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Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things
Tudor Season: The Queen Killer
Season 3, Ep. 71
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He broke with Rome. He defied the Pope. He turned England upside down to marry Anne Boleyn. Just three years later... he sent her to the executioner's block.
In this gripping third episode of our Henry VIII series, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary rise and devastating fall of England's most fascinating queen, Anne Boleyn.
From the birth of the future Elizabeth I and the execution of Sir Thomas More to Henry's wandering eye, Anne's disastrous miscarriages and the ruthless conspiracy that sealed her fate, this is one of history's greatest political thrillers.
Was Anne really guilty of adultery and treason? Or was she simply the victim of a king who had already decided she had to die? Join us as we explore the evidence behind one of the most shocking Royal stories in British history.
Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames
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75. The Bayeux Mysteries!
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74. The Aragon Girls
24:59||Season 3, Ep. 74We’ve had the Boleyn girls. Now meet the Aragon girls: two sisters born into perhaps the most powerful royal family in Europe, whose lives would take very different but equally extraordinary turns.Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams head to Renaissance Spain to meet their formidable mother, Isabella of Castile: warrior queen, patron of Christopher Columbus and, with Ferdinand of Aragon, architect of a new Spanish superpower.Her youngest daughter Catherine would become Henry VIII’s first wife, an educated, politically astute queen who proved considerably harder to get rid of than Henry expected. But Catherine’s elder sister Joanna faced an even darker fate. Married to Philip the Handsome and heir to Castile, she was declared insane and shut away while first her husband, then her father and finally her own son ruled in her place.So was “Joanna the Mad” really mad at all? Or was one of Europe’s most powerful women simply the victim of the men who wanted her throne?
73. Tudor Season: The Bloody End
32:44||Season 3, Ep. 73Wives, bloodshed, war: the end is approaching for Henry VIII, but England’s most notorious king is not going quietly.In the final part of our epic journey through Henry’s life, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams meet his doomed fifth wife, Catherine Howard, and discover how a convenient change in the law helped send another queen to the scaffold.Then comes wife number six: the clever, glamorous Catherine Parr, who proves more than capable of managing the increasingly ill-tempered king, but still comes perilously close to becoming wife number three to lose her head.There’s war with Scotland, another invasion of France and catastrophe at sea as Henry watches his beloved Mary Rose sink before his eyes.So, as the curtain finally comes down on Henry VIII, what are we left with: Renaissance prince, murderous tyrant or a king whose desperate obsession with producing a son changed England forever?
72. Tudor Season: Monstrous Henry
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68. Rebel Princess: The Patty Hearst Story
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