Vulgar History Podcast
The Tudors Take America
August 19, 2026
So, hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster. I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudor era since I was a little girl. This season on the podcast, we will be talking about the notorious Tudors: who they were, the times they lived in, and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.
In this episode, we are talking about what’s happening in England, and also what’s happening across the Atlantic in the Americas. This week, we’re talking about the collision between the Tudor era and exploration and colonization of the Americas, and what sorts of things were shared between the two, and what people in Tudor-era England thought about the Americas, and what was going on there, and what people in the Americas thought about the English people who were showing up on their shores.
Our guest today is Lauren Working. She’s the author of a new book called A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England. I mean, she’s going to explain everything. It’s such an interesting point of view, and I think it’s something that hasn’t really been considered this way in a major book of this kind. I think it’s really worth considering the effect that the Americas had on the Tudor world and vice versa. So, enjoy this chat between myself and author Lauren Working.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Lauren Working, author of the new book, A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England. Welcome, Lauren.
Lauren: Thank you so much for having me.
Ann: Can you explain the premise of your book to everybody?
Lauren: Really, what it comes down to is the book is kind of grappling with and kind of pushing back against the traditional way of thinking about Tudor and Stuart travel to the Americas. I think often we think about this period as a time of explorers and privateers “discovering” parts of the Americas, and really kind of having an impact on the Americas, rather than the other way around. So, what I really wanted to think about was not how the Tudors kind of imprint themselves on various parts of the Americas, but really, how the Americas, its resources, its peoples, imprints onto Tudor and Stuart London.
Ann: And your book is arranged in an interesting way. Can you explain, kind of, each chapter is almost, like, a certain object, and then you sort of delve into that? Can you explain sort of the way it’s set up?
Lauren: Yes. Yeah. So, it’s a kind of object-based history. This was so that I could really think about that idea of travelling objects and how those might help us connect the indigenous Americas with Tudor and Stuart London. There’s relatively few, I mean, there are numbers of Indigenous peoples who come to London in the 16th and 17th centuries, but they’re not huge numbers compared to places such as Paris or Madrid. And yet, English travel narratives are full of all kinds of encounters and adventures between the English and Indigenous peoples.
So, for me, the objects are this kind of way of thinking about, like, how those encounters in the Americas can kind of be felt and can be seen to impact Renaissance culture. I had a lot of fun kind of choosing what objects to include in the book; there are kind of natural goods or resources as well as Indigenous-made artifacts, or cultural belongings, as I call them. So, there are chapters on emeralds, on silver mining, on tobacco, but also chapters on featherwork or Algonquin canoes, for example.
Ann: And so, could you set the scene for people who may not have any knowledge about this at all in terms of when England, because it wasn’t Britain at that point, when they started colonizing. In the context of Western Europeans coming to “the New World,” sort of Spain and Portugal got there first, right? And they got to what we would now consider Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean. What they found was gold, for instance. So, England is sort of like… They’re slower, so kind of, what’s left for them is further north, right?
Lana: Yeah. So, England is in a bit of a bind because they want what Spain and Portugal have, but also, Spain and Portugal are Catholics, right? They’re the enemy in this period; England is at war with Spain. So, as a Protestant nation, they have to kind of grapple with, like, how do we legally justify our intervention in the Americas, and also ideologically justify it?
So, as you say, the English are late to the game. Colonization has been going on for about a century before the English really start to attempt to colonize various regions. They’ve seen the way that Europe has been enriched and transformed by all the gold and silver flooding in from South America. In his account of the Amazon, Walter Raleigh in the 1590s writes that, as he calls it, “Indian gold” lays at the heart of Renaissance politics, “for princes which abound in treasure have great advantages over the rest.” So, in this moment of war with Spain that’s reaching its height in the 1570s and ‘80s, the English try to settle in places that Spain and Portugal have not laid claim to because they don’t want to violate international law. And as you say, those tend to be places in North America.
So, the first real kind of colonial attempt is Walter Raleigh’s project in Roanoke off the coast of North Carolina in the mid-1580s, then Virginia, which is kind of officially established in 1607, Bermuda in 1609, and Newfoundland in 1610, and then New England in the 1620s. In the 1620s, we get a little bit of colonial attempts in the Caribbean, so Saint Kitts in 1623 and Barbados, which the English kind of claim in 1625. So, it’s really interesting that by the end of the Elizabethan era, when Queen Elizabeth dies in 1603, there are no real, kind of, English colonies, claims to Atlantic lands beyond Ireland.
I always think of the movie – is it Shakespeare in Love, I think – where at one point there’s this kind of reference to like “the colonies in Virginia,” and I’m like, this is taking place in the Elizabethan era; there are no colonies in Virginia yet.
Ann: Sorry, can I just say, we talked about that movie on this podcast, and what there’s a reference to is a plantation in Virginia.
Lauren: [laughs] That’s… yeah.
Ann: Doubly incorrect and insane.
