December 22, 2025 • 50 mins
Margaret talks to Chelsey Weber-Smith about the saint who built hidden compartments to hide priests during the persecution of Catholics in England.
Sources:
https://ewtn.co.uk/article-st-nicholas-owen-builder-of-secret-hiding-places-for-priests/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/articles/2005/11/02/hindlip_gunpowder_plot_feature.shtml
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/harvington-hall
https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/12/05/nicholas-owen-little-john-paid-highest-price-ingenious-camouflaged-places-hide/
https://fellowshipandfairydust.com/2022/02/18/st-nicholas-owen/
https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-8/mary-i-reading/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/why-was-anne-boleyn-executed/
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/beyond-the-pale.html
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/9/1055
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26845784?read-now=1&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.advocate.com/history/king-james-bible-queer
https://www.worldhistory.org/Gunpowder_Plot/
https://www.catholicpamphlets.net/files/pamphlets/mary%20tudor%20and%20the%20protestants.pdf
https://catholic.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/saints_heroes/reformation/php/martyrs.php
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/gunpowder_hutton_01.shtml
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that actually, secretly most podcasters record
out of their closets. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this week, not only am I in a closet,
but my guest, Chelsea Weber Smith, host of American Hysteria,
appears to be. And I don't want to make any
assumptions in a closet. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hi, Margaret, I am in a closet, and it is
the only place in my home that isn't too echoey
to record. And yeah, I think it's important for people
to know that the glamour you think that we live in,
it's not true.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We're all in the closet, especially as you like move
up more towards professional podcasting where you have like higher
needs in terms of echoes and all of yes, uh
huh exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
And some people who do video are in those cool studios,
But for those of us who haven't made that demonic
jump into video content, we're stuck in the closet.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I remember when my producer not Sophie, Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Sophie, Hi, okay Sophie.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
When my producer Ian was like Margaret, I hate to
tell you this. You have to go back in the closet.
That's cute, that's my closet joke. But it's also true.
It's a moment that happened.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
It was really hard for me not to make and
in the closet joke just now, But I really I
physically restrained my.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I also physically restrained myself because it just felt so easy.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
It was too easy.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
You could make these jokes. It's totally fine. No one
will be upset by them. No one is sensitive about
these things. That's what's so nice about joking around identity.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Oh, I know, nobody gets sensitive in this economy, in
this country.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh no, no, we can't afford it anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I actually like, I actually agree that we can't afford
it anymore. We have to keep our eyes focused on
the people who are actually doing homophobia and not the
people who are I.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Will say that every day of my life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So, I was thinking, you are the host of American Hysteria,
which is a podcast that on some level lives up
to its name. Is that a decent way to put it?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I think?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, what if I decided to tell you about some
British hysteria.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I would love nothing more than that, because when I
come on your show, Margaret, I have no idea what
I'm going to get, and I'm always like, I hope
I don't get something that I don't know anything about.
And so this I feel like I can maybe contribute
to it in at least a mildly meaningful way.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So this is great.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, I figure, if nothing else, you'll have a better
sense than I do coming into it about the way
that group hysteria. Well, in this case, it's elite panic,
I would say. But oooh, the thing that I want
to talk to you about this week, and it's fitting
that you and I are in very small spaces. I
want to talk to you about the history of Heidi holes.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Ooh, I don't know anything about this, but I am
immediately engaged and utterly yes.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So what are going to be talking about? Places that
you hide things, especially place that you hide people. And
I wanted to do this because it's come up over
and over again as I read history that people survive
some pretty gnarly stuff just by hiding or I guess
being hidden by their neighbors and things. The most famous
example of this, of course, is all of the people
(03:17):
who hid Jewish folks and Roma folks and queers and
leftists during the Holocaust, in the Nazi era in Europe,
And for some weird reason, I've been thinking a lot
about the kind of work that people do to prepare
to live in a fascist society, just.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Like, totally randomly, for no reason at all.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, totally just a history interest. And I thought originally
that this week I would be mostly talking about that era,
but then I started pulling on a thread that I
knew a little bit about, and Okay, this is a
completely normal thing to do with your time. Are here
to watch the people who magnet fish? No, okay, they're
(03:56):
these people who get really powerful magnets and they go
in cities, especially to like canals and rivers and stuff,
and they drop these really powerful magnets off of bridges
and they pull up stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
That's cool. Yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
As someone who loves to use my metal detector, that's
just like cranking it the magnet fish.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
I've never done it, yeah, but there is a thing
that often happens where people are like actually trying to
pull up something that is not pull up able by
a magnet. Okay, right, and so I had this little
tiny thread that I was going to pull on, and
it is this whole week's worth of episodes, because this
week we are going to be talking about the priest
(04:38):
holes of England. And that is not as dirty as.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
That sounds, not as Yeah, that's immediately what I thought. Okay,
all right, I don't even have a response to that.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I just excited to find out.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That ever heard anything about the priest holes of sixteenth
century England?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
No, but I'm thrilled.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
So the shortest version of this is that starting in
the sixteenth century or so, Catholicism was more or less outlawed,
and when I say more or less, people were absolutely
getting burned at the stake. Yeah, and priests were being
hunted by a group of people that would make an
excellent D and D class, but as a bad actual profession,
which is priest hunter. Wow, that was a job you
(05:18):
could have.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
That's real.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, that's completely real. There's another like fancy name that
they had also that I forgot to write into my
script because I didn't know how to pronounce it. It's like
a pursuant or something like that. So there's this entire
class of people who are hunting priests throughout the ands,
and they're bounty hunters and they're getting paid per priest.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right m hm.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
So people hid their priests in their houses against the
priest hunt. And one guy in particular is known for
his work building these Heidi holes. He's so known for
it that he now is known as Saint Nicholas owen oohter.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Saint Nicholas himself.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
A different Saint Nicholas. But you know what, I think
we can just decide that Christmas is actually about hiding.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Well, the original Saint Nicholas. I remember there were stories
of him pickling children in his basement, but that's the
story for another time.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I know nothing about that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Well, you know, we did a War on Christmas episode
and I think we talk about the pickling Santa, but
I can't.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I can't be sure.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
It's okay, okay, Now, this Saint Nicholas didn't become Saint
Nicholas until nineteen seventy. Okay, I am, But this Christmas
you should give the people that you love what they
really want, which is a place to hide people. Yeah,
not bodies. I want to be really clear about this. Yes,
living people, which are actually harder to hide. They have
(06:46):
to have like food tubes and things.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, and they have to be really quiet, like in
a quiet place.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, I can't have a baby. Why'd they have a
baby in that movie?
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Anyway, So, as always, I quickly found out that in
order to understand priest holes, I had to understand the
persecution that the Catholics faced, and therefore the persecution that
the Protestants faced at the hands of the Catholics before that,
and just the whole thing so tall order. Yeah, I
(07:16):
threw the magnet in and I pulled out several bicycles.
I don't know, I'm trying to think of heavy things
that you can pull out of a river. Canon, I
pulled out a cannon.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Sweet.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
One of my favorite things is when I read history
where modern historians weigh in super hard on ancient rivalries
and come swinging with like transparent propaganda. And this is
absolutely one of those things. Every single I account I
read about this was either like, yeah, the priests were
kind of whining the Catholics, I mean, it wasn't whatever,
(07:49):
they kind of had it coming. Or they are like,
truly none have suffered as the Catholics suffered.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Sure, Yeah, so it's one extreme or the other.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah. So that's one of my favorite things about reading
history because I actually kind of enjoy it when it's
like really transparent.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Oh, I love it too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
One of my least favorite things about reading history is
trying to keep track of various English monarchs. But this
week I'm going to do a little bit of what
I love and a little bit of what I hate.
Because this story, it's context involves telling you a little squabble,
a little tiff between two queens. You marry the first
(08:28):
the first ever queen regnant of England, like a queen
is actually ruling versus just married to the king. She's
marry two door. You can make jokes about three doors
down if you really try. But everyone I tried this
on ahead of time hasn't been excited about it. So
I just want you all to imagine jokes about that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Imagine that you made one.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, but a good one, unlike all the ones that
I've tried. That everyone I've talked to whenever I'm doing
an episode, i'm working on a script, it's like all
EDA can talk about. I have like friends who call
me to tell me about their life problems, and I'm like, well,
let me tell you who had problems marry two or
had problems.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm the same way.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I just watch people like they watch like the Simpsons
thing where it's turkey in the straw in Homer's head
in church. Yeah, that's how I feel like people are
reacting to me.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yes the time. So it's always good to be here.
That's another history herd.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, and it's like it's also a good like test,
like can I be so excited about something to make
other people excited upout?
Speaker 1 (09:22):
True? Really true? Yeah, that's the goal.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The thing about Mary Tudor that I immediately find interesting
is that she's Bloody Mary. She is the woman who
appears in the mirror if you say her name, that
I was terrified of as a child, and then wrote
a long essay about transsexuality and being the woman in
the mirror.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Oh that is so cool.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
But I do have to tell you, Margaret, we just
did our Halloween special on Bloody Mary and the whole
history of the urban legend. So I very much appreciate this,
and I will say, what you're saying is just one theory.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
We don't know for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
That was. What I can tell you is that she
was named Bloody Mary.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
She was definitely named Bloody Mary. Yes, the connection between
it is more tenuous, but she is, of course bloody Mary.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
She did a lot of bloody stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, although less than everyone on either side of her, honestly. Like, like,
someone wrote this polemic against her, called against monstrous regiment
because she was monstrous, because she was a woman, because
a woman was running England.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Well, yeah, that's just science.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I know, she did burn several hundred Protestants at the.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Stakes, That's what I'm thinking of.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, just the monarchs on either side of her did
just as much as the thing. Yes, yes, but okay, wait,
what are some of the other theories?
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
I mean it has a lot to do with just
different light, because every Bloody Mary thing is different, right.
I mean we went back to like the Halloween cards
that they used to send out in early Halloween, and
the Victorian era was like it was focused on women
and girls basically trying to divine their future husband, so
(11:06):
they would sit in front of the mirror and chant
and then it would be like a man would appear.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So my theory was like that.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
As we kind of got through second wave feminism, it
was no longer that you were looking for the husband
in the mirror, so you could talk about the different
types of like monstrous women you were looking for in
the mirror and why. But it kind of comes out
of that tradition. But then you go back and back
and the Puritans had all these divining methods for figuring
out who their husband was going to be. So it's
(11:34):
like a lot about the occult and girlhood and why
girls are you know, seeking the occult in these quiet indoorways,
but boys get to go out to the graveyard and
like stomp on the witch's graves and you know. So
it's I always like to take a very complicated approach obviously,
but you should listen to the episode.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think you'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
No. I like that because some of the divination stuff
I know around Sawin and Halloween and Ireland is always
a like who you gonna marry?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
And I just love that it all comes down to
plane mash in the schoolyard.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
That's the literal like final boss. It's like it just
trickled down urban legends.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I guess. Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
DeCamp during the summer is when I learned about palm reading.
