S1 E1: The Red Rose and The White

How We Made Your Mother Is The How I Met Your Mother Rewatch Podcast with me, Josh Radner, and series co-creator Craig Thomas. Well, our guest today is the great Bob Odin Kirk. I want to tell you that cast, Allison, and Bobi, and Neil, and Jason, and you, you were so upbeat and gotten how the spirit that you guys had was like, I actually thought it was like, are you mocking this? Are you making sarcastic? Follow How We Made Your Mother, wherever you get your podcasts. The Royal Servant fills the elegant bowl with water, adds a few drops of perfume oil, steps back, and checks that everything is just so. The bowl? Yes. Linen sheets? Got 'em. A cushion for the boss to kneel on. Yes, that's their two. They have everything they need, except for the obvious. That's Henry VII, the first Tudor King of England. Oh, and 29 filthy beggars with rancid, stinking feet. It's the first day before Easter, 1486. And here, at the Bishop's Residence in Lincoln, beside the great Gothic cathedral, a striking piece of royal spectacle is set to play out. Less than eight months ago, King Henry swept into England and took the crown from his deadly rival, Richard III. Since then, he's been shoring up his royal power. Before the battle that won him the crown, Henry made a promise. He asked God to judge his right to start a new royal dynasty, and he won, which translates to a big, holy thumbs up. Now Henry is letting God know that he's grateful. Because if there's one thing a king can do to make the almighty feel seen, it's a spot of royal footwashing. During the last supper, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. That tender act showed he was not just a Lord, but a servant. King Henry strides into the hall of the Bishop's Residence. He's a 29-year-old man of average height with long, wavy brown hair, small blue eyes, a pale complexion, and a mouth of fairly horrible teeth. He's not exactly attractive, but he's cheerful looking. After the King come the porpoise, there are 29 of them because that number matches the King's age. And they've been sweating their athletes' foot and veruchas for months. This is supposed to be a grizzly task, and it is. But fair play to Henry. The beggars put their worst foot forward, and Henry gives them each a royal peddye. They're in a messenger bursts in. That messenger is Sir Reginald Bray, one of Henry's oldest and closest allies. And from the look on Bray's face, the news is bad. The porpoise are told to use those freshly pampered feet of theirs to scram once they're gone. Bray delivers the horrible news. 150 miles away, in Essex, a fugitive is on the run. And not any fugitive. It's a troublemaker called Lord Lovell, a noble man of huge wealth and influence, and a die-hard loyalist to the old regime. He was supposed to be under royal supervision, taking sanctuary in a church, not quite captured, but contained. Now, Bray says, "Lovell is on the loose." But there's a problem. Henry has hardly any troops, armor, or weapons, and no track record at all of handling this kind of situation. Right now, Henry is holding nothing in his hands, but the residue of 29 porpoise manky toenails. This new dynasty is just eight months old, and already King Henry VII is facing up to his first existential crisis. Does he have what it takes to show that this is a new dawn for England? Or are the tutors going to be one big flash in the pan? I'm Dan Jones, and from Sony Music Entertainment, this is history, season one of The Tudors, episode one, The Red Rose, and The White. Well, hello, friends. Have you missed me? In the time since I said, or of war to the Plantagenets here on This Is History, I've been whisked away to the land of the tutors, a dynasty you might be familiar with. Now, Tudor history is about as packed as the wardrobe of a Tudor pretender, more on that later. So, if you want to learn more, do listen to this week's bonus episode. There, I open up to producer Al about why the tutors live rent-free in my head, and whether this whole Tudor dynasty ever deserved to claim royal lineage. But for now, let's get early modern. In the grand scheme of British history, maybe even world history, there aren't many hotter properties than The Tudors. Their names, their faces, their diabolical psychodramas, The Tudors aren't cuddly, but their box office. This is the dynasty that gave us Henry VIII, stacking wives and packing on love handles. Bloody Mary, making a bonfire of her religious enemies, and Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, having her ultimate main character moment with the Spanish Armada bearing down. This is the mob that, in just over a century, changed the whole fabric of the English state, church, and international reputation. There's is the era of the Reformation, of Shakespeare, of voyages to the new world. Like them, or not, The Tudors hit parts that other royal dynasties struggle to even tickle. Which is why, having spent ten seasons of this podcast with my beloved Plantagenets and their medieval mayhem, it's time for us to get down and dirty with their early modern successes. So, if you've been here since day one, welcome back. I promise we're going to have just as much fun as we charge out of the wars of the roses and into the 16th century. But if you're coming to this show fresh, well, I'm very happy to have you on board. It's time for us to saddle up for a wild ride with English history's most dysfunctional family. All of which brings me back to the Bishop's Palace in Lincoln in the spring of 1486, where Henry VII, not even a year into his reign, is looking like he