Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.

My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey through 16th century England.

Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous world of the Tudor court?

Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.

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Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.

I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

This episode of Talking Tudors is sponsored by TudorCon from home.

If you haven't heard of it before, TudorCon is a one-of-a-kind Tudor history festival that takes place every year at Agecroft Hall, a genuine Tudor-era manor house that was brought from Lancashire and is now in Richmond, Virginia.

It's organized by Heather Tejsko, host of the Renaissance English History Podcast, and brings together leading historians, authors, musicians, and Tudor fans from around the world.

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TudorCon from Home is the online version, a three-day event this October from the 3rd until the 5th, where you can watch the talks, take part in Q&As, and join social events with fellow Tudor enthusiasts.

Past speakers have included incredible historians like Tracy Borman, and this year's lineup is just as exciting.

It's more than just talks.

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Now, on to today's episode.

I am thrilled to welcome Professor Tracey Borman back to the podcast to talk about her new book, The Stolen Crown.

Let's dive straight into our conversation.

Welcome to Talking Tudors, Tracey.

How are you?

Thank you so much for having me back, Natalie.

I'm very well.

I'm feeling very excited.

The Stolen Crown has just been launched in the UK.

And so I'm right at the beginning of this journey.

And it's wonderful to be talking to you at this moment.

Oh, it's so exciting.

And before we jump in and talk more about your fabulous new book, would you mind just saying hello to all our listeners and viewers and just telling us a little bit about you and your background?

Yeah.

So hello, lovely listeners and viewers.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm Tracey Bournemouth, and I've been on this podcast many times before, and it's always a journey.

So I am first and foremost a historian and an author, mostly of the Tudor period.

They are my first love.

I also work for Historic Royal Palaces as Chief Historian, and I'm Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust.

And alongside that, I think the word broadcaster now pops up in my description when I'm doing things, because I do a lot of TV work, documentaries, and obviously things like this podcast.

So it's all connected by history and it's all a joy.

Well, that's absolutely wonderful.

And yes, you did mention there that, of course, your sort of first love are the Tudors, Tudor history, write lots of books about the Tudors and talk about them a lot.

But your book, The Stolen Crown, is a little bit different.

So what inspired you to actually turn your attention to that sort of end period of the Tudor dynasty and the beginning of the Stuarts?

So I can still remember where I was when I heard the news that was announced a couple of years ago by the British Library that they had made a fairly earth-shattering discovery about the death of Elizabeth I and the rise of the Stuarts.

I can tell you I was actually in the middle of writing a different book.

And then I heard this news that basically this wonderful PhD researcher called Helena Rutowska, working with the British Library on William Camden's annals, so his biography of Elizabeth had discovered that they were pretty much a fake, or at least certain sections had been rewritten.

On the orders of James, to make it look like his succession was more assured than it actually was.

And so the British Library used some transmitted light to x-ray all these pastings over that Camden had done once James was king.

And the text underneath showed that so much had been changed in the published version that historians have been relying on for 400 years, and I count myself among that number.

So really, it changed everything that we thought we knew about the succession because it was very, very clear that in his original draft, Camden never wrote that almost with her last breath, Elizabeth named James as her heir.

And that's what we believed, as I say, since the book first appeared in the early 1600s.

So it really is a startling discovery.

And I talked to my publishers and said, can I pause the book I'm writing?

And write one all about the close of the Tudor era and then the rise of the Stuarts, but also looking at who else might have been king or indeed queen if James hadn't pipped them all to the post.

Yes, and we are going to come to that very important question.

But just in case any of our listeners want to delve into that a little bit more, I did actually interview Helena.

It was an amazing, as you say, an amazing discovery.

And she very kindly talked to us all about what she found and all of that exciting stuff.

So definitely tune into that episode if you're interested in hearing more about what Tracy's just referred to there.

So let's maybe start at the end of the Tudor dynasty then.

So tell us about the final days of Elizabeth I.

Well, they must have been very dramatic days.

I mean, Elizabeth's reign is marked by drama, as you know.

So she had moved to Richmond Palace, quite close to where I'm talking to you from now, actually, West London, at the beginning of 1603.

It was a bitterly cold winter.

And we know that Richmond was her favourite palace because she called it her warm box.

