Welcome to Dan snow's history hit. To listen to all of our episodes ad free, get bonus content and watch hundreds of history documentaries. Download the History Hit app or go to historyhit.com. Slash subscribe. And if you're an Apple listener, you can subscribe for new ad free episodes within the Apple app. Hi, folks, welcome. Dan Snow's History Hit often get stopped in the street and they say to me, when are you going to give that Professor Susanna Lipscomb another go on your pod? And the answer is right now, folks. Right now. I'm very happy to bring you this episode of our sibling podcast, Not Just The Tudors, presented by the very brilliant Professor Susanna Lipscomb. She is talking about the hapsbugs and not just talking about them, she's talking about their inbreeding. This is such a good episode. You're going to love Susanna and her guest, of course, who is Dr Adam Rutherford. He attempts to describe how closely inbred the Habsburg family became and its rather disturbing consequences. Enjoy.

Despite being an age that assumed a dubious corollary between outward appearance and inward quality, no one went so far as to call the Habsburgs good looking. But the Habsburg monarchs shared one characteristic so distinctive that it came to be regarded as a badge of honor, a symbol of membership of one of the most powerful families of early modern Europe. I imagine that as a keen listener of Not Just The Tudors, you can picture it the Habsburg chin, or more precisely, the Habsburg jaw. It juts out sharply, pulling the lower lip into a bulbous shape and is accompanied by an overlarged nose. These were a result of mandibular prognitism and this trait was caused by an unfortunate family predilection uncles marrying nieces. In fact, the prognitism was hardly the worst of it, as we shall see. To discuss the inbreeding of the Habsburgs, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Adam Rutherford. We don't often get to speak to scientists on this podcast, so I'm glad that on one of the rare occasions we do, we've got one of the good ones. Dr Rutherford is a geneticist at University College London. During his PhD, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness.

He's written and presented many award winning shows including BBC Radio Four's flagship programs Inside Science and Start the Week the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry with Dr. Hannah Fry is on its 20th series and he's also presented TV series on BBC Two and BBC Four. He's the author of five books, including Control, the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics how to Argue with the Racist and the one we'll be talking about today, a brief history of everyone who ever lived the stories in our genes. I went to University College London to record with him.

Adam, it is a pleasure to welcome you to Not Just The Tutors.

Thank you, Susie. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I was very excited when you suggested we could talk about genetics and history and we're going to be talking about the Habsburgs. But I wanted to start with the sad or glorious fact, depending on how you looked at it, that we are all inbred or put it another way, we all have regal ancestry.

Yes, absolutely. It's become a sort of bugbear of mine over the last few years because of programs like Who Do You Think You Are? Which is great TV, highly entertaining and a good way of accessing sort of personal narratives and stories from histories that relate to individuals. The problem with it, from my tedious perspective as a geneticist is that it really only represents tiny minuscule proportion of our total ancestry. So when you identify a notable person in your genealogy and in that program, it's always if you're a woman, it's always a chamber maid and if you're a man, it's always a duke or a Nazi. That's the general pattern. But what it does is it fetishizes individuals from history in our historical narratives without representing the fact that all of our family trees collapse and coalesce in on each other. So when we start doing the math on this as a concept, an idea emerges which we refer to as the Isa point or the identical ancestors point which is the time in history when the population at that time is the ancestor of everyone alive today. Wow. Yeah, I know, right? And I've explained this so many times and even when I say the words, I still think, can that be true?

But it is. It's conceptually and mathematically true. But it's based on the simple premise that everyone has two parents. Everyone who's ever existed has had two parents. Which means that the number of ancestors you have as you go back through the generations doubles each generation. Right. So two parents, four great grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on. But there's a problem inherent in that which is if you go back 40 generations and we take a generational time to be about 25 years 40 generations, 25 years per person is 1000 years into the past. So it means that the number of ancestors that you have as an individual 1000 years ago is two to the power of 40. And that number comes out as 1 trillion. And 1 trillion is ten times more than the number of people who've ever existed on planet Earth. So it cannot be correct. But the mathematical sneak in this is that you have 1 trillion positions on your family tree going back 40 generations. But as you go back through time you find that those positions are occupied by the same people. Initially just a few people because we're all inbred to a certain degree.