When I learned about all kinds of divination. You know.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Of course I was absolutely the kid holding the seances
at the sleepover that parents were wary of.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, hell yeah, that was me.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Okay. So there's Mary tudor Bloody Mary, all right, and
then there's Elizabeth, her half sister, Elizabeth the first Mary
liked burning Protestants. Elizabeth liked burning Catholics. It was a
bad time to have a religion.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I suppose, Yeah, it seems like it.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
So I'm going to try and explain all this shit, right,
But first, do you know what needs no explanation, needs
no introduction at all?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
What's that? Margaret?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The fine products and services that support this podcast is
nodding excitedly saying, yes, this is appen. We did incredible transition,
thank you, thinking, here's the beds and we're back. I
wanted everyone to have a deep breath before I talk
(13:16):
about something really scary. Protestants. So there's three different routes
of Protestantism. There's probably more, but we're gonna go with three.
One is the most famous. A guy named Martin Luther
nailed some ideas to a door and was like, hey,
we should do a reformation. This is not actually how
it went, but I'm going to oversimplify it. Sure, this
is where almost all the major Protestant denominations get their start.
(13:38):
And we've talked a little bit on this show about
another route, the Bohemian Reformation, that actually happened before that,
and how some of those folks ended up in North
America actually throwing down alongside of indigenous folks and interesting ways.
And we talked about this in our Nonjlema episodes a
couple months ago. And then there's a third route to Protestantism,
(13:59):
the Anglican Church, and its roots are far less noble.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I know a little about them, yes, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
To be clear, when I talk about any of this,
I'm actually not trying to imply anything about modern religion.
Just the modern Anglican Church, especially the American side of
the Episcopalians, are actually like some of the nicer, more
progressive folks you're going to run across within Christianity. But
the Anglican Church, it was started, of course, famously by
(14:29):
Henry the eighth, maybe the most famous king of England.
He's mostly famous for beheading his wives and starting an
entire church. His dad the seventh. Imagine just being like hey, dad,
or hey the seventh. That's how I like to imagine
they talked about each other, and they were like, yes,
eight seven.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Eight nine, there's a joke in there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Oh god, nor there's a secret spooky thing about the ninth.
There is no Well, maybe there's a Henry the ninth. Yeah,
but his son is Edward the whatever. We'll get to it.
His dad, Henry the seventh, had won a whole civil war,
the War of the Roses, to become king. I don't
know anything about that. I don't want to know about
it until I have to. Henry the Eighth he becomes king,
(15:13):
he marries his first wife, a woman about five years
older than him named Catherine. After five miscarriages, Catherine gave
birth to a baby girl, Mary, who you might see
in the maryor we call her Mary Tudor because there's
a fucking lot of people named Mary, including a second
Mary in this story, who is going to hold a
very similar position. He wanted a son because of patriarchy,
(15:36):
and the two of them just didn't manage to have
a son. Now, despite winding up a famed reformer of
the church, Henry the Eighth fucking hated Protestantism and Protestants.
He wrote all these anti luther triestises. The Pope gave
him the title Defender of the Faith, but probably in
Latin because of how much he liked setting Protestants on fire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, but he.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Wanted to have his wedding to Catherine and gnuled because
she was older than him and not making sons, and
because he wanted to fuck her maid of honor as
you do. Yeah, this is the main version of this story.
So he declared the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism,
except the King of England is now the head of
the church instead of the Pope, and he kept burning
Protestants at the stake because he still hated Protestants even
(16:22):
though he was technically one now. He also killed a
lot of Catholics. And I've read a bunch of different
arguments about why he split from the church. Is this
a thing? Have you done?
Speaker 1 (16:32):
A hysteria responancial?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
I mean, I know a little bit about it. My
family is actually very British. My mom was born in England,
so I feel like I have maybe a little little
more knowledge, but not much because I haven't ever found
it to be that compelling.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I know I needed a way in.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
You needed a push, And for me, the way in.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Was like actually realizing that they were doing real oppression
to each other. Like not to the I don't give
a shit if the king's oppressed the king, I honestly
just don't care, but like, they were absolutely oppressing people.
And so there's all of these uprisings that get painted
in history as like, well, they didn't like the other religion,
so they had an uprising. And that's as nonsensical as
(17:13):
people when people look at geopolitics now and are like, well,
the Palestinians, they just they have a different religion than Israel.
That's what it's about.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Like, no, it's not okay, all right, this is actually
I'm in now you've you've also pulled me in.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah, well okay. And so the other thing about it,
so most of the versions of the story, like the
version of the story that I heard as a kid, was,
you know, this whole thing where he's like he wanted
an air and you know, it's kind of a middle
of the road approach where he was like, ah, he
was a bastard, and well whatever he was worried about bastards,
but he like wanted an air right and wanted to
(17:48):
sleep with more women, except he could have slept with
anyone he wants. He's literally the king.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He didn't need to create a whole religion about it, really,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, although actually there's a weird thing where his next wife,
he actually was like trying to be like, yeah, what's up.
We have the letters where he's like, yeah, what's up,
and she's like not until we're married, and he's like,
all right, I'm working on it. I'm trying to anowl.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
It literally are like rearranging the history of the world
right now for you, babe.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah. Romantic Yeah, and then he's gonna chop her head off,
but we'll get to that. So the most sympathetic to
Henry the eighth version, which is I have no expectation
that this is the real reason. But the most sympathetic
accounts claimed that he did it because his marriage to
Catherine wasn't actually holy, because the Bible says that you
(18:32):
can't marry your brother's widow.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
It does say that.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, Margaret, can I tell you that I've been reading
the Bible from what I'm doing start to finish, and
I did get through those rules recently, so I can confirm, yes.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Okay, what brought on this book club for yourself?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
I love biblical history.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
I really do like just understanding the context of like
the document that, though I find to be completely outrageous
and insane, is the basis of most of the culture
that we know. So I was like, you know what,
I'm gonna just do it. I've always wanted to. But
it's I'm about fifteen percent done and I've been at
it for like a month and a half.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
There's like a handful of texts that have impacted society
and inn you can't even count level. And it's like,
you know, yeah the Bible, Lolita, like that's happening.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, yeah, both have similar moral stances, are a lot
of issues actually those two books.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
I fear you are correct so far.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
One of my favorite Biblical things is that you can't
eat bats. I don't know why I found that to
be so amusing, but I really want to name something
the Bible says you can't eat bats. Maybe a Halloween album? Sure, thanks, Sophie, Sure, sure,
whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
All right, cut it.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I actually share your interest in this. I haven't done
it yet. I haven't sat down to read the Bible yet. Instead,
I like spend way too much time reading like biblical
scholars talking about what they were and weren't trying to say,
and not necessarily from a theological position, but like a
like this is a list of societal ideas from where
a lot of our society comes from, like what people
(20:28):
thought about two thousand years ago. And it's funny too,
right because like modern right wing people get everything wrong.
Not because the Bible is left wing, it's not at all.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Although it's pretty pro be nice to neighbors and foreigners.
That's actually it's pretty consistent on that.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
That's very true.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Even the Old Testament is like it just is always
like be nice to foreigners. I've been like, damn, this
feels pretty uh, pretty basic stuff here.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
But yeah, they like they missed that one. They instead
like nitpick the really weird specific things. But it's just
funny because it's like, you know, the whole like man
shall not lie with man, is he does with women
is an abomination. Thing. I can't remember I said this
last week or not, or I was just a conversation
I had because I'm really good at entertaining my friends
and everyone likes me, is that it has nothing to
do with homosexuality, because that didn't really exist as a concept,
(21:10):
and instead it's about like, no, you can't degrade a man.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Sure, it's really the way that you degrade women. Yeah, yeah,
aye buy that.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
It's a really passing moment so far that I had
gotten to in the Bible about it. It's not not
a huge deal because they're killing people who are working
on the Sabbath. And baby, a lot of you are
working on the Sabbath.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Yeah, working on the Sabbath eating bats.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yep, I know.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Oh my god, I wonder if that's why Ozzy Osborne
did it? Oh wait, was it Alice Cooper one of
the like Chakras Bozzie?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Oh he's going to hell now he ate that path.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Oh no, So most people are pretty sure Henry the
Eighth wasn't specifically trying to get his marriage and all
because he was afraid of it being on the whole
that he had married his brother's widow, but instead was
trying to get out of the marriage and that was
the best option that he thought he had. And yeah,
most of what I've read and what I learned in
(22:09):
school was a Henry the eighth wanted a son, and
he wanted to fox someone younger, like his wife's maid.
But the argument I'm running across that I find the
most convincing and is what kind of hooked me in,
is that he looked around, he saw how rich the
church was and was like, oh, what if I just
like took all their shit, Like what if I just
robbed the church of everything? Because everything that's just about
(22:34):
religion quote unquote is also about property, always in forever.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
The Catholic Church was a major landowner and landlord in England.
This keeps coming up, by the way, whenever there's like
peasant uprisings that are about religion. The peasants don't care
about transubstantiation. They care about whether there's actual food in them. Yeah, right,
but you know they'll put things in the drapings of
(22:59):
whatever makes the most well.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
I'm sure there's a lot of like propaganda, culture war
stuff even then to kind of make it, you know,
make people riled up about things like that, and oh yeah,
so distract them from Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
But the Catholic Church was a major landowner and landlord
in England. They owned about a fourth of the rented
land as far as I understand, or maybe it was
a fourth of the rented estates. And it's probably a
bad thing that the Church was like this major landowner, right.
I've always run across it as bad, and that makes
sense to me. Landlord's not my favorite thing, but it's
the way it was. And the Anglican Reformation confiscated all
(23:34):
the church's property and suddenly they enclosed the shit out
of the Commons, enemy of the pod Enclosure of the
Commons is what all of this stuff comes down to.
They're like, how do we make the rich richer and
fuck over the poor? And one of the ways is
to steal everything from the church because the Church liked
being richer than the people, right, And they had a
lot of internal fights about that, but overall they're pretty
(23:54):
into that. But they didn't do it as egregiously. And
so the Anglican Reformation enclosed the Commons and tens of
thousands of people are evicted from their homes. Plus, of
course you have nine hundred religious houses of various kinds,
like a friaries, which is totally a word I knew
before this. I absolutely totally knew that definitely, Like the
(24:16):
nunneries and the friaries are all shut down. One in
about fifty adult men were directly part of the church
in some order or another in this era, and so
this is very disruptive and unpopular the Anglican Reformation as
compared to the other reformations. As far as I understand,
I haven't really done anything about Martin Luther. Yet it
(24:36):
was top down, it was imposed on people. So in
fifteen thirty six, when twenty thousand peasants took up arms
to say, hey, we're actually allowed to be Catholic, they
were also trying to say, hey, by stealing all the
church's property and kicking us out and closing the commons,
you're fucking us and we don't want that.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Is it true?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Like the way that Catholicism is today where there is
like an idea that you need to do good works
and help the poor, like that is actually part of Catholicism.