It was the place that was the warmest of all her residences.

And it was as if she'd moved there to die.

You know, she knew she didn't have long left to live.

And she seemed to almost be hastening her end, refusing to eat or drink or even to sleep to go to bed.

And one of those present at Richmond said, the Queen has decided to die, you know, ever mistress of her own fate.

But still, the question on everybody's lips, as it had been for 44 years, was who is going to come next?

Because Elizabeth had doggedly refused to name her successor from the outset of her reign.

And still, she kept her silence on this as she went to Richmond.

So you can imagine the atmosphere there.

Her councillors followed her there, of course.

And they were clustered around her bed, urging her.

To at last name her successor.

And there's this wonderful moment where you just get the sense that this weak, you know, weakened woman, not weak, you know, personally, but certainly for me, she's now weak.

She's still got it because Robert Cecil, her chief minister says, ma'am, you must name your successor.

And the room falls silent.

And then Elizabeth said, little man, must is not a word to use your prince.

You know, she's still in control.

I love it.

puts him firmly in his place.

And there's a crisis looming because people at this time, they still refer to the Wars of the Roses.

There's still a real fear of civil war.

And those councillors know that the succession is by no means clear.

There are several, if not more, candidates with a quite strong claim to Elizabeth's throne.

And they're basically begging her on their knees to just say at last, what have you got to lose?

Just name your successor.

But as we as we now know, Elizabeth dies without naming the successor.

And it's interesting because she was said by a very, very reliable source.

So Ambassador Beaumont, he was the French ambassador, that the Queen was beyond speech in her very final days, which is precisely the time when Camden puts words in her mouth later.

So that further cast doubt on the viability of his source.

And so, yeah, she dies on the 24th of March.

And really, what brings James to the throne is Robert Cecil.

He has smoothed the path for the King of Scots.

I think Cecil has decided by the late 1590s, James isn't ideal.

And I can say a little bit more about why.

But he's kind of the best of a bad lot in that nobody has got an absolutely watertight claim.

But James has a strong blood claim.

He's descended from Henry VII's elder daughter, Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland.

But the real fly in the ointment is that Henry VIII had barred all Scots his throne and actually made that law.

So we tend to gloss over the fact James's accession was illegal.

And many people in England saw it as that, even though they were sort of suppressed, or we haven't really kept their words.

But England and Scotland saw each other as foreign countries.

They'd been at war for centuries.

So it's not like today when we're part of a United Kingdom.

You tend to sort of underestimate what they felt about each other and the animosity.

So Cecil was aware there would be a lot of animosity around for James.

So that's why he'd been carefully doing this kind of smoothing of the path, even drafting the proclamation of James's accession well before Elizabeth.

was dead.

I mean, There's no wonder he went to great lengths to keep this correspondence he had.

You know, Scott's very secret.

Elizabeth could have had his head for that.

So really, I don't think it's exaggerating to say James pretty much owed his throne to just Robert Cecil and his allies on the council.

It's extraordinary.

What a story.

And so let's go back to Elizabeth for a moment.

You obviously said there that she was pretty much reluctant, well, she was reluctant her whole reign to name a successor.

Why do you think this is?

Yes.

So she had very good reason.

And I always get kind of very defensive of her because people say, oh, it's because she's so vain, you know, and she doesn't want anybody else, you know, getting any attention.

It was for really sound reasons.

She had direct experience of what it was like to be an heir to the throne during his sister Mary's reign.

And she knew full well that the same might happen to her because during Mary's reign, there had been endless sort of plots, conspiracies, and then a major rebellion in Elizabeth's name to put her on the throne and get rid of Mary.

And so Elizabeth knew that the moment you name a successor, you create a rival.

And you put yourself at the mercy of potential plots and rebellions.

And of course, that's exactly what had happened during her reign, Mary, Queen of Scots, the mother of James VI.

Of course, she therefore had an even stronger claim in a way than her son.

And she was the subject of plots and rebellions, even though Elizabeth never named her.

So that would have just been tenfold if she had actually ever named a successor.

She knew it would place herself in danger.

But one has to ask, so why not on her deathbed?

What she got to lose by that point?

And I think then perhaps a tiny bit of vanity comes into it.

It's like Elizabeth doesn't want, her subjects to imagine a world without her in it.

