this is part of the divine constitution of the church, that there is a pope as a successor to St. Peter, and and he reversed his old position on that, and to the point where he is now ready to die for it in 1535, whereas Henry has utterly repudiated it. The complete reversal from a decade earlier.

SPEAKER_03: 19:20

What uh what what uh Kale and I have talked about is uh because we were we were just talking in the green room about the stripping of the altars, reading that book. Yeah, and because I think a lot of people's idea of the reformation is that it was a revolt of the people against the church, like a bottom-up revolt. And that that book kind of sheds light on how this was the elite of the time basically just forcing this from the top down to everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 19:47

It's Henry, it's it's very I wrote an article about this that you can see at Pelican Plus, actually, the the Pelican Brief. Uh, they published it there on the nature of the English uh Reformation. And I I argued in there uh by the fact that this is very much Henry's personal initiative. Henry is the one who is putting there, might be people in place that are Protestant, frankly, like Kramer will be he will be seen to be that. He's not seen to be that directly, at least publicly, in 1527. Uh Cromwell also is leans to that opinion. Uh what Protestant means is still, you know, it's actually a political term to to German princes, both Catholic and Protestant, opposing Charles V and his centralizing policies in Germany. And the term doesn't get applied more widely until the Schmuckaldic League. And then even then, what is a Protestant? The dividing lines aren't really there in 1527. The notion of what that means gradually crystallizes over the next 20 years or so. So um the result is that you know Henry is pushing his own initiative to get what he wants. And that's the the entire Reformation, it has his personal stamp and character on it, and that it's nature. That's why English uh Protestantism is so different from uh Calvinism and Geneva, even though it detects a lot of Calvinist doctrine under Elizabeth, it's so different from Lutheranism or anything else, at least in its initial stages, because it keeps the the corpse of the church like a Frankenstein monster with a new head on it in Henry's image.

SPEAKER_03: 21:23

It's kind of like uh post-consiliar Catholicism. Um, what's interesting is um because I I I I wanted Cale to come on because there was a conversation between Cale and Paul Vanderclay where they were discussing this time period, and this time period cannot be just seen, like you can't just look at this through the lens of England. What is going on in the wider world is extremely important. Like the new world was just discovered, the printing press has been invented. There's like technological advances that have never been seen in the world before. You have in Munster this lunatic, the Anabaptists are starting starting their revolt. Like, there's so much going on during this time period that I'm pretty sure most of most of Europe thought the apocalypse was happening.

SPEAKER_00: 22:18

I mean, it it was end times fever is already on um on the docket, as it were, because it back at Savonarola, you know, and they're on and he's very much you know infected with the antichrist design, uh, you know, everything's gonna end soon. People have this all over uh Europe. And so Luther's arrival plays into this in two ways. Some people see Luther, and this is a sign we're in the end times, the the formation of the Anabaptists, you know, the end times are near, so hey, don't sow, don't you know, go in the fields and ends up becoming this almost semi-Manichean cult under Vanderleiden at the at the end of it all. Um, but then you also get on the flip side, uh, Lutheranism plays very heavily into the end times fever. So that um the Pope is the Antichrist, but now we have the Church of the State, uh the Saints that is at war with Antichrist in the final you know run of it. So you get in May 20 uh 29th of uh 1527, you have uh Charles the Fifth is really angry with the Pope because he is as much as Charles has done for the church and and uh fighting against Lutheran things. Now the Pope has decided Charles is too powerful, so he's gonna lie with the French and they make the League of Chamburg. So the uh Charles is really ticked off. So he decides to send an army within striking distance of Rome to basically say, Hey Pope, you've done bad. And in the midst of it, he forgets to pay them and whatever, because he's also putting down a revolt in Spain, the Commoneros Rules, right? So in the midst of all this, then the army's like, hey, where's their pay? And they get ticked off. And now it's made up of a lot of mercenaries, some of whom are Lutheran. They're called Lans Connects. And I think I talked about them another time, and uh, I'm not gonna that that that's a tangent waiting to happen.

SPEAKER_02: 24:08

Yeah, they got the stream kicked eventually. Oh, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00: 24:11

Yeah, we did get into that. Yeah, so I think so. Some of the cores are Catholic, some of the Lans Connect cores are Lutheran, they run by their own rules and everything. So the Lutherans they revolt, they mutiny their commanders can't get them back in order. One of the commanders, he's French, I can't remember his name off the top of my head. He decides to get together to get to organize them all, say, we're gonna go to Rome, we'll make the Pope pay your wages. And they all say, Yay! So they and Rome wasn't really prepped for an attack. So they come in now. Two weeks before this, there was a guy named Petroyo, and he was like a weird mystic, uh, would come in, give little prophecies and stuff. So he comes half naked um and stands at the statue of St. Paul's um outside um the the Vatican when the uh uh Pope Clement the Seventh is processing in um after Easter, and he says, Clement, thou man of Sodom, Rome will be destroyed in 14 days and a fortnight uh because of your sins. And they kind of laugh at him and ignore him. This guy's half naked, it looks mad. Exactly that amount of time, the uh Lance Connects come into the city and uh just completely devastated, like all of in Rome was like the Renaissance capital uh of Italy at this time, they because it the popes have worked really hard to outpace Florence and make it the jewel of Renaissance Italy. They destroy everything they do things that would make this Nazis and the Soviets blush, actually, to be perfectly honest, without recounting all the time.

SPEAKER_03: 25:36

You you also see um with with some of the Pope's decisions to with Charles V and even the the racking of his brain on how to handle the the Henry VIII situation. It's like you see the Pope in these um temporal matters maybe airing in judgment on some things, and it's like I think a lot of people have this idea that before the council the popes were perfect or something. It's like we've had some messy popes who made some awful temporal decisions and done some really stupid things. Uh, Andrew said the Tutors is a great series to watch. I I did watch all the Tudors. Uh I don't think you should watch it.

SPEAKER_00: 26:17

I mean, if you like a certain drama with some poor quality acting uh in some places, I guess um it's not there's certain elements that they do try that that that you can tell they tried. They did Thomas More really well in that series. Yeah, they did Fisher horribly.

SPEAKER_01: 26:33

Well, well, and I I think I think they did the young Henry pretty well because you know, we tend to think of uh Henry as the big fat bloated guy with seven no, he was young. He was an absolute you know unit of a man. I mean, he was he was like he was big, he was strong, he was athletic, he was handsome, he was smart. I mean, he really was the full package. Um, and you can really see why somebody like Thomas More, you know, who was invested in his early education, you know, really struggled because he really thought that Henry was kind of the answer, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 27:05

So well, I mean, as it is, it is at the beginning of uh Henry's reign, he actually writes a book more. He's like starstruck. He writes a book and it's actually it will put into illuminated manuscript, it's in the royal collection of Latin verses that he delivers to Henry uh when Henry's uh coronation procession winds around Cheapside, and he declares that after uh the winter king, namely Henry Henry's father, now with you know as the end of our slavery, it be now is the beginning of a golden age. That's it. More says to kill Henry on his coronation procession.

SPEAKER_03: 27:41

Well, that's also like so. When you get to Elizabeth, they call Elizabeth is the golden age and stuff like that. But I do want to touch on uh like we're gonna jump ahead a little bit. Henry goes through through Ambelyn and then he goes through all his other wives, but Mary winds up getting put back into the line of succession. And when Mary takes the throne, shh, um, I don't the the way um the rest of his history handled it, I thought was pretty good. They were saying like Mary didn't really think that because like you said, the like the phrase the reformation didn't even take hold yet. Like they people just thought there was some things that were a little out of whack that needed to be tightened up, and so Mary gets in and she's trying to clean things up.

SPEAKER_00: 28:23

Now she has this reputation of being bloody Mary, but she really didn't even show up until the 1600s, but yeah, that's that's a yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01: 28:33

That's pretty much that's an ad campaign, that's a post hoc ad campaign to just make to just make Catholicism look awful.

SPEAKER_03: 28:42

But it really Mary really was like a very merciful queen when she was in. She that I think they said that all through the course of her entire reign, only 300 people were put to death. But as queen, your responsibility is to put down rebellions, and if people are trying to cause uprisings and things like that, you really have no choice but to keep those in check. Otherwise, people constantly be checking.