Where is it not as much Protestantism? Do you think
that was part of it too? Is like by taking
money away from the church, who were taking away like
alms from people and things like that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, I suspect that's heavily part of it, because there
is like a it's like a thing that actually came up.
I recently did a bunch of stuff about ancient Greece,
and one thing a historian talked about was that beggars
in ancient Greece actually had it worse than the Christian
and especially the Catholic era of medieval Europe, because giving
alms is good for your soul in the Catholic tradition.
And yeah, so it's like again and not trying to
(25:39):
be like the Catholic Church was good and noble, but
it had people within it who are trying to be
good and noble. I'm fine as compared to the.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
King, yeah, iypoth sis, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah. The leaders of that rising, the Lincolnshire Rising, were
all executed. This is under Henry the eighth. So they
tried to do it non violently stead and they got
twice the numbers, forty thousand peasants and priests and monks
demanding that they can be Catholic and also not starved
to death or whatever. This is called the pilgrimage of Grace.
(26:11):
And of course his history has shown us. Of course
they were listened to because they were nonviolent and all
of their no, wait, no, wait, I got that wrong.
Oh no, it was disbanded and all the leaders were executed.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Oh yeah, okay, that's smart.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Probably pretty horribly Yeah. And then there was Bigods Rebellion,
which sort of looks like Big God, which I think
is cool. And this is in fifteen thirty seven. This
led to two hundred executions, and so people didn't take
it lying down that they were suddenly told that they
had to be a new religion. But people in power
(26:43):
are willing to kill over property in law every time,
still do so. Henry the Eighth, he's created the Church
of England and stolen all the churches money that they
stole from the working people. And then he's killed all
the working people who are mad about it, and he's
annulled his marriage to Catholic. She remains Catholic and faithful, though,
(27:03):
so she doesn't believe in the annulment, and until she
dies at fifty of probably cancer, she holds that she's
the rightful Queen of England. And if you want to
be the Queen of England.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
I would be really great at that job.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
That's actually true. I would be.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Really great at that job. I would be so helpful
and really see it.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
The first thing I would do is say, there's no
longer any Queens of England.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Nail that high. I thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
This position is no longer need.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, I'm keeping this scepter, but just purely just so
I have something to tell me.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Also, any countries that in the UK we don't own
you anymore, yeah, have an oprah.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And you get exactly here's all the art we stole.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
I'm just saying so.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
And Queen Sophie for queen, you know what, I will
vote for you or actually the thing I've learned about
how to try and make Queens of England and this
time is assassinate a lot of people and blow people
up and whatever is necessary, but mostly listening to ads.
(28:23):
And we're back. So Henry the eighth he marries Anne Boleyn, next,
the maid of Honor that he was trying to fucking
for like seven years. He's like writing her letters being like, yeah,
what's up, and she has a ton of miscarriages and
then eventually gives the king a daughter, Elizabeth. The first
historians have like written a lot about like what might
have been going on about There's like some specific medical
(28:44):
conditions that you can have that are going to lead
to some of his health problems that he had and
also like lead to difficult berths for the people that
you are sleeping with. So it was his hault quite possibly, Yeah,
not known for certain, but a lot of people. The
most annoying thing is if you try to read about
Henry the eighth, I'm trying to find things like why
(29:06):
did this man hate women so much? And instead I
find thing after thing talking about the fact that he's fat.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Great, And there's so many pictures of his armor that
are like and this is his waist size, And I'm like, man,
I actually think you should lead with a number of wives.
He'd beheaded. I actually think that's a more important fact.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Maybe that's more important.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
You know. The turkey leg is a myth that he like,
you know, you see him like with that giant turkey
leg and pop culture, Yeah, there's never like an image
of him with a giant turkey leg. That's like a
really old Mandela effect.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
That makes sense, And it probably was a like check
out this fat guy. That's what I'm like, that's not
what's wrong with this man.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
No, it's like, have you seen how many turkey legs?
This dude can house.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, I'm like more concerned about the wives he goes
through y and the forcing everyone to change religions.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
And so they have a daughter, Elizabeth the first, And
for whatever reason, historians argue about why Henry the eighth
was like, I have an idea, dear wife of mine,
sixteen months into their marriage, what if I frame you
up on adultery and incest charges and then claimed you
fucked your brother and then cut your head off.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, and he was king, So he did that, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Maybe it was because she didn't give him a son.
Maybe it was because and again, she only wanted to
close some of the monasteries, and more specifically, she wanted
to use the loot that they were stealing from the
Catholic Church for charity.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Ooh, he's not going to buy that. Yeah no, no, wow.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And this guy Thomas Cromwell, who's the grandfather of the
guy who's going to genocide Ireland. Who's more famous Oliver Cromwell.
That's not what Cromwell's famous for, but it should be.
So I'm going to lead with that. Thomas Cromwell is
the Secretary of State and he kind of arranged the
whole execution thing. Later though, cancel culture is going to
(30:59):
come for him too. In a couple of years, he's
going to get arrested and beheaded also, Okay, After killing
his second wife, Henry the Eighth married another woman who
had a son and then died because of that birth.
Then he married a fifth woman who he accused of
cheating and had beheaded, and then he married a sixth
and final wife. Fuck Henry the eighth. That's a speed
(31:19):
run through Henry the Eighth. Yeah, but his two daughters
are important characters, and they're presented as polar opposites. But
the main thing I know about them is that they
liked burning heretics at the stake.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Hey, girls have to pond over something.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
That's true, right, and they just disagreed about who counted
as heretics. And then you can really easily see whether
you're reading a like pro Protestant or pro Catholic thing,
because if you're reading a pro Protestant thing, it's like, well,
Elizabeth didn't want to burn the Catholics, but they forced
her to, And the Catholic ones about Mary are literally
the same. They're just like, but it wasn't really about heresy.
(31:54):
It was about holding onto political power. They were trying
to overthrow the government. Oh god, okay, But first before
either of them can get around to burning people and
being in charge, Henry the Eighth has to die, and
he dies of being alive in the medieval era. He's
like fifty or fifty five or something. I don't know.
Everyone's like that's cause of whatever. Anyway, I'm just really
(32:15):
mad at the fat phobia history.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But there's a lot of waste to die in the
fifteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, his son's going to die at sixteen, all right, Like,
I don't think that he had an extra turkey leg
at dinner is the problem here, I don't think. So,
I'm just going to go with this turkey leg thing now.
I've decided to believe in it. I'm a believer in
a conspiracy that is trying to get people to stop
believing in Henry the Eighth and turkey legs.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
It's an epidemic.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, Henry the Eighth dies, and his son, who's nine
years old, is deemed to be a better heir than
either sister, which you know.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Obviously not surprised.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So Edward the sixth becomes king for all of six years.
He didn't want the kingdom to go Atholic, so he
named his sixteen year old cousin, Lady Jane Gray, to
be his heir, and he made the country way more Protestant.
Priests could fuck. Services had to be in English. And
there's a whole rebellion about it, the Prayer Book Rebellion
(33:14):
of fifteen forty nine. So the crown looked at a
rebellion of their own people and said, I know, let's
hire foreign mercenaries to kill them all.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
And at least two thousand of the rebels were killed
right off in the fighting, and thousands more were killed
after they surrendered. Then our teenage king went ahead and
got sick and died when he was fifteen years old,
probably a friend of the pod tuberculosis.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I can't believe how many like teen kings there were.
I think the stress of that, I just can't imagine
how a teenager can handle it. But I guess I
don't know. Kids back then were like thirty basically.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
That's true. Fifteen, you know, you're like, all right, well
I did pretty good, you know, I made it to fifteen,
had a good run. It was a king for six years,
they did have a I think it's called protectorates where
there was like people.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
In charge of guiding them.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, and kind of like like an underage king. I
think I actually don't know what age this is. I
think it's different every time, but I'm not sure an
underage king is like half in charge.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Every child king needs a dick Cheney exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
He's dead.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Do you think that's what Jade Vance thought he was
going to do. Do you think he thought he was
going to be the power behind the throne.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I do think that, I really really think that.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
What a fool.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, I know. I wonder how long his heart will last.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Well, I do know that when the heart of whatever
that kid's name is, I just saideen King Edward the sixth. Yeah,
I do know that. When he died, Lady Jane Gray
was handed the kingdom on July tenth, fifteen fifty three,
because he'd been like, oh no, my cousin, she's the heir.
Mary though, was clearly the people's choice, and so she
(35:10):
gathered up supporters and marched on London and then everyone
was like, including Lady Jane Gray, was like, you're right,
you should be in charge, Okay, I see the persuasiveness
of your argument. It has spears.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
The group of senior advisors to the Throne the Privy
Council looked at the crowd and we're like, yeah, Mary's queen.
I guess. Lady Jane Gray was queen for nine days,
so in some ways she's the first queen regnant, and
then there's like another one from like eleven hundred. It
was like, in general, Mary's the first one who counts.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I guess she popularized it. That's what I say in
American hysteria. It's like it happened before, but really it
doesn't matter, but now it matters. So popularized.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Mary popularized being queen regnant, and wasn't the popularization of
Burnie heretics at the stake. She got that from her dad,
who probably got from everyone for hundreds of years. Because actually,
one of the things that's interesting is that being a
heretic wasn't necessarily a religious crime. It was a civil crime, right.
It was like being disorderly. It was like only as
a felony in a capital offense, but it was like
(36:13):
up there with being a murderer. You're like, you're fucking
up society. You know, it's treasonous to be a heredic.
It's not just a religious problem from this point of.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
View, right, because they were just like politics and religion
were just completely married at that point.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
So yeah, yeah, and there was no annulment available, even
though they shouldn't have fucked anyway. So you have Mary,
the first Mary tudor Bloody Mary. She got her name
because of the two hundred and forty Ish Protestants she murdered,
burning them at the stake for questioning the Catholic Church,
which is a lot of people, for ruling for only
(36:48):
five years. And the Catholic apology around this is usually like, well,
she shouldn't have done it, sorry about that, but she
used proper legal procedures.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Oh good, Okay, Yeah, she followed the law.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, she didn't risk putting the country into a lawless state.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
And according to that same apologia, she actually wanted to
do religious freedom, but the Protestants forced her hand.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
There was a whole Protestant uprising that tried to overthrow her,
called Wyatt's Rebellion in fifteen fifty four. Wyatt got himself executed.