She's now to let go of the control and of the focus on her.

So I think it's fitting with what we know of Elizabeth.

It really does match up far more the idea that she would just die and leave the whole thing open.

Yeah, I don't think Elizabeth could imagine a world without Elizabeth.

Well, no, exactly.

She probably thinks, oh, well, you know, So what does it matter?

It's going to be a disaster anyway when I'm gone.

Oh, goodness.

So you also mentioned there, Tracy, that there were other potential heirs to the throne apart from James.

So could you tell us a little bit about who these other candidates were?

Yes.

So at any one point during Elizabeth's reign, there were about 15 or 16 people who were really viable contenders for Elizabeth's throne.

And I should just say a word about how they were related to the Tudor throne.

As a general rule, because it does get complicated, most of the candidates were either related to Henry VII's elder daughter, Margaret, or his younger daughter, Mary.

And Henry VIII had very much favoured Mary's descendants.

So they included the Grey Sisters, Catherine and Mary Grey, sisters of Lady Jane, the short reigning queen.

They had a really strong claim.

And probably legally, it should have been their descendants who took the throne in 1603.

There was poor old Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, who was actually not related to the Tudors, but the Plantagenets.

He had arguably a better claim than the Tudors themselves, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

But people kept pushing him forward and he kept really trying to assure Elizabeth he had no ambitions for her crown at all.

There was even the Infanta Isabella of Portugal.

She was the daughter of Philip II.

She was a sort rank outsider, but she could count on the Spanish army to support her.

And then my own personal favorite, I know I shouldn't have favorites, but Arbella Stewart, what a story.

Again, so she comes from the Margaret Tudor line.

She's James's greatest rival for the English throne.

She, like him, is a great-granddaughter of Henry VII.

But she has the edge because she was born in England.

And that really matters, as I say, in this kind of xenophobic age where Scotland is seen as a foreign country.

Arbella enjoys a lot of support, but it turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing so many times to have royal blood.

And nobody demonstrates that better than poor Arbella, who ends up ultimately, a prisoner in the tower, not once but twice, and loses her life there.

She dies there.

Goodness.

So there really were a lot of people that could have ended up as king or queen, as you say, which is so interesting.

But let's go back to that source that you were talking about, Camden's source.

So, you know, this is probably lots of our listeners have heard the story that Elizabeth named James.

Is that the only source, Tracy?

Was there any other stories about her kind of naming James or is it solely Camden's account?

Yes, that's such a great question because Camden's the only one who says that Elizabeth spoke the words in favor of James.

There are other accounts, mainly Robert Carey, who was Elizabeth's kinsman, you know, descendant of Mary Carey, as in Mary Boleyn, better known as, And he left an account behind.

Proved quite influential.

And he describes how in her dying moments, when her councillors once more urged her to name her successor, and they said, will it be the King of Scots?

She raised her hand to her head.

Now, that could have meant anything.

He also raised her hand to her head when the Archbishop of Canterbury was mentioned, or when she wanted a glass of water.

And we know she's from migraines, so I can imagine her just saying, look, just leave me alone.

But that single gesture was imbued with enormous significance in later years and in fact it was embellished so that I think it was the Venetian ambassador a few years later said she made the sign of a crown when James and so it went from a gesture of the hand to a crown and so you see the kind of ripple effect but none of the people there at the time said that Elizabeth verbally named James, only Camden.

And that was hugely significant.

And yeah, I feel so sorry for Camden.

And I really want your listeners and viewers to get a sense of him because he has had a bad press over the years as almost either an apologist for Elizabeth or now as an outright liar.

He was acting so far against his own will.

James was literally breathing down his neck, getting to rewrite his account.

And so Camden actually was a very respected, a very meticulous historian.

He was first commissioned to write this biography of Elizabeth by Lord Burley, William Cecil.

He didn't want to do it because it's quite a poison chalice, isn't it, to write somebody's living?

And so he tried to avoid doing it, but at least he thought, I'll make it a credible account.

And he went all the way up to Elizabeth's death.

And then he kind of, left his book.

He never wanted to push it, because of course now there was somebody else on the throne.

So he just quietly put it to one side.

But then James, a few years into his reign, heard about this book.