SPEAKER_00: 29:03

Mary and Elizabeth are not any different, or even for that matter, Edward to a certain extent. Um, they're a little more caprice with Edward, but with Mary and Elizabeth both, the way they deal with rebellion is basically the same because Protestant you got Wyatt's rebellion. So, right away, when Mary uh sends as queen and the announcement that she's going to marry Philip of Spain, you have uh a reaction amongst the the very committed Protestants that this is bad, we need to revolt against this. And so you have Thomas Wyatt um revolts. He's a soldier, he's got he's landed gentry, his father actually was a court poet, composed a great poet, a great poet. Very good poet. Um so Thomas Wyatt starts a rebellion and it's supposed to kick off in various counties. A lot of them get stopped before they happened, but he actually has a strong contingent of troops. Now, everybody sells Mary short at every stage of her accession, so even when they had intruded. Lady Jane Grey and to try to stop Mary from taking the throne. The imperial ambassador Simon Renard doesn't think she has a chance. Um, you know, he thinks it's done. Uh, it turns out to be quite false. The French don't think she has any chance of getting the throne, and it actually goes exactly the other way. Uh, Wyatt's Rebellion is the same thing. Simon Renard writes to the Emperor Charles V, he says, Yeah, she there's no way she's going to survive this. And he's already packing up the state papers to get the get him out of London. And but Mary, she uh now she's extremely well educated, and she's an excellent public speaker. So she goes to the guild hall in in London, and which is where if you're like you're looking to get, you know, very you conduct business in off days, and if you're running for magistrate, you'll give speeches there. So she gets and she assembles as the choirs to assemble the people, and she gets a speech that's so impassionate, moves the crowd, even the Protestants in the crowd are moved by it. Where she says that you know, that you know, she has one ring that truly matters, her coronation ring. And by that, she is married to her people, and that they always you know are first in her affections. I should have pulled that up because it's a great speech to read. But um, so that that moves the London populace. And so when Wyatt shows up, the gates are shut, they're supposed to be open, they're shut. And then you know, their troops are able to move in, she's able to raise a small army, but it's not really necessary. A lot of Wyatt's support melts away. They try to get away, they're captured and arrested. And so that that's dissipated. But this tells Mary that that she needs to focus on where is this rebellion coming from? Well, from Protestantism, not just from people in the country, but the people who we kind of let go out because we basically showed them the door if they didn't want to be here, the Marian exiles, and they set up in Switzerland. So, like if you've ever seen like the Geneva Bible, for example, that comes from Protestants who left England under Queen Mary and went to Geneva and translated the Bible over there. So they um, you know, all the various Protestant groups, they represent the potential for a revolt against her throne. So that's why so what's her solution to use the church to level that um that threat. So in that, and with the return of Catholicism, there's the return of the heresy laws. And so that's the vehicle that she chooses. Now, interestingly, there were two critics of this. Uh, one were her own bishops, and two were the Spanish. So Alonsa de Castro, who is a confessor for Philip while he was there, um, he actually urges against severity in punishing the heretics, lest it bring up ill-feeling and possibly more revolt and be you know, do more harm than good. Uh, another critic on the other hand was the bishops. Now, the re there's a reason for this. So when Mary restores Catholicism, uh, you know, she appoints people, she she's quick to forgive some people who are very much a part of the policy of breaking from Rome, like Stephen Gardner. I mean, she never forgave Cramer. Kramer was like that's you know, Tom Holland, Dr. Holland says uh Mary didn't hold grudges. That is absolutely true in every respect, except for Kramer. But Gardner was just as much a part of the break from Rome and the divorce uh Henry's annulment from Catherine as uh Kramer was. Does she does she uh does does she put Kramer to death? Uh yes, we'll get to that. Um so it but good but the bishops in the in Mary's Restored Church, and they do a lot of great work, by the way. Uh the Counter-Reformation in England, it's a real thing. And if she had lived or had an error, it it would have extirpated Protestantism from the realm. It was wildly successful. Um, the the reason it fails is because she doesn't produce an error. That's that's why the counter-reformation is doomed. Otherwise, what do you think? Well, in fact, let me just finish this. The bishops, a lot of them, Cuthbert Tunstall, uh, Bishop Bonner, Stephen Gardner, they were all diehard Henry uh in the Henry Sk Henrichian schism. They were all part of that. And when Edward got more radically Protestant than they were ever prepared to go, they resisted, they were put in the tower, they accepted Mary, and they completely subscribed to the reinstitution of Catholicism. So uh, but now here's the problem. So they're proceeding against various heretics, and the heretics say, Well, I just believe what Bishop Bonner believed uh five, six years ago. Hey, I believe hey, uh, the book I'm following was written by Bishop Gardner over there. And that's the book I follow. Are you gonna burn me for believing what what the bishop here are you are you gonna burn me for believing what you wrote? So it's a huge problem, an uphill battle that and they're unfortunately put in the front lines very much against their will Bishop Bonner at a certain point. Somebody comes announced a heretic and he just says, Go away. He doesn't want to be doing it anymore, you know.

SPEAKER_03: 34:43

When I was listening to the to the Tom Holland uh series, man, I just couldn't like get it out of my head. Like, like, why didn't God allow one of them to produce an heir, like a male heir? Like you think, because I'm always thinking in the grand story of things, and it's like like God could have given one of them a male heir, like Mary gets cancer and she dies young.

SPEAKER_00: 35:12

I mean, she's in her 30s, but forties, but still, you know, for especially for royalty in the time, you know, it's um it's God's permissive will versus his providential will, and it could be there wasn't sufficient grace for so uh in terms of merited by the members to to get that result, and in terms of God's permissive will, and his providential will did not see the need you know to to overturn this. Um, it could be other, it could be it's part of his plan.

SPEAKER_03: 35:38

I that's what I that's what you are thinking about. Like, I'm looking at it like this is actually how God works through history by allowing things like this to happen, and it kind of leads to the dissolution of of of all of Christendom because you you lose England, and that puts all these really difficult um marriages, like there's no now. You can no longer marry like the the the a princess from France anymore, or it really puts all this strain on how Europe even interacts with each other because of these individual countries leaving Catholicism. Now you can't have these strong alliances like you once did, where you would marry your daughter to this prince, and you're you know, you would have families coming together to keep the line of succession going.

SPEAKER_00: 36:28

And you look at Mary's uh marriage to Philip, and if you watch some historians that they talk about this, the disastrous Spanish marriage, it was always a mistake, blah, blah, blah. Um, there is very good reasons. Actually, Mary's choice to marry Philip was um, I mean, it's part of her emotional attachment to the Hobbsburgs and specifically Charles V, but it makes it extremely sound political policy. Because uh, where does England make most of its revenue? How is it that the trade internationally, where is that done? It's done at the Netherlands, it's done in Antwerp at the in the wool markets at the exchange. Well, yeah, right where England makes its its bank. Um, and who is the Lord of the Netherlands? Well, the Hobbsburgs and Philip. So it's a dynastics you know, policy makes sense. It also follows the tradition of Hopsburg Tudor relations going back to Henry the Seventh. And it's only been in the last 20 years people have been researching this and getting back into the sources. And I've been following this keenly, I've been trying to do a lot of that on my own. But there the Hobbsburg Tudor Alliance goes back to Henry VII, and because you have Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor, and he's he's the with so many titles, the lord of so many lands and perpetually broke. And but he's also bankrupting Henry VII's biggest rival, Edmund de la Poole, who is uh legit uh you know, a better claim to the throne than Henry VII has. So he needs to to stop all the various rebellions that are being fomented, he needs to stop the bankrolling of Edmund de la Poole. Easiest way to do that is uh pay off the emperor, and so he starts he just starts making uh alliances with Maximilian, he started Philip the Good in Burgundy, he starts sending money, tons, I mean a hundred you know, thousand marks. Uh, there's another year, like the almost the whole annual revenue of England, Henry the Seventh sends to the the the Hopsburgs. And then when uh Philip the Good and his wife Joanna, Catherine's older sister, they try to make good on their claim to Spain, they get shipwrecked in England, and it becomes the rather involuntary guest in the seven. And then Henry the Seventh basically is maximum, hey, you know, in addition to some more money, let's make a trade. You can have your son back, and I get the Duke of Suffolk, Edmund Dillapool, which is precisely Western Earl of Suffolk. I always except English period, sorry. So and that's exactly what happens. They make the trade. So then the Earl of Suffolk goes into the tower before uh getting beheaded, and um Philip the Good goes back to Burgundy. So the um, you know, that that is an old alliance, and it's important politically for England, and so it makes absolute sense at every level. It also, if there's an error, it it absolutely shures up the succession beyond doubt. Because again, like we said, Philip uh the second, he's got a better claim to the throne than Mary.

SPEAKER_03: 39:20

And he there's there's two things I want to touch on, also. Um, one is why was Catherine of Aragon never canonized? Because that woman lived an absolutely saintly life. I mean, she was humiliated before the world, remained a devout Catholic and a good wife, and never I just don't understand why there was never a big enough cult around her to start the start the process. And the other is uh I want to discuss the recusant Catholics during this time. And we should probably get we should probably do an ad for recusant before we discuss the recusant Catholics.

SPEAKER_00: 40:00

I bloviated a bunch, uh as if Kayle wants to jump in.

SPEAKER_01: 40:05

No, I I I really appreciate the the you're bringing a level of complexity to the kind of low resolution that people um I in both sides, right? You know, both sides sort of traffic in these kind of very simple, you know, fat crayola crayon markers when they're talking about this this time period, but that the intrigue behind you know matters of church and state, you know, when the pope is acting as the head of the church versus when the pope is acting as the head of the papal states, their relations with all the royal families throughout Europe. I just think this is such an important um thing to insert. And into your question, Anthony, you know, why does God allow such things? I mean, I think that's a great question. I mean, I think that's a you know, and and maybe it's one that hasn't been fully answered yet, right? I mean, I you know, these things are still in essence playing out even now.

SPEAKER_02: 41:00

You know, um, I've been reading uh Buchanan's book on Churchill, Hitler, and the the unnecessary war. And yeah, you you see how much um kind of uh the Whig progressivism has has pushed so much of history over the last hundred years and and prior to that. And I wonder if you don't have the English Reformation, do you get that kind of you know, that Whig push uh of always progressing history to the next step?

SPEAKER_01: 41:30

And you know, well, you can really see, Rob, you can really see why they they believe their own hype in that regard. I mean, like England really does propel itself uh you know into world domination, and all those people who all those ancestors that helped Henry do his thing, you know, through the establishment of himself as the head of the Church of England, you know, they were paid for um handsomely by his largesse. And those guys went on to conquer the world. And so you could you can imagine sort of thinking, like, hey, I think we're on the right side of history, right? I mean, we we make those kind of jokes all the time when we hear somebody like Obama say it, and and and and you know, sort of the left progressive element in our own country, but this notion of a right side of history is fueled by, and it's hard, you know, their success. I mean, they were incredibly successful, and a sharmada, he defeated the greatest empire of the world, right? We're talking about that an act of God, right? I mean, like that's the way that they saw these things, and it's hard not, you know, it would be very hard to resist the temptation to grab providence um under your own hand, right? In that regard, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 42:40

No, absolutely 100%.

SPEAKER_01: 42:42

You know, and I would just one more thing. You know, I I take a group of students to England every year. Um, we go primarily to Oxford, and what's amazing to me as an American and as a Catholic, you know, you go there and the reformation is just still it's it's the big elephant in the room everywhere you go, every church, you know, every every you know, function, every uh every building, everything, it's it's it's empire, this this like radical fusion of church and state.

SPEAKER_00: 43:12

Amazing too how it developed. So you look at Saint Paul's and you see Union Jacks, you've got statues to secular poets. You can't have a statue of Saint, but you've got statues to secular poet. Uh Lord Nelson is buried in the crypt, and actually in the start off because it was meant for Henry the Eighth. Yeah, um, that's fine. There's a story behind that, too. So you've got all of these things, and uh the it becomes just this bigger and bigger tent, secular and uh even the act of union 1714. Right, Scotland is a Presbyterian country, it is not an Anglican country. So, what do they do? For the Act of Union, uh the Scottish Presbyterian Church is the official church of Scotland, still is, and uh then when the monarch goes to Scotland, he changes religion, he becomes a Presbyterian as long as he is in Scotland, and then when he goes back to England, he goes back to being an Anglican, or she amazing, and that's how they solve the the disparities of the two countries. You know, it's uh a strange you know mix, but again, it it is the national destiny of England, especially as um Englishman, you at least used to learn it. I mean, I guess now it's Islam is the national destiny, but um anyway.

