Noble Blood - Wyatt and Elizabeth in Revolt

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Queen Mary I's decision to marry a foreign prince turned people against her. Some were so against her they planned an uprising to overthrow her in favor of her half-sister, Elizabeth. But how much did Elizabeth know? And when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, how much evidence of her treason would be uncovered? Support Noble Blood:—ORDER 'THE ARCANE ARTS'— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On Palm Sunday, 1554, Elizabeth Tudor, half-sister of the Queen Mary I, was brought to be imprisoned at the Tower of London. The tide was too low for Elizabeth to enter through a watergate. and so she crossed a drawbridge past rows of armed guards and the squawking, growling, royal menagerie. But the lions roaring and bearing their teeth wasn't the most frightening sight that the young royal princess suffered.

On her way to the inner ward of the tower where she would be staying, she passed the scaffolding where, just weeks earlier, her cousin, Lady Jane Gray, had lost her head. The scaffolding remained erect, at the ready to claim more victims. Elizabeth had been implicated in a plot against her sister, the queen. The plot has become known as the Wyatt rebellion in uprising of major landowners and noblemen who would converge on London an attempt to overthrow the Catholic Mary the First before her wedding to the dreaded foreigner Prince Philip of Spain, replacing her with the next in line, Elizabeth. But the rebellion had failed, and the conspirators that hadn't fled were captured and interrogated.

It was almost certain that Elizabeth had known about the rebellion beforehand, and now her sister Mary was determined to mount enough evidence to prove that Elizabeth was guilty of treason, a charge that would lead to her head on the chopping block. Elizabeth was certainly aware how dire her circumstances were, how precariously close she was to death. But even if she wasn't, the very rooms that she was imprisoned in would have reminded her. The chambers in the inner ward of the tower

were the same where her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been brought before her own execution. before King Henry VIII had charged her with treason and had a Calais swordsman slice her head from her pretty white neck. The question was whether her daughter would now suffer the same fate. And then what had only been nightmare became manifest in reality. The lieutenant, Master Bridges, received the document that would seal Elizabeth's fate. Only a few days into Elizabeth's stay at the Tower of London, a warrant for her execution had been delivered.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Mary Tudor's ascension to the throne in the summer of 1553 had been triumphant. Before her half-brother, King Edward VI, died at only 15, he and his advisors had attempted to rewrite the Orchurch. order of succession, and place Edward's cousin, Lady Jane Gray, on the throne, which would exclude both of his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from the line, despite the wishes of the late King Henry VIII. But Mary Tudor galvanized her support and marched into London triumphant, with Elizabeth at her side, as the powers opposing her crumbled. But that sense of triumph and popular support, for Queen Mary the First would not last very long.

Mary was 37 years old when she became queen, and though medical progress today has made it happily possible to bear children at that age or older, by tutor standards, the possibility of Mary having an heir was a rapidly dwindling possibility. Mary knew that she needed to get married extremely quickly, not only, on the chance that she might be able to get pregnant, but also because Mary fundamentally believed that as a woman, she needed a man by her side to rule the kingdom. There were certain aspects of her extremely early reign,

like at her coronation where she declined dubbing knight herself and instead assigned the role to a male courtier that indicate a fundamental lack of conviction with regards to what a female monarch could do. Mary getting married would have been all well and fine in theory, but Mary's choice of husband would reveal itself to be the fundamental blunder of her reign. Her advisors and parliament wanted her to marry an Englishman. In November, a parliamentary delegation came to Mary to formally request it.

The ideal candidate in mind, the unlawful, Unspoken frontrunner was Edward Courtney, recently restored Earl of Devon, who, like Mary, was a great grandchild of King Edward IV. But Mary had another husband in mind, Philip of Spain, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor. In order to understand why Mary would make such an unpopular choice, I think it's worth rewinding a bit to remember just how tumultuous Mary's childhood was. Her father was, of course, King Henry VIII, and her mother was Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, a Spanish princess. When Mary was about 11 years old, her father decided that he wanted to pursue Anne Boleyn and annul his marriage to Catherine, which meant illegitimizing Mary. Over night, she went from Prince

princess two bastard, separated from her beloved mother, and isolated from the father who once adored her, but began treating her with outright contempt. Her lifeline throughout this period was the Spanish ambassador. Her greatest ally became the Holy Roman Emperor who was advocating to preserve his aunt Catherine's marriage and keep Mary legitimate. So even 20 years, later, half-Spanish Mary still identified with her Spanish ancestry and still trusted her Habsburg family. Mary's chosen husband, promoted and celebrated by the Habsburg ambassadors Mary trusted, was, as I said, the Holy Roman Emperor's son. Philip was 26 years old, handsome and virile. Mary was queen now, and her mind was made up. She managed to be able to. She managed to