But the further you go back through time, what you see is that those positions are occupied by the same people over and over again until all lines of your family tree as an individual begin to cross through all of the individuals at a particular time. And when that happens, that's the genetic ISO point. And when we calculate the genetic ISO point for Europe, which is the best studied population, what we find is the ISO point occurs about a thousand years ago. And so if you can demonstrate that anyone alive a thousand years ago has living descendants today, then what it means is that they are the ancestor of everyone alive today. The name I always use is Charlemagne, because he's the first Holy Roman Emperor. We have his lineage. We know that there are living descendants of Charlemagne today because people have done their family trees. And that's a sort of badge of honor. It's Kudos in genealogy to have Charlemagne in your family tree. If Charlemagne has any living descendants today, which he does, then he is the ancestor of everyone alive today in Europe.

This blows my mind.

I know not everyone can prove it, and that's a different question. So when they do, who do you think you are? And they have a paper trail, a proper Births, Deaths and Marriages certification, which goes back through the ages. Not everyone can do that. And so there is still Kudos in that process. But if it's true for Richard Branson when he press released this a few years ago, or the actor Christopher Lee, who was from a semi royal family, italian royal family, it's true for those guys, which means it's true for you, and it's true for me, and it's true for pretty much everyone listening.

So what we have to imagine is that a family tree almost is a kind of diamond shape, that it starts with a point at the bottom, but also has a point at the top.

Yeah, that's almost right. It's more that it expands out from you as an individual, as a tree. Then it begins to straighten up, then the branches begin to cross over. So it's not quite diamond. I suppose it's just square at the top. When we look at family trees, the way we draw them, nice branching patterns, they're just never like that. In reality, they're never like that because we know that there are crosses over. So, for example, five generations back, you will have two to the power of five ancestors, which I can't remember what that number is, and I should know, but it's hundreds, right? Half of them will be women, and half of them will be men. But those are just the positions. It's quite possible that your great grandmother is your great grandmother twice or even three times, because she had descendants who had descendants, and then they maybe met and married each other, and you might be married to your fifth cousin. In fact, it's likely you're married to your fifth cousin, me. And you were probably fifth cousins. Being fifth cousins, it means we've got shared ancestor x number of generations ago.

So that person, whoever that person was, occupies multiple positions on our family trees. And that's a few generations back. If you keep going back through time, if you go 1000 years, every single person is in every position on everyone's family tree.

So would it be even vaguely accurate to say that for the period we mostly talk about on this podcast, 16th 17th century, where people get very excited, understandably, if they think that they have a link to Richard II or Amberlin or someone of importance in that period? Is it tall true to say she says carefully to someone who knows about numbers much more than she does, to say that sort of half of the people living may be related to one of those people living 500 years ago?

Probably more than. So I did the calculations for Edward II because and I did it specifically because that was one of the episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? With the actor Danny Dyer. They demonstrated that he was 21 generations directly descended from Edward II, and he was born in the 70s, like me. And so one of the things he said, he's very funny. And it's well worth watching this on YouTube, because as it's revealed, and I think they're sitting in Westminster Abbey and they do this big sort of scroll and roll out, and it's got its family tree, their lineage, which starts with the first plantagenet and ends with Danny Dyer. And he says, I can't get this into my nut. Fair enough. He said, I'm going to treat myself to a massive rough, which you all know is not the right time period at all. But the third thing he said is, I can't compute this. My blood is his blood. And I was sitting there watching this, and I was writing a book about this at the time. And I just thought, well, I wonder if I can calculate this specifically.

Can I calculate the probability that anyone born in the 1970s is directly descended from Edward II, as they had demonstrated that Danny Dyer is? And the long and the short of it. And it was a fun project to do with some of my colleagues here at UCL, just a couple of offices down from where we're sitting and what we worked out using very conservative. We did it multiple times just to test it, but using the most conservative, most constrained possibilities. The probability that anyone born in the 1970s, in the U. K who is not of recent migration to the U. K the chances of them not being descended from Edward II are ten to the -21 so as close to zero as it's possible to be sorry this.

Is left me speechless.

I would bet my house and children and everything valuable in the world that you are directly descended from Edward II, probably 21 generations.

Always knew I had royal blood. And that's the thing, isn't it? We're all special, as you say, but none of us are special, therefore that's.