SPEAKER_03: 44:24

No, that's interesting. So they can't have statues to saints, but they can have statues to secular figures, or it's worth it.

SPEAKER_00: 44:32

Who else is in there?

SPEAKER_01: 44:32

Well, I mean you go to Westminster, I mean the crypt, yeah. I mean, go go go into Westminster Abbey and you'll really see this. You know, that's like poor Saint Edward the Confessor is sort of in prison behind the altar, this beautiful, amazing shrine to him, but it it's essentially an occupied building, you know. And I say this is like I'm I'm kind of weird because I'm kind of an anglophile. Like, I mean, I kind of dig the whole UK thing, but it's hard to go into that building and not see it as you know, well, it's kind of like the Haggia Sophia in an interesting sort of way, right? It's it's a it's an occupied, um, stolen valor or something like that, you know.

SPEAKER_03: 45:09

Well, you see that culture gets transferred to the US to the to America because it's the English that colonize here, right? So you see these secular monuments to past presidents. We have Mount Rushmore, you have the Lincoln Memorial, you have all these things, and because statues really are such an important part of culture. It's why you see in you we still have Roman statues from the times times before Christianity. Hits we still have these Greek statues. Statues are a very important part of culture, and that reformation transfers over to America, where you'll have these Protestants telling us we worship statues when they it's like threw away you threw away your your heroes of the Christian faith for for Freemasonic heroes, the rotunda of the White House is the Washington painted by an Italian and modeled after the ascension of Saint Ignatius in in San Ignacio in Rome.

SPEAKER_00: 46:06

They they actually Protestants who would never assent to the the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary paint on the roof of the rotunda this painting of the ascension of George Washington into heaven.

SPEAKER_03: 46:16

You know, it's like if you like a proper country, we would have a statue of our lady instead of the statue of liberty, right? So they'll tell us we're worshiping a statue when we when we're praying next to a statue of our lady, but they literally put a pagan goddess in the New York Harbor, like a pagan goddess is what my last comment in fairness to John Knox, he would have torn down a statue to him as well.

SPEAKER_00: 46:40

He would not have consented to a statue of him, just to be fair to John Knox.

SPEAKER_03: 46:44

But I've I've said they like they did it with Charlie Kirk, like they they they basically canonized Charlie Kirk overnight when he passed, right? There the I've seen uh pictures of Protestants praying at a statue of Billy Graham. It's like you guys just don't because Catholicism is so intuitive, right? Right. Like what we what what what we did was so intuitive to you know it we were we replaced the pagan gods with the saints, the saints then became the governing authorities over these different areas where there would have been some pagan god that was worshipped, and then we bring the relics of the saint in, the pagan god gets pushed out now. That saint is the governing spirit of that area.

SPEAKER_01: 47:24

Yeah, Venice is a perfect example of this, right? That that is a banger story, by the way. The the the bones of Saint Mark and the theft of the bones or the whatever well, the theft of the bones of Saint Mark is just a great story, but I believe now you might know this better than me, Ryan. I believe Venice was was dedicated to Mars. It was one of the pagan gods specifically. I don't remember which one off the top of my head, but they had to sort of take Saint Mark as kind of like a replacement for that for that, like to to crowd out the spirit of that pagan god and sort of establish Saint Mark's Cathedral in the middle uh of Venice. It's uh it's really funny.

SPEAKER_03: 48:02

When you go to when you go to Florence, it's um it's really strange when you go to Florence because like every Catholic site I went to in Italy was dedicated to the saints, but then you go to Florence and you see how much money perverted them, and you have similar to what like it's like you have statues to Machiavelli, and you have it's really strange what they do.

SPEAKER_01: 48:31

But that's such a retrofit.

SPEAKER_00: 48:32

I mean that's an anachronism, but it's more you do see other things though in Florence, like the Medici, for example. Um, you have you know Cosmet Vecchio, right? The Cosmo the old, he's the founder of the Medici dynasty, or he's a banker, he's a usurer, and so he cannot actually you know go to confession, right? He goes to Eugene the Fourth and he says, Well, you know, other people they give you a painting, they they they put some nice word altar in a hospital. What if I build you a whole monastery? I'm just gonna give you a whole monastery. So San Marco in in in uh Florence, uh the Dominican monastery there is then built, and uh Fra Angelico, you know, it paints the cycle, the life cycle of Saint Dominic and the cells. There's actually, if you everyone knows that Fra Angelico uh picture of her the Annunciation, right? But where it sits, if you go to San Marco in Florence, you go up the stairs, when you first go up the stairs, you can see the annunciation, and it looks like it's part of the monastery because fra Angelico is really good at its mathematical proportions, and by scale, the buildings look like it's another cortile in say in San Marco, and so it looks like what's the idea with the goal is that realism that you're trying to approach with so much renaissance painting, bring the the the visual mysteries into our lived space. It's what you're trying to do. So you look at you know the enunciation, it looks like it's happening in some wing of the monastery as you're going up the stairs. Then you get closer, you see it as a painting, you know. But its size and its scale, as you go up the stairs, it looks like the enunciation is happening in some corner of the monastery.

SPEAKER_03: 50:11

One of the most jarring things that we saw when you go to the Duomo in Florence. First off, the nothing can prepare you for walking up on this building, yeah. Because you're going down some tiny little alleyway, and you have no idea you're about to walk up on it, and all of a sudden the thing's just there, and it's the most incredible cathedral you'll ever see in your life. It's just on the outside, you've never seen a building adorned like this, but there is like you have you have our lady on the duomo below Machiavelli. Like Machiavelli puts himself above our lady. It's it's such a weird sight to see that you just see money, how how it corrupts people, and I don't know. It was a it's a very weird experience to go see, and then you go inside the duomo, and it's the most bare, empty space you could go to. It's this on the outside, you think you're going to walk into something incredible, and you walk in, it's just this bare, empty space. It's really strange.

SPEAKER_00: 51:12

I don't know the building to know when that happened or if it was always that way, and so um so all right, so uh recus and sellers, Rob Recucin Cellars, and then I want to talk about the Recus and Catholics.

SPEAKER_02: 51:25

Such a great uh great transition there.

SPEAKER_03: 51:27

Well, Ryan didn't talk for like three seconds, so I figured I'd meant to show it. Ryan knows I love it.

SPEAKER_01: 51:34

Man, it's sorry.

SPEAKER_03: 51:40

Uh Regus and sellers, you could use code based at checkout for 10% off in honor of Christ the king. I think we could get rid of the yeah, I need to change the banner, but so uh use code based at checkout for 10% off. Uh Regison Cellars is uh a winery out in Washington. They're a beautiful Catholic family that has sponsored our show for quite some time now. We love them. If you guys can show them some support, they also have fruit, they can they can deliver wine to most states.

SPEAKER_02: 52:12

And I never can't, but I'm not sure what you're doing.

SPEAKER_03: 52:14

Yeah, there's a few that can't, but um, I never knew that recusant sellers was taken from recusant Catholics dealing with this time period. So we wanted to make sure we absolutely featured recusant sellers during this show. But where does the name recusent Catholic come from?

SPEAKER_00: 52:29

From the Latin word recusare, which means to refuse. So they refuse the act of uniformity, and I'll lay that out, what that is. So Elizabeth comes to the throne. Actually, this very day in 1558, a messenger came to uh Hatfield House, where Elizabeth was in residence, and it told her that that Mary was dead. And then she says, Um, you know, the the Lord has done it is marvelous in our sight. She quotes that from the Psalms. And then she goes on to uh the coronation. The country is still Catholic, the episcope is still there. Cardinal Poole dies, you know, shortly thereafter, who would have been a significant obstacle for her reimposition of Protestantism. But she she makes it quick quickly known what the way things are gonna go with at Christmas, um, the Christmas Mass, she sends an instruction to the Bishop of uh London that he is not to elevate the host. So he tears it up and continues doing what he's gonna do. So when Elizabeth sees that, then she walks out of the chapel royale during the Gloria and Chelsea's and retires uh to her own chapel where she says the litanies, the Protestant litanies, among which are uh Libranos uh uh papatu and the Christi, Libra uh free us from the papacy, the antichrist. Wow, and so that uh is it was pretty much known which way it was gonna go, but it was still a an impossible thing to some observers because it has to go through the lords. Now um I could go through about a lot of Catholic Lords, actually. They you know the patriotism button, yeah, got to support the monarch. So people kind of fall in line. So one of the first things they do in 1559 at the first parliament is there, there's the renewal of the act of supremacy barely passes through, but it does. So it renews the act of royal supremacy. With one change though, Elizabeth does one thing. Instead of being the supreme head in her own person of the church, she calls herself the supreme governor of the church of England. Uh, it re they they reimpose the Book of Common Prayer of 1551, you know, uphold it, and then they establish fines and penalties for not attending the uh the services. This parliament also puts in the death penalty for Catholic priests uh uh operating you know in the country who refused to say the Protestant service long before the Spanish Armada, because some historians used to say, well, that was just a reaction to Regnans and Axelseys and the Spanish Armada. No, right off the bat. And now with the testament to the strength of Mary's church, what what Cardinal Poole and Gardner and Tunstall and Bonner and all these other and many other clergy had done in restoring the Catholic faith, when Elizabeth reimposes Protestantism, only one bishop goes along with it. The entire hierarchy refuses to accept Protestantism, you know, whereas it's the exact opposite of 1535, where St. John Fisher is the only bishop that will not go along with Henry, everyone else goes along with it. Every bishop stays loyal to the true faith.

SPEAKER_03: 55:38

So what's really interesting about all of this is that you see how important it is to capture someone's mind from when they're young. Yes, because it's the people who are teaching Elizabeth when she's a child, and Elizabeth is like wicked smart, she's smarter than her brother Edward, and she's yes, and but it's the people around her who are tea are teaching her these things and putting these ideas in her head.