Lauren: Yes, exactly. So, yeah, there’s not a lot that the English have yet, but I think what’s important is that the English are what I call imperially minded. They’re kind of developing this ideology of imperialism very much in this period. And also, one that I think gets sidelined a bit with this emphasis on kind of the founding of the American nation is about, like, the godly colonies in New England and things, but actually, the English are implicated in and benefit from colonial economies for a long time, even when they themselves are not colonizing regions. So, my chapter on silver, for example, really shows how the kind of burst of silver in banquets and on dining tables in Tudor England, a lot of that is silver that’s coming from what is now Bolivia. And so, there’s kind of implications in colonial economies, even before the English themselves lay claim to Indigenous territories.
Ann: Well, I think that’s a good point, too, because, you know, at the time that your book is coming out, it’s the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in America, and a lot of that history traces back… I’m in Canada, but what people celebrate in America tends to be, yeah, like, the Puritans and the Mayflower and stuff. But what we’re talking about are more of these, I don’t know if capitalists, but like, business… Virginia, it’s a business. The people going there weren’t just suffering religious— The Puritans came over because they felt they were suffering religious persecution and they wanted to start this “godly colony.” But Virginia was England coming over, being like, “Let’s make some money. Let’s get some crops. Let’s pillage some stuff.” Like, that’s the context of these first…
Lauren: Yes, and that’s kind of what I’m getting at in my title as well with the Golden World, and playing on the idea of the Golden Age and kind of, you know, how this Golden Age is actually funded. Hopes for gold are always kind of there, even when the English are like, “Oh, this is a very commercial project that’s going to just establish industry and trade,” and things like that. But the accounts that are written often in kind of secret intelligence reports for Elizabeth and then James VI/I’s secretaries of state, they always have some kind of promise of gold, some hare-brained scheme to bring some metallurgist to kind of go off and find gold mines.
Sadly, I had to cut this chapter out of the book, but I had an instance, for example, when the English travel to Saint Lucia in the Caribbean in the early 17th century, a few years after the death of Elizabeth and everything starts to go wrong on the island as soon as the English start insisting on finding a gold mine that they’re convinced is there that isn’t there. So, that kind of story is there from the very first chapter of the book, which looks at Martin Frobisher’s obsession with gold that turns out to be false gold in the 1570s, all the way through to these later colonial projects as well.
Ann: To me, as somebody who grew up on the East Coast of Canada, and just imagining people going there looking for gold, or going further north in Canada. Guys, you’re not going to… That’s not what you’re going to find here.
Lauren: No, I know. And the fact that Frobisher actually conducts three voyages before this is kind of definitely found out that this is maybe not the way to find gold. It really does show how much they are afraid of kind of treading on Spanish-controlled territories, that they are searching for gold in Nunavut, in an Arctic region in Canada.
Ann: Yeah. No, you mentioned in your book, there’s a chapter about the… You mentioned, yeah, like “the far north.” And I thought, oh, my gosh! First of all, not going to find gold there. But second of all, English explorers don’t have the clothing to survive that climate.
Lauren: No. No, and I think that’s part of why they’re so fascinated by Indigenous material culture from that region is they are really impressed by the technology and the skill of Indigenous women who are making these garments, because that’s so foreign to their own sense of how to deal with the extreme elements.
Ann: Well, and mentioning the Indigenous women, too, this is what I found really interesting in your book, too, is when you’re talking about crafted goods coming back to England, you look at, well, who are the people who made these things? Like these things, they didn’t just find them lying on the ground; people would have made them. Can you give examples of some of the fashion trends that kicked off in England from some of these things that were found?
Lauren: Yes. So, it was a lot of fun, not least because I kind of love clothes, I love textiles, even now. I’m really interested in ideas of, you know, commodity chains and kind of where things come from. So, how do I even choose?
I mean, I guess speaking of Indigenous women’s work, one really big example is featherwork. And by featherwork, I mean various garments or methods of adornment that are made with feathers. There’s also an idea of featherwork in circulation, which is about a specific technique of making in Mesoamerica where, like, the feathers of hummingbirds are used to make images, tapestries and things like that. But my featherwork chapter is more about the kind of headdresses, as the English call them, or kind of what they call aprons, or kind of coverings that come from the Americas, from various communities ranging from the Tupi in Brazil to the Wampanoag or Algonquin in what they call Dawnland or New England, and the Chesapeake.
So, there’s lots of evidence of featherwork appearing in cabinets of curiosities in Tudor and Stuart England, and also kind of fakes and imitations used in court performances such as court masks. So, for me, this was a really great example of thinking about something that is so clearly a marker of indigeneity, both kind of among Indigenous peoples who use featherwork in ceremonies and for sacred purposes, and then in a different way, the way that that’s used to kind of stereotype Indigenous peoples in England at the time. But it’s a place where we really see Indigenous women’s hands and expertise at work.
For this chapter, I really learned a lot by listening to interviews and looking at the artwork of the contemporary artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá, who’s a Tupinambá artist. She was at the Venice Biennale a few years ago, and she made a mantle based on observing surviving 16th-century mantles, basically, because until one reparation case that happened a few years ago, there were no surviving 16th-century Tupi mantles actually in Brazil.
Ann: What’s a mantle? What would that be?