Exactly it, genetically speaking. I don't want to poo poo people's fun with this. Being able to trace it is different from most people. I've done quite a lot of genealogy on my own family, and it just drops off a cliff in the 19th century for various reasons. One of which is that on one side of my family is via indentured slavery in Guyana, via from India. And so the records, they literally vanish. And most people's records just fall off a cliff. But it is mathematically and absolutely true that all of those family trees coalesce. But the simple reason is that there are more people alive today than at any point in history. But you have a trillion ancestors a thousand years ago. The simple math is you just got to cram those two numbers into each other. And the answer that falls out of that is, well, it's everyone that's so interesting.

And I imagine the paperwork particularly drops off before the introduction of parish registers, which was 1538. And so you've got details from then. I remember once putting on Twitter, the site formerly known as Twitter, that I had seen a portrait of an ancestor from 1660 who was called Richard Lipscomb, who drowned in Portsmouth Harbor, possibly when drunk. And it's quite a fine picture, and he's wearing some nice linen around his neck and fairly sort of modest suit. And the portrait doesn't show hands, so he wasn't terribly wealthy because he'd gone for an artist, you couldn't do hands.

Was that a thing?

Well, they're difficult to do, aren't they? So the artist would have to be expensive to be able to do them anyway. So I put this on. Someone said, oh, well, look at you with your Lardy Dar ancestors. All my ancestors were tilling the fields. And I'm like, this is one person from my seven time removed great grandparents, or whatever it is. I have no idea about the rest of them. They're probably all tilling the fields as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a good story that emerged when I was writing this book, a brief history of everyone who ever lived, which is that my dad's cousin is quite a keen genealogist and he'd done quite a lot of family. Tree on my dad's side of the family, and they're all northeast Yorkshire and southern Scotland back as far as we can tell, as the name Rutherford portrays. And then he came across a marriage certificate from 1818, I think it was, and it's between a guy called Benjamin Handy and his then wife, who's described as a savage. On the marriage certificate in Covent Garden, it says savage. Now, Benjamin Handy was the proprietor and owner of Handy's Traveling Circus, which was the biggest traveling circus of the time. Her name was Mary Huntley, and he had recruited Neil Huntley, who was a Katorba tribesman from the States and was described on the bills as the world's greatest horse jumper. So that's a person who jumps from horse to horse as part of the circus act. We know loads about circus. Circus history is fascinating. And Mary Huntley was his daughter and they got married. Right now, she's my great great great grandmother.

And I tell this story because that's quite cool. Having a Native American ancestor is quite a cool thing to say, right? And it was just at the time when Elizabeth Warren in the States was claiming Native American ancestry. And it's meaningless. It's genetically meaningless. It's culturally meaningless. She is probably the ancestor of tens of thousands of people. If you go that far back and just because I've demonstrated this link, it means absolutely nothing. And as you just said, identifying her, Mary Huntley, you fetishize that over the other I don't know how many hundreds of great great grandmothers I should have at that time. Well, we don't know the names of any of them. Just she's one who happens to stand out because the record exists. I drew that comparison in an article I got in quite a lot of hot water for it. But saying Elizabeth Warren is saying I've got Native American ancestry it turns out I've got more Native American ancestry than her, where I'm saying exactly the opposite. It doesn't mean anything other than of.

Historical interest at that sort of remove anyway.

Yeah. So there's another fact which is worth mentioning, which is that genealogy and genetic genealogy are not quite the same and they diverge from each other as you go back through time. Now, I won't get too molecular about this, but everyone has two parents, right? That's uncontroversial. And we inherit all of our DNA from both parents. So you have two sets of genes in every cell. One has come from your mother, one has come from your father. And it's the interplay between them which is what makes you you. But due to the way that sperm and egg are actually produced in your body and in your parents and their parents bodies, the half that turns into you, that goes into the sperm and the half that goes into the egg. And then they come together and form a complete genome in an individual. It's obviously not the same half every time through generations. And what that means is if you go back through time, we begin to lose genetic information from specific people who are your actual ancestors. And if you go back roughly ten or eleven generations, what you find is that we carry genetic information from only half of our actual ancestors ten or eleven generations back.

They are on your family tree. They are your absolute guaranteed blood ancestors. But you're genetically unrelated to them because the deck has just been shuffled and shuffled until it doesn't contain hearts or clubs or diamonds, cards works quite well as an analogy there.

So Danny Dyer's claim that Edward II's blood is running through his veins may or may not be true.