SPEAKER_00: 56:01

Also, Henry VIII's last wife, Catherine Parr. And so just a quick thing with Henry VIII's wives, obviously, Catherine of Aragon dies um after Henry's mistreatment, but but ostensibly of natural causes. There's some people in the 16th century who think she was poisoned. Some of the charges against Anne Boleyn, actually, are that she poisoned the late uh Princess Dowager, i.e., Catherine, um, and which is actually not impossible, but uh Henry probably wouldn't have done that. But Anne is then, you know, executed on trumped-up charges uh that she absolutely wasn't guilty of. And she's beheaded. Jane Seymour dies uh from complications after giving birth to Edward. She gets an infection and they don't have the means to treat that then. So she dies a few weeks after he's born. Um then there's there's uh Anne of Cleves, that ends up being a big disaster. Henry doesn't like her, he just takes a dislike to her so strong that he never even consummates the marriage. So it's uh annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Then he's married to Catherine Howard, roughly at the same time. But as it turns out, she's a woman with a past, and she really did commit all kinds of adultery. There's a man named Thomas Culpepper that she was keeping up with, um, even while she was married to Henry. So she's executed for treason because a king can have as many mistresses as he'd like, but a queen, well, that's through whom the issue comes, right? Right. If you can't be sure of the issue, you could have some war, so it's treason for a queen to commit adultery. King, well, yeah, and Henry had quite a few mistresses. So um then you get to Catherine Parr, she survives, she survives Henry. She is very much of Protestant opinion, and so when she's Elizabeth chooses to stay with her after Henry's death, and you know, and and of course, there there's a definitely link with with uh the Protestantism between the two.

SPEAKER_01: 57:49

So anyway, so when Elizabeth and of course she's a Boleyn, right? I mean, I and I think that it bears, you know, you know, you would imagine like Mary is is like Mary is loyal to her mother, you know, you would you would see that Elizabeth would be loyal to the memory of her mother. Yes, no, or she actually isn't.

SPEAKER_00: 58:06

Believe it or not, it's one of those because Elizabeth the the the the trauma of her youth growing up knowing that her mother was executed right by the king, there is a there's a pressure to never incur the king's displeasure, so to never mention her mother. Uh Elizabeth shows no uh mention in private notes, letters, any extract that's ever been written about recollection about her mother, and and and any indication that her mother's on her mind very much. Now, when during Wyatt's rebellion, Elizabeth was implicated. Mary actually tries very hard to play this kind of psychological pressure by putting her in rooms that Anne Boleyn was in before she was executed to get her to confess because they need her to confess to complicity in Wyatt's rebellion. Otherwise, there's no grounds in which they to kill her, and without any issue, uh she can't kill the heir to the throne. Yeah, and and Mary and Elizabeth actually they do get very close during um during the when Jane Seymour becomes queen and uh gives Henry his son. They are very close at that time, and and Mary starts to take a liking to Elizabeth, and they they feel like both having been you know in it together, uh suffering through their father, and so and they both are very close for a long time. But after Henry's death, you know, Mary's an older woman, she's she's in her late 20s, she's now able to be free.

SPEAKER_03: 59:35

Yeah, these old broads in their late 20s, unbelievable. Then they start to grow apart, yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_00: 59:40

Yeah, then they start to grow apart, and you know, Catherine Parr wrote Protestant opinions. Well, she she departs from Catherine Parr's household because of a certain incident that that uh almost ruined Elizabeth's reputation. So Catherine Parr had married her old flame Thomas Seymour, who's the younger brother of the Duke of Somerset, who's the Lord Protector. For Edward in the Regency Council. And Seymour, you know, certainly, you know, it seemed to have liked Catherine Parr at one point, but he's got his designs fixed on Elizabeth. And um, you remember him in the Tom Holland episode recently. He called him Mr. Tickle. Yeah. He was a weird guy.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:18

Because she was young, she was like 14.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:20

He was speaking in her own while she was there. He works the magic and she's smitten by it and she enjoys the attention. So, but but she's also disciplined enough to keep from certain things. And so, and that's how she's able to keep her head through that situation and keep herself intact. So when she's interrogated about the whole thing, she's able to truly say, No, I never had you know any my I didn't know this, and I I saw he had certain advances, and I said, This must wait for the council and and and whatnot. And so she was able to exculpate herself very well from it, and because she was self-disciplined and was able to keep her head in a very dangerous situation, she was able to keep her reputation largely intact.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:00

Is this true that because she was the daughter of adultery, she couldn't be a queen as a Catholic?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:06

Um that's not necessarily the case. Uh, the strict laws of primogeniture, if your kingdom is strictly follows those, a bastard should not reign. And but in England, there well, actually, in general law, Norman law and other things, you can legitimate a bastard and they can legitimately hold the throne, because parliament also makes the law. And like William uh Julien de Botha, he is William the Conqueror, he was a bastard when he comes to rule in England, and he his rel his rule is acknowledged. Um, Pope acknowledges him as king in England and whatnot. So there's no like direct barrier to that if the laws of the realm allow it, versus if they don't. So Mary is a bastard when she reigns, because I had Henry the eighth's will up earlier. Henry never repudiated the bastardy for either Mary or Elizabeth. So she comes to the real the throne because she's a tutor and she has wide popular support. She is Henry VIII's daughter, and so the now she does get her bastardy undone. Parliament officially uh declares the marriage between Henry and Catherine was valid, and she was a legitimate child, and actually that still stands in English law, it was never undone. And Elizabeth, by contrast, does not try to undo the bastardy. Why? Well, because Mary was completely, you know, unsuspect in any way. Um, you know, Elizabeth can become queen only because Mary did it first, and Mary did it damn well, right? She, you know, she she has to come into a situation that is, you know, where men rule this particular style of government. Uh, it is a king, that's why the the Spanish marriage runs into problems with the English populace, even though, like I was saying earlier, it makes absolute political sense. But one, you have the natural English xenophobia, but that is comes into play because it's a queen. By natural order, the the man is the lord of the wife, and now we're gonna have a king who should be the lord of the wife, but right, but she's our queen, he's not our king. But we're gonna have a Spaniard as king. There's a real and true sense in which Philip is king, by the way. The Privy Council does report to him, but he you know, he doesn't have direct authority in England as king, he's a king consort. It's like the first um path for that. It's actually the model that Victoria uses with Albert, by the way.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:32

Uh for a king's it's it's it's uh what what a weird situation to be in, to be married to a queen when you're supposed to be the head of the household.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:43

Essentially, you're a royal stud. And Philip does not like this at all. So Philip uh set up a monument to all of his wives uh in in 1596, and absent from those wives was Mary I. She's not no monument commemorating her, just gives you indication how much he he really disliked his time. He played his part to the absolute perfection. Mary was smitten by him, he was less so, and um, and of course, it's one of those queer, weird marriages where Charles V, his father, uh Philip's father, is Mary's cousin, right? Catherine, you know, Veragon's uh nephew. So it's so close. But so Elizabeth, she comes to the throne, Mary showed it could be done. Mary was the trailblazer, she got the economy on a sure footing, and Elizabeth then is able to take credit for every last thing that Mary did it ultimately. And so she comes in. So first you have the Oath of Supremacy 1559, and I'll read this out so you get the sense of what's what's going on. So I name do utterly testify and declare in my conscience that the Queen's Highness is the only supreme governor of this realm, and of all other of her highness's dominions and countries, as well as in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal, in that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, preeminence, or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm. And therefore I do utterly renounce and forsake all foreign jurisdictions and powers, PBC, superiorities and authorities, and do promise that from henceforth I shall bear faith and true allegiance to the Queen's Highness, her heirs and lawful successors, and to my power shall assist and defend all jurisdictions, preeminences, privileges, and authorities granted or belonging to the Queen's Highness, her heirs or successors, or united or annexed to the imperial crown of the realm. So help me, God, and by the contents of this book, you know, the Bible, the English Bible that you're supposed to be swearing on, right? So anyone who would not swear this act, anyone who would not attend the Anglican service was called a recusant, like I said from recusare, which is to refuse. Um, and then the the uh there is a fine of five pounds, it was placed. Well, the Religion Act of 1580 increased that to 20 pounds for not attending the Anglican service. If you are an average laborer in England, you could hope to obtain between three and seven pounds a year for your wow, so they really enforce this upon the everyday English. Yes, and then because of resistance, and again the Jesuits coming in the country, we'll get to that. Um, in 1584, again, four years before the Spanish Armada, the Act Jesuits, etc., is passed through Parliament. So it commands all Roman Catholic priests to leave the country in 40 days, or they would be punished for high treason, unless within the 40 days they swore an oath to obey the queen. Those who harbored them, priests, and all those who knew of their presence and failed to inform the authorities would be fined and imprisoned. And you would have pay for your imprisonment, by the way. Anyone else who became a Jesuit overseas had to return to England within six months, and within two days of arriving, swear to submit to the queen and also take the oath required by the act of supremacy, the oath I just read out to you. Failure to do so was high treason. Any person who did take the oath was forbidden from coming within ten miles of the queen for ten years unless they had a personal written permission. And again, failure to observe this uh requirement was treason. So that now becomes uh, you know, that's the law of the land. So some people get around this. So, like if Elizabeth liked you personally, so Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, uh famous composers, the greatest, probably with the exception of Henry Purcell, the greatest natural-born English composers, right? So, you know, there was William Byrd, we absolutely know was Catholic because Elizabeth paid his recusancy fine. She liked him personally, so he was able to get around it. So Byrd composed a whole bunch of things. He composed motets. The motets were really mass settings, and he even published or gave wrote out a secret code for Catholics to use so they could use those mass settings um and have like the indication of how this is meant to be used, like the mass of three voices, mass of four voices, mass of five voices, and bird originally those were published as individual motets, and you know, he gets a key for Catholics to use to use that music and put it all back together.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:31

So so does is there um an underground Catholicism that endures yes throughout this whole period?

