Ruffs, Reformation, and Real Life: Why I Write the Tudors

Episode summary:
This is a personal, behind-the-scenes episode on why Tudor England became the setting for The Bedlam Series: the whiplash of religious change, the evolving Tudor monarchs, and how “madness” was understood, feared, and controlled—especially around Bethlehem Hospital (“Bedlam”). Along the way, Anne Marie threads careful parallels to current U.S. events and the emotional toll of living through political instability.

Content note: This episode references political violence, immigration enforcement, protest, and a personal medical experience.

In this episode

• Why Tudor England feels like a pressure cooker (faith, law, identity, survival)
• Religion as “weather”: shifting doctrine, shifting danger
• Tudor power and insecurity: Henry VIII → Edward VI → Mary I → Elizabeth I
• Bedlam as symbol and setting: who gets labeled, who gets confined, who gets believed
• Modern parallels: competing “official narratives,” public meaning, labels that flatten human lives
• “We must cultivate our garden” (Voltaire) as a grounding practice in hard times

Rough timecode outline (edit once you have final audio)

• 00:00 Show open + what the podcast is
• 00:35 Personal note: this week, mental health, “cultivating our garden”
• 03:10 Bedlam Series orientation + how to get the prequel
• 04:30 Tudor religion as a changing tide
• 08:00 Tudor royals + insecurity-driven power
• 11:30 “Madness” as label + Bedlam’s role
• 15:20 Borders, sovereignty, Greenland parallels
• 18:00 Closing reflection + how to get the prequel + May release reminder

Get the prequel (free) + follow the series

• Get The Sum of Broken Rooms free when you join the email list (official download page): link at top of page https://www.amcannon.com/
• Explore The Bedlam Series hub. 
• Armchair Historians on A.M. Cannon’s site. 
• Main site / signup landing page. 

Mentioned in the episode (current-events context)

• Reporting and video updates around Renée Good’s fatal shooting by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, protests, and disputes over official framing vs. public footage. 
• Greenland rejecting U.S. takeover talk; NATO / sovereignty concerns. 
• Reuters coverage on Nicolás Maduro saying he was “kidnapped” amid U.S. charges (referenced as a “foreign president kidnapped”). 

Tudor + Bedlam background (learn-more links)

• English Reformation (1527–1590) overview (The National Archives). 
• Reformation Parliament overview (UK Parliament). 
• From Bethlehem to Bedlam (Historic England). 
• Bethlem Royal Hospital background (Museum of the Mind). 
• Bedlam and “theatre of madness”

Transcript

Anne Marie: 0:06

Hello fellow. I'm chair Historians. Welcome to the show. I'm Annmarie Cannon, your host, historical fiction author, and curious soul, always chasing the human side of history. Show notes include my website, links to content discussed in the episode, how to support the show, and a free short story download that introduces readers to bedlam from my soon to be released historical fiction series. On this podcast, my guests share the history they love most and we experience it through their eyes, what fascinates them, what they've uncovered, and why the story still matters. Let's get into it. Hi guys. Welcome back to the show and thank you so much for being here. Before we step into Tudor England, I want to name something about this week because I don't make this show in a vacuum, and neither do you listen in one. I've worked really hard to keep my mental health in check this time around. I've tried to be intentional, breathe, limit, doom scrolling. Keep my nervous system from living in a constant state of alarm. But I'm gonna be honest, I'm afraid I'm losing the battle this week. The last time Trump was president, I literally went blind in my left eye. It was caused by a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the nervous system, including the optic nerve, the spinal cord, and eventually the brain. Thankfully, real science and a knowledgeable doctor were able to stop the attack and treat it, and I regained my vision with minimal permanent damage. No one can say for sure what caused it. But I've carried a theory that the daily outrage, this constant grinding stress, created such a hostile environment in my body, in my nervous system, that something had to give. And yes, the metaphor of not being able to see anymore is not lost on me. I've done better this time around. I really have. I've kept fear and panic at bay more days than not, but this week between the headlines and the escalation, the talk of nations being taken, the violence and the way power tries to spin, what we all witnessed, something in me just hit its limit. And today my good friend Ruth reminded me of volunteers line from Candied, we must cultivate our garden. And the truth is, that's all any of us really has. Regardless of what's going on around us in this country, in this world, it's still necessary to do what needs to be done to cultivate the garden we're responsible for, especially in hard times. So consider this episode part of my garden. Because Tudor history, especially the world of Bedlam, is a story about what happens when institutions destabilize truth, when fear becomes policy, when the mind becomes a battleground, and how ordinary people try to stay human anyway. Okay. deep breath everyone. Let's go to Bedlam. Okay guys. Today we're stepping into Bedlam, my historical fiction series. If you're new here, quick orientation. These novels take place in Tudor England where faith and power are always shifting. Rumors can be lethal, and the human mind, especially a troubled or misunderstood mind is treated both as mystery and threat. The series rooted in real history, but it follows fictional characters moving through very real storms, the changing tide of religion, the volatility of Tudor Court, and the harsh ways society responded to mental illness, especially in and around Bethlehem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. And if you wanna start at the very beginning, I've got good news. The prequel short story, some of Broken Rooms is available free@amcannon.com when you sign up for my email list. You can also buy it on Amazon and other digital retailers. Today's episode is all about why Tudor history grabbed me by the collar and why it became the heartbeat of bedlam. Let's get into it. Why the Tudors? You may ask, why build the Bedlam series inside a world of Ruffs plague politics and people being punished for the crime of existing too loudly? The answer is because Tudor England is a pressure cooker. Everything is changing. Truth, religion, the crown, the rules of survival, and when the outside world becomes unstable. We see what happens inside the human mind, which is exactly where Bedlam lives. Today I'm gonna talk about three things that keep pulling me back, the title, violence of Religious Change, the Evolving Drama of the Tudor Royals, and three, how madness was understood, feared, punished, misunderstood, and what it means to write about that through the lens of bedlam. And along the way, I'm gonna pause a few times to thread in something else because history doesn't stay politely in the past. If you wanna understand Tudor England, don't think of religion as a private belief, think of it as weather. It's in everything. It determines what you can say out loud, what you can't say at all, what your neighbors report, what your family whispers behind closed doors in one lifetime. England can shift from Catholic to Protestant to aggressively Protestant, back to Catholic, and then into a carefully managed compromise. And every shift is a social earthquake. It can change marriages, inheritance, public ritual, law. What counts as treason? What counts as heresy, and what counts as good. Everyone becomes a performer. Everyone learns to read the room, and the room is always dangerous. In the case of Lord Simon, that danger is intimate. It gets under your skin. It shapes childhood. It shapes family. It shapes what's safe to believe, especially if your mind already runs on a different rhythm than the common measure. And this is one of those moments where tutor history starts to feel painfully modern, because when a society is frightened, there's an urgency to declare the story immediately. Who was right? Who was wrong? Who started it? Who deserved what happened? We've seen that recently in the aftermath of Renee Good's fatal shooting by an ice officer in Minneapolis. An incident that has sparked protests and fierce disagreement over how footage should be interpreted while investigations are still unfolding. In Tudor England, power didn't just enforce laws. It enforced narratives. It decided what a person was in public forever. Heretic, traitor, mad. Threat in moments like this then and now. The fight isn't only over actions. It's over who gets to name reality first and how quickly that name hardens into truth. Now let's talk about the tutors themselves. Because if they were a streaming series, we'd all say this is too much. But the thing that makes the Tudor Royals more than pageantry is this. You can watch power mutate across reigns. Henry VII reshapes the world through will and force. Edward the six becomes a boy king. Mary tries to restore order through religion and fair. Elizabeth, the first Master's image, like its warfare. And the connective tissue between them is insecurity, insecure power needs enemies, insecure power, needs proof,