Well, metaphorically, sure, because some of the language is confusing and we talk about bloodlines but that is a biologically meaningless phrase. But it is highly likely that he contains no genetic information directly from Edward II at.

So in terms of thinking about collapsing family trees that brings us neatly onto the Habsburg. So I thought maybe we'd start at the end as you do in your book which is in Madrid on the 1 November 1700 with Carlos II. So let's talk about him.

First of all, yes, he's a deeply troubled individual who's had a torturous life and he died on that day, November 1, 1700 and I think it was just before his 39th birthday. He's King Charles II of Spain and he's the ruling Habsburg. And the Habsburgs they are the biggest ruling dynasty. For the last 200 years. At least five Holy Roman emperors have come out of this one family. The Habsburg Empire is the biggest chunk of land in Europe and he's the last of them because he dies childless. So no heir. And what follows is the Spanish wars of succession where Europe is divided up brutally amongst various warring factions.

So in terms of thinking about what we know about him and why he couldn't have children, what can you tell me?

Yeah, so he was profoundly disabled all of his life, physically and mentally. And this was registered from his birth 39 years before this. He didn't learn to walk or talk until he was less than ten but very developmentally delayed the Habsburg jaw which I think many of your listeners will be thinking of when we talk about any Habsburgs. That sort of really iconic, what we would now call a prognathus jaw and considered to be a badge of this divinity in their family. They've all got them. And if you look at the portraits from Philip I who was his nickname was the Handsome. I don't see it.

I definitely think that stands of beauty change over time.

Yeah, they definitely do. None of these guys are handsome at all. And many of the women in this family also have this Habsburg jaw. But it's the badge of honor, right? It says, we are Habsburgs and we have divine rights. Carlos Charles II, his is so pronounced and his tongue is so swollen in his mouth that he couldn't retain food in it. When he was eating, liquids would dribble out of his mouth. On his throne in Madrid, he had a little semicircular curtain that the courtiers would pull around so that they couldn't see the food falling from his mouth. Really, really troubled existence. He was the king from the age of 14 but he was Rex in absentia and it was his Aunt Mariana who really was controlling the throne. And his courtiers gave all the people gave him a nickname which was now my Spanish is terrible. My spanish pronunciation is terrible, so correct me on this. It was Carlos El Hechito, which means the hexed or the bewitched. Now, he was married twice and both in private letters. Both of his wives, one of them complained of his impotence and the other that he couldn't ejaculate.

This fitted in with his overall disabilities and physical problems, but he couldn't produce an air. That's the big issue here. Even his autopsy is incredible. I've got a line from it here, which let me just check this, because it's yeah. Towards the end of his life, he asked for his ancestors to be exhumed so he could look at their decomposing corpses. Just a bit dark, bit weird. Yeah. And then when he was dissected the post mortem, the quote was his heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded, his intestines rotten and gangrous. He had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water. I don't think that's accurate.

It feels like a significant amount of exaggeration going on there. Do we have any sense of who the source is and what relationship they have to him? Because it feels like a hostile source.

It does, doesn't it? Yeah. No, I don't know. It was a physician describing his deformities.

And the only reason to do something like that and to produce a post mortem report like that is to damn him. There can be no other reason. There's no use in it otherwise.

Yeah, well, if there's something extensive, people are trying to divvy up the empire.

Upon his death, so let's try and explain this. Can you talk me through his family tree?

Yeah, it's a butte. So we talked about family trees earlier, we talked about how they branch outwards and eventually they collapse. And we actually call that pedigree collapse. And when we're talking about the Isa point, all pedigrees collapse over a long enough period of time and for a healthy population, you don't want it to collapse too quickly. But what we see in the Habsburgs is full pedigree collapse over two or three generations, which ends with the death of Charles Carlos. And the reason for it is because the Habsburgs had engaged in profound, inbreeding deliberate in order to maintain that chin, maintain their power, in order to keep the power within the very small group of people. And they basically stopped outbreeding about 200 years before Charles was born. So when you begin to look at the family tree, if you go back five or six generations, you should have 200 to 500 people in your family tree. That rule about doubling the number of ancestors you've got. And me and you will have probably a little bit less than that, because we'll have the same people occupying multiple positions. And I always make the joke that I'm from Suffolk, so mine probably collapses more quickly than yours.