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:42

Absolutely. Um, in the beginning, so so Mary had used the church to reduce Protestant revolutionaries. Elizabeth takes note of how even Catholics kind of were kind of tired of it and the bishops didn't even want to enforce it anymore. I mean, it was working, but she wanted something that was a little more uh on color, so she went for you know, you can, I don't have a window into men's souls, you can do what you want in private as long as you conform to the Anglican service in public. So there are Catholics who won't do this, there are bishops and priests working in secret, especially in the northern part of the country. Uh, Stratford upon upon Avon, where Shakespeare is from, the town council where his father was a counselor. Um, they get the notice from Elizabeth, they are to destroy all images. And so they they're they're not going to do it. Tunor monarchs don't live very long. Who knows when there's going to be a change in government? So they put a layer of whitewash over the walls in in Stratford upon Avon. And so it was covered, and it was discovered by accident. Somebody was cleaning something and scraped and noticed there was like some very intricate things underneath the whitewash. And so they they eventually scraped it away and have revealed this whole uh edifice of medieval English piety in the in the town council, there, right? And so people hide the the various elements of the old religion because they figure tutors don't live long, she'll die. The next heir is Mary Queen of Scots, and that that's a subject I don't think we want to broach tonight because of too many things. Um, and then it'll be Catholic again, so we don't have to worry about it. So they then no nobody knows in 1559, 1560, 1562 that Elizabeth is gonna live for 45 years, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:27

And and in this is, and I think you know where I come into it, or where my interests come into it, of course, are with um Guy Fox and um you know the the the power the the the plot out our plot we were actually gonna do this show November 5th and do the and you know remember remember the 5th of November, but we we had something else planned that night.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:47

So we I have something unorthodox to say about that.

unknown: 1:10:51

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:51

But what were you saying, Kate?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:53

No, no, no, go ahead. I just I I don't know what I I don't know if it's gonna be maybe I'll agree with that. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:59

Well, you know, essentially that Guy Fox is more or less the sheep dip past. Well, yeah. I mean he's he's the he's the yeah there's the debate, there's a thing that almost nobody believes, which is the official government story for the gunpowder plot, right? Which is that this thing was going on, and uh Lord Monteagle wrote the last minute, and then then uh James interpreted it by Divine Light. Nobody believes that anymore. So there's the two views. One is that the English government becomes aware of this plot that originates with Catholics to blow up parliament and then intercepts it and then lets it widen to get, you know, get as many people who would act this way, capture them, you know, the intel spy service being what it is. The other view, and uh that the state is created it, that that Robert Cecil, the son of William Cecil, who very much makes Elizabeth's policy happen, he's a brilliant actor. Uh, I haven't talked about him yet at all, probably should. But Robert Cecil um is great for creating learns from Walsingham all the tools of statecraft and spy craft, and he creates plots and and squashes them. Shakespeare even has a reference to that. Yeah, I know that's yeah, yeah. And so the theory agree with you. Yeah, yes. This theory that Father Francis Edward uh is a Jesuit propounds from the state archives. I mean, you go through his book, his book's a little hard to read because it's bouncing around at different things, but it when you track down what is the source, it's always an archival source, it's always a contemporary source, so it's not mere conspiracy theory postulated hundreds of years later. And this is also what people thought at the time, actually, in in Rome and in other places, that the English state had created a conspiracy, it was just too good, and it lines up with all the interest of the English state at that time, namely James comes in after a union, the union, right. James makes peace with France and with Spain. Now gunpowder is uh no longer a needed commodity, the gunpowder futures drop, and people like Cecil lose out tons of money on the gunpowder trade. Uh, on top of that, Englishmen can now legally join the English regiment in Flanders with an English regiment on the Spanish military. So there is now a core of Englishmen that is now widening because you may join it to fight against the Protestant Dutch. And Cecil's looking at this with horror. There was already the English regiment was already a concern under Elizabeth, but now it's a bigger concern because you can legally join it now that uh James has made peace with Spain, and because they're fighting in the 80 Years' War against the Dutch, the Protestant Dutch, right? And so Catholics joining this their fellow English Catholics in the Spanish army. You've got a trained group of Catholic Englishmen, trained hardened soldiers with foreign backing, possibly that could overturn the king. And again, I mentioned earlier a sphere the second has a better claim to the throne than uh even the tutors do. Same thing's true of the Spanish infanta at that time. So Catholics have their alternative candidate, you know.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:56

And once uh how many years, how many years like what year what year is the gunpowder plot? 1605. Five, five, yeah, yeah. Oh, so so it's a good 70 years after Henry VIII.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:09

Remember, Elizabeth's reign is so long, right? Yeah, that that you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:14

So 1558 to 1603, Elizabeth's reign. So she reigns a very long time, you know, much longer than than anyone thought she would. The final plot of her reign is the uh the Essex plot, right? And uh so the the Earl of Essex, you know, the we and we were talking earlier about golden age stuff. Um, the Elizabethan period is a golden age from about 1560 or so to about 1585. If you are in a certain class, a certain middle class of aristocracy, uh, or even the higher classes, um, or you're in the position to benefit very widely from increased trade and other, or you are like Francis Drake, you're a pirate that now has a legalized letter of mark to go after Spanish shipping. You uh you make bank. You this is a golden age for you. It's a golden age if you're in the right place. Shakespeare, obviously, um, you know, theater, culture, all these things, you know, that this is Shakespeare requisite. Um, it's unknown. There's a there's a good evidence for Shakespeare having been Catholic. There is nothing that I've ever seen in the digitally of it, because I've never been in the archives in England, like I have the Vatican or the Bibliothèque National in Paris. So I can't say from physically being there, but the digital archives for the British Library and the Bodleian, Oxford, I've never seen a reference to Shakespeare or anyone purporting to be Will Shakespeare paying a recidency fine.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:42

And then somebody's asking if um his father did his father did. Bell Lock in his characters of the Reformation suggests that Elizabeth suffered from some horrible affliction that rendered her unable to have children, but he doesn't specify does Ryan or Kale know what that is, what it was.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:59

I don't think that's true. Um, because well, one, of course, uh you know, she wasn't married. Now, whether she actually did have sexual dalliance with someone, it's possible, but unknown. I would say it's an improbable because I have two things to ask you on that, Ryan.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:15

I mean, for me, one of the enduring, you know, if you know you can look at Elizabeth's refusal to take a husband and to produce an heir um a couple of different ways, right? On the one hand, man, you know, if you're English, like it would have been so great, right, if Elizabeth had had an heir, but you could also look at that as a really canny move on her part. That what that does in essence is that it it provides that extension of her reign. You know, she winds up living for a really long time. That gives her an ample amount of time to erect the police state necessary, and really one of the probably the world's first true police states in place in order to um solidify, you know, uh the her reformation because she had, you know, there are manies, but she had one of them. Um, but I do I you know, I I do wonder, you know, it's a little bit of a mystery to me why she refused, you know. Again, it's easy for us to kind of look back and say, oh, well, it was actually a good idea for her not to do this, but right.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:25

You think she was terrified to get pregnant after seeing two of uh the queens die after childbirth?