And yeah, she brings back heresy as a capital crime,
and you have the Maryan Persecutions, which is kind of
cool name from fifteen fifty five till fifteen fifty eight.
Then she died of cancer.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
It's so weird that cancer existed.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I know, like I know it did, like obviously, it
just seems so anachronistic.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I know, it feels very modern and it's like how
do we know that? We only kind of know it.
But some of it is like autopsies and tumors and
things like that, right, Okay, And in this case, Mary's
was kind of tragic. She like she thought she was
pregnant and she'd been trying to get pregnant for a
really long time. It was a tumor.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Okay, well that doesn't make sense how they figured it
out then.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, so people are like, she died of false pregnancy.
Is like the way it gets written about at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
That is sad, That's true.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, She's kind of an interesting tragic figure. Fuck a queen,
and she sure murdered people. She's like an interesting especially
once you read about people like writing like, you know,
the people she's putting at the stake are like writing
things like, you know, the monstrous regiment of women or whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
So she dies of cancer. So her sister, the Protestant
Elizabeth the First, became queen and at no point where
people like, maybe this isn't a good system of government,
although it be fair. I guess Grumwell did, and they
had a whole war about it.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, and probably people did that are now lost to history.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, that's true. Elizabeth the First kept the heresy laws
but turned them on their heads. It was illegal to
be Catholic. You were allowed to repent, but you know,
people in their religions dying because you refuse to give
up your faith as like a whole vibe and the
whole that respected thing. There's a word martyr. Within ten
days of taking the throne, she's declared herself head of
(39:04):
the church and starts seizing more Catholic assets. All the
bishops that refuse to convert, which was all of them
but one, were locked up, as this part's interesting. Originally
they're thrown in jails, but then they were locked up
in the houses of the new bishops. Oh and so
they're like, all right, your captor is the guy who
took your job.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
WHOA that's dark.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, And the thing I read about it was like
you know, probably better conditions and way way more degrading.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah, it's hard for me to actually picture and imagine
what that situation was like. Is it just like you're
in the basement, you're like locked and.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So I think that a lot of old manor houses
and stuff had jails.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Had a little jail. Yeah, that does feel true.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And I can't remember where I ran across that. It's
been a while, but I remember reading about how like
before sort of the centralization a lot of like you know,
prison systems, it was just kind of like, all right,
well we just locked this guy up.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That makes sense, Yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I think all the time about this web comic I
read a while ago that's like complaining about the prison system,
and it's like if I caught someone in my driveway
trying to steal my car and so I just like
kept him in my basement for seven years, people would
think I'm a bad person.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah, I'm going to be thinking about that now too. Yeah, yep,
because they acted within the law, right, we're.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Talking about that. It's like if you do it in prisons,
it's okay because it's part of the law.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, And that's the attitude people have and still have
about all of this. Oh yeah, you know, we're like, oh,
a good thing, we got rid of slavery. And you're like, well,
just don't read that amendment too closely where it specifically
says accepting cases of you know, punishment for crimes.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
So, just like her sister before her, Elizabeth had an excuse,
although her main excuse that people use came after she
started criminalizing Catholicism. But there was the Rising of the North,
which is a good name, when the Catholics from northern
England tried to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with the
second Mary of our episode, Mary Queen of Scots, who
(41:09):
was the Queen of the Scots. So at least seven
hundred people were executed for that little uprising thing, and
Mary spent the rest of her life in prison, although
actually she might have been arrested for a different whatever. Anyway,
she's in prison. Uprising didn't work.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Stuff's complicated, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, And priests were being hunted down and executed. Most
of the clergy in the country went into hiding her exile,
especially to Ireland, and then a lot of folks went
over to northern France, I believe, but brave priests would
smuggle themselves into England to give mass and preach because
three quarters of the population were like thirty years into
(41:44):
the Anglican Reformation, three quarters of the population is still
firmly Catholic.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Well, it's hard to even get your religion out, you know.
It's like, I guess you have the printing well, printing press.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Not yet.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I believe they're printing things in there. Oh lord, when
is I can't time. I know that some of the
people in this story at the end of the sixteenth
century are going to be printing things, and I can't
remember it's the end of the fifteenth or und of
the sixteenth.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
It's a new thing, and spreading things takes a long time.
So it makes sense that people haven't even gotten the memo,
let alone want to convert based on what totally wants.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, they're just like, well, we're not allowed to do
that anymore. We're like, bo, why, yeah, what? And I
just imagine being like but it's all kind of nonsense.
It's just this is the comforting nonsense I grew up with.
Why would this be a problem. I guess that's not
how they viewed it. No, I just don't have it
quite the modern cultural version of it, and theoretically Ireland
(42:40):
was under the rule of the English crown at this point.
But emphasis on the word theoretically. The Anglican Reformation, however,
did become a major part of the colonization of Ireland.
The rule of law everywhere that the crown ruled, which
included all of Ireland, was you have to be Protestant now.
But this was essentially unenforceable because what it was called
at the time the wild Irish another good name. Yeah.
(43:05):
What it did work and why it was such a
part of colonization is it worked to steal a ton
of Irish land and shit from the Church, which was
then put into private English hands. And it ties deeply
into how one of the main ways that Ireland is
colonizes economically by making English a landlord class over the island. Okay,
(43:26):
and then the other fun rabbit hole about this. Have
you thought about the whole like beyond the Pale and
the origins of that before?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
No?
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Okay, so I have made incorrect claims about this before
on this podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
I believe, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Because the place that Protestant was successfully enforced was called
the Pale or the Pale of Ireland or the Pale
of Dublin, which was the most Anglicized part of Ireland,
which was basically the area around Dublin. And I used
to think that beyond the Pale was a reference to
the Pale of Settlement, which is a part of the
Russian that Jews were allowed to live in. But then
(44:02):
I read about the Irish Pale and was like, oh,
it's that area because it's hundreds of years earlier and
it's closer to England, right, But it's actually not either
of those. Instead, they come from the same route. Pale
sort of means a picket, like a fencing board, and
so the pale means the fenced in area. It's the
(44:23):
same route as palisade or impale.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Okay, okay, wow, well there you go.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, I got really excited about that. Also to correct
my past self.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Hey, we love to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah. So yeah, the English robbed Ireland but failed to
convert it. But in England it was really bad news
to be a Catholic, which was more than three fourths
of the population. It was illegal to not go to
the Protestant Mass on Sunday, so you also couldn't just
be like an atheist or whatever. Right, well, you probably
(44:54):
weren't allowed to do that anyway.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
You wouldn't have even thought to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, totally. And these law they're called the penal laws.
They got more and more restrictive during the end of
the fifteen hundreds, especially once in fifteen seventy or fifteen
seventy one. I have read both in the same source.
The Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. So basically like, all right,
excommunicate me, I'm excommunicate you. And so it became illegal
(45:18):
to publish anything that the Pope wrote. It was illegal
to import or distribute Catholic material like crosses or rosaries.
It was illegal to be a priest. It was illegal
to harbor a priest. It was illegal to convert someone
to Catholicism. Most of these are killing crimes. Catholic priests
started training overseas to go on stealth missions to England,
especially from the newly formed Jesuit Order. By fifteen eighty
(45:40):
they started returning to England and were like, all right,
we have some priests now. And when I say some,
it really is some. It's like a couple hundred in
the whole country. Because there's a whole group of people
called the priest Hunters, who are generally private individuals working
as bounty hunters and they're permitted to search houses up
and down and rest and torture priests. They would read
(46:03):
people's mail, they maintained spy networks. They would pay informants,
like you snitch on someone for being a papist, get
some money. The priest hunters would go under cover and
pretend to be Catholic and arrest people who are like, ah, yes,
I too am Catholic. They'd be like haha, I got.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
You, okay, wild Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
I know. It's one of these things that sounds made up.
Yeah it does.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Priest Hunters sounds like a movie that would come out
in January.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Which is funny because like the witch Hunter thing, witch
Hunters also existed, but like this was bigger. This was bigger, huh,
at least in England. Although actually James is going to
be doing a lot of both the hating on Catholics
and witches real soon and writing a Bible.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And it would make sense that that was more pervasive
because punishing witches doesn't get you the same benefits of
like seizing things right and like taking their I don't know.
I think it makes sense that priests were more of
a threat even though they weren't like the demonic threat.
And well I guess they probably thought they were.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, yeah, well they dropped more loot. Definitely, that's true. Absolutely,
And you've got famous torturers like Richard Topcliff, who is
again if only there were a show about bad people.
He is famous for sexual assault and for building a
torture dungeon in his own house with the queen's permission. Okay,
(47:25):
also possibly groped the queen and got away with it.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Wow, is there just a source that says, like, how
do they know that?
Speaker 2 (47:34):
One of the things I read was like many people
claimed he groped the queen when it's talking about how
he like assaulted people like all the time. And then
that one was sourced, but it was to a book
that I don't have. Okay, that's fine, that's as far
as I was, like, this rabbit hole has stopped, now.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
We need to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, And so he is one of the most scoundrelly scoundrels,
devere scoundrel he also I read an academic paper about
him about how he voraciously read every book that he
confiscated about Catholicism and saw himself as like a professional
reader to better understand his enemies, and he took a
ton of notes in the margin. So he was the
(48:11):
one who would like, He's like, ah, I killed these
people and tortured them, and I found their books, and
here's some notes about what they say in their books
for everyone to read. So he's like doing the cliff
notes of them for people.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Okay, So the.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Priests were like, man, I don't like any of that
stuff happening to me, but I kind of feel like
I should still do this thing that I believe in.
So I guess they need to hide. They traveled around
the country, and before the heat was really turned up
and the priest hunting got intense, they would just like
show up and if someone came looking, they'd be like,
oh no, we're just like visiting relatives. We're just like
that's just my uncle, you know, or whatever. But soon
(48:45):
enough that wasn't enough, and they would travel around under
a variety of disguises. They'd be like, oh, I'm just
a traveling tutor or whatever, and they would hide if
they had to, and what are called priest holes hidden
compartments and houses all across the entry for hiding persecuted people.
These had to be meticulously built because the priest hunters
(49:06):
were meticulous. The priest hunters would measure the inside and
outside of houses and rooms, looking for discrepancies. They would
count the windows outside the house and make sure they
knew where each one was inside. They would walk around
sticking swords between floorboards and wall panels to see if
anyone would scream or bleed. They would search a house
(49:27):
and then pretend to leave to see if anyone emerged
from hiding.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Sex, serial killor shit.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
It really is And I honestly like, I'm just like,
I don't know to take notes everyone, if you think
it about possible futures.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
These are the ways that they mightn't find you out.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, so people built really good priest holes, people like
Saint Nicholas Owen, who will talk about on Wednesday. Then
then dumb, very.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Cool, Okay, anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Oh, I mean, yeah, I love this. This has been
really interesting and I cannot wait to see where it goes.