So if you go back seven generations, 256 people on your family tree, charles has 80. Right. So almost an order of magnitude. Too few people on his family tree. And almost all of those inbreeding events are between uncles and nieces. So you only have to look at the family tree itself, which I know you've seen, but I'll show you, and it's difficult to describe, but you have.

To kind of see it to talk through it. So given that people can't see it, we're going to have to explain it very carefully.

Yeah. So it's not a tree. It's the first thing. If you imagine an idealized family tree with it going, you two parents, they've got four parents. And maybe there are some weird loops because people died or remarried or had children out of wedlock or whatever, they still just branch outwards. This only contains loops.

Is this his whole family tree?

This goes back to Philip I, philip the Handsome and his marriage to Joanna of Castile. Now she had a nickname as well, LaLoca. LaLoca, yeah.

She was the mad. She was the daughter of Isabelle of Castile and Fernando of Aragon.

And she lived an extremely troubled life as well. I'm always a bit cautious about posthumous diagnoses.

Yes, it's so hard to do. But she certainly fell madly in love with Philippe the Handsome. She became Queen of Castile, and he did by her. Right. But when he died, she carried his body around for a long time and wouldn't allow it to be buried. She was so attached to him. I know a lot more about her mother and her other sisters, but she certainly was a little troubled herself. I think it'd be fair to say.

Charles at the bottom of this tree, and his parents are Philip IV of Spain, who was married to Mariana of Austria. Now, you follow Philip's lineage back because his father is Philip II, who was married to Margarita of Austria. So Philip II is Charles's grandfather. But if you go via his mother, Mariana of Austria, and her mother was Maria Anna of Spain, who was married to Ferdinand II, who was one of the early Roman emperors. And Maria Anna of Spain's parents were Philip II and Marguerite of Austria. So what that means is that Philip II and Marguerite are simultaneously Charles's grandparents and great grandparents.

So his grandmother is also his paternal aunt.

No, his grandmother is his great grandmother, as mean, she probably is his paternal aunt too. We can work this out by looking at the tree. So one, two margarita is Ferdinand II's sister. So yes, she's a great aunt as well as being grandmother and great grandmother.

And Maria Anna, I was thinking, was his grandmother through his mother.

That's right.

And also his aunt because she's the sister of his father.

That's right. Yeah. It's complex and mad and really quite distasteful and funny because it's the single most extreme example of inbreeding I've ever come across in the historical record. People talk about it compared to some of the Egyptian pharaohs, but I think the records are much less clear. We've got a really good understanding of this family, but basically it's all loops. It's all loops like that. And if you track it back to Joanna of Castile, Joanna LaLoca, what you find is that there are at least, I think it's nine different routes you can get from Charles to Joanna. And so she occupies nine different positions on three generations. Ideally, she would be his great great great great grandmother once, but in fact, she's his great great great grandmother three times, his great great great grandmother, I think, twice, and his great great great grandmother a number of times as well. So none of this is even vaguely desirable.

And you talk about an inbreeding coefficient. Can you explain that?

Yeah, sure. So we've known about the family tree for a long time. To attribute his abnormalities and disabilities to his inbreeding is not new. But 2015 or 16, a team, a Spanish team, calculated the actual metric that we use to measure how inbred people are, and we call it the inbreeding coefficient. So again, I mentioned that you get half of your genetic information from your mother and half from your father, and ideally, you want them to be different to each other. So your mother's genome contains all of the same genes as your father's genome, but they're slightly different, and you want them to be as different as possible. So outbreeding results in generally healthier children. And the reason for that is to do with what we refer to as recessive diseases or recessive traits, where if you've inherited a disease gene from your father, say, it can be masked by a healthy version of that gene from your mother. And we call that a recessive trait. So it's something like cystic fibrosis. You have to have two disease genes in order to have cystic fibrosis. But if you have one and one normal wild type we call them, then the diseased version will be masked by the wild type, and you'll be a carrier, but you won't have cystic fibrosis.

So you want to have different sets of genes from your mother and your father in order that the possibility of disease genes emerging is minimized. The problem with inbreeding is you might be inheriting the same genes because your parents are related to each other, so they're more likely to have the same genes as well. So the metric, we call it the inbreeding coefficient, basically, it's a measure of how similar your mother's genes are to your father's genes, and it's basically a percentage. So if a brother and a sister were to have a child together, then their inbreeding coefficient would be 00:25. It means that 25% of the DNA of the child will be identical on both sets from the brother and the sister because the brother and sister share half their DNA because they're brother and sister. That's really bad news, because if. A quarter of your genes are the same, it means the probability of a disease, a recessive disease emerging, are extremely heightened. Now, when the Spanish team calculated Charles's inbreeding coefficient a few years ago now, they worked out that his inbreeding coefficient was 00:25 four.

