First, I have neglected the blog for some time, and I apologize but my “On this Day” posts have covered just about all the days, many twice, some three times. Several thousand of you find those old posts each month, making them truly evergreen, and I am grateful – but I want to do more for my subscribers, here and everywhere. I recently started a YouTube channel named Too Much Tudor, designed to sit at the intersection of BookTube and the Tudorverse. To balance out the bookish posts, I am going to be re-conceiving some of my blog posts – the ones where the stories are too great to miss. Today, I did my first of these: I talked about Friar William Peto’s Easter Sermon, delivered on March 31, 1532 (and how it became legendary some fifteen years later). I am embedding the video if you’d like to watch – and right below it I’m also including the cleaned-up transcript to make it feel like one of my regular blog posts. Of course, if you only want the original post you can just click here!
Hello BookTube, hello Tudorverse! Today’s video is more for the Tudor fans than the booktubers – for all that the name of this channel is Too Much Tudor, there has not been enough Tudor so I need to balance the scales. BUT to be true to the Booktube side, I will focus on narrative arc.
I’m still going to let the dates inspire the stories – like I do on my blog. I’ve done “On This Day” posts at the rate of about once a week for the past ten years – though I have neglected it a bit lately because I’ve covered all the days, many twice, some three times. This will be a new take, focused on fun rather than footnotes (though I will link to the original posts if you want details).
To illustrate my plan, the first Tudor Tidbit involves Friar William Peto. I chose him because March 31 is the day on which he preached a wild Easter sermon.
The year was 1532 – Henry VIII had left his wife Catherine of Aragon – and was still trying to get the Pope to agree to an annulment so he could marry Anne Boleyn. He was starting to gather men around him who would eventually push him to break with Rome and form his own Church of England, but that hadn’t happened yet.
Somehow, a Franciscan monk, William Peto, was chosen to preach the Easter Sermon for the court. A brave soul, a Catholic soul, he told Henry he needed to turn from Jezebel Anne Boleyn and return to his faithful wife – or he would be as Ahab, and the dogs would lick his blood.
He was quickly arrested for that one. Prophesizing the death of the king was trason. But Petto had not quite prophesized – the “if” saved his life. Five years later, after Henry had turned a bit bloodthirsty, it wouldn’t have, but this was still early. Peto was released after a year, fled to the Continent instead of staying to protest when Henry did break with Rome.
People quickly forgot about the whole thing…there were news cycles even then…but then came 1547, when Henry died. His plans were to be buried at Windsor, next to Jane Seymour, so there was a large formal procession to get his body there. It took two days, especially since the road was bad and jolted the coffin a bunch, damaging it (at this point, Henry weighed a good 500 pounds). They stopped at Syon Abby for the night and placed the coffin in the chapel…where it leaked. The next morning, the attendants returned to find a dog with red eyes lapping up the blood. That’s the legend.
An added vindictive twist here: Syon is where Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was held before being taken to the Tower to be beheaded for adultery. Catherine’s execution took place almost exactly five years before this blood lapping incident…
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this balancing of the scales…and agree that this was not at all Too Much Tudor (as if there ever could be!).
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If you like my posts, you’ll love my books! Nothing Proved comes out on May 19, but you can preorder now through your favorite platform – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple!
Or, of course, you can get yourself in the mood by rereading my Seymour Saga, the gripping story of the short-lived dynasty that shaped the Tudor Era. Jane the Quene skews romantic, The Path to Somerset is pure Game of Thrones (without the dragons), and The Boy King is a noir coming-of-age. Get them now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple, or even your local independent bookstore!
So interesting, and thankfully the Friar had used the little word ‘if’.
One of those words that punches far above its weight!