might just be the last Tudor as well as the first. His predecessor, Richard III, lasted two years and two months. Right now, even that feels like it's Eons away. So how did Henry end up in this tangle? Well, let's take a quick rewind. On August the 22nd, 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Henry Tudor took on Richard III in the mother of all battles, with the crown quite literally up for grabs. It was a battle that could have gone either way. But in the end, Henry's stepfather, Thomas Lord Stanley, supplied his men to the Tudor cause, securing the win. Richard was surrounded and hacked to death. His body was stripped naked, slung over a horse, and taken off to Leicester, where it was buried in a hastily dug grave in the Church of the Greyfriars. Richard's corpse was abused, kicked, mutilated, someone even stabbed him in the backside. You can imagine this joker propping up the bar and retelling the story of how he butt-knife the old crook back until his dying day. In his place, still on the battlefield, Henry was proclaimed king. Now the setting was crucially important. Just like William the Conqueror back in 1066, Henry Tudor became king in 1485 because he stepped up and took the title. But of course, after Bosworth, this becomes a problem for Henry. It's all well and good for him to take the crown by force of arms, but he really doesn't want anyone else getting the same idea. If becoming king is only about killing the guy who's currently got the big shiny hat on, then Henry is soon going to have a target on his back. So, after Bosworth, Henry has to come up with some other justifications for the new regime. That effort is what carries him from Bosworth to where we found him at the start of this episode, washing porpoise feet in Lincoln and, staring down the barrel of his first major challenge. When Henry starts to work on exactly how to sell England on its new Tudor management, he decides on three simultaneous moves. Move one is to proclaim to England that he's king by right of blood, which Henry can sort of do if you squint a bit. On his dad's side, Henry's connected to English royalty via marriage. His grandma was a woman called Catherine de Valois. She married the Plantagenet King Henry V, then after he died of a dose of dysentery, Catherine shacked up with Henry's grandad, a random boy from North Wales called Owen Tudor. That monumental mezzaios produced Henry VII's dad Edmund, who died of the plague months before Henry was born, all of which is admittedly tenuous, but on his mum's side, Henry's family tree looks a bit more promising. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, is a great granddaughter of the undisputed Plantagenet Top Banana, Edward III. She's part of the House of Lancaster, rivals to rich the thirds House of York. There are some asterisks next to Margaret's name when it comes to her right of succession, I'll get into those in this week's bonus episode with producer Al. But for now, let's just say that if Henry wants to, he can claim just enough royal blood to make his power grab stick. And to make that point, Henry uses the heraldic image of a red rose a lot during his early months. It's a symbol that was once connected with King Henry IV, first ruler of Margaret Beaufort's House of Lancaster. The subtext is loud and clear. If you like the Lancasterian kings, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, you're gonna love lucky number seven. So that's move one. Move two is the Henry to strengthen his claim to the throne, with a good marriage. There's something he's been working on for a good while, even before Bosworth. For most of his adult life, Henry has lived in exile from England, in Brittany and for a hot minute, France. While he was overseas, he swore a holy vow to get married to a girl called Elizabeth of York. She is the eldest daughter of the late Yorkist king, Edward IV. So if and when Henry goes through with his promise to marry her, lucky her, he will be able to position himself as the honorary claimant of the York side of the family tree, as well as the Lancasterian. Or rather, the House of York in its golden days before Richard III got his hands on the wheel and crashed the dynasty into a lamp post. Option two does however come with some issues, and Henry knows he has to tread carefully. He's definitely into marrying Elizabeth of York. She's 19, good looking, a solid choice. She gives him credit with everyone who loved Edward IV and hated Richard III. But Henry is super wary of making it look like this marriage is the whole basis of his claim to the throne. Henry needs to be king in his own right, not as second fiddle to his teenage bride. So he has to tread carefully. Rather than getting the wedding invitations out the day after Bosworth, he delays nearly six months before putting a ring on Elizabeth's finger. He needs the world to know that he's a king first, and a husband to a Yorkist princess second. Which brings us to Henry's third strategy for selling England on his right to the throne. This one is either incredibly clever or incredibly dumb, depending on how you feel about the tutors. To justify his dynastic revolution in the month after Bosworth, Henry Tudor argues that he's king because, well, he just is. Never mind the wise, though wherefore's the who's the house, he's king because in some sense he always was. And if you don't like it, then there's going to be trouble. To make this reality-defying claim a political fact, Henry pulls off one simple, extremely brazen bit of slight of hand. He tells everyone that his reign began on August the 21st, 