And by then he was clinging to power by his fingertip.

There had been the gunpowder plot, numerous other plots and conspiracies against him.

Parliament hated him.

Most of the people of England hated him.

So he needed almost Elizabeth's retrospective approval for his accession from beyond the grave.

So he spied an opportunity and he ordered Camden very much against his will to take up his quill and to rewrite sections that biography of Elizabeth.

And of course, the most notable section being the succession.

And so it's so great that you've already had Helena on to talk about the intricacies of this research because it's just groundbreaking.

It's absolutely amazing.

And you see that.

The original text where he just writes, you know, Elizabeth just died without naming anybody.

And then it's so blatant how it's been written.

But poor old Camden.

I love that he had the last laugh, though, because he took his merry little time rewriting the book.

And 1608 is when James first asked him to do it or told him to do it.

The first installment, which didn't cover the succession, only appeared in 1615.

And the second and final installment was published in 1625, by which time Camden and James were both dead.

So, you know, Camden didn't have to live to see this falsification of history.

It didn't benefit James in his own lifetime, but it has done ever since.

We've just accepted him as the rightful heir.

Yeah, so interesting.

I know there was so much that Helena shared that was fascinating, including that there were a number of hands in that manuscript, which I thought was really interesting.

So I think, you know, we definitely need to question what's in there for all the reasons you've said, the context, all of that.

Of course, the other interesting thing, Tracy, that I know you'll be interested in as well is that Camden is the main source for Anne Boleyn being born in 1507.

So I was interested to look at that section very closely to see how that had changed.

I won't divert our subject today, but that's also a fascinating area, I think.

Yeah, we've relied on him for an awful lot.

I think what this research has made me realize is actually, for the most part, we've relied on him for good reason because he was meticulous in his sources.

Yeah, he wasn't just this kind of apologist for Elizabeth.

Burley gave him access to all sorts of original sources and state papers.

But yeah, that's intriguing, isn't it?

About the 1507th.

Absolutely fabulous.

It's never as straightforward as you think it is, is it?

And I'm sure you know this as well.

Let's not go down that rabbit hole.

Let's not go down that path because, yeah, we'll be another hour.

So could you talk to us a little bit about the transition of power then from the Tudor Queen to a Stuart King?

You know, what does that look like?

And what were some of those immediate changes that were felt at court?

Sure.

So it started off well enough.

James was proclaimed king.

We are told to widespread rejoicing, although there were accounts of riots in some towns in England and some people expressing and being arrested for kind of hostility towards the new king.

But I think crucial to this and something I haven't yet mentioned is at least he was a man.

And that really counted among the late queen's former subjects because as she was dying, a member of her council said, the people of England are wishing no more queens.

You know, we've had three queens in succession, 50 years of female sovereignty, and this is not the natural order of things.

We need a king on the throne.

So his gender counted for a lot, as did the fact he was married with children, so there would be no succession crisis.

And he made his way south, and great proclamations were made of loyalty to him, and then he was crowned.

Even before his coronation, things had started to slightly unravel in that there was a real culture clash, I think, between the Tudors and Stuarts.

And what I should say as well is, I think probably, even though my book is called The Stolen Crown, James was probably Elizabeth's sort of preferred choice, even though she recognized there were real issues, because she tried to advise him over the years how to be a good king, including play the king, she said.

show yourself to your people.

They like the display majesty that the Tudors are so spectacular at.

James disregarded all that advice.

And so he lived very much more privately.

There was scandal and rumour surrounding the fact he just spent his time with his male favourite.

He was obviously heavily into witch hunting and that didn't really go down particularly well with his New English subjects, and certainly the fact that he was far harsher on Catholics than Elizabeth ever was.

And that's what then gave rise to the gunpowder plot.

Because I think there'd been a real hope that even though James was absolutely an avowed Protestant, he's the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.

So I think Catholics had thought, oh, we'll have an easier time of it.

And of course, the opposite was the case.

So very soon you get a sense of James's grip loosening on the throne.

And people are disillusioned.

They think, oh, but he was supposed to be great.

And he's a man, he's got a dynasty, and he's got experience of governing a country, you know, for about 30 years.

And I think it's always telling to look at the kind of ballads that are doing the rounds and the kind of pamphlets that are being circulated.

