Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell - the only commoner to have become Britain's head of state - has puzzled biographers for centuries. He was a complex character, courageous but at the same time devious and self-serving...
15 Nov 202146min
The Last Witches in England
In 1682, three impoverished women from Bideford in Devon were hanged, becoming the last people to be executed for witchcraft in England. The evidence against them was flimsy and their conviction was s...
11 Nov 202156min
England: Devil-Land 1588-1688
In the 17th century, England was known as "Devil-Land" - a diabolical country torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Dr. Clare Jackson has written a dazzling, origi...
8 Nov 202137min
Ottoman Empire in the Renaissance
The Ottoman Empire has long been seen as the Islamic-Asian opposite of the Christian-European West. But the reality was very different: the Ottomans played an integral role in European history. Their ...
4 Nov 202144min
Singing the News in Tudor England
In an age before newspapers and mass media, how did the general public keep abreast of what was going on? How did they find out about the seismic changes going on at court, and in the religious life o...
1 Nov 202158min
The Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn
In the Vatican Library, there survive 17 highly personal love letters, written in King Henry VIII's own hand to Anne Boleyn between 1527 and 1528. How the letters got there no one exactly knows - they...
28 Okt 202139min
Witches & Puritans
On a remote Massachusetts plantation in 1651, an unpopular local brickmaker was blamed for a wave of animal ailments, children dying and vanishing property. The argumentative Hugh Parsons was accused ...
25 Okt 202156min
Massacre of the Huguenots
The royal wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre on 18 August 1572, was designed to reconcile France’s Catholics and Protestants - or Huguenots. But six days later, the execution of Prot...
21 Okt 202149min