So thank you both. And yeah, you can just find
American Hysteria wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
As they say, Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
It's going to tie into another modern kind of hysteria
thing because Guy Fox is going to make your parents
guy big gunpowder plot.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
All right, Yeah, I love to see him. All right.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Well, check out American Hysteria and check us out on Wednesday,
and check out Cooler Zone Media. It's the same, only
you don't have to listen to ads.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. The more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Goolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the five or radio app podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that actually, secretly most podcasters record
out of their closets. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this week, not only am I in a closet,
but my guest, Chelsea Weber Smith, host of American Hysteria,
appears to be. And I don't want to make any
assumptions in a closet. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hi, Margaret, I am in a closet, and it is
the only place in my home that isn't too echoey
to record. And yeah, I think it's important for people
to know that the glamour you think that we live in,
it's not true.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
We're all in the closet, especially as you like move
up more towards professional podcasting where you have like higher
needs in terms of echoes and all of yes, uh
huh exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
And some people who do video are in those cool studios,
But for those of us who haven't made that demonic
jump into video content, we're stuck in the closet.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I remember when my producer not Sophie, Hi.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Sophie, Hi, okay Sophie.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
When my producer Ian was like Margaret, I hate to
tell you this. You have to go back in the closet.
That's cute, that's my closet joke. But it's also true.
It's a moment that happened.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
It was really hard for me not to make and
in the closet joke just now, But I really I
physically restrained my.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I also physically restrained myself because it just felt so easy.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
It was too easy.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
You could make these jokes. It's totally fine. No one
will be upset by them. No one is sensitive about
these things. That's what's so nice about joking around identity.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Oh, I know, nobody gets sensitive in this economy, in
this country.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh no, no, we can't afford it anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I actually like, I actually agree that we can't afford
it anymore. We have to keep our eyes focused on
the people who are actually doing homophobia and not the
people who are I.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Will say that every day of my life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So, I was thinking, you are the host of American Hysteria,
which is a podcast that on some level lives up
to its name. Is that a decent way to put it?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I think?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, what if I decided to tell you about some
British hysteria.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I would love nothing more than that, because when I
come on your show, Margaret, I have no idea what
I'm going to get, and I'm always like, I hope
I don't get something that I don't know anything about.
And so this I feel like I can maybe contribute
to it in at least a mildly meaningful way.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So this is great.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, I figure, if nothing else, you'll have a better
sense than I do coming into it about the way
that group hysteria. Well, in this case, it's elite panic,
I would say. But oooh, the thing that I want
to talk to you about this week, and it's fitting
that you and I are in very small spaces. I
want to talk to you about the history of Heidi holes.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Ooh, I don't know anything about this, but I am
immediately engaged and utterly yes.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So what are going to be talking about? Places that
you hide things, especially place that you hide people. And
I wanted to do this because it's come up over
and over again as I read history that people survive
some pretty gnarly stuff just by hiding or I guess
being hidden by their neighbors and things. The most famous
example of this, of course, is all of the people
(03:17):
who hid Jewish folks and Roma folks and queers and
leftists during the Holocaust, in the Nazi era in Europe,
And for some weird reason, I've been thinking a lot
about the kind of work that people do to prepare
to live in a fascist society, just.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Like, totally randomly, for no reason at all.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, totally just a history interest. And I thought originally
that this week I would be mostly talking about that era,
but then I started pulling on a thread that I
knew a little bit about, and Okay, this is a
completely normal thing to do with your time. Are here
to watch the people who magnet fish? No, okay, they're
(03:56):
these people who get really powerful magnets and they go
in cities, especially to like canals and rivers and stuff,
and they drop these really powerful magnets off of bridges
and they pull up stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
That's cool. Yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
As someone who loves to use my metal detector, that's
just like cranking it the magnet fish.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
I've never done it, yeah, but there is a thing
that often happens where people are like actually trying to
pull up something that is not pull up able by
a magnet. Okay, right, and so I had this little
tiny thread that I was going to pull on, and
it is this whole week's worth of episodes, because this
week we are going to be talking about the priest
(04:38):
holes of England. And that is not as dirty as.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
That sounds, not as Yeah, that's immediately what I thought. Okay,
all right, I don't even have a response to that.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I just excited to find out.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That ever heard anything about the priest holes of sixteenth
century England?
Speaker 1 (04:55):
No, but I'm thrilled.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
So the shortest version of this is that starting in
the sixteenth century or so, Catholicism was more or less outlawed,
and when I say more or less, people were absolutely
getting burned at the stake. Yeah, and priests were being
hunted by a group of people that would make an
excellent D and D class, but as a bad actual profession,
which is priest hunter. Wow, that was a job you
(05:18):
could have.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
That's real.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, that's completely real. There's another like fancy name that
they had also that I forgot to write into my
script because I didn't know how to pronounce it. It's like
a pursuant or something like that. So there's this entire
class of people who are hunting priests throughout the ands,
and they're bounty hunters and they're getting paid per priest.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right m hm.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
So people hid their priests in their houses against the
priest hunt. And one guy in particular is known for
his work building these Heidi holes. He's so known for
it that he now is known as Saint Nicholas owen oohter.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Saint Nicholas himself.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
A different Saint Nicholas. But you know what, I think
we can just decide that Christmas is actually about hiding.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Well, the original Saint Nicholas. I remember there were stories
of him pickling children in his basement, but that's the
story for another time.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I know nothing about that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Well, you know, we did a War on Christmas episode
and I think we talk about the pickling Santa, but
I can't.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I can't be sure.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
It's okay, okay, Now, this Saint Nicholas didn't become Saint
Nicholas until nineteen seventy. Okay, I am, But this Christmas
you should give the people that you love what they
really want, which is a place to hide people. Yeah,
not bodies. I want to be really clear about this. Yes,
living people, which are actually harder to hide. They have
(06:46):
to have like food tubes and things.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, and they have to be really quiet, like in
a quiet place.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, I can't have a baby. Why'd they have a
baby in that movie?
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Anyway, So, as always, I quickly found out that in
order to understand priest holes, I had to understand the
persecution that the Catholics faced, and therefore the persecution that
the Protestants faced at the hands of the Catholics before that,
and just the whole thing so tall order. Yeah, I
(07:16):
threw the magnet in and I pulled out several bicycles.
I don't know, I'm trying to think of heavy things
that you can pull out of a river. Canon, I
pulled out a cannon.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Sweet.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
One of my favorite things is when I read history
where modern historians weigh in super hard on ancient rivalries
and come swinging with like transparent propaganda. And this is
absolutely one of those things. Every single I account I
read about this was either like, yeah, the priests were
kind of whining the Catholics, I mean, it wasn't whatever,
(07:49):
they kind of had it coming. Or they are like,
truly none have suffered as the Catholics suffered.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Sure, Yeah, so it's one extreme or the other.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah. So that's one of my favorite things about reading
history because I actually kind of enjoy it when it's
like really transparent.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Oh, I love it too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
One of my least favorite things about reading history is
trying to keep track of various English monarchs. But this
week I'm going to do a little bit of what
I love and a little bit of what I hate.
Because this story, it's context involves telling you a little squabble,
a little tiff between two queens. You marry the first
(08:28):
the first ever queen regnant of England, like a queen
is actually ruling versus just married to the king. She's
marry two door. You can make jokes about three doors
down if you really try. But everyone I tried this
on ahead of time hasn't been excited about it. So
I just want you all to imagine jokes about that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Imagine that you made one.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, but a good one, unlike all the ones that
I've tried. That everyone I've talked to whenever I'm doing
an episode, i'm working on a script, it's like all
EDA can talk about. I have like friends who call
me to tell me about their life problems, and I'm like, well,
let me tell you who had problems marry two or
had problems.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm the same way.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I just watch people like they watch like the Simpsons
thing where it's turkey in the straw in Homer's head
in church. Yeah, that's how I feel like people are
reacting to me.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yes the time. So it's always good to be here.
That's another history herd.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, and it's like it's also a good like test,
like can I be so excited about something to make
other people excited upout?
Speaker 1 (09:22):
True? Really true? Yeah, that's the goal.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The thing about Mary Tudor that I immediately find interesting
is that she's Bloody Mary. She is the woman who
appears in the mirror if you say her name, that
I was terrified of as a child, and then wrote
a long essay about transsexuality and being the woman in
the mirror.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Oh that is so cool.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
But I do have to tell you, Margaret, we just
did our Halloween special on Bloody Mary and the whole
history of the urban legend. So I very much appreciate this,
and I will say, what you're saying is just one theory.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
We don't know for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
That was. What I can tell you is that she
was named Bloody Mary.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
She was definitely named Bloody Mary. Yes, the connection between
it is more tenuous, but she is, of course bloody Mary.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
She did a lot of bloody stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, although less than everyone on either side of her, honestly. Like, like,
someone wrote this polemic against her, called against monstrous regiment
because she was monstrous, because she was a woman, because
a woman was running England.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Well, yeah, that's just science.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I know, she did burn several hundred Protestants at the.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Stakes, That's what I'm thinking of.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah, just the monarchs on either side of her did
just as much as the thing. Yes, yes, but okay, wait,
what are some of the other theories?
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
I mean it has a lot to do with just
different light, because every Bloody Mary thing is different, right.
I mean we went back to like the Halloween cards
that they used to send out in early Halloween, and
the Victorian era was like it was focused on women
and girls basically trying to divine their future husband, so
(11:06):
they would sit in front of the mirror and chant
and then it would be like a man would appear.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So my theory was like that.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
As we kind of got through second wave feminism, it
was no longer that you were looking for the husband
in the mirror, so you could talk about the different
types of like monstrous women you were looking for in
the mirror and why. But it kind of comes out
of that tradition. But then you go back and back
and the Puritans had all these divining methods for figuring
out who their husband was going to be. So it's
(11:34):
like a lot about the occult and girlhood and why
girls are you know, seeking the occult in these quiet indoorways,
but boys get to go out to the graveyard and
like stomp on the witch's graves and you know. So
it's I always like to take a very complicated approach obviously,
but you should listen to the episode.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think you'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
No. I like that because some of the divination stuff
I know around Sawin and Halloween and Ireland is always
a like who you gonna marry?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
And I just love that it all comes down to
plane mash in the schoolyard.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
That's the literal like final boss. It's like it just
trickled down urban legends.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I guess. Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
DeCamp during the summer is when I learned about palm reading.