So it's more than a brother and sister having a child.

Exactly. He was more inbred than the offspring of a brother and a sister and that accounts for all of his disabilities. It's too much for us to say he had a specific disease, he had a specific syndrome because that's a quarter of your genes. Cystic fibrosis is one gene out of 20,000, but for Charles it may have been 4000 or 5000 genes that are basically the same. So there's various ways to phrase this, but he was shafted from birth by generations and this inbreeding started way before Joanna and Philip I but was really consolidated in this period and he had no chance. It was amazing that he lived at all.

It's amazing he lived till 39. I mean, yeah, what a terrible hand.

Exactly. When thinking about it as cards, he was dealt the worst hand that is conceivable. It's an interesting irony because the intention was to maintain power by inbreeding, by marrying uncles to nieces, which is mostly what those relationships were, but they had a 17th century understanding of genetics and so the result of that was ultimately to relinquish power permanently. The Habsburgs didn't go away, but that was the last ruling habsburg as a result of a 17th century understanding of molecular genetics.

And presumably, I mean, his fate is awful, but even before that, those sort of statistics when it comes to inbreeding is also going to result in number of children dying along the way because of conditions that they've inherited.

Yeah, that's exactly right, because what you see is increased infant mortality. So the fact that Charles made it to 39 is something of a miracle because within the same family the numbers are pretty stark. So between 1527, which is when Philip II is born and Charles's birth in 1661, they had 34 babies, but 17 of them died before they were ten and ten of them before they were one. Now, infant mortality in the past has always been significantly higher but that compares to the Spanish general rate and these are difficult numbers to calculate, but we estimate that the infant mortality in the Spanish population at the time to be about one in five. Right. So it's twice or maybe three times higher than the general population. And again, that's a huge irony because this is the ruling class, the ruling family, they have all the resources available to them, whereas the peasants, the subjects of Spain, are actually genetically much healthier. The reason I'm fascinated by this is not just because that's a cool story and it's just interesting history, but fundamentally I think that the role of biology in history is sometimes ignored or minimized or not talked about at all.

But there's this element to history which occurs at a molecular level in our cells, in our sperm and our eggs, and it plays out on the world stage with absolute authority. The end of this empire is a direct result of genetics.

And I love that idea that you've conveyed, which is that it's in seeking power, in seeking to strengthen themselves, that they weaken themselves. Feels like there's some sort of lesson there for the rest of us.

Yeah. And I don't know whether you spotted, but there's a Princess Leia quote hidden in that chapter, which he says to Darth Vader, the more you tighten your grip, the more systems fall through your fingers. And I hide nerdy quotes and song lyrics in all of my work. But there is right in the middle of the Habsburgs is a bit of Princess Leia.

Well, thank you very much for talking us through this utterly fascinating genetic material, and I think you're absolutely right. I think we do overlook this biological component to history at our peril.

And I think we've just gone through a period where it's been exposed, because pandemics through history have been some of the most significant historical events. If we want to talk about plagues, the Black Death, the Justinian plague being endemic from the 15th century and indeed is to this day, but we know how to treat it, we very rarely talk about the fact that a plague is a fundamentally biological thing. We understand the molecular genetics of how those genes work in eucenia pestis and how they get transferred from marmots to rats to us again, it's a funny thing that biology is sometimes minimized in us discussing these global events, but it's right there.

Well, I think I might be coming back to talk to you about the plague in the future, but thank you very, very much.

Thanks.

And thanks to my producer Rob Weinberg, my researcher Esther Arnott and Joseph Knight, who edited this episode. And thanks to you for listening to not just the Tudors from history hit. We're always eager to hear your suggestions for podcast subjects, so drop me a line at Not Just The Tudors@historyhit.com or on Twitter at Not Just Tudors. Also, if you're in need of an extra hit between podcasts, do sign up to our newsletter, tudor Tuesday. Details of how to do that are in the notes below this podcast. And please rate rank bestow multiple stars and comment on this podcast wherever you listen, including on Spotify. It really helps more people find not just the tutors.

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