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:31

No, I don't think so. Uh it was more of a matter of statecraft. One, yeah, her heart was to Robert Dudley, and they her father, William Dudley, was executed um uh under Mary, and they were both in the tower as part of Wyatt's Rebellion, you know, suspected, both with a threat of death hanging over them. They became very, very close and remained very close. And so when she became queen, she made Robert Dudley the groom of the school, the stool, which put him in in con he could physically touch the queen. Master of the horse, right? Right, they were very close. And William Cecil despaired of this because Dudley was a rake and an adventurer, but he had the masculine charms, and Elizabeth was definitely smitten by him. Yeah, and but Elizabeth also, because she had learned she was very politically savvy and she was definitely self-governed and disciplined, just like Mary was, yeah, in a way that Mary, Queen of Scots, was not, and we'll get to her in a second because this also solidifies Elizabeth's opinion on this. So she dangles out marriage, and but the problem like marriage uh to be politically expedient means marriage with a Catholic power, and she doesn't really want to do that. And one Philip woos her right away, oh, obviously you're not sad about my sister because you're you already want to marry me right away. Uh, in and so for Philip, it's expediency to keep the Hobbsburg Tudor alliance because that's going to be useful for him against France, uh, which is England's traditional enemy. You know, it would be in Elizabeth's interest, but she doesn't want it. Then there's um, you know, you know, so many different you know, figures, crown heads, and you're just like, no, no. Um, and then you know, there's there's Dudley, and then she absolutely is smitten and in love with Dudley. And a lot of people this divides the privy council. This is contentious, there's rumors. Uh the Virgin Queen, but not so virgin in the court, you know. Uh, the contemporary witness very much attests to that. So, what happens is all of a sudden, now Dudley is married, he hates his wife. There is a you know, thought that that he's waiting for something to happen to her. And of course, um, things happen, right? He dies, things happen, falls down the stairs and has a broken neck. I mean, so then the suspicion automatically falls on Dudley. My opinion, I can't vindicate this as true. The the documentation doesn't exist to vindicate this as true. My opinion is that Cecil arranged in some way for Dudley's wife to be killed. That way, uh, you know, the suspicion would fall on Dudley and that would put an end to Elizabeth's Dalliance with Robert Dudley, and then the business of statecraft could go on. Because I mean, he's the he has the couy bono. Cecil benefits, yeah, and the state English state ultimately benefits, and so it's it's logical that if there was a conspiracy to murder Dudley's wife, it was Cecil that did it. So, what happens with her and Dudley after his wife dies? So he's he has to depart from court. There's a even though the coroner's jury rules it an accident, but the gossip is going like a hundred miles a second. So he is yeah, gossip go brrr. And so Dudley has to depart from court. He does so for about two, three years. You know, Elizabeth and he do see each other. It's not until Elizabeth comes down with smallpox and nearly dies in 1661 that she's able to, when she recovers, she tells tells Cecil that that she needs to make arrangements to appoint a Lord High Protector in case she should die, since she has no issue. And Cecil absolutely draws everything up. Then Elizabeth does her little coup where she turns around and she names Robert Dudley the Lord High Protector if she should die. So Dudley's back in court, you know, but if it's not the same, it can't be the same. They don't have the same proximity, and and they drift, and eventually Dudley leaves court and gets married to someone else. And so it uh that's kind of where it goes. There is another occasion where Elizabeth um uh entertains this uh marriage proposal from the uh the Duke of Anjou, and they've been briefly betrothed when she was much younger, but now you know he's an adventurer, he uh is too young in the French royal family to ever have any hopes of gaining the throne. Of course, he he couldn't foresee how the uh French wars of religion would go that eventually Henri III would die with no error. So uh, but anyway, he he woos Elizabeth very strongly, and and Elizabeth needs uh you know aid in fighting the war in the Netherlands against the Spanish because Elizabeth belongs to the same king's club that Philip does. She can't directly uh aid the rebels in the in the Holland against the Spanish, but she can do so indirectly and discreetly, so it's all you got plausible deniability, as it were, and so she needs more support for this, and so that's why she entertains the Duke of Anjou, and she's actually smitten by him. But again, she always comes back to what happened to Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Queen of Scots, brilliant woman, but she's not as self-governed as either Mary or Elizabeth were, and so she she um is she's brought to France during when Henry VIII uh does the rough wooing as it's called. You know, he wants to put Scotland firmly in his control, and so get want to obtain the heir to the throne and marry her off to some some noble in England. Well, that doesn't work out. She gets to France, she's married to the Dauphin Francois II, he dies, and now she's the Queen Dowager of France. So she returns to Scotland and then takes up role in Scotland. She's very determined, she's very much in control, and but she's got her eyes set at another price because she knows she has a better claim to the throne than Elizabeth, coming from Mary Tudor, Henry's sister. And no, no, no, not Mary Tudor, um, Margaret Tudor, sorry. And so she has this better claim to the throne again than the Tudors do, and then Elizabeth does, because Elizabeth becomes descending for her bastardy and everything, has been undone. Here's a legitimate error coming from Henry and Henry the Seventh. It's like, and then so what she does is she marries Lord Darnley, who also is descended from Henry the Seventh, and now their son is going to have a very strong claim to the throne. All seems to be going swimmingly for Mary, except Darnley turns out to be the worst possible dodgy character you can imagine. He's a drunk, he's a psychopath, he is um horrible. Um, and I I would recommend actually going to uh you know the rest is history for the whole bit on Mary Queen of Scots that they do because they they cover in so much detail. I'm not going to even broach it here. She's accused of the murder of her husband. I I actually legitimately think that like uh Jean Guy and uh Tom Holland are correct that she had nothing to do with that. But either way, then uh there's a weird sequence of events. There's revolt against her, the Earl of Bothwell, who had been one of her supporters, John Hepburn, he abducts her to her castle, rapes her, and then they're married in like you know, a month later. It's like, what the hell's going on? And and then it goes from bad to worse for Mary, and then more war against her, and she gets imprisoned. So, and her son's taken away from her. And so Elizabeth sees all these things going on. Now, some of these machinations Cecil is causing, but just the same, Elizabeth's like it just confirms her earlier decision not to marry. So Elizabeth was actually and Mary uh Tudor both were better actors than Mary Queen of Scots. They they understood what was necessary in their kingdom. So, because Mary Queen of Scots has a tolerance policy with Protestantism in Scotland. She she tries to play a bigger game than she's capable of managing, and and both Mary the Tudor and Elizabeth are far better self-governed. And the result being, you know, you know, like Mary's policy would have worked except for the succession, the children that didn't come. And then Elizabeth, she's able to hold on long enough to to you know get her protest her policy so that she comes to the throne where England is 80 to 90 percent Catholic, and at her death, it's about 80 percent Protestant. And repression was the successful policy. Tolerance only bred more rebellion in Scotland and and led to the you know establishment of the Protestant you know minority becoming the Protestant elite and majority under under Mary Queen of Scots. And she wasn't a fervent Catholic until she comes to England, because then she knows that's a good political tool for Catholics disaffected by Elizabeth. So her showing up on English soil after she escaped Scotland brings about immediate rebellion in England with a northern rising, and then there's so many different plots that happen afterwards.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:12

When is it that um like that Catholicism is legal, legalized in England? Like, how long is this period? How long is it like hundreds of years later, or is it like yeah?

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:26

Um, so what happens in historically, I mean you have the the great the last throws of the counterrephrase. You have uh Edmund Campion's great mission, and he comes, and a lot of Englishmen, especially in the middle gentry area, you know, they they were openly kind of conforming and secretly having their masses, and Edmund Campion comes, you can't do this, you can't have any association with the Anglican sacrament. Pope Paul IV has put out a bull. Um, the Anglican sacrament is not Catholic, you can't take it, you can't have anything to do with this Communicatio and Socrates. So people listen and it hardens and stiffens the Catholic underground resistance. Um, he's martyred. Robert Persons, who's who's with him, he ends up escaping the country and carrying out his political activism afterwards. But Catholics are still strongly, you know, uh about they get even um funding, you know, from abroad to what year are we talking about?

SPEAKER_03: 1:27:20

When when does Edward what when is Edward Campion?

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:24

Edmund 1560s. Edmund 15s. Um he has this great work that he leaves in the pew, the ten reasons, the decambration. Um he leaves them in the pews of Oxford University in Latin. Protestants reject the parts of scripture that don't support their doctrine. The number two, Protestants distort the parts of scripture to support their doctrine. Protestants have a weak notion of the church. Point number four, Protestants should accept Catholic teaching on the Mass, communion of the Saints and the authority of the Pope. The fifth point, he argues, the fathers of the church don't support Protestant views of the church. The Eucharist, the communion of the saints, the authority of the Pope, etc., they support Catholic views. Number six, Protestants ignore the authority of the fathers of the church, even the apostolic fathers, since they can't find the support for their doctrine in their lives and works. Number seven, um, he basically says to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant. I mean, the second point of the Deccan Rations is that church history does not support Protestant doctrine or the on the sacraments or the priesthood. Um, you know, bad Protestant model motto like good works are immortal sins. You know, he argues all the worst things from Luther and others, you know, nine weakness of Protestant arguments, um, like you know, it being against clerical celibacy because marriage is good, right? He just shows the sophisms in there. And his tenth, his final argument, Catholicism is the true Christian religion, the church founded by Jesus Christ on St. Peter and the Apostles. And for 1500 years, everyone agreed this is true until Henry. So what it what are you gonna which side are you gonna support? You know, and this is also the tenor of his preaching to people who had been on the fence. So, you know, he is eventually interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 1:29:08

My my priest on Sunday read in his homily, just read I forgot whose whose writing it was, but it was about the English Reformation, and he kind of just reads this this whole thing about how you know um how how it was just this whole thing about the English Reformation. It was really interesting because I was watching, I'm like, oh we're talking about this on Tuesdays. This is so interesting, and then Tom Holland. Tom Holland puts out his thing. I'm like, what is going on? Why why is everybody talking about the English Reformation right now?

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:44

I mean, talk about it. So um the um Edmund can't be in his horse martyred, but this really you know it brings a lot of people off fence sitting into being fervent Catholics, and so other Jesuit missionars come. You know, Englishmen leave uh England and become Jesuits, or they leave and become ordained abroad. And the uh once you get to the then of course Mary Queen of Scots eventually is executed because the spy service is able to implicate her in several plots. And it's one of those things.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:18

Tom was at Mass Sunday. He's it was Cardinal Arthur. Uh but yeah, he read it read one of his sermons just talking about these.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:26

You mean Cardinal Allen? Oh, maybe, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't know. Well, be that as it may. Um, Mary Queen of Scots is implicated in the casket letters, and it's an insoluble problem historically, whether she was actually a part of it or not. Um, it may have been. And Elizabeth still won't consent to her execution. So when she falls asleep, Cecil comes and forges her name and sends out the execution order. And so when Elizabeth wakes up, Mary Queen of Scots is already executed because he knew she would delay and try not to commit herself to doing it. So as a more or less as a response, uh, Pius V is induced to issue regnans and excelsis, and it's a papal bull, which of course declares Elizabeth deposed and as a heretic, and then any you know, her subject releases her subjects from obedience again, you know, to her. And Elizabeth responds with heavier persecution uh of Catholics in the state. And it's so bad that future popes, Pope Paul V is asked whether he should proceed against uh King James. And Pope Paul V says, I prefer to follow the example of Clement VIII rather than that of Pius V. And Pius V himself, uh, once he was it was represented to him how how uh how much Catholics suffered as a result of the bull, he himself was sorry that he issued it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:39

You know, well that's I actually I actually think that this I think this affected the way that the church handled Hitler. I was just about to say that, yeah. Like that I really do, I do think it, I think that's certainly and certainly the Soviet Union and and look, and certainly you know, uh I have my my bone to pick, of course, but I think this is well part of the thinking with China as well.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:01

Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, so the idea that you know the the Pope Pius XII should have come down heavy and said all these things, and it's like if he would have done that, it would have just led to the person.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:14

You know, it's uh it's a hard thing, and and he he struggled with that. Pius XII struggled with that, so he tried his best to do things secretly and diplomatically, you know, with the cover of good behavior, but privately to get you know people into Russia that that he could to do pastoral missions there. Many of them were apprehended and rounded up.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:35

So, yeah, it's it's it's a tricky spot for a pope to be in when you know if you come out strongly on a position, it's just going to lead to the death of your of your children. Like, how do you how do you do that? You know, uh it's a it's not such a simple uh you know, the pope should be a good idea.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:56