1485, which is to say the day before the Battle of Bosworth. Now, moving a date by one day might not sound much, but the political implications are huge. It's a forced reshaping of England's collective memory. By shifting the start of his reign, Henry's arguing that he wasn't the rebel invader at Bosworth, rising up to snatch the crown, actually, Richard III was the rebel, illegally withholding the crown from him. It also means everyone who fought for Richard on that day wasn't defending the kingdom, they were traitors trying to destroy it. And anyone who wants to open an argument about the legitimacy of Henry's kingship can have a good long think about what happened to the last man who challenged him. He ended up dead in a hole in Leicester with a knife wound in his butt. Genius? Or totally brazen BS? Well, the truth is, it's a bit of both. But that's the strategy Henry Tudor decides to base his dynasty's right to exist on. He's not going to mess around justifying himself on anyone else's terms. He's the king. Like him? Loathe him? You're going to have to deal with him. This is the sort of rat brain cunning that's going to keep the Tudor's going for an entire century. But Henry Tudor is going to need an awful lot of it in a reign where the universe seems determined to send him thunderbolt after thunderbolt. The streets of London are eerily deserted. It's autumn 1485 and normally the English capital is a constant hive of activity. But for weeks this place has been a zombie town. The normal throngs of merchants and traitors have thinned to a trickle. Those carts that do rumble down the streets are carrying a grim cargo. Piles of cold stiff human corpses. Back in the summer the great peril to England was war. Now it's pestilence. London is in the grip of a terrible disease people are calling the sweating sickness. Behind closed doors in the city men and women are shivering and driving as the malady grips them. It takes its victims so fast that you can be healthy in the morning and dead by midnight. Doctors are clueless and helpless. England has suffered outbreaks of bubonic plague now and again since the monstrous black death erupted in the 14th century but this is a new one. It may be what today would call a hantavirus, spread by foreign soldiers who've been fighting at the other end of the Mediterranean before they were hired to fight at Bosworth. But no one really knows. All they do know is that the disease starts with chills and shaking followed by a high fever and terrible weakness. Then comes the insane sweat which can last up to 24 hours. If you make it through that you'll find you'll be pissing gallons for the next day or so. But if you get to that stage you're probably going to live. Yet 30 to 50% of people who get the sweat don't make it to the uncontrollable pissing stage. In just six weeks as many as 15,000 people die. That's around one quarter of the city's population. What can the new king, Henry Tudor, do about an enemy like the sweating sickness? Not much except wait it out. Which is what he's forced to do so that there's a strange lag between his victory at Bosworth in August 1485 and the formalities that are required to get his reign properly underway. In fact more than two months go by between Bosworth and Henry's public appearance in London for his coronation on October 30th. Still when it does happen the worst of the sweat is over and the citizens are in the mood for a decent party. In fact London scrubs up very nicely to welcome the new king and he is paraded through the streets, from the city, down to Westminster Abbey, in full royal pomp. Trumpets Blair, crowds cheer, and everyone who's anyone, and still alive, comes out to show their support for England's fourth King in two and a half years. In line with Henry's strategy for selling his right to rule, symbols of the new dynasty are everywhere. There are banners and flags bearing those red roses, symbolising the house of Lancaster, and golden dragons representing Henry's Welsh heritage. Hundreds of silver port coluses are painted in prominent spots. That's the symbol of Henry's mother, Margaret Bowford. She comes along to the coronation of a man she gave birth to, and she was only 13. Margaret has always been a tough cookie, but seeing her boy anointed and crowned is too much for her. She breaks down in tears. Once the coronation is done, Henry moves on to the next stage of his political program, a Parliament. Now, Parliament's can be a big snooze. The King asks for tax, the Commons moan about whatever's yanking their chain that year, yadda, yadda, yadda. This one, though, is a lot more exciting than usual, because it puts the Tudor claim to the throne into cast iron law. It starts by disrespecting the memory of Richard III. Parliament passes an act of a tinder against Richard, which, in plain speaking, means his dead ass gets cancelled. A law slam dunking on Richard's head condemns his unnatural, wicked and great perjuries, treason's homicides and murders in shedding infant's blood. With many other wrongs, odious offences, and abominations against God and man, and in particular against our said sovereign lord. Yeah, Andy always left the toilet seat up. The same act confirms Henry's redating of his reign, making out that he was already King before the battle was fought. And having done that, it also takes aim at those who supported Richard at Bosworth, accusing them of having "traterously levied war" against our said sovereign lord and his true subjects. A tamed as a past against a whole gang of them, too. Henry does make it known that this spate of legal punishment