Lauren: So, a mantle is basically like a cape of feathers, and they are absolutely stunning. I mean, yeah, I highly recommend people just kind of googling and searching for these and seeing them because they’re used from the feathers of all kinds of different kinds of tropical birds in beautiful hues of red, and yellow, blue. You know, you can imagine in Tudor England in candlelight what this must have looked like, to kind of hold something like this. And so, it’s interesting to hear a contemporary artist talk about, you know, the process of making these; that often they’re women in the community who made them together, that they might have had, you know, their children kind of around them or helping them gather feathers. They would often take feathers that have fallen off birds, so it’s not like birds are being kind of killed just to take their feathers; they’re kind of gathered and viewed as kind of gifts from the birds to create these material belongings.
So, I really wanted to bring in kind of that aspect of, like, women’s skills in making and the fact that mantles are very closely tied to Indigenous homelands and territories, because obviously you’re making these mantles within the context of your community with the resources that are around you. And so, in that context of colonialism and kind of Indigenous dispossession, that becomes harder for Indigenous peoples to do. So, I kind of wanted to bring in that story of how Indigenous peoples view mantles, make mantles, and bring that into the story of Tudor aesthetics.
Ann: Another example that I thought was really interesting that you talk about in your book is pearls, because those are so… When you look at portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, especially from later in her reign, she’s always just draped in pearls; you see people with pearls pinned. I’d never considered the connection between the Americas and all these pearls that they’re wearing. But can you explain that?
Lauren: Yes. Pearls are a great example, because, as you say, women are just dripping in them, right, in almost any portrait of an elite person in this era, or even a kind of middling person, like a merchant. They’re so fitting for the court of Elizabeth because of their associations with luminescent whiteness that she’s kind of concerned with in her image-making as a virgin queen.
They were long acquired from the Indian Ocean, especially the Persian Gulf, via trade networks with Asia, and they could also be found on a much smaller scale in freshwater streams in Scotland or in Sweden, for example. But Columbus and Vespucci’s voyages flood the market with millions of pearls from what was kind of known as the Pearl Coast, especially islands off the coast of what is now Venezuela. I think I cite a statistic in the book that I got from Molly Warsh’s book, American Baroque, where she says that over the course of his reign, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was a contemporary to Henry VIII, received 34-and-a-half million pearls from Central and South America during his reign. So, I mean, I think this is really the context where we kind of, yeah, think about that insane amount of pearls that proliferate at the Tudor court.
I think that’s really the context for reading even things like the portraits of Mary I that survive of the time, where she often is wearing the same pearl jewel, which has this very large, dangling kind of baroque-shaped pearl. And she marries Charles V’s son, Philip, who becomes Philip II of Spain, and he gives her this table-cut diamond with the large pearl pendant. For a long time, the pearl was believed to be a very specific gem called La Peregrina, and I think eventually La Peregrina ended up in the hands of Elizabeth Taylor in auction. Whether or not that’s actually the pearl that Mary herself wears in all these portraits, I think it does suggest her interests in marrying into this kind of imperial dynasty that has claims to vast stretches of land in the Atlantic, and that her access to something like such a huge pearl is making a bold statement about her political ambitions.
But yeah, I had so much fun just researching all the pearls that were circulating at the Elizabethan court and then trying to find instances where we could maybe trace some of those pearls to the Americas in kind of more concrete ways. So, in a single year, in 1586, for example, there’s a document in the state papers that accounts for all the pearls delivered to Queen Elizabeth, and in a single year, she received pearls to the value of 644 pounds, which is basically more than a wage labourer might make in a lifetime. And so, yeah, it seems that this pearl mania that we get, even from portraits, are kind of matched by this material circulation of pearls coming from the Atlantic.
There’s a great incident where a snarky courtier complains in the aftermath of Raleigh’s execution about how Raleigh had cheated him and his family out of their rightful profit of a ship coming back from the West Indies. Raleigh basically just shrugs it off and blames the Queen and just says, “Well, Queen Elizabeth was so obsessed with pearls that I didn’t even see anything from the ship. She took everything, and she didn’t share even a single pearl with me.”
So, I don’t want to suggest that kind of all pearls are coming, you know, definitely from an Atlantic context to the Tudor court, but it does seem that especially in the 1580s and the 1590s with the war in Spain, that wearing pearls is a little bit of a conscious declaration by the English of, like, their own ability to source these materials from the Atlantic, even while they’re at war with Spain. This kind of continues on into the early 17th century, even when war with Spain ends. But Anne of Denmark, James VI/I’s wife, you know, inherits lots of pearls from Elizabeth, so those might even be some of her pearls that she’s now wearing. And so, I think the association of pearls with the sea and with seafaring kind of really works for those associations.
Ann: And so, in terms of women in Tudor and Stuart England, you have a chapter where you’re talking about, sort of… I like the way that you phrased it in the book, and I’ll paraphrase my memory of it, but it’s basically, how most of these women know about what was actually happening in the Americas, because there were women there who were receiving letters about it, there’s women there who were sponsoring some of these trips. Can you explain some examples of who they were?