Smash it. There there is a politicking that's involved, and there is the the the interest of the faith in that country. So the um and that leads to a lot of different things. So what happens ultimately is you get James, obviously, there's a gunpowder plot in its legacy, irrespective of whether it was a state-created plot that drove drew people in, and Guy Fox is Apache, thinking that he's he's recruiting for the English regiment, or if he was a committed plotter looking to blow up parliament, irrespective of whichever way that goes. The the aftermath. Uh, Catholicism, this is what it gets you. It's trees it, it's destruction, it fuels the anti-cat, it cements the English, the anti-Catholic character of uh English destiny, really. And and that goes on. And so you have Catholics in England who are doing their best under the situation. The Stuarts give a little opening, especially under Charles I, because Charles I is married to French princess Henriette Marie. And she, you know, has like there's there's treaty obligations. She has she's able to maintain an embassy chapel, she's able to have priests and not not just in the chapel, but even in in the royal bedchamber, even you know, at her meals. And of course, monarchs have very little privacy. Um, you actually can sit there and watch the monarch eat. It's like a thing, which I've still like grappled to like I know this has happened. I've read the primary source documents on this is happening in the archives of various places. I can't grapple my head around why any anyone allows, okay, we're gonna let all these people gawk at us as we eat. But it was the standard thing for monarchy that uh as a royal personage, almost everything you do except sex, pretty much, is public. And even the aftermath of that is public whether the queen's pregnant or not, you know. There's very few truly private places, even your privy. You got the groom of the stool to help you, right? Um, and he doesn't actually wipe your rear end, like like some people think. But the groom of the stool does you know maintain all the things necessary for the king to attend to his chamber pot. So uh there's very few things that monarchs do that are private. So Henriette Marie gets all these different things, she has oratorian chaplains and um from the order of St. Philip Neary and Franciscan chaplains and whatnot. Um, because that's like the one thing English say, no Jesuits. You can have everything else, no Jesuits. Aristocracy are coming with Henriette Marie to mass, and they're seeing this, wow, this is amazing. And people start converting. Uh, the Duke of Buckingham, uh George Villier, who is um Charles I's particular favorite, his mother and sister uh convert to the Catholic faith. And so Charles is alarmed by this because even though he's very high church, he's still very Protestant. And uh Archbishop Loud, uh, who was actually offered a cardinal's hat if he'd convert, he's determinedly Protestant. There's actually a debate that was arranged to try to dissuade members of the royal family people from converting Catholic between Loud and a Jesuit that they had in prison. And uh the whole debate basically turns on Bellerman. And Loud here is this this is uh 16 uh eight uh twenty-two, twenty-three, somewhere around there. And loud basically you know says that after to answer the point from this Jesuit, he says, Well, you know, if this were true, I should become a papist without further ado, but I would never do that, and I hope that you know, unless I don't, may God for you know for forbid that that should ever happen. He was absolutely determinedly a Protestant, but he was concerned with conversions in the aristocracy to Catholicism. So they wanted to show Charles I and Loud that Protestantism could have the beauty of holiness that Catholic the Catholic Catholicism seems to have. In other words, don't go for the smells and bells. We got it right here, too. So you have this curious thing in the 1620s and 30s the re-erection of the altars and the rude screens in English churches, and loud gives this direction, and Charles backs it with royal authority, and of course, it's being forced in in communities that are very low church Protestants. They've got to see altars go up, they've got to see the root go back up again. So the rude screen, if you're familiar with an iconostasis in a Byzantine church, yeah, it's the same thing. The root is the Western equivalent, and which the Latin word rudis, which in and of itself means wood or branch, and will refer to the crucifix, actually, made of wood with an image of our Lord flanked by our lady in Saint John.

SPEAKER_03: 1:37:20

And that that that's where the high church Anglican stuff starts coming back in, more or less, more or less.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:26

Well, it creates a reaction, though. Right. The reaction, of course, is the is the revolution uh against against Charles, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:34

And why do we call the Anglican church in this country the Episcopal Church? It's actually because of these events, because the same thing happens in Scotland. So Charles I, then you know, he was the king of both Scotland and England, Scotland's a Presbyterian country. James had forced bishops on the Scottish Church, they didn't like it, but they accepted it. Charles is a little less savvy, so he comes in, he wants to impose the book of common prayer in Scotland, and the Scots do not like the Book of Common Prayer, they call it the filthy popish book. They call the Book of Common Prayer the filthy popish book, right? It tells you how far out radical they are, so they revolt and they call the Anglican side episcopalians for the support of bishops because hardcore Calvinism says that bishops are anathema to the gospel, that what you what it is is that aristocracy is the best system of government, according to Calvin, and therefore presbyters councils mirror this best system of government, not bishops, not authority. The presbyters' councils are the magisterium that will interpret the word of God for the people and not bishops, uh the Anglican model. So the Anglicans are called episcopalians, and that's the same time a lot of people who support the Presbyterians in Scotland and likewise in England, they are the ones who found you know flock in the American colonies. So their term for the official church is episcopalian, and that's why in this country it's called the Episcopal Church because they have bishops, and we don't accept bishops, much to the chagrin of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans. Yes, exactly. Who furnished soldiers to go fight in the English Civil War against the king?

SPEAKER_03: 1:39:13

So okay, so so that's in the 1600s. When does it when does it actually become where you you're not persecuted for being Catholic in England?

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:25

George the Third attempts to uh legalize Catholicism, and his test case is Quebec.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:32

We have the Seven Years War, and that ends up in the Declaration, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:37

Yes, it does actually. The you know the Quebec Act is named amongst the intolerable acts. What was the Quebec Act? Legalizing Catholicism in Quebec. Uh Quebec was part of the French territory, the English took it during the Seven Years War, what in this country we call the the French and Indian War. And but it was fought all around the world, you know. That's just the face over here. So George III wanted peace in Quebec, and he didn't want to impose English penal laws. So he wanted so he was put through parliament to legalize Catholicism in the territory of Quebec. And that was kind of the test case. And he was looking to legalize it throughout English colonies and then England itself. But then what happens is during the American Revolution, the King of France and the King of Spain stab him in the back. The uh French are looking for uh, you know, their you know, revenge for the Seven Years' War to give the English good pasting. So they support American independence. The Spanish support it and because they want to recover Gibraltar, and because of the siege of Gibraltar, it pulls away English forces that otherwise would have been aiding Cornwallis. So without that, we might not have gotten independence. So there is that. But George III feels personally attacked, so he just sours on Catholic emancipation, doesn't deal with it again. Um, after the Napoleonic Wars, there's a lot of Irishmen in the uh English Navy, a lot of Irishmen in uh the English service, and so anti-Catholicism is a problem. Uh there is riots in uh you know in in Ireland for the the institution of English penal law and in England itself, too. There's a move, and none other than uh uh Wellington comes to tell the George IV you have to grant Catholic emancipation. It has to, you know, Wellington's Irish, but he's Protestant Irish, comes from Protestant aristocracy, but he recognizes the situation in Ireland and in Wales and in other places where there's discontent. You can alleviate that immediately and share up the monarchy by granting Catholic emancipation. And so as a result, um, you know, the George I fourth is in more or less feel wellington is the one who pushes him the other way.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:44

And sorry, Anthony, we're we're talking 18 late 1820, I think 1829, 1830. 1834. Yeah, wow, yeah, and and of course, it's important to point out you know the the the downstream you could not be effectively you could not be English in any official capacity um until technically 1830, but effectively much later. So you have somebody like Cardinal Newman, you know, when when he when he swims the Tiber, he has to leave Oxford. Wow, he has to he can no longer be part of Oxford College, yeah. Um, because he's not English.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:26

And so he wrote the first biography of St. John Fisher, he had to leave Cambridge because once he got done doing the research on John Fisher, he realized Catholicism is true, right? I can't like and he couldn't be at St. John's College Cambridge anymore.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:38

He had to like like anybody like illegal, like in other words, you could not be a illegal entity in the British Empire if you were not Anglican or Episcopalian. Yeah, it's certainly not if you were Catholic, that's just like no go zone.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:52

It was like no go. Recusancy fines still hit people, but it was it was sporadically enforced because the danger of of a political revolution, the last gasp of that, was Bonnie Prince Charlie. And the English Jacobites put their colors to the mast as well when he came down after Preston Pans when he beat the uh the English army at Preston Pans. Then English Jacobites said, Oh, this is serious, okay. And so uh both Catholic and Protestant Jacobites both all signed their colors to the mast for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and it was again duplicity that won the day for them because the English did not have an army that could defeat them, so they used spies. And into there's a guy named Cartwright, an impeccable Jacobite credentials, but he was a spy. And he said, Oh, there's so many armies here in Dover and other places ready to march up, and then Bonnie Prince Charlie kicks him out, but then the Scottish nobles are terrified. Oh no, we're gonna lose. And so they hit beat a hasty retreat, and then he had Colloden. And after Colloden, that's the end. The British built forts all over Scotland, they nailed Scotland to the Union forever, and it's done. So there's that's 17 um 50s. So after that, there's no danger of Catholic rebellion in England. So reconcency fines are only casually enforced. Catholicism is found either amongst the gentry in places where it was safe, or average people who had kept the faith, they didn't quite know exactly what it was all about. They didn't have regular places to go to mass, but they kept it. Uh, Father Philip Hughes, who's probably one of the very best Reformation historians in England, he has a book about this. I'm looking to get it back into print because I did um his book, English and the Counter-Reformation in England. I reprinted that. It's a wonderful book, but it's very dense. So you gotta love history, love details, love endless segues worse than what I've done here tonight. And that's a great book, though. If you're good for that kind of thing, similar thing with his book on Cat basically the Catholic question up leading up until emancipation. And he goes, and again, as always, extremely well sourced, state documents. Um, you know, he's always Father Hughes, always brings the receipts.

SPEAKER_03: 1:45:08

Man, this was uh a jam-packed episode. I thought we might be able to get to locals tonight, but I yeah, I don't know what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 1:45:17

We can still get time, we can still do that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:45:19

Oh, I can't. I I wake up at 4 a.m. for work, so yeah, um, yeah, no, Brian. I know I know you would keep going if uh if I if I allowed it, but all right, so we'll we got a question. We got a couple of questions.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:32

We got a couple. Um so just generally speaking, how many political and religious executions were there by so-called bloody Mary versus uh very different rain time as well is taken to account.