to strong-arm Parliament and her counsel into accepting her decision, but the public would be another story. It probably feels obvious why people were against the idea of their queen, marrying a foreigner who would become king. After all, a husband has power over his wife. So this foreigner would just be lording over all of them? Was England going to become just another Hapsburg state, a piggy bank to fund their expensive European war? As the historian David Starkey points out, there was also a specific context to the anti-foreigner sentiment at this time. The lower classes might have always been xenophobic, but it was actually King Henry VIII and his break from the Catholic Church that contributed to nationalistic pride

among the upper class and nobility too. As Starkey writes, quote, Henry's emphasis on England as an island empire, standing independent and alone against a papal antichrist on the one hand and Protestant rebels and heretics on the other, helped make xenophobia intellectually and politically respectable among the elite as well. And quote, and so rumors of Mary's upcoming marriage to a hated Spanish prince began sowing seeds of discontent that would quickly bloom into outright rebellion. Though Thomas Wyatt wasn't really the leader of the rebellion that bears his name, because it is known as the Wyatt rebellion, it feels worth talking a little bit about who he is and how he got to the point where he would raise troops and arms against the Queen of England. Wyatt was born

around 1521, the son of a famous courtier who's known for possibly introducing the sonnet to England and possibly having an affair with Anne Boleyn before she married King Henry. Though not much is known about this younger Thomas Wyatt's early life, it seems like he studied classical military strategy and moral philosophy before embarking on life as a soldier. There were were a few early bouts of legal trouble, which maybe reveal a less than strict adherence to the rule of law. In 1543, Wyatt, along with two of his friends, went on what I found delightfully described as a, quote, episode of aristocratic hooliganism, during which they drunkenly broke some windows and threw stones at sex workers down on the banks. Wyatt also got in trouble for eating meat on Fridays and on fast days, which led to him being

imprisoned in the Tower of London for a month. But none of that seems particularly notable, except in the ways it speaks to what would happen later. In his 20s, Wyatt would be commissioned to lead a hundred men in the war against France. He purported himself incredibly well and was promoted to captain, and then he was knighted. During an attack on Hardlock Castle, he personally stormed the first gate and broke the door open, leading to him being commended for his personal bravery. King Edward the 6th continued to pull England towards Protestantism, but when he died, his Catholic half-sister Mary took over, determined to return the country to her faith. There has been plenty written about whether the motivation for the Wyatt rebellion was religious.

Was Thomas Wyatt a devoted Protestant who saw overthrowing Mary as essential for preserving his choice of worship? The historians disagree about just how religiously motivated, how anti-Catholic the rebellion was. Certainly, Wyatt's propaganda downplayed the anti-Catholic. The anti-Catholic. Catholic angle, no doubt trying to rally as much popular support as possible. When someone brought up the hope that they would restore Protestantism as a reason for the rebellion, Wyatt apparently replied, quote, you may not so much as name religion, for that will withdraw us from the hearts of many. You must make your only quarrel for overrunning by strangers. In other words, the anti-Philip sentiment is the winning argument. Whatever religious

goals Wyatt might have privately held in his heart, he, like many others, was incensed by the approaching wedding of Queen Mary to a foreign prince. The question then was, what was he going to do about it. In the fall of 1553, a group of established landed men with military experience, all likely Protestant, got together to make a plan. They landed on a rebellion that would consist of four individual uprisings across England that would all converge in London on March 18th, Palm Sunday of the next year. Before Prince Philip was expected to leave from Spain, in anticipation of his upcoming nuptials. Sir James Croft would lead his men from here for sure.

Henry Gray, Duke of Suffolk, would rally the Midlands, Sir Peter Carew would come from the West, and Thomas Wyatt would come from Kent. It's hard to gauge exactly what they imagined the plan would be once they reached London. Certainly they assumed that the people would come out and rally behind them. But then what? Even among the conspirators, there seemed to be disagreement about whether or not the goal would be to assassinate Mary.