is intended as a one-off. He's not going to spend his whole reign taking revenge on Richard's supporters. Redemption is going to be possible. All the same, he wants the old die-hards, legally speaking, on the back foot. If they want to have a future in England, they're going to have to work their way into his good books. He'll decide in his own sweet time who can be forgiven and who can't. Henry's first parliament breaks up in December 1485, and once that's done, he's finally in the right political space and headspace to move on to the next item on his "Tudorization of England" program. That's marrying Elizabeth of York. The ceremony takes place after Christmas on January 18th, 1486. England gets to see its new queen who fits the stereotype of what a young royal bride should look like. She's 19 with blue eyes and fair hair. She's been given a good look over by Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, who's had her lodging in her own house, the mansion of Cold Harbor in London. It's a stunner of a mansion right on the river with new windows installed that look over the gardens towards the waterfront. There, Elizabeth has been briefed by Margaret on her duties as a new royal bride. Don't rock the boat, do rock the bedroom, pop out sprogs, a sap. She's also been given the Pope's seal of approval. A dispensation has been issued from Rome, allowing Henry and Elizabeth to tie the knot, despite being middle-distant cousins. The Pope not only signs off on the mild incest, he praises the marriage as an overdue diplomatic detente. The way his holiness sees it, Henry X Elizabeth, is the long-awaited reconciliation of the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The red rose is grafted onto the white rose. Everyone can breathe again. So in early 1486 it feels like things are finally starting to settle down for Henry's regime. Under the guidance of his reliable sidekick John Morton, Bishop of Ely, a Tudor propaganda machine cranks up. Morton is set for big promotions to arch Bishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, effectively Prime Minister. Under his watch, the royal treasury mince coins showing a new Tudor rose, with red petals and white petals mixed together. Red and white roses start popping up, painted on gateposts and in bedrooms all over the royal estate. When Henry and Elizabeth get down to producing some little Tudorlings, they're going to be the living embodiment of this new rosy state of affairs. So that's the situation, when Henry sets out on the journey that takes him to where this episode began, in Lincoln, at Easter 1486, with 29 porpers lining up for the mother of all monarchical footrubs. A back-of-field win and a legal fiction have laid the basis for the Tudor monarch. A good marriage has put the long-running blood feud of the wars of the roses quite literally to bed. The trouble is, not everyone, is ready to hear the good news, especially Ricardians. And one of them has just broken out a century. Observe the North American dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offers appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com, pick up these may apply. Henry Tudor has a reputation for being good-tempered, but right now, in Lincoln, he's lost his land. The pedicured porpers have been since scattering. Now, toys are being tossed out of the royal cram. The cat isn't just getting kicked, he's been put on a plastic tee and booted into the far reaches of outer space. The king's confidant and fixer, Reginald Bray, is copying some of this royal flak. He's the messenger who just arrived in Lincoln to tell Henry, Lord Lovell has escaped sanctuary and is planning a hellacious uprising. But even more royal air is being directed at the guy Bray has brought to confirm the story. His name is Hugh Conway, and he's snitched out Lovell via someone who he knows in Lovell's crew. The trouble is, he's only giving up part of the story. So what is the story that Bray and his snitch are short-selling Henry? Well, basically it's this. Francis, Lord Lovell, is a confirmed diehard, loyal to the old Plantagenet Yorkist regime of Richard III. He's a mega wealthy baron with huge land holdings, and he spent Richard's reign way up the last Plantagenet's pop-up pirated poop shoot. Popular songs called him Richard's Laptop. Lovell was supposed to guard the South Coast before Bosworth and make sure Henry Tudor didn't land. Well, he screwed that up, then he fought at Bosworth where it was initially thought that he died. Soon after Bosworth, though, it became clear that rumors of Lovell's death had been wildly overstated. He was alive, hunkering down in a church in Colchester Essex to take sanctuary from the strong arm of the Tudor Law and figure out his next move. He survived the sweating sickness epidemic, so Henry's first parliament passed one of their acts of a tinder against him. Now though, Lovell's gone on the run, and what he's planning is a matter of urgent national security. Conway says there's a plan for Lovell to raise Yorkshire against the Tudors, while one of Lovell's minor noble mates stirs up the Midlands. They'll be a rebellion on two fronts, and the aim will be to smother the Tudor regime before it's even a year old. Unsurprisingly, given these high stakes, Henry wants to know every last detail. He's most keen to have the name of Conway's informant in Lovell's crew, but Conway is refusing to give it up. Hence, the Royal Tantra. [GUNSHOTS] First, the king says that he doesn't believe Conway's telling the truth. Then, when Conway sticks to his guns, Henry starts yelling. The Conway is holding