SPEAKER_00: 1:45:47

It's hard to quantify it exactly. So Mary, um it's around you know 300 or so, over 300 Protestants, but two things you got to keep in mind two-thirds of those were Unitarians in East Anglia. And even before Edward the Sixth died, he and Cramer were actually planning to do a similar campaign of burning at the stake of Unitarians, and so most of those people that Edward VI and Cramer are going to burn are the ones that Mary flat out Protestant could be able to do. You'd have Lutheran people of Lutheran opinion that would turn on their Unitarian neighbors to look good before the uh the state, you're right, and so now that's roughly, and again, these are committed Protestants. Some of these are a little bit unjust because you have people whom were might have been born when England was still Catholic, but they came to the age of reason under Henry's church, where you have preaching against papal supremacy four times a year, where Henry's particular schismatic church is preached as a new religion, and that's the religion they grew up in. So you have people now being told to forsake this, and you know, it's a it's a there are some people that go down that probably shouldn't. It's true. There's some other other things. It's not that Mary herself is personally doing there's only one. I mean, Ridley, obviously, and um but but Nicholas Ridley, that is, but Cramer is the one that that she is personally responsible for making sure he goes to the stake. And now Cramer, terrified of the thought of being burnt alive, recants, takes all the gas out of it. Because according to law, a recanted heretic can't be burned. Mary basically says, not good enough, and she she intervenes directly to make sure he will be burned. And that's why I said I had to modify what what uh Dr. Holland says. I love Tom Holland, a brilliant guy, and and he and he's absolutely right in normatively that Mary Queen Mary Tudor did not keep grudges, and you see that in the case of Gardiner. But Kramer, as far as she was concerned, is the author of every unhappiness she had in her life, every bit of suffering she had in her life, and he was going to burn. That was it. And so once Kramer found out he was going to burn anyway, he withdrew his recantation and he gets the propaganda coup. Oh, this is the hand that did it. And there's where that's that's repeated in Fox's Book of Martyrs and learn in perpetuities. It was a huge mistake. But so Elizabeth's numbers are are far more vast in one respect and smaller in others. It depends on what way you're going to view them. So Elizabeth's numbers are I mean, some of her, like for heresy, there's both Catholics and recusant Protestants that are that are executed for heresy under Elizabeth. The the numbers are hard to quantify because the records aren't really well detailed for those types of things. For obvious for obvious reasons. Up in the, you know, up in around the same numbers or more than Mary, in terms of like people who are killed because they're Catholic priests or harboring priests, or again, you have the priest hunters, and then you have to add in other things that don't get caught in the official numbers. Like um uh everyone knows the poet John Dunn, his younger brother was thrown into Fleetwood prison for harboring uh Father Robert Walpole, a Jesuit who was martyred. And then uh his brother was put into Fleetwood prison, and because he was Catholic and he did not have any money or subsistence to it's he ends up uh contracting um uh cholera, if I'm not mistaken, and he dies. Well, that's directly because he was Catholic. He wasn't you know immediately killed by the state because he was Catholic, but he dies as a result of it. And of course, Fleetwood Prison is still there today, except it's a prison of a different sort. Now it's a bunch of office buildings, you know. So but the Marshall, see all these kind of places, a lot of Catholics died in those prisons for the crime of being Catholic because they couldn't pay the recurrency fines, and they died from d disease and malnourishment because they had no means to accept public charity to survive. Because again, when you went to prison, you had to pay for your own imprisonment.

SPEAKER_03: 1:49:59

Uh, what's next, Rob?

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:01

Any inside baseball on the supposed Elizabeth and Francis Drake romance?

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:06

Not a thing. I wouldn't it's one of those fun little uh interludes, uh, but by contemporary sources, um, Drake was someone celebrated as a celebrity, but he had a respectful distance from the queen because he was a pirate, yeah, legitimately. You know, it was it was unseemly for the royal personage to be that close to to Drake. Now, Drake does get you know a certain degree of honor for the Spanish armada and everything, but then he falls out of favor with the court, you know. So the idea of a room at the time that this romance is supposedly take place. Elizabeth is in her 60s. She, you know, this is not a thing that you're gonna do, and uh there's no benefit to either side in it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:47

So do you have an opinion on Robert's The Last King of America, the misunderstood reign of George III?

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:55

I'm not familiar with the book per se. Um, but in terms of the misunderstanding of King George, we suffer from a lot of propaganda, and and of course, um people hate me for this, but I'm kind of more of a Tory as far as the American Revolution goes. Um, it doesn't really matter, it happened, and this is my country, so there it is. But at the same time, George III was trying to change the balance of representation in England. Part of it was neutering the Whigs, but also he just noticed that wait a minute, would you we have a county with like 30 sheep herds and like a hundred MPs, and then you have places with thousands upon thousands of souls, and they've got like two MPs, and the whole of Scotland has one MP. And it's like, well, what does representation actually mean here? So he wanted to. I mean, he's the first of the Georges that actually spoke English. Amazing he's the the you know, because George I've he's mostly Hanover, right? German and that all comes about because of the the act, um, the act of succession, and after the glorious so-called glorious revolution of 1689, where you get James off the throne, the English monarchy temporarily becomes elective, and they declare James is dead, he's not, and he has no heirs, he does, but we're gonna pretend it's otherwise, so that we can take uh William, who is connected to the monarchy, but is does not actually have the right to rule in light of the other errors, and we're gonna make him the William III, uh, and uh his wife, who is James's daughter from his first uh first marriage, Mary Stuart as Queen Mary I, joint monarchs by election. And William, thus William and Mary. Yeah, so then you get William and Mary, and then uh the last of uh James's said the second's Protestant daughters, Anne, rules after them, right? And then then you have the issue because you know John Locke actually writes the act of succession. No one who is Catholic or married to a Catholic may succeed the throne, so that knocks out 49 people out of the line of succession after Anne. And that leads you to Hanover, because in Hanover you have the the Georg, who is the son of Sophie. Sophie's the younger sister of like Prince Rupert of the Rhine and um that family, which are the the grandchildren of King James. So you're you're pretty far removed from the line of succession versus people who have a far better claim, all because of parliamentary law. You can't be Catholic or married to a Catholic. Sophie was a Protestant, she was living in Hanover, and Georg was the young elector of Hanover. So he comes over to England, he doesn't understand English, he doesn't understand what he's supposed to be doing. His wife uh does learn English, and she works with Robert Walpole, who is the he never officially has the title, but he's de facto the first prime minister. So parliament already declared itself supreme in 1689. The William III wanted England to fight his wars against Louis XIV in France. So there's a trade-off of you give up more rights of the monarchy to Parliament, we will give you English blood to spill in the continent, and that's what happens. So that's how the English monarch becomes uh this kind of figurehead, and George III means to reverse that. So Parliament wants some kind of payment for the Seven Years' War in the English defense of the colonies, which ran into the many, many millions of pounds. And so George wants like a token amount. Let's put a tag now. The Stamp Act is the tax they settle on. Tax on paper makes perfect sense in England and the way English affairs work, makes zero sense in New England. Zero. Because everyone is using paper, you have tons of lawyers, tons of business, a ton of merchants, a high literacy rate compared to most of England. Um, it makes zero sense. And so it's it's unpopular. George hears it's unpopular. What does he do? He tells the king's men to get this tax revoked, he gets it revoked. When was the last time we got a tax revoked? I'm under you know, the English monarchy up to that point, tax breaks were permanent and tax increases were temporary. Uh, today, tax increases are permanent and tax breaks are temporary. So there's all kinds of things where it's not what it was built. We gotta kind of divorce ourselves from the revolutionary propaganda, which then leads you to, and then you got people, well, Ryan, do you want to be under England today? Well, no, but the defeat of King George's policies over here are also the defeat of King George's policies over there, and the England today is the result of that, and the hyperform that we're always espousing to get to by steps and and what have you. So, no, I don't want to be England today, I don't want to move to England today. So it's like fourth of July comes around, like, what's my country? Celebrate the revolution, even though when I look at it historically, I kind of support the other side, but it's too late, it's done, and this is my country that gave me birth. So here we are.

SPEAKER_03: 1:55:49

Um, all right, we're gonna wrap this one up because I am exhausted and I have to get up for work in the morning, Ryan. You are a wealth of knowledge, man. I cannot believe how you can just go off the top of your head like that tobacco and just rip on. No, it's pretty amazing, man. You are you are an impressive person to talk to because like like one subject just leads into another, and you are just you know literally every that's the danger.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:17

Then you end up off off topic, and you end up in that that's why when I create my power, I create a PowerPoint when I used to give lectures because and in PowerPoint was largely just pictures, and I memorized a 55-minute talk around the pictures, and that way when I get to the end of things, oh here's a tangent. Nope. Next picture, yeah, otherwise, who knows where it's gonna go.

SPEAKER_03: 1:56:38

Well, we appreciate it, man. Kale, uh, let's uh plumb Kale's course one more time for anybody that uh wants to join. Kale's doing uh what is it gonna be four weeks, Kale?

SPEAKER_01: 1:56:49

Yeah, yeah, four nights.

SPEAKER_03: 1:56:50

Yeah, so four weeks in a row, he's gonna be doing uh Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol.

SPEAKER_01: 1:56:55

It's gonna be and it'll give you plenty of time to prepare for Christmas. You know, it's it's it's it's really well timed out, so uh no need to worry about that. Starts next Tuesday, right? That's right, next Tuesday. Cool.

SPEAKER_03: 1:57:06

All right, yeah, let's let's all let's all help Kale push this thing. Let's all join it. Let's uh let's let's get ready for advent with uh Christmas Cal. Ryan, you got anything you want to plug? Uh Mediatrix Press?

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:17

I mean, who knows? Any number of things. I don't have anything new just yet. I'm still working on things, but um almost there. Uh I was hoping to get a book from Cardinal Newman out since he's being declared a doctor of the church this month, just didn't happen. But his book, The Church of the Fathers. Uh, I haven't got the proof back yet. And so hopefully that'll be soon. But otherwise, like subjects we talk about tonight. Um, I sell a book, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in England by Father Philip Hughes. Again, it's a very dense book, it's a very good book. Um, I have a good life of Saint uh Thomas More by uh E. E. Reynolds, also the only complete biography of St. John Fisher, again by Reynolds. I sell that. And uh St. John Fisher's works, uh Defense of the Priesthood and the Defense of the Royal Assertion Shredding Luther's Babylonian captivity. It's just phenomenal stuff. So um, you know, I highly recommend those books. And um, yeah, there's probably a lot more that I want to get done now than uh the rundown on Friday nights. Yeah, and the run. Well, yeah, we haven't done it though. Actually, since you were on, we haven't done it. We killed the rundown, and our schedules together. We're hoping to do one Friday. We'll have to see how things go, but it's just the time, man, and getting it all together. And it's a hobby podcast. Like, if we were serious grifters, there's so many things we'd be doing, but it's like, yeah, we're like, yeah, we got other stuff we're doing. It's just kind of fun.

SPEAKER_03: 1:58:40

Yeah. Well, thank you both for coming on, Kale. Appreciate you coming on too, brother. We will uh we will see you guys on Thursday night. So thank you all, and we'll see you next time. Take us out, Rob.

SPEAKER_01: 1:58:50

God bless, guys. God bless you.