And there's a particular ballad that became very popular in the early years of James's reign.

And it said, a Tudor, a Tudor, we've had Stuarts enough, none ever reigned like Queen Bess in her rough.

So suddenly there was this wave of nostalgia for Elizabeth.

And this queen who had been neglected in her later years, and people had said, oh, everyone's weary of an old woman's government.

But now it was like, bring back Elizabeth.

We should have realized what we had.

and they celebrated her accession day and James was getting more and more annoyed by this and kind of banned celebrations of the late queen and that's really when he became inspired to just do something about it and actually use Elizabeth to his advantage by having this on the surface very complimentary account of her reign published but one that would make it clear she wanted James as the king.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

It does demonstrate that Elizabeth must have been looked well upon at that point as well, if he's looking for her kind of blessing from the grave.

So fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So it was quite clever of James.

But as I said, I think, Camden managed to outmaneuver him by just taking so long.

And at, I should say, the first account, the first installment that came out in 1615, Camden made sure it was only available in Latin.

So, of course, most couldn't read it.

And also, it's so interesting going back and rereading Camden, now you know what you know.

And he included in the preface an ode to truth, where he's basically begging his readers, don't believe everything that I say in this.

And somebody else come along and just re-research it.

And you see it now, but at the time you just think, oh yeah, it's just one of those things you say, you know.

You pretend falsely modest to say that my book isn't that great.

But actually he meant, he was like, no, really don't believe me.

It's amazing.

And so you talked earlier, you mentioned earlier, or alluded to the fact that perhaps James wasn't the most appropriate candidate or the best choice, even though perhaps Elizabeth thought he was in the end.

But what made you say that?

What are some of the things?

Is it because he didn't know the country well, or why do you think he was the best choice?

I think it was a lot about him not yielding one inch his style of kingship.

He hadn't, he'd been very arrogant in receiving all of these letters from Elizabeth.

They had a correspondence that lasted 30 years, and you can see how Elizabeth is really trying to counsel him how to be a good king if he's king of England.

But he ignores that because she's just a woman.

And what does she know?

And so he sticks by his style of monarchy, which is very much based on the principle of the divine right of kings.

So nobody can oppose a king, not even parliament.

Whereas the Tudors had worked in partnership with parliament.

James just opposed it from the start.

And it was very obvious in his first parliament, it was very bad tempered.

And I think James had thought it'd be easy just to get his will like he did in Scotland.

So he immediately proposed a formal union of the crowns of England and Scotland, thinking, well, this is kind of just rubber stamping.

Of course, there'll be a union because I'm now king of both.

But neither England nor Scotland wanted it.

And the English Parliament was particularly vociferous in their response to this and ultimately stopped James from having a formal union.

It wouldn't be until Queen Anne in 1707 that England and Scotland would be formally united.

And James kind of threw his toys out of the pram a bit.

It was like, well, okay, well, I'm not going to come Parliament then, and I'll just go ahead and design a flag, the Union Jack, Jack for Jacobus or James, that shows our unity.

And he also proposed a united currency between England and Scotland, a coin called the Unite.

But these were all sort of fairly token gestures because Parliament really held the power in this respect.

And James wasn't prepared to see that or understand it.

And his successor, Charles I, was very much a king in the mold of his father.

And of course, he took this to even greater extremes, dissolving parliament whenever it didn't agree with him.

And so, ultimately, you can trace back the devastation of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, to this kind of lie that started the Stuart dynasty in England.

Yeah, I'd wonder if you'd sort of tease that out a little bit more, Tracy, because I did want to kind of end by asking you what you thought was the impact of that story, that lie, as you've said, and what impact does it have on not just James's reign, obviously, but then his successes as well?

Yeah, absolutely.

It had a huge impact.

You know, if James had been willing to take on Elizabeth's advice and to be more willing to compromise, to fit to the English system a bit more, I think things could have turned out very differently.

And particularly if he had kind of trained his son up to do the same, he didn't do that, of course.

And I think ultimately, I don't think it's overstating it to say, you know, this lie, as we now know it was, this illegal succession, as it absolutely was, because it was against the terms of Henry VIII's Acts of Succession and his last will and testament, it ultimately led to the destruction of the monarchy, really, within the space of a generation.