And it seems most likely that the plan was to put Elizabeth Tudor on the throne and marry her to Courtney. But it also sort of seems like Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, would have probably wanted his own daughter to be queen again, Later, once the rebellion failed, Wyatt would claim that he meant absolutely no harm to marry, that he only wanted to protest the advice of her privy counselors and keep her from marrying a foreigner. But of course, once you're captured, you're going to want to frame your rebellion in as innocent a light as possible. But whatever their ultimate goal, the rebels would never make it that far. Word of the rebellion got out months before the scheduled uprising. And when Karu was summoned to a privy council meeting on January 2, 1554,

the men knew that the proverbial jig was up. If they were going to move, it needed to be now. The other three planned arms of the rebellion were harmlessly doused. Their leaders fled or captured, and only Wyatt was left. On January 26th, 600 troops departed from London to meet him, under command of the then 80-year-old Duke of Norfolk.

The London contingent stood opposite Wyatt's men, and there was a moment before the groups engaged. But then a shout erupted through the London men. They cried, We are Englishmen. There were cheers, and the London men turned, their royal white coats inside out to hide the royal insignias, defecting to Wyatt's side. The people, it seemed, would join with him.

Bolstered and buoyed by the support, Wyatt and his men marched toward London. It was with this encroaching threat that Queen Mary I gave the speech of her career, appealing directly to her subjects. She publicly proclaimed, quote, I cannot tell how naturally the mother loveth the child, for I was never the mother of any, but certainly if a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly love her subjects as the mother adopt the child,

then assure yourself that I, being your lady and mistress, do as earnestly and tenderly, love and favor you. Mary managed to underplay the real fear among her people that she would be married to a hated foreigner against the wishes of Parliament and her advisors by saying, quote, ye shall understand that I entered not into the treaty

without advice of all our privy counsel and by assent of those to whom the king, my father, committed his trust. In the word of a queen, I promise and assure you that if it shall not probably appear before the nobility and commons in the High Court of Parliament, that this marriage shall not be for the singular benefit and commodity of all the whole realm, that then I will abstain, not only from this marriage, but also from any other where of peril may ensure to this most noble realm.

Her appeal to the people worked. Even with the added defectors, Wyatt's troops numbered fewer than 3,000, and without London rising up to join him, there was very little realistic hope for success. And though Wyatt did advance by putting down a government attack at Charing Cross, when they reached St. James, his group split into two factions, with his main body of rebels continuing along Fleet Street

before finding Ludgate barred to them. Eventually, Wyatt and his men turned to face a cavalry commander who forced his surrender. Though the rebellion was not successful in the end, Mary was facing genuine danger. Historians do point out several points in the rebellion were only slightly different actions. Wyatt moving faster straight to London, or keeping his group together and attacking the palace where Mary was less than properly defended, might have changed history.

But alas, Wyatt was brought to the Tower of London where his interrogation began. The rebels had been planning to replace Mary, it seems, with her sister Elizabeth. And Mary was determined to find the evidence that she was shown. sure would prove her Protestant sister guilty of treason. Elizabeth knew that she was in trouble. Once the rebellion was put down, Mary summoned Elizabeth to London, ostensibly to have her stay with Mary for her own protection,

but obviously in order to get her into custody and prevent her from going into hiding. Elizabeth, wisely, declined the invitation, saying that she was too ill to travel. Mary called her sister's bluff, sending two physicians who determined that Elizabeth was, in fact, well enough to move to London. Whether her illness was psychosomatic or not,

Elizabeth was ill as she went by litter to the city. But perhaps knowing what she was facing, one can hardly blame her. The stress would have made me keel over her. right there. Mary refused to see Elizabeth when she arrived and put Elizabeth immediately under guard in a small isolated apartment. When word came that Elizabeth would be moved to the Tower of London, Elizabeth understood that meant she would be one step closer to her death. Elizabeth begged to be permitted to write a letter to her sister. And even though they were losing the tide,

her guard granted her that opportunity. Elizabeth wrote deliberately slowly, so that the boat would not be able to take her to the tower that day. It is not an overstatement to say that she was quite literally writing for her life. Quote, if any ever did try this old saying, that a king's word was more than another man's oath, I most humbly beseech your majesty to verify it to me and to remember your last promise and my demand that I be not condemned without answer and due proof. Elizabeth pledged her loyalty to her sister

and begged Mary to believe that she was entirely innocent. The letter, sometimes referred to as the Tide letter, worked insofar as Elizabeth managed to delay enough for them to miss the tide, and Elizabeth was brought to the tower the next day, but Mary did not reply. The evidence against Elizabeth was thin, but it was there. Wyatt had written her a letter before the rebellion, and allegedly Elizabeth had replied, though pretty non-committally, by sending a servant back to deliver a message in person. copy of one of Elizabeth's letters had been given to the King of France,

who would have, in theory, been backing the rebellion once Mary had been taken off the throne. And Elizabeth had apparently been making plans, allegedly at the rebels' behest, to move her household from Ashridge, where she was living, to Donington, one of her other palaces that would have been a more strategic stronghold. A few days after Elizabeth was put in the tower, her interrogation began.