Lauren: Yes. Yeah, I really grappled with this because, as I’m sure you will know, and your listeners will know from thinking about women’s history in all kinds of different ways, you have to be quite creative about how you reconstruct the lives of women in the past often, because there’s so little evidence compared to the lives of men. So, I was really kind of wanting to move away from the idea that women are just passive consumers or recipients of colonial materials and knowledge. So, as you say, there’s a couple of ways that we can kind of think about this. One is to see when women’s names appear in accounts of investors and voyages; so they’re kind of concretely helping to finance ships that are crossing the Atlantic.
Another big way, I think, is as patrons of kind of colonial literature as well. So, Martin Frobisher, which we mentioned earlier, his voyages to Nunavut in 1576, 1577, and 1578 had a few women investors: Queen Elizabeth, but also the poet Philip Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and also a woman named Lady Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick. So, in a 1577 book of travels to the Americas, there’s a specific reference to Frobisher arriving on what’s known as Kodlunarn Island and renaming the island the Countess of Warwick Island. So, it kind of gets you thinking, you know, you’re like, “Why is he renaming this island after this English woman unless, you know, she is seen as this kind of important patron or particularly interested?” Like, he kind of says in the account, “Please refer to the other report I sent you with more details because you inquired after them,” or that kind of thing. So, we get those little statements that really show us that women are interested and kind of actively asking questions, sending out maybe servants or agents to pursue colonial interests.
In terms of financing projects, I think really a large reason behind that is just hopes for money, right? And again, they’re projecting, like men might be, in the hopes of kind of getting good returns on the investment. So, in some ways, we could almost see it like a form of gambling or something like that.
So, we have kind of women investors, and we get them later on as well. Really uniquely, we get the Countess of Bedford, who’s this big literary patron in the early 17th century, on the official charter, which is really unique. She’s listed on the charter alongside really prominent male investors in 1612 on the charter for Bermuda. So, again, kind of, what her role is there exactly, it’s really hard to tell, but women are there; they’re there in the Virginia Company records, too. So, definitely, this kind of financial interest that they have, which is maybe tied up also to religious interests and desires to piously bring English Protestantism to England, but we don’t we don’t have a lot of really obvious evidence that that is their primary motivation.
Ann: How would these women have money? Like, why wouldn’t it be the husband of these women whose name is on there? Would these be, like, heiresses?
Lauren: Yeah, I mean, some of them are super, are super elite; they’re very, very wealthy. And so, how exactly they use it or justify it, I don’t know. I think there probably is a way for them to kind of… This could be a way of aligning themselves to their husband’s interests as well. So, for example, Lady Raleigh, Walter Raleigh’s wife, she helps Raleigh kind of sell off parts of their own land in order to fund the voyages to Guyana. So, in some ways, sometimes they might be kind of working in tandem with their husbands, or possibly kind of brothers or other kin. That’s probably the case also with Mary Sidney, because her brother, Philip, is like, really interested in Martin Frobisher’s voyages, and he writes a letter to his mentor in France, just saying like, “People have found gold in this voyage, and this is going to be really lucrative.”
But I think it also gives us an insight into the kind of relative or sometimes financial independence of women, such as merchants’ wives and things as well, that they are often entrusted with taking care of their husband’s affairs, especially if they’re off travelling. And so, I think we get little glimpses and maybe ways in which women are able to make decisions about kind of where they want to put their money.
Ann: It’s so interesting to me to think about the women. Some of the history that you found is you were able to link the women to these voyages because there were records that were dedicated to them, like, the records of these trips. For instance, John Smith, who is famous from the story of Pocahontas, et cetera, he was funded by, and so he dedicated his writing about this to his patroness, who was Frances Howard, the double duchess, yes?
Lauren: Yes, exactly. I really don’t think this gets acknowledged much at all, right? That like, John Smith’s account of his Generall History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles is one of the canonical texts for understanding some of the earliest English colonial projects. You know, I’ve spent some time doing research at the Jamestown archaeological site, for example, and just how much the early decades of the Jamestown colony is understood through both the archaeological record, but alongside John Smith’s text, and yet it’s so intriguing to think that this, you know, he says in his preface that this work – and I know some of it is kind of typical rhetoric and kind of flattery and things – but he kind of says like “Your patronage is what has made it possible for me to write this book,” and it is a huge book, and it would have been very expensive to publish. So, he dedicates this work to her, and I think if there’s any acknowledgement that she has kind of funded it, it’s that typical assumption that again, she’s just maybe not that interested or, like, she happens to kind of fund this thing, but isn’t that important to directing how it’s written or, you know, what’s kind of included in it.
But there’s multiple accounts in the early 17th-century of writers saying things like “If it won’t interest men, it will interest our women readers,” or “I’m including this detail about Indigenous women in the Chesapeake because English women in London will be really interested by these facts of their lives and things like that.” So, I tried to do this a bit in the book, and it’s kind of work I want to continue to do is just really think about how women’s patronage is shaping the literature that comes down to us as kind of really key pieces of information that we have about colonial projects in this period.