to some sort of high-end snitch code. He won't reveal his sources, he says, even if wild horses are recruited to tear him to bits. [GUNSHOTS] Which leaves Henry in a quandary. He has to assume Tackle Tail Conway is telling the truth, but he has no way of following up the lead to find out more. What does he do now? Where does he go? Henry is in Lincoln on a royal tour heading towards York, the former HQ of Richard III. If he calls off the tour, he looks weak. But if he goes ahead and walks into a fully insurgent north, he's in deep shit. Henry definitely doesn't have the numbers to send an army out to hunt Lovell down. A few months ago, Henry decided that his strategy for personal safety was going to be all about keeping a tight bodyguard rather than a large standing army. He set up a permanent posse of 200 hard-nut men at arms known as the 'Yoman of the Guard'. They wear fancy red uniforms, and their number one priority is keeping him safe and foiling assassination plots. Can he rely on them to keep him safe if Lord Lovell manages to get a full-scale warband together? It's taking a big risk. Once he's done with berating Conway the Snitch and calm down, Henry decides his only option is to eat the risk and keep moving, to go on with his tour of the realm and monitor events as they develop. He doesn't know yet what shenanigans Lovell is planning, so maybe this will all fizzle out. Henry tries to style it out. He leaves Lincoln and hits Nottingham. Then he goes on to York. When he gets to York though, it's clear trouble is going nowhere. Lovell's co-escapies from sanctuary are Humphrey and Thomas Stafford, more die-hard old Ricardians. It emerges that these three likely lads have hatched a plot to kidnap Henry while he's in York, then kill him and put a new man on the throne. Or rather, a puppet. The 11-year-old Edward Earl of Warwick is who they have in mind. He's the only son of George Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a barrel of wine in 1478 for constant scheming and treachery. He has way more royal blood than Henry, even if he's not old enough to go to a scary movie on his own. Meanwhile, to make things even worse, Henry hears rumors of a rising in North Yorkshire under the banner of Robin of Reedstale. That's a stale old pseudonym which has been dragged out several times in the last couple of decades to rally in northern Malcontents. There's no such person, and it's become a bit of a cliche, even to say his name. All the same, a useful political aristic in the 15th century is this. When you hear the name Robin of Reedstale, you're in trouble. So this is the first big test of Henry's reign. And somehow he has to scramble defense. His yeoman of the guard go door to door in York, rallying the townsfolk to defend their king. They send out word beyond the city that any rebels who are thinking of joining level will have full partners if they lay down their weapons. Then the yeoman run to the market and buy up all the leather jerkings they can as basic body armour in case non-competence have to be drafted in to fight for the Tudor Dynasty's survival. Then with tension so thick you could cut it, Henry and his bodyguards settle down to wait. When the morning comes, it looks like they're out of the woods. Word is whipping around the city that Lovell has called off his march on a walk. The townsfolk come out for the Tudors and turning out into the street and shouting, "King Henry, King Henry, God preserve that sweet and well-savered face." The whole royal party lets out a big sigh of relief. Lovell is still on the run, but it feels like the imminent danger of a fight has passed. Cautiously, Henry starts to look forward to a big public showpiece he has planned in York. His first St. George's Day as King is coming up and he plans to stay in York and enjoy the festivities. There's a high mass planned in York, Minster, a Gala dinner in the Archbishop of York's great hall. A bunch of girls are coming along to hang out with him. God, once more, is smiling on the Tudors. Well, that's the way it looks, but there's a catch. Because while Lord Lovell has squelched his plan for a full-on rising, he's still on the loose and he certainly hasn't joined the chorus of converts singing songs about Henry's well-savered face. In fact, the flag bearer for Old Ridge the Third's cause hasn't run away at all. He's still secretly hanging around York. And on St. George's Day, he and a team of deadliest assassins are planning an attack that will recast the line of English succession forever. Henry Tudor is going to hear one St. George's Day mass in York, Minster. If Lovell has his way, it'll be the last mass that Henry ever hears. Join us as the plot unfolds next time on This Is History, The Tudors. Really? And just when he thought England was going to have some shot at stability, not so, for the latest King Henry. Remember, more about his claims to Royal lineage in this week's bonus episode. My lovely Royal favourites get those ad-free on Patreon. And speaking of my Royal favourites, it's time for our first ever discussion starter for The Tudors. So, I want you to imagine yourself in King Henry's shoes. If you could write your act of attainment against Richard III, what would it say? Added points for added spice. Submit yours at patreon.com/ThisIsHistory. In our time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glenny, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world. It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure. In our time, listen wherever you get your podcasts. Or watch on YouTube. Teal coffee? Lovely cup of tea.