And a monarchy that had looked so powerful, so secure under the Tudors and particularly under Elizabeth.

We're talking 46 years after her death, a king is executed and it seems inconceivable that it would go so badly wrong so quickly.

But I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the rise of the Stuarts in England and how James kind of seized the throne.

It wasn't bestowed on him and he hadn't kind of accepted the sort of Tudor way of doing things, if you like.

So there was this clash and it did have devastating consequences.

So that's the sort of so what of this, I suppose.

You can say, well, okay, so he took the throne when Elizabeth hadn't named him.

But actually, would any of the other contenders have made a better job of it?

And that's when we get into really interesting what-ifs.

Because from personal favourite, Arbella Stewart, I have to admit, I think she'd have made a complete hash of it because Elizabeth had her card marked.

She knew that Arbella wasn't really the stuff of which great queens were made.

I think I feel so sorry for Arbella because she had this suffocating upbringing at the hands of her grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, another great Tudor figure, of course, who just controlled her every move.

But it meant that Arbella grew up quite fatally naive about how the court operated because she'd never been allowed to experience that.

But she also grew up very, very aware of her royal blood.

So she kept kind of making bids for the throne without really knowing what she was doing.

We don't know what, for example, the grandsons of Lady Catherine Grey or the grandson and the great-grandson would have made of it, they might have done a better job.

We might have been talking about King Edward Seymour, as he was called, Catherine Grey married Seymour.

Obviously, another blood connection.

But it is really, really fascinating to look at, okay, so how far do we take this?

Would we not, therefore, after the Stuarts, have the Hanoverians and then Saxe-Coburgs and then even the Windsors, or actually, would the Stuarts have grabbed the throne at some point anyway, if, you know, another successor had either died without an heir or made a mess of it?

So it's impossible, really.

You can go so far with imagining the what-ifs and a completely different dynasty succeeding.

But, you know, there are so many twists and turns in history, as you know, that we might still have ended up ultimately with the Stuarts and then all the dynasties that followed.

Yeah, so fascinating.

Well, I can see why you turned your attention to this particular subject and period of history.

Absolutely fascinating.

And I know, Tracey, that you've got quite an extensive book tour that you're currently embarking on.

So if our listeners might want to see you at one of these events, where can they go to find out more?

No, I haven't.

Yeah, so it's tracyborman.co.uk.

I'm also quite active on social media.

I'm on Instagram as Tracy Borman and X and Facebook and occasionally TikTok, although I always feel really old when I'm trying to do something kind of engaging on TikTok.

I realize I don't understand it as well as Instagram.

Oh, I love that.

I'll have to go and look you up there.

I didn't realize you were there.

I know I'm the same.

I feel a little bit like a fish out of water.

Yes, exactly.

It's fun to dabble in other things, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

It really is.

So, but no, it'd be wonderful if people wanted to come along and find out more.

And I should say, and I'm now allowed to say, I think this is the first time I've actually officially said that the book that I was writing, that now I finished, is actually going to be out next year, just in just a few months time.

And it is The House of Berlin.

It's fiction.

Tracy, this is so exciting.

I thought it won definitely for you, Natalie, but you might.

So, yeah, please can I come back and talk to you about it?

That would be amazing.

Yeah, so when is that coming out?

It's scheduled in the UK for early May next year.

That may be subject, but it'll definitely be kind of the first half of next year.

And you said this is a fiction.

This is fiction.

I love it.

It's basically rising up all of the Boleyns.

So, yes, they're airtime now, now that I've dealt with The Stolen Crown as it was.

Exactly.

Oh, I'm so excited for that.

Absolutely amazing how you can write both brilliant fiction and brilliant nonfiction.

Absolutely.

Take my hat off to you.

thank you so much i feel very lucky to do both yeah oh and that's so exciting what an exciting note to end our podcast episode on i'll watch this space for tracy's next book and of course i will add a link to your website to our show notes and i cannot wait to have you back on the show to talk about the balloons as you know my favorite family from history so thank you so much tracy for taking the time to talk tutors with us again today such a pleasure always thank you nicely.

Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.

Thank you so much for joining me.

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It's time now for us to re-enter the modern world.

As always, I look forward to talking Tudors with you again very soon.

Music.