Another example is William Strachey’s account of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture onto Bermuda in 1609. This is a text that’s seen as one of the main sources behind Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but the whole text is written to a woman, and she’s not just kind of mentioned at the start and then just left out of the account. It’s like, the whole account is constantly Strachey coming back to this woman reader, whoever she is, and we don’t know who she is. But he’ll say, like, “Oh, illustrious lady, know that this happened on this day,” or “Noble lady, if you want more details, check out some of these other publications that have come out about Virginia.” So, it really seems that there is this relationship between the writer and the patroness in some of these sources that we’ve never really given much credit to, or thought about.
Ann: It’s interesting, too, to think about phrases like, you know, “This might interest the ladies.” So, just thinking, there weren’t any women on these voyages, but they’re back in England, and they’re so curious! Like, everybody probably is, anyone who’s not involved in these voyages, to know “What was it actually like? What did you actually see?” Because it’s just all brand-new, the way that we… Today, like, you want to hear about news from other parts of the world, but back then, you were relying on these voyages.
So, it’s interesting you mentioned, like, Shakespeare’s The Tempest because you talk about this in your book as well, about how these explorations affect theatre. People are so interested to know what it’s like, so maybe you have a portrayal. You talk in your book about, like, a mask that people put on where they’re sort of dressed up like Indigenous people, and maybe wearing some of the featherwork and stuff, because people in England just want to vicariously experience what it was like, right?
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, this is something that I’m just so intrigued by, and it’s kind of a challenge, but it’s also part of the exciting aspect of doing this research, but it’s how much people know about the kind of geopolitics and the realities of different Indigenous groups, and what life is like in the Americas, but then also the fantasy and the appropriation and the kind of imaginative filling in the gaps that the English, kind of, are engaged in at the same time.
As you say, a really intriguing example is The Memorable Mask, which is from 1613. It is written by George Chapman, who is the one to write a poem to endorse Walter Raleigh’s journey to South America in the 1590s, and all the way into 1613, he’s writing this mask about… The stage directions say, “Virginian priests and princes,” and they’re supposed to be these Indigenous peoples who are kind of arriving in England from an island off the Virginia subcontinent, [chuckles] as they call it in the text. It’s the first performance that really stages this kind of imagined sense of Indigenous peoples on such a large scale in England. This is only, you know, five, six years after Jamestown is established. So, as you say, the knowledge is very patchy about, you know, the realities of life. And the descriptions of these, like, feathered ruffs and feathered headdresses that are spangled with gold, and glittering with little embroidered pearls everywhere, I think really collapses kind of different Indigenous groups. You can see that they’re kind of influenced by South American featherwork here as well.
I was really intrigued to think, you know, this performance is actually performed at court around the same time as The Tempest is as well; they’re both performed for the marriage of James I and Anne of Denmark’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, to Frederick of Bohemia. And so, even though many of the performers were men, they were gentlemen from the Inns of Court, so kind of teenagers and gentlemen in their early twenties, doing this kind of elaborate fancy dress for the royal family, I was really intrigued by thinking, like, what are women in the room thinking about this, you know, when they’re watching this performance? And when these “Virginian priests and princes” end the performance and stream into the crowd and take the hands of the court ladies and, like, draw them into a dance, you know, what must that have been like for them to kind of think about… Like, what kind of associations might they have had?
It takes a little bit of speculation, I think. But we can have informed speculation. We can kind of… You know, based on kind of what we know and what women are collecting and things, I think we can kind of think about how they might have responded to those performances in a way that would make them more interested in finding out more and maybe, you know, collecting other goods from the Americas and that kind of thing.
Ann: I think it’s also really interesting, there’s several examples in your book that you talk about where trying to understand the culture of the Indigenous groups that are being encountered, the understanding, and having to explain trying to explain it back to people in England, it does involve a lot of like, “Well, this is their king, and this is their priest,” where it’s just kind of like, taking the concepts of how society works in England and applying it to a group where it’s like, well, it’s not quite that, but this is maybe the best way you can understand it, or you can explain it, “best.” But I mean, just trying to wrap their heads around a culture that there’s, “Okay. Well, this must be the king. This must be the princess. They must surely have the same kind of culture that we do.” That’s interesting when you explain like, “Oh, the Virginia priests.” Like, okay. They don’t really have priests, but yeah, okay.
Lauren: Yeah, yeah, totally. The English are, in some ways, really informed about the politics. Like, you do read some of the early accounts of places like the Chesapeake, and the English are using Algonquin place names, and, you know, they’re using terms like Weroance, which is the kind of Algonquian Powhatan word for the regional ruler. So, they’re kind of… They are learning Indigenous languages as they write these accounts and trying to make sense of these really complicated geopolitics in the Americas, but they are also interested in these places, ultimately, as conquerors, right? So, they also have to make it kind of easy to latch onto and understand, to induce people to go out and have the confidence to, kind of, wage wars and battles for various lands.