When I learned about all kinds of divination. You know.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Of course I was absolutely the kid holding the seances
at the sleepover that parents were wary of.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, hell yeah, that was me.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Okay. So there's Mary tudor Bloody Mary, all right, and
then there's Elizabeth, her half sister, Elizabeth the first Mary
liked burning Protestants. Elizabeth liked burning Catholics. It was a
bad time to have a religion.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
I suppose, Yeah, it seems like it.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
So I'm going to try and explain all this shit, right,
But first, do you know what needs no explanation, needs
no introduction at all?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
What's that? Margaret?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
The fine products and services that support this podcast is
nodding excitedly saying, yes, this is appen. We did incredible transition,
thank you, thinking, here's the beds and we're back. I
wanted everyone to have a deep breath before I talk
(13:16):
about something really scary. Protestants. So there's three different routes
of Protestantism. There's probably more, but we're gonna go with three.
One is the most famous. A guy named Martin Luther
nailed some ideas to a door and was like, hey,
we should do a reformation. This is not actually how
it went, but I'm going to oversimplify it. Sure, this
is where almost all the major Protestant denominations get their start.
(13:38):
And we've talked a little bit on this show about
another route, the Bohemian Reformation, that actually happened before that,
and how some of those folks ended up in North
America actually throwing down alongside of indigenous folks and interesting ways.
And we talked about this in our Nonjlema episodes a
couple months ago. And then there's a third route to Protestantism,
(13:59):
the Anglican Church, and its roots are far less noble.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I know a little about them, yes, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
To be clear, when I talk about any of this,
I'm actually not trying to imply anything about modern religion.
Just the modern Anglican Church, especially the American side of
the Episcopalians, are actually like some of the nicer, more
progressive folks you're going to run across within Christianity. But
the Anglican Church, it was started, of course, famously by
(14:29):
Henry the eighth, maybe the most famous king of England.
He's mostly famous for beheading his wives and starting an
entire church. His dad the seventh. Imagine just being like hey, dad,
or hey the seventh. That's how I like to imagine
they talked about each other, and they were like, yes,
eight seven.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Eight nine, there's a joke in there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Oh god, nor there's a secret spooky thing about the ninth.
There is no Well, maybe there's a Henry the ninth. Yeah,
but his son is Edward the whatever. We'll get to it.
His dad, Henry the seventh, had won a whole civil war,
the War of the Roses, to become king. I don't
know anything about that. I don't want to know about
it until I have to. Henry the Eighth he becomes king,
(15:13):
he marries his first wife, a woman about five years
older than him named Catherine. After five miscarriages, Catherine gave
birth to a baby girl, Mary, who you might see
in the maryor we call her Mary Tudor because there's
a fucking lot of people named Mary, including a second
Mary in this story, who is going to hold a
very similar position. He wanted a son because of patriarchy,
(15:36):
and the two of them just didn't manage to have
a son. Now, despite winding up a famed reformer of
the church, Henry the Eighth fucking hated Protestantism and Protestants.
He wrote all these anti luther triestises. The Pope gave
him the title Defender of the Faith, but probably in
Latin because of how much he liked setting Protestants on fire.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, but he.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Wanted to have his wedding to Catherine and gnuled because
she was older than him and not making sons, and
because he wanted to fuck her maid of honor as
you do. Yeah, this is the main version of this story.
So he declared the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism,
except the King of England is now the head of
the church instead of the Pope, and he kept burning
Protestants at the stake because he still hated Protestants even
(16:22):
though he was technically one now. He also killed a
lot of Catholics. And I've read a bunch of different
arguments about why he split from the church. Is this
a thing? Have you done?
Speaker 1 (16:32):
A hysteria responancial?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
I mean, I know a little bit about it. My
family is actually very British. My mom was born in England,
so I feel like I have maybe a little little
more knowledge, but not much because I haven't ever found
it to be that compelling.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I know I needed a way in.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
You needed a push, And for me, the way in.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Was like actually realizing that they were doing real oppression
to each other. Like not to the I don't give
a shit if the king's oppressed the king, I honestly
just don't care, but like, they were absolutely oppressing people.
And so there's all of these uprisings that get painted
in history as like, well, they didn't like the other religion,
so they had an uprising. And that's as nonsensical as
(17:13):
people when people look at geopolitics now and are like, well,
the Palestinians, they just they have a different religion than Israel.
That's what it's about.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Like, no, it's not okay, all right, this is actually
I'm in now you've you've also pulled me in.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah, well okay. And so the other thing about it,
so most of the versions of the story, like the
version of the story that I heard as a kid, was,
you know, this whole thing where he's like he wanted
an air and you know, it's kind of a middle
of the road approach where he was like, ah, he
was a bastard, and well whatever he was worried about bastards,
but he like wanted an air right and wanted to
(17:48):
sleep with more women, except he could have slept with
anyone he wants. He's literally the king.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He didn't need to create a whole religion about it, really,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, although actually there's a weird thing where his next wife,
he actually was like trying to be like, yeah, what's up.
We have the letters where he's like, yeah, what's up,
and she's like not until we're married, and he's like,
all right, I'm working on it. I'm trying to anowl.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
It literally are like rearranging the history of the world
right now for you, babe.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah. Romantic Yeah, and then he's gonna chop her head off,
but we'll get to that. So the most sympathetic to
Henry the eighth version, which is I have no expectation
that this is the real reason. But the most sympathetic
accounts claimed that he did it because his marriage to
Catherine wasn't actually holy, because the Bible says that you
(18:32):
can't marry your brother's widow.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
It does say that.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, Margaret, can I tell you that I've been reading
the Bible from what I'm doing start to finish, and
I did get through those rules recently, so I can confirm, yes.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Okay, what brought on this book club for yourself?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
I love biblical history.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
I really do like just understanding the context of like
the document that, though I find to be completely outrageous
and insane, is the basis of most of the culture
that we know. So I was like, you know what,
I'm gonna just do it. I've always wanted to. But
it's I'm about fifteen percent done and I've been at
it for like a month and a half.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
There's like a handful of texts that have impacted society
and inn you can't even count level. And it's like,
you know, yeah the Bible, Lolita, like that's happening.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, yeah, both have similar moral stances, are a lot
of issues actually those two books.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
I fear you are correct so far.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
One of my favorite Biblical things is that you can't
eat bats. I don't know why I found that to
be so amusing, but I really want to name something
the Bible says you can't eat bats. Maybe a Halloween album? Sure, thanks, Sophie, Sure, sure,
whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
All right, cut it.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I actually share your interest in this. I haven't done
it yet. I haven't sat down to read the Bible yet. Instead,
I like spend way too much time reading like biblical
scholars talking about what they were and weren't trying to say,
and not necessarily from a theological position, but like a
like this is a list of societal ideas from where
a lot of our society comes from, like what people
(20:28):
thought about two thousand years ago. And it's funny too,
right because like modern right wing people get everything wrong.
Not because the Bible is left wing, it's not at all.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Although it's pretty pro be nice to neighbors and foreigners.
That's actually it's pretty consistent on that.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
That's very true.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Even the Old Testament is like it just is always
like be nice to foreigners. I've been like, damn, this
feels pretty uh, pretty basic stuff here.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
But yeah, they like they missed that one. They instead
like nitpick the really weird specific things. But it's just
funny because it's like, you know, the whole like man
shall not lie with man, is he does with women
is an abomination. Thing. I can't remember I said this
last week or not, or I was just a conversation
I had because I'm really good at entertaining my friends
and everyone likes me, is that it has nothing to
do with homosexuality, because that didn't really exist as a concept,
(21:10):
and instead it's about like, no, you can't degrade a man.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Sure, it's really the way that you degrade women. Yeah, yeah,
aye buy that.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
It's a really passing moment so far that I had
gotten to in the Bible about it. It's not not
a huge deal because they're killing people who are working
on the Sabbath. And baby, a lot of you are
working on the Sabbath.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Yeah, working on the Sabbath eating bats.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yep, I know.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Oh my god, I wonder if that's why Ozzy Osborne
did it? Oh wait, was it Alice Cooper one of
the like Chakras Bozzie?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Oh he's going to hell now he ate that path.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Oh no, So most people are pretty sure Henry the
Eighth wasn't specifically trying to get his marriage and all
because he was afraid of it being on the whole
that he had married his brother's widow, but instead was
trying to get out of the marriage and that was
the best option that he thought he had. And yeah,
most of what I've read and what I learned in
(22:09):
school was a Henry the eighth wanted a son, and
he wanted to fox someone younger, like his wife's maid.
But the argument I'm running across that I find the
most convincing and is what kind of hooked me in,
is that he looked around, he saw how rich the
church was and was like, oh, what if I just
like took all their shit, Like what if I just
robbed the church of everything? Because everything that's just about
(22:34):
religion quote unquote is also about property, always in forever.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
The Catholic Church was a major landowner and landlord in England.
This keeps coming up, by the way, whenever there's like
peasant uprisings that are about religion. The peasants don't care
about transubstantiation. They care about whether there's actual food in them. Yeah, right,
but you know they'll put things in the drapings of
(22:59):
whatever makes the most well.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
I'm sure there's a lot of like propaganda, culture war
stuff even then to kind of make it, you know,
make people riled up about things like that, and oh yeah,
so distract them from Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
But the Catholic Church was a major landowner and landlord
in England. They owned about a fourth of the rented
land as far as I understand, or maybe it was
a fourth of the rented estates. And it's probably a
bad thing that the Church was like this major landowner, right.
I've always run across it as bad, and that makes
sense to me. Landlord's not my favorite thing, but it's
the way it was. And the Anglican Reformation confiscated all
(23:34):
the church's property and suddenly they enclosed the shit out
of the Commons, enemy of the pod Enclosure of the
Commons is what all of this stuff comes down to.
They're like, how do we make the rich richer and
fuck over the poor? And one of the ways is
to steal everything from the church because the Church liked
being richer than the people, right, And they had a
lot of internal fights about that, but overall they're pretty
(23:54):
into that. But they didn't do it as egregiously. And
so the Anglican Reformation enclosed the Commons and tens of
thousands of people are evicted from their homes. Plus, of
course you have nine hundred religious houses of various kinds,
like a friaries, which is totally a word I knew
before this. I absolutely totally knew that definitely, Like the
(24:16):
nunneries and the friaries are all shut down. One in
about fifty adult men were directly part of the church
in some order or another in this era, and so
this is very disruptive and unpopular the Anglican Reformation as
compared to the other reformations. As far as I understand,
I haven't really done anything about Martin Luther. Yet it
(24:36):
was top down, it was imposed on people. So in
fifteen thirty six, when twenty thousand peasants took up arms
to say, hey, we're actually allowed to be Catholic, they
were also trying to say, hey, by stealing all the
church's property and kicking us out and closing the commons,
you're fucking us and we don't want that.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Is it true?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Like the way that Catholicism is today where there is
like an idea that you need to do good works
and help the poor, like that is actually part of Catholicism.
Where is it not as much Protestantism? Do you think
that was part of it too? Is like by taking
money away from the church, who were taking away like
alms from people and things like that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, I suspect that's heavily part of it, because there
is like a it's like a thing that actually came up.
I recently did a bunch of stuff about ancient Greece,
and one thing a historian talked about was that beggars
in ancient Greece actually had it worse than the Christian
and especially the Catholic era of medieval Europe, because giving
alms is good for your soul in the Catholic tradition.
And yeah, so it's like again and not trying to
(25:39):
be like the Catholic Church was good and noble, but
it had people within it who are trying to be
good and noble. I'm fine as compared to the.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
King, yeah, iypoth sis, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah. The leaders of that rising, the Lincolnshire Rising, were
all executed. This is under Henry the eighth. So they
tried to do it non violently stead and they got
twice the numbers, forty thousand peasants and priests and monks
demanding that they can be Catholic and also not starved
to death or whatever. This is called the pilgrimage of Grace.
(26:11):
And of course his history has shown us. Of course
they were listened to because they were nonviolent and all
of their no, wait, no, wait, I got that wrong.
Oh no, it was disbanded and all the leaders were executed.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Oh yeah, okay, that's smart.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Probably pretty horribly Yeah. And then there was Bigods Rebellion,
which sort of looks like Big God, which I think
is cool. And this is in fifteen thirty seven. This
led to two hundred executions, and so people didn't take
it lying down that they were suddenly told that they
had to be a new religion. But people in power
(26:43):
are willing to kill over property in law every time,
still do so. Henry the Eighth, he's created the Church
of England and stolen all the churches money that they
stole from the working people. And then he's killed all
the working people who are mad about it, and he's
annulled his marriage to Catholic. She remains Catholic and faithful, though,
(27:03):
so she doesn't believe in the annulment, and until she
dies at fifty of probably cancer, she holds that she's
the rightful Queen of England. And if you want to
be the Queen of England.
Speaker 4 (27:14):
I would be really great at that job.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
That's actually true. I would be.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Really great at that job. I would be so helpful
and really see it.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
The first thing I would do is say, there's no
longer any Queens of England.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Nail that high. I thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
This position is no longer need.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, I'm keeping this scepter, but just purely just so
I have something to tell me.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Also, any countries that in the UK we don't own
you anymore, yeah, have an oprah.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And you get exactly here's all the art we stole.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
I'm just saying so.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
And Queen Sophie for queen, you know what, I will
vote for you or actually the thing I've learned about
how to try and make Queens of England and this
time is assassinate a lot of people and blow people
up and whatever is necessary, but mostly listening to ads.
(28:23):
And we're back. So Henry the eighth he marries Anne Boleyn, next,
the maid of Honor that he was trying to fucking
for like seven years. He's like writing her letters being like, yeah,
what's up, and she has a ton of miscarriages and
then eventually gives the king a daughter, Elizabeth. The first
historians have like written a lot about like what might
have been going on about There's like some specific medical
(28:44):
conditions that you can have that are going to lead
to some of his health problems that he had and
also like lead to difficult berths for the people that
you are sleeping with. So it was his hault quite possibly, Yeah,
not known for certain, but a lot of people. The
most annoying thing is if you try to read about
Henry the eighth, I'm trying to find things like why
(29:06):
did this man hate women so much? And instead I
find thing after thing talking about the fact that he's fat.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Great, And there's so many pictures of his armor that
are like and this is his waist size, And I'm like, man,
I actually think you should lead with a number of wives.
He'd beheaded. I actually think that's a more important fact.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Maybe that's more important.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
You know. The turkey leg is a myth that he like,
you know, you see him like with that giant turkey
leg and pop culture, Yeah, there's never like an image
of him with a giant turkey leg. That's like a
really old Mandela effect.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
That makes sense, And it probably was a like check
out this fat guy. That's what I'm like, that's not
what's wrong with this man.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
No, it's like, have you seen how many turkey legs?
This dude can house.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, I'm like more concerned about the wives he goes
through y and the forcing everyone to change religions.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
And so they have a daughter, Elizabeth the first, And
for whatever reason, historians argue about why Henry the eighth
was like, I have an idea, dear wife of mine,
sixteen months into their marriage, what if I frame you
up on adultery and incest charges and then claimed you
fucked your brother and then cut your head off.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, and he was king, So he did that, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Maybe it was because she didn't give him a son.
Maybe it was because and again, she only wanted to
close some of the monasteries, and more specifically, she wanted
to use the loot that they were stealing from the
Catholic Church for charity.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Ooh, he's not going to buy that. Yeah no, no, wow.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And this guy Thomas Cromwell, who's the grandfather of the
guy who's going to genocide Ireland. Who's more famous Oliver Cromwell.
That's not what Cromwell's famous for, but it should be.
So I'm going to lead with that. Thomas Cromwell is
the Secretary of State and he kind of arranged the
whole execution thing. Later though, cancel culture is going to
(30:59):
come for him too. In a couple of years, he's
going to get arrested and beheaded also, Okay, After killing
his second wife, Henry the Eighth married another woman who
had a son and then died because of that birth.
Then he married a fifth woman who he accused of
cheating and had beheaded, and then he married a sixth
and final wife. Fuck Henry the eighth. That's a speed
(31:19):
run through Henry the Eighth. Yeah, but his two daughters
are important characters, and they're presented as polar opposites. But
the main thing I know about them is that they
liked burning heretics at the stake.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Hey, girls have to pond over something.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
That's true, right, and they just disagreed about who counted
as heretics. And then you can really easily see whether
you're reading a like pro Protestant or pro Catholic thing,
because if you're reading a pro Protestant thing, it's like, well,
Elizabeth didn't want to burn the Catholics, but they forced
her to, And the Catholic ones about Mary are literally
the same. They're just like, but it wasn't really about heresy.
(31:54):
It was about holding onto political power. They were trying
to overthrow the government. Oh god, okay, But first before
either of them can get around to burning people and
being in charge, Henry the Eighth has to die, and
he dies of being alive in the medieval era. He's
like fifty or fifty five or something. I don't know.
Everyone's like that's cause of whatever. Anyway, I'm just really
(32:15):
mad at the fat phobia history.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But there's a lot of waste to die in the
fifteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, his son's going to die at sixteen, all right, Like,
I don't think that he had an extra turkey leg
at dinner is the problem here, I don't think. So,
I'm just going to go with this turkey leg thing now.
I've decided to believe in it. I'm a believer in
a conspiracy that is trying to get people to stop
believing in Henry the Eighth and turkey legs.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
It's an epidemic.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, Henry the Eighth dies, and his son, who's nine
years old, is deemed to be a better heir than
either sister, which you know.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Obviously not surprised.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So Edward the sixth becomes king for all of six years.
He didn't want the kingdom to go Atholic, so he
named his sixteen year old cousin, Lady Jane Gray, to
be his heir, and he made the country way more Protestant.
Priests could fuck. Services had to be in English. And
there's a whole rebellion about it, the Prayer Book Rebellion
(33:14):
of fifteen forty nine. So the crown looked at a
rebellion of their own people and said, I know, let's
hire foreign mercenaries to kill them all.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
And at least two thousand of the rebels were killed
right off in the fighting, and thousands more were killed
after they surrendered. Then our teenage king went ahead and
got sick and died when he was fifteen years old,
probably a friend of the pod tuberculosis.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I can't believe how many like teen kings there were.
I think the stress of that, I just can't imagine
how a teenager can handle it. But I guess I
don't know. Kids back then were like thirty basically.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
That's true. Fifteen, you know, you're like, all right, well
I did pretty good, you know, I made it to fifteen,
had a good run. It was a king for six years,
they did have a I think it's called protectorates where
there was like people.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
In charge of guiding them.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, and kind of like like an underage king. I
think I actually don't know what age this is. I
think it's different every time, but I'm not sure an
underage king is like half in charge.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Every child king needs a dick Cheney exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
He's dead.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Do you think that's what Jade Vance thought he was
going to do. Do you think he thought he was
going to be the power behind the throne.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I do think that, I really really think that.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
What a fool.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, I know. I wonder how long his heart will last.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Well, I do know that when the heart of whatever
that kid's name is, I just saideen King Edward the sixth. Yeah,
I do know that. When he died, Lady Jane Gray
was handed the kingdom on July tenth, fifteen fifty three,
because he'd been like, oh no, my cousin, she's the heir.
Mary though, was clearly the people's choice, and so she
(35:10):
gathered up supporters and marched on London and then everyone
was like, including Lady Jane Gray, was like, you're right,
you should be in charge, Okay, I see the persuasiveness
of your argument. It has spears.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
The group of senior advisors to the Throne the Privy
Council looked at the crowd and we're like, yeah, Mary's queen.
I guess. Lady Jane Gray was queen for nine days,
so in some ways she's the first queen regnant, and
then there's like another one from like eleven hundred. It
was like, in general, Mary's the first one who counts.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
I guess she popularized it. That's what I say in
American hysteria. It's like it happened before, but really it
doesn't matter, but now it matters. So popularized.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Mary popularized being queen regnant, and wasn't the popularization of
Burnie heretics at the stake. She got that from her dad,
who probably got from everyone for hundreds of years. Because actually,
one of the things that's interesting is that being a
heretic wasn't necessarily a religious crime. It was a civil crime, right.
It was like being disorderly. It was like only as
a felony in a capital offense, but it was like
(36:13):
up there with being a murderer. You're like, you're fucking
up society. You know, it's treasonous to be a heredic.
It's not just a religious problem from this point of.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
View, right, because they were just like politics and religion
were just completely married at that point.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
So yeah, yeah, and there was no annulment available, even
though they shouldn't have fucked anyway. So you have Mary,
the first Mary tudor Bloody Mary. She got her name
because of the two hundred and forty Ish Protestants she murdered,
burning them at the stake for questioning the Catholic Church,
which is a lot of people, for ruling for only
(36:48):
five years. And the Catholic apology around this is usually like, well,
she shouldn't have done it, sorry about that, but she
used proper legal procedures.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Oh good, Okay, Yeah, she followed the law.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, she didn't risk putting the country into a lawless state.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
And according to that same apologia, she actually wanted to
do religious freedom, but the Protestants forced her hand.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
There was a whole Protestant uprising that tried to overthrow her,
called Wyatt's Rebellion in fifteen fifty four. Wyatt got himself executed.
And yeah, she brings back heresy as a capital crime,
and you have the Maryan Persecutions, which is kind of
cool name from fifteen fifty five till fifteen fifty eight.
Then she died of cancer.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
It's so weird that cancer existed.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I know, like I know it did, like obviously, it
just seems so anachronistic.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
I know, it feels very modern and it's like how
do we know that? We only kind of know it.
But some of it is like autopsies and tumors and
things like that, right, Okay, And in this case, Mary's
was kind of tragic. She like she thought she was
pregnant and she'd been trying to get pregnant for a
really long time. It was a tumor.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Okay, well that doesn't make sense how they figured it
out then.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, so people are like, she died of false pregnancy.
Is like the way it gets written about at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
That is sad, That's true.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, She's kind of an interesting tragic figure. Fuck a queen,
and she sure murdered people. She's like an interesting especially
once you read about people like writing like, you know,
the people she's putting at the stake are like writing
things like, you know, the monstrous regiment of women or whatever.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
So she dies of cancer. So her sister, the Protestant
Elizabeth the First, became queen and at no point where
people like, maybe this isn't a good system of government,
although it be fair. I guess Grumwell did, and they
had a whole war about it.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, and probably people did that are now lost to history.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, that's true. Elizabeth the First kept the heresy laws
but turned them on their heads. It was illegal to
be Catholic. You were allowed to repent, but you know,
people in their religions dying because you refuse to give
up your faith as like a whole vibe and the
whole that respected thing. There's a word martyr. Within ten
days of taking the throne, she's declared herself head of
(39:04):
the church and starts seizing more Catholic assets. All the
bishops that refuse to convert, which was all of them
but one, were locked up, as this part's interesting. Originally
they're thrown in jails, but then they were locked up
in the houses of the new bishops. Oh and so
they're like, all right, your captor is the guy who
took your job.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
WHOA that's dark.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, And the thing I read about it was like
you know, probably better conditions and way way more degrading.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah, it's hard for me to actually picture and imagine
what that situation was like. Is it just like you're
in the basement, you're like locked and.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So I think that a lot of old manor houses
and stuff had jails.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Had a little jail. Yeah, that does feel true.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And I can't remember where I ran across that. It's
been a while, but I remember reading about how like
before sort of the centralization a lot of like you know,
prison systems, it was just kind of like, all right,
well we just locked this guy up.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That makes sense, Yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
I think all the time about this web comic I
read a while ago that's like complaining about the prison system,
and it's like if I caught someone in my driveway
trying to steal my car and so I just like
kept him in my basement for seven years, people would
think I'm a bad person.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah, I'm going to be thinking about that now too. Yeah, yep,
because they acted within the law, right, we're.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Talking about that. It's like if you do it in prisons,
it's okay because it's part of the law.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, And that's the attitude people have and still have
about all of this. Oh yeah, you know, we're like, oh,
a good thing, we got rid of slavery. And you're like, well,
just don't read that amendment too closely where it specifically
says accepting cases of you know, punishment for crimes.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
So, just like her sister before her, Elizabeth had an excuse,
although her main excuse that people use came after she
started criminalizing Catholicism. But there was the Rising of the North,
which is a good name, when the Catholics from northern
England tried to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with the
second Mary of our episode, Mary Queen of Scots, who
(41:09):
was the Queen of the Scots. So at least seven
hundred people were executed for that little uprising thing, and
Mary spent the rest of her life in prison, although
actually she might have been arrested for a different whatever. Anyway,
she's in prison. Uprising didn't work.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Stuff's complicated, yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, And priests were being hunted down and executed. Most
of the clergy in the country went into hiding her exile,
especially to Ireland, and then a lot of folks went
over to northern France, I believe, but brave priests would
smuggle themselves into England to give mass and preach because
three quarters of the population were like thirty years into
(41:44):
the Anglican Reformation, three quarters of the population is still
firmly Catholic.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Well, it's hard to even get your religion out, you know.
It's like, I guess you have the printing well, printing press.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Not yet.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I believe they're printing things in there. Oh lord, when
is I can't time. I know that some of the
people in this story at the end of the sixteenth
century are going to be printing things, and I can't
remember it's the end of the fifteenth or und of
the sixteenth.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
It's a new thing, and spreading things takes a long time.
So it makes sense that people haven't even gotten the memo,
let alone want to convert based on what totally wants.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, they're just like, well, we're not allowed to do
that anymore. We're like, bo, why, yeah, what? And I
just imagine being like but it's all kind of nonsense.
It's just this is the comforting nonsense I grew up with.
Why would this be a problem. I guess that's not
how they viewed it. No, I just don't have it
quite the modern cultural version of it, and theoretically Ireland
(42:40):
was under the rule of the English crown at this point.
But emphasis on the word theoretically. The Anglican Reformation, however,
did become a major part of the colonization of Ireland.
The rule of law everywhere that the crown ruled, which
included all of Ireland, was you have to be Protestant now.
But this was essentially unenforceable because what it was called
at the time the wild Irish another good name. Yeah.
(43:05):
What it did work and why it was such a
part of colonization is it worked to steal a ton
of Irish land and shit from the Church, which was
then put into private English hands. And it ties deeply
into how one of the main ways that Ireland is
colonizes economically by making English a landlord class over the island. Okay,
(43:26):
and then the other fun rabbit hole about this. Have
you thought about the whole like beyond the Pale and
the origins of that before?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
No?
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Okay, so I have made incorrect claims about this before
on this podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
I believe, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Because the place that Protestant was successfully enforced was called
the Pale or the Pale of Ireland or the Pale
of Dublin, which was the most Anglicized part of Ireland,
which was basically the area around Dublin. And I used
to think that beyond the Pale was a reference to
the Pale of Settlement, which is a part of the
Russian that Jews were allowed to live in. But then
(44:02):
I read about the Irish Pale and was like, oh,
it's that area because it's hundreds of years earlier and
it's closer to England, right, But it's actually not either
of those. Instead, they come from the same route. Pale
sort of means a picket, like a fencing board, and
so the pale means the fenced in area. It's the
(44:23):
same route as palisade or impale.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Okay, okay, wow, well there you go.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, I got really excited about that. Also to correct
my past self.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Hey, we love to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah. So yeah, the English robbed Ireland but failed to
convert it. But in England it was really bad news
to be a Catholic, which was more than three fourths
of the population. It was illegal to not go to
the Protestant Mass on Sunday, so you also couldn't just
be like an atheist or whatever. Right, well, you probably
(44:54):
weren't allowed to do that anyway.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
You wouldn't have even thought to do it.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, totally. And these law they're called the penal laws.
They got more and more restrictive during the end of
the fifteen hundreds, especially once in fifteen seventy or fifteen
seventy one. I have read both in the same source.
The Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. So basically like, all right,
excommunicate me, I'm excommunicate you. And so it became illegal
(45:18):
to publish anything that the Pope wrote. It was illegal
to import or distribute Catholic material like crosses or rosaries.
It was illegal to be a priest. It was illegal
to harbor a priest. It was illegal to convert someone
to Catholicism. Most of these are killing crimes. Catholic priests
started training overseas to go on stealth missions to England,
especially from the newly formed Jesuit Order. By fifteen eighty
(45:40):
they started returning to England and were like, all right,
we have some priests now. And when I say some,
it really is some. It's like a couple hundred in
the whole country. Because there's a whole group of people
called the priest Hunters, who are generally private individuals working
as bounty hunters and they're permitted to search houses up
and down and rest and torture priests. They would read
(46:03):
people's mail, they maintained spy networks. They would pay informants,
like you snitch on someone for being a papist, get
some money. The priest hunters would go under cover and
pretend to be Catholic and arrest people who are like, ah, yes,
I too am Catholic. They'd be like haha, I got.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
You, okay, wild Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
I know. It's one of these things that sounds made up.
Yeah it does.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Priest Hunters sounds like a movie that would come out
in January.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Which is funny because like the witch Hunter thing, witch
Hunters also existed, but like this was bigger. This was bigger, huh,
at least in England. Although actually James is going to
be doing a lot of both the hating on Catholics
and witches real soon and writing a Bible.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And it would make sense that that was more pervasive
because punishing witches doesn't get you the same benefits of
like seizing things right and like taking their I don't know.
I think it makes sense that priests were more of
a threat even though they weren't like the demonic threat.
And well I guess they probably thought they were.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, yeah, well they dropped more loot. Definitely, that's true. Absolutely,
And you've got famous torturers like Richard Topcliff, who is
again if only there were a show about bad people.
He is famous for sexual assault and for building a
torture dungeon in his own house with the queen's permission. Okay,
(47:25):
also possibly groped the queen and got away with it.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Wow, is there just a source that says, like, how
do they know that?
Speaker 2 (47:34):
One of the things I read was like many people
claimed he groped the queen when it's talking about how
he like assaulted people like all the time. And then
that one was sourced, but it was to a book
that I don't have. Okay, that's fine, that's as far
as I was, like, this rabbit hole has stopped, now.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
We need to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, And so he is one of the most scoundrelly scoundrels,
devere scoundrel he also I read an academic paper about
him about how he voraciously read every book that he
confiscated about Catholicism and saw himself as like a professional
reader to better understand his enemies, and he took a
ton of notes in the margin. So he was the
(48:11):
one who would like, He's like, ah, I killed these
people and tortured them, and I found their books, and
here's some notes about what they say in their books
for everyone to read. So he's like doing the cliff
notes of them for people.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Okay, So the.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Priests were like, man, I don't like any of that
stuff happening to me, but I kind of feel like
I should still do this thing that I believe in.
So I guess they need to hide. They traveled around
the country, and before the heat was really turned up
and the priest hunting got intense, they would just like
show up and if someone came looking, they'd be like,
oh no, we're just like visiting relatives. We're just like
that's just my uncle, you know, or whatever. But soon
(48:45):
enough that wasn't enough, and they would travel around under
a variety of disguises. They'd be like, oh, I'm just
a traveling tutor or whatever, and they would hide if
they had to, and what are called priest holes hidden
compartments and houses all across the entry for hiding persecuted people.
These had to be meticulously built because the priest hunters
(49:06):
were meticulous. The priest hunters would measure the inside and
outside of houses and rooms, looking for discrepancies. They would
count the windows outside the house and make sure they
knew where each one was inside. They would walk around
sticking swords between floorboards and wall panels to see if
anyone would scream or bleed. They would search a house
(49:27):
and then pretend to leave to see if anyone emerged
from hiding.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Sex, serial killor shit.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
It really is And I honestly like, I'm just like,
I don't know to take notes everyone, if you think
it about possible futures.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
These are the ways that they mightn't find you out.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, so people built really good priest holes, people like
Saint Nicholas Owen, who will talk about on Wednesday. Then
then dumb, very.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Cool, Okay, anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Oh, I mean, yeah, I love this. This has been
really interesting and I cannot wait to see where it goes.
So thank you both. And yeah, you can just find
American Hysteria wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
As they say, Wow.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
It's going to tie into another modern kind of hysteria
thing because Guy Fox is going to make your parents
guy big gunpowder plot.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
All right, Yeah, I love to see him. All right.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Well, check out American Hysteria and check us out on Wednesday,
and check out Cooler Zone Media. It's the same, only
you don't have to listen to ads.
Speaker 4 (50:40):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. The more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Goolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the five or radio app podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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