When questioned about the Donington move, at first Elizabeth said she didn't even remember having that palace. Elizabeth was, at the time, the second largest landowner in England, so you can't expect her to remember all of her houses, but eventually she conceded, quote, Indeed, I do now remember that I have such a place, but I never lay in it in all my life. But as the interrogation continued and Elizabeth was presented with more evidence, including from Sir James Croft, one of the captured conspirators himself, Elizabeth countered saying, quote, As concerning my going unto Donington Castle, I do remember that mine officers and you, Sir James

Kroff had such talk. But what is that to the purpose, my lords? But that I may go to mine own houses at all times. After all, Elizabeth is correct on that count. It's not illegal to go to one of your own houses. When Thomas Wyatt finally went to the block on April 11, 1554, before he died when he was speaking to the crowd, he declared that Courtney and Elizabeth were completely innocent of treason. But the priest on the scaffold, Dr. Hugh Weston, interrupted him in a panic to try and undercut him. To say, actually under interrogation, he admitted differently. But cutting off a confession moments from death was not a good look, for the priest or for the government. Though Wyatt was executed, people witnessing the execution dipped handkerchiefs into his blood to keep as mementos.

and his head, which was mounted on the gate, as a warning to other traitors, was actually stolen fairly quickly as a martyr relic. As I said, the material evidence against Elizabeth was pretty thin. She would later write in one of her more Yoda-like verses, much suspected by me nothing proved can be. But, of course, evidence doesn't always save someone from a behind. heading. Elizabeth's own mother, Anne Boleyn, was killed on trumped-up charges. As Elizabeth waited in the tower imprisoned, she knew that death was a very real possibility and that her

fate was fundamentally out of her hands. And then her worst nightmares were made real. Allegedly, a death warrant came to the lieutenant at the tower, calling for Elizabeth's beheading. But as the story goes, the man decided to follow up to ensure that the order was correct, and he realized that the warrant had not, in fact, been signed by Queen Mary herself. If the warrant had come at all, it was just something of a dummy warrant, apparently written by Mary's chancellor to have ready just in case. And as some stories go, when Queen Mary heard that the warrant had been written without her condition, sent, she was furious. The literal tide had saved Elizabeth from one extra night in the Tower of London,

but the metaphorical tide saved her life. As it became clear that the evidence against her was flimsy and the crowds were growing dismayed at the bloodshed, it became apparent that Elizabeth's life would be spared. Gradually Elizabeth's privileges, of moving around the tower were increased. And finally, two months after she was escorted into the tower, Elizabeth was released to live under house arrest. Mary had survived the Wyatt Rebellion, and her sister Elizabeth had survived its aftermath. That's the story of the Wyatt Rebellion, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about the rebellion's most famous, supernatural supporter.

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Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on I-Hard Radio. Wyatt wasn't the only public voice against Queen Mary the first marrying Philip of Spain. In early spring 1554, a voice from nowhere, from beyond the grave,

began speaking from a wall in Aldersgate Street in London, denouncing Marian Philip and speaking out against Catholic Mass and confession. It was a spirit, some supernatural power, communicating directly with the people. Sometimes referred to as the voice or the bird in the wall. It was a strange phenomenon which allegedly attracted a crowd of thousands of people. It's unclear whether the voice was working in organized tandem with the planned rebellion or whether they just shared the same opinions on national politics. Eventually, the ruse was discovered.

The voice in the wall was not a ghost. It was a young servant girl who had been smuggled in to a hollow wall. Her name was Elizabeth Croft, no relation to the Sir James Croft who had been meant to lead part of the rebellion. And though Elizabeth Croft was arrested, it was ultimately determined that she was just an innocent party working on behalf of others, and though she apologized, she wasn't ultimately punished.

As a side note, if you like historical hoaxes, you should probably listen to another podcast I do called, Hoax with an exclamation point. We just finished our first season, and we covered plenty of spooks and spirits and pranks like this. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Paul Jaffe, Natasha Lasky, and me, Dana Schwartz.

The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Nome's Gripen, with supervising producer Rima Il Kali, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.