So, yeah, you get this really complicated kind of mix of attempting to understand cultures, and attempting to assimilate them or make them kind of easily digestible at the same time. I think a good example is, as you mentioned earlier, Matoaka, who was also known to us as Pocahontas, and if listeners can imagine, you know, the one surviving portrait of her from the time period is an engraving of her in court dress. But it is interesting because she is introduced there, not as Matoaka in the… There’s a kind of circle around her portrait, and inside that circle is written her name, so Matoaka, and also that she is coming from Tsenacommacah. So, they acknowledge these Indigenous territories, even as it’s being kind of subsumed and packaged within a Jacobean aesthetic.
Ann: I think that’s a lesser-known part of the story of Matoaka, AKA Pocahontas, is that she actually went to England. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Disney’s Pocahontas II?
Lauren: Oh, my gosh. Not in a while, but a student mentioned it to me the other day, and I was just like, I need to see this again, but also, it’s going to be… It’s going to be painful.
Ann: Yeah, it’s bananas. I haven’t watched it. I’ve seen clips of it, but I do know that that involves her going to England. So, you see her meeting James and Anne of Denmark and just, kind of… I’m not sure how they kind of make that be a heartwarming story for children, because it does end with her death from various diseases. But yeah, so just the fact that she went there, we don’t need to get into it in this conversation, but you do – listeners, for when you read the book – you have several examples of Indigenous people come over to England to sort of, often, just to be like, “Look! A person!” like, just to sort of be on display. Some people come over themselves to try and make… For political diplomatic reasons, but it’s just… It doesn’t go well for any of them, really.
Lauren: No.
Ann: And part of that is just diseases, like, going from a place, like two cultures meeting each other, the germs are just so different, you can’t really get past it.
But yeah, so just thinking, to me, you know, as someone who has always been sort of interested in the Tudor and Stuart period, it feels so separate to me from colonialism. But actually, there’s so much back and forth just of goods and even of people, like, it’s not separate. The cultures were thinking about each other a lot.
Lauren: Yeah. And I say in the introduction to my book that this isn’t a story of settlement, it’s a story of unsettlement. You know, that we tend to think of, like, the settlers going out and establishing these colonies as if everything was really static, and it’s why, again, I think objects are a good way of thinking about the fact that there’s so much kind of mobility and exchange and trafficking that’s going on, and it’s going both ways. I tell a couple… I tried to pick out the happier stories where I can. So, there’s a couple stories of Indigenous visitors who then go home and make it back to their homelands, including Epanow, who I discuss in the same chapter as the chapter about the court mask. But sadly, as you say, there are also just really heart-wrenching stories about those who are forcibly brought here and don’t find a way home.
And yeah, the travellers are important to look at, but what I also try to make clear is that the object focus in the book is a way of telling stories about people as well. It might not be that loads of people from the Americas travelled to London, but their lives, their expertise, their labour can be very much felt and traced back to so many Renaissance objects and kind of fashions as well.
Ann: Well, and I think even tangibly, the way that you talk in the book about things like some of the Indigenous women who create crafts up in Nunavut, in the far north, they’re using their mouths to craft some of these things. It’s like, you couldn’t be more intimate. And then, to think of those things being in England, like, yeah, of course, this isn’t just an object that exists. A woman, like, physically created this with her mouth. Like, yeah.
Lauren: Yes. And with, you know, thread made of sinew, and you’ve got animal guts, right, like used to kind of create parkas and things. Inuit canoes come back to Tudor London as well. Yeah, I really liked that idea of this, you know, this is a really kind of intimate process of women’s bodies, and natural resources, animal bodies that come to England.
There is concern in England as well about how assimilating or showing interest in objects made by Indigenous peoples might lead to corruption, you know, or kind of moral decay in some way as well. So, the Jacobeans, you know, love to complain about savage, foreign, barbarious influences. And I mean, the Jacobean period is really a misogynistic period as well. So, you know, James I does not say very nice things about women. There’s a lot of concerns about cross-dressing and women kind of, you know, adopting the styles and fashions of men. So, I talk about all the hate that’s kind of thrown onto someone like Moll Frith, who is this independently minded kind of cross-dressing woman who’s the character who becomes the character in a Thomas Middleton play as well, who’s kind of known for her tobacco-smoking. So, it gets kind of wrapped up in questions around morality and gender, kind of in London as well.
Ann: Well, and tobacco, speaking of, I think that’s another really interesting example. I like the detail that James I did not like it, [chuckles] he is not a fan of it. But do you know, there’s a really old comedy bit that Bob Newhart did in, like, the ‘60s where he’s trying to explain tobacco, as though he’s an explorer explaining, and he’s just like, and the preposterousness of just kind of like, “Oh, well, what you do? You smoke it.” Like, what?! So, the fact that tobacco comes from the New World and it just really takes off in this way. Can you explain some of what you talk about in your book about tobacco crops?
Lauren: Yeah, tobacco is a really big one for me because it is the first intoxicant of mass consumption in England that isn’t from Europe. So, it’s such a key example for me in the book, in terms of kind of thinking about transformations or impacts of the Americas on Tudor and Stuart life; tobacco is such a big one because until these voyages, it is kind of unknown to the English. And yet, as you say, it gets adopted so quickly. I mean, people just really like the effects of it. It was also a lot stronger back then than it is now. So, I think historians have estimated that it was maybe – I don’t know how they figured this out – but apparently a kind of seven times stronger than it is now.