9:41

insecure power needs public punishment because it's never enough to be right. It needs to be seen being right. That's why the tutor era is so compatible with Bedlam, because bedlam isn't just a place, it's a symbol for what happens when authority decides what you are. It is where society stores what it doesn't want to understand, where it confines, what it can't categorize, where it turns fair into structure. And setting the Bedlam series in 1554 under Queen Mary matters because it's a hinge moment. England is trying to return to an older truth. Sound familiar, but the people have already changed. Even faith has bruises. If that does sound familiar, it's because the language of restoring order is timeless. We're hearing it now around immigration enforcement, around protest around federal authority, especially his public response to Renee Goode's death has widened into demonstrations and political conflict over accountability and transparency. And again, the Tudor parallel isn't history repeats. Exactly. It's this. When power feels threatened, it often tightens its grip, not only on policy, but on public. Meaning It tries to control the story. People are allowed to tell about what they saw. That's a tutor instinct. And it's a human one now the heart of bedlam mental illness in Tudor, England. Madness was one thing. It was a collage of medicine. theology, superstition, grief, trauma, poverty, and sometimes convenience. Sometimes it meant illness. Sometimes it meant difference. Sometimes it meant this person is hard to manage. Sometimes it meant this person knows something. We'd rather they didn't. And that is terrifying because it means madness is a label with power. In the sum of broken rooms, the city is alive with tension and noise. London swelling with its own becoming. And then we step into bedlam, where the people inside are framed as those whose minds do not fit the common measure. That phrase matters because common measure implies there is a ruler, a standard, a line you're supposed to meet. And if you don't, then what? What I'm drawn to in this series is the distinction between being unwell. And being named unwell by someone who benefits from the name. This is where I wanna pause and thread carefully because we're talking about real lives, but one of the clearest bridges between Tutor England and now is the way labels can be deployed to collapse complexity in Tudor England. Mad heretic, traitor, and modern life. Threat, criminal, terrorist, illegitimate. And in the Renee, good case. You can watch how quickly a human being becomes a symbol. How different sides compress the story into something usable. While grief and uncertainty are still raw, that compression, turning a life into a headline shaped object is something bedlam as an institution practically ran on. Which is why writing Bedlam is for me, an act of resistance against flattening It's me saying every person. Has context. This person is not a category. One more, Tudor fascination. The airs of obsession with control of borders, of loyalty, of legitimacy, of who belongs to whom. Tudor England is constantly negotiating sovereignty. Through force, religion, marriage and diplomacy. Borders aren't just on maps. They're in bodies, vows and laws, and that's why a modern headline can suddenly feel tutor in its bones. This week's reporting has focused on renewed talk from President Trump and his administration about acquiring Greenland. With Greenland's leaders firmly rejecting the idea, an international observer's warning about implications for sovereignty and alliances, whether it's framed as purchase pressure or options in air quotes, the tutor echo is this Power often describes possession as practicality. It's strategic, it's necessary. It's for security. It will be easier this way. And in Tudor history that reasoning, security destiny, divine right inevitability was frequently the velvet glove over the iron hand. So when I write Bedlam inside Tudor England, the writing inside a world where power can convince itself it's moral while doing harm, and I'm asking the same question in the series that we have to ask now. Who pays the price for power? Who pays the price for a powerful person's certainty? The tutors are dramatic. Yes, they're deliciously dramatic, but what keeps me here isn't the roughs and intrigue. Though to be clear, I am not above a rough. It's the human pