History Cafe

History Cafe

True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

#129 ‘It’s a joke’ - Ep 6 Columbus - legend and loser

August 26, 2026 • 33 mins
Columbus may now be dressing up like a friar and searching for the Garden of Eden but he and his brother are still cutting off the Arawaks’ hands if they fail to deliver a monthly quantity of gold. Horrified, Ferdinand and Isabella send a judge to bring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and his family, home in chains.

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#128 No more Mr Nice Guy - Ep 5 Columbus - legend and loser

August 19, 2026 • 38 mins
When Columbus’s second voyage - the showy Armada of 1493 - reaches Hispaniola they find that the Arawak, including the chief who rescued Columbus from the shipwrecked Santa Maria on Christmas Eve 1492, have had enough. The avaricious, raping crew left behind at fort Navidad are now a pile of bleached bones.

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#127 'They eat human flesh' - Ep 4 Columbus - legend and loser

August 12, 2026 • 32 mins

Columbus is told where to find ‘pieces of gold as big as the ship’s great stern post.’ And that where the gold is, there are people called ‘Caribs’ who not only have bows and arrows, but also eat human flesh.

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#126 'Seven head of women' - Ep 3 Columbus - legend and loser

August 5, 2026 • 36 mins
Within two days of Columbus making first landfall on an island he named San Salvador after his God, Columbus had kidnapped several men to take to Spain to train as interpreters. To prevent them escaping, he then rounded up ‘seven head of women,’ along with three children.

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#125 The torrid affair - Ep 2 Columbus - legend and loser

July 29, 2026 • 32 mins
Nobody believed Columbus could reach the Indies (Asia, home to the Grand Khan). So why did Ferdinand and Isabella back him? The answer is all tied up with a torrid affair.

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#124 Columbus was invented in 1777 - Ep 1 Columbus - legend and loser

July 22, 2026 • 29 mins
Columbus the romantic hero is a myth created in 1777 by the Scottish historian Revd William Robertson. It hit the big time with Washington Irving’s biography 50 years later. Tales of lone scientific geniuses were becoming popular and Columbus had been snapped up by rebellious American colonists waving their newly minted Declaration of Independence. But the historical research was hopelessly flawed. Columbus had been wrong abo...

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# 40 Henry VIII: Pope Clement, Katherine, Anne and Florence

July 15, 2026 • 36 mins
After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing. Pope Clement was trapped between a rock and a hard place: the only way to save his Medici family’s city of Florence was to ...

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# 52 Anne Boleyn - Henry VIII's MacGuffin

July 8, 2026 • 44 mins
Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her.

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# 51 Marrying Anne Boleyn, the best of a bad job - Ep 6 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

July 1, 2026 • 30 mins
The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry’s French allies now needing him more than he d...

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# 50 No more menage à trois - Ep 5 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

June 24, 2026 • 28 mins
In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England?

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# 49 Like an episode of the Borgias - Ep 4 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

June 17, 2026 • 33 mins
31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other.

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# 46 Missions Impossible - Ep 3 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

June 10, 2026 • 32 mins
1527: The pope is a prisoner of the marauding Spanish in Rome and yet Henry sends his man Knight on a madcap mission to ask Pope Clement VII for permission to marry a young woman he is already sleeping with. It’s the first of a whole series of crazy errands, asking the pope for the impossible. Does Henry have a hidden agenda?

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# 45 The Jilting of Princess Mary - Ep 2 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

June 3, 2026 • 32 mins
Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England? We find that the dates don’t add up. Instead we look at why in June 1525 Henry promoted his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy over the head of his heir Mary. And why Charles V broke off his engagement with 9 year old Mary to marry a Portuguese princess instead.

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#44 Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - Ep 1 Henry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French

May 27, 2026 • 31 mins
In 2010 a document from 1527 was found in which Henry VIII admits to the pope that he is sleeping with the woman he wishes to marry instead of, or as well as, his Spanish wife Katherine. Very little of the traditional story can be believed. It’s Katherine who matters in the story of Henry’s Reformation, not Anne.

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#39 Newton and the Occult - Ep 2 Was Newton the last of the magicians?

May 20, 2026 • 44 mins

Having considered the arguments in favour of defining Sir Isaac Newton as an early 'scientist', we now consider the other side of the coin.

Newton’s best-known breakthrough – the identification of gravity – belonged not to the latest tradition of European Cartesian rationalism, but to a very English strand of occult philosophy. In fact it was only because Newton worked in this tradition that he was able to think o...

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#38 Newton the Alchemist - Ep 1 Was Newton the last of the magicians?

May 13, 2026 • 36 mins
The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good s...

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#123 Pissing on bagpipes - Ep 5 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

May 6, 2026 • 45 mins
Was Shakespeare a Catholic? We examine the evidence and then ask whether his audience would have compartmentalised the world into Protestant, Catholic or alchemical. Wasn’t their world full of magic? In his last solo play, The Tempest, a white magus, Prospero, tells the audience that it’s up to them to make good things happen, to create a ‘brave new world’ in which everyone can be reconciled. Is this Shakesp...

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#122 Queen Elizabeth's Toyboy - Ep 4 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

April 29, 2026 • 41 mins
The Earl of Essex, it always used to be said, was an airhead. Elizabeth’s swaggering toyboy who posed as a military genius. And yet Shakespeare took the young Earl of Essex seriously, portraying him as Henry V in early performances in 1595. It riled Essex’s rival at court, the Queen’s Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, so much that he ensured English history plays were banned.

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#121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

April 22, 2026 • 37 mins
Shakespeare confronts homelessness with his aging king, reduced to beggary. He makes the audience ask what it would be like if it was you who found yourself out of house and home, shivering and hoping someone would give you their cloak. Is it not, Shakespeare asks, an outrage to blame the poor for their condition?

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#120 'Hang, beg, starve' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

April 15, 2026 • 39 mins
We reveal the real-life factional feud that inspired the Montagues v Capulets and which makes the groundling audience so angry. It’s London. 1595. Life is tough. It’s wet and cold and only three years ago 20% of the population died of the plague. And it’s not fair. The rich can commit murder, duelling in the streets, and get away with it. While young apprentices are hanged for arguing over the price of a fish beca...

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