You can really imagine how this did change the social landscape, that suddenly, people are taking these clay pipes out, lighting little fires in public spaces, there’s little puffs of smoke appearing everywhere. What’s intriguing to me is the difference between kind of smoking and just using tobacco leaves in medicine, because I think a lot has been written about, and there were a lot of debates in the time, about the benefits of tobacco and whether or not tobacco harms the body, or can heal the body in various ways. But often, when Elizabethan physicians are recommending taking tobacco, what they mean is, like, infusing it in water to make a tea or a kind of herbal to sip. So, when it gets to smoking, this is when this fear of the influence of Indigenous practices really comes in, because this is how… The English only know how to smoke tobacco because they are learning from different Indigenous groups who have been taking tobacco in this way for millennia at this point.
And so, there’s this desire to use tobacco in a kind of pharmacological sense, but at the same time, there’s this real concern that tobacco is kind of unbefitting of good, decent, honest English subjects, especially because we know that women widely smoked tobacco as well as men; it wasn’t just a pastime that men engaged in. Women were smoking, children were smoking. [both chuckle] Everyone was smoking while they were having their beers and everything. So yeah, it really was a kind of revolution. And even just in terms of tobacco pipes, you know, we find so many tobacco pipes strewn around archaeological sites in England, even now. I have a friend who’s an artist, and she met with her mudlarking friend, and they collected 17th-century tobacco pipe fragments, and she actually made me a necklace from these pipes, which is so nice of her, as a gift for a collaboration we did. So, you can kind of find them everywhere, and it’s so intriguing to me that these pipes are directly modelled on Indigenous cultures.
Ann: That’s why it’s just sort of, I don’t know, I’m just remembering this old Bob Newhart bit, but just, like, trying to expl— Imagining the English people coming to the Americas, seeing people smok,e and just like “What are you… What is this?” Like, to have never seen or experienced smoking, like, “Why? What? Whyyyy?” And then for them to realize, “Oh, actually, this is great,” [laughs] and to bring it back. And the fact that people were like, “[sigh of relief] Yeah.” So, you know, they didn’t find gold, but they found tobacco, and that becomes their crop.
Lauren: Yeah, exactly. I mean, tobacco is what makes English imperial ambitions in the Americas possible in a lot of ways, because they’re not finding gold, they’re not finding silver. They’re even desperately looking for copper mines in places like Florida; they’re not having luck with that.
James I really gets to the point where he’s like, you know, “What is the point in sending all these funds and things to Virginia? The colony has been around for a while now, nothing’s really taking off,” and Virginia Company investors really and members of parliament who support the colonial project really have to convince him, “Okay, we know you hate tobacco, but actually investing in this tobacco crop is the thing that’s going to actually make this a lucrative business, and with that money, we can then turn to other colonial projects.” And so, James eventually is like, “Okay, I’ll support the tobacco industry as long as you promise that once you get enough capital and things stabilize, you’ll move away from that, and you’ll move to silk weaving and things like that instead.” And of course, the history of Virginia tells a very different story.
Ann: No, that’s interesting, just because I’m currently doing research on James and Anne, and so your book had some interesting, interesting bits that I’m sure I’ll be returning to when I get into my research as well. But I just love that about James. He’s just, like, the original anti-smoker.
Lauren: I know! And rereading his… In 1604, he publishes A Counterblaste to Tobacco, and like with a lot of his writing, because he’s such a prolific author, you know, he’s kind of putting his foot in it because he’s like, “I’m the King, and I’m telling you not to smoke,” and then obviously no one listens to him, and then, it’s just like, you know, this is undermining your authority a little bit because you don’t actually have the power to stop it.
But I do find it really intriguing that his reasons against smoking are social, and kind of, he draws on medicinal tracks that talk about the dangers of smoking. But for him, this track is really political as well. You know, he’s kind of interested in, like, going back to that idea of corruption from the Americas. He’s kind of thinking like, “How are we going to be the ideal colonizer if we’re inviting the drugs of the people we’re trying to colonize into our bodies? Like, that’s just not going to end well.” So, he is kind of thinking through not just the physical body, but the kind of political body and what it might mean to accept different resources and technologies and things from the Americas.
So, it’s something I grapple with a lot in the book with the different objects is when the English are making really obvious associations between the Americas and the objects they have – which there is a lot of evidence of them doing that at various points – and then at other points, the objects that come from the Americas get subsumed into other stories and fantasies, and don’t become as explicitly about the Americas.
Ann: So, this came out of your research that you do, like, in your job at a university. What sorts of courses do you teach? I’m just curious to know. If people want to learn more about this.
Lauren: Yeah! I mean, I’ve been researching this for about 10 years now, I think, so it’s kind of the culmination of a lot of work. I try to bring it in when I can to things, even like we’ve got our big survey modules on the Renaissance, and we’ll look at things like The Fairy-Queen, and I’ll be like, what is this reference to tobacco in The Fairy-Queen happening? You know, how is this influencing our ideas of Elizabethan knightly culture and romance?
But I teach a module on Renaissance global travel, and it has a big object focus in it. So, I actually got some funding to hire some student interns, I think it was last summer now. We basically purchased a 17th-century cabinet and filled it up with lots of 17th- and 18th-century objects. So, part of the module is kind of thinking about that relationship between objects and literature in the Renaissance, and then they get to kind of incorporate various objects from this cabinet that we have into their essays and their literary analysis, which I think is really fun for them. I’ve just been marking the essays now, and they’ve been doing a great job.
Ann: I love what you do in this book, and clearly what you’re doing in your teaching as well, which is just thinking about these objects, thinking about like, “Why do you mention tobacco in this play?” Like, it’s not as I often… Not thinking about it, but just how I’ve experienced reading books, you can read a whole book about Tudor and Stuart England, and it never mentions colonization, but it’s like, it was such an integral part. But like you said, some of it just sort of dissolves into the cultures; you don’t really think about it. You just mention, “Oh, this person, and she had this featherwork.” Like, okay, but where was this featherwork from? So, just like drawing that out again, I think is really important and really interesting work to do.
Lauren: Thanks. Yeah, I kind of end with the image… One of the closing images in the book is of the typical Elizabethan or Jacobean courtier and the fact that they might have a beaver hat on, right? Those kind of classically Jacobean canonical, pointy hats that are often made out of beaver pelts from the Americas. They might be wearing a beaver hat, have a pearl earring with a pearl from Venezuela, they might be wearing clothes that are dyed with cochineal dye, which is also coming from the Americas. So, I think so much of what we have come to associate with this really quintessential Tudor-Stuart style are made up of components that we can trace back to colonial encounters, and to budding kind of imperial aspirations that the English have in the Atlantic.
Ann: Yeah. And I think that sort of thing is so interesting, like, fashion history and stuff like that, where it’s just, these trends didn’t come out of nowhere; they really represent what people were talking about in society, what access they had to new sorts of things. And so, I love that sort of digging into it. It’s really interesting. Thank you so much for writing this book, but also thank you for joining me for this conversation today.
Lauren: Thank you, Ann. My pleasure. It was lots of fun to talk about with you, and hopefully readers will be able to draw other connections, find other objects that I’ve kind of overlooked as well, and if they do, I would love to hear about them.
Ann: Absolutely. Well, actually, if people do want to follow your work or get in touch with you, do you have a website? Or what’s the best way for people to do that?
Lauren: Probably Bluesky, I would say. I’ve got an official university website where they can find my articles and academic work as well. They might not want to read an academic book, but my academic book is open access, so you don’t have to purchase it, it’s free to read online. But for the kind of newest finds and just an excuse to share lots of beautiful images of Tudor and Stuart art, yeah, I’m on Bluesky.
Ann: Fantastic. Well, thank you again for this wonderful conversation.
Lauren: Thanks so much.
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So, Lauren’s book is called A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England, and it’s such a fascinating book. We only had time to talk about a few of the objects and things that she discusses in her book, but it’s so readable, it’s so interesting, and it’s so valuable to me, especially as a person who’s living in modern-day Canada and researching the Tudor era, just to see the way the cultures came together when everybody thought of each other. So, you can pick up Lauren’s book, A Golden World, wherever you get your books from.
I also want to mention that if you want to keep up with me and my work and get ad-free versions of these episodes, you can do so by joining my Patreon as a paid member. So, if you pledge at least one dollar a month, you’ll get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History, and/or for six dollars or more a month, you can also get bonus episodes featuring me and some of my friends. We had a recent episode discussing the Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus, and what that has to do with Tudor history, and why it’s my favourite play of all time. We’ve also got an episode coming up soon where my friend Lana Wood Johnson is going to explain the plot of one of her favourite books, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. We also talk about costume dramas and other things. Basically, bonus episodes if you join my Patreon at that six dollars or more a month level. There’s also an episode you can hear there where I talk with my friend Gina Berry about the new Odyssey movie.
Members at the six dollars or more a month level also get access to our Discord chat, which is an elite place to just chat about people from history, and share memes, and have a good time. Honestly, like, I talk about The Traitors there a lot, which is like the only show I have time to watch, and I’m obsessed with it. Anyway, you can also get access to my Zoom Live events if you’re at that six dollars a month level. But again, you can join for as low as a dollar a month to get the ad-free access, and I appreciate every single person who’s a member of my Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter to get a free trial or to join as a paid member.
And if you like hearing me talk and you’re like, “But what’s she like as a writer?” I have written a book. It’s called Rebel of the Regency. It’s a biography of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen without a crown, and it is now available to buy wherever you get your books. Go to RebelOfTheRegency.com for all the links to buy a copy.
And the Tudor era is up and running here on this podcast. Next week’s episode, we’re going to get into a bit of what was happening in another country, not England, but next to England. We’re going to be talking about Scotland during this era, and what were they up to at that period of time, and why was it putting women on trial as witches? We’re going to talk about that next week with some very special guests I think you’d be really excited about. But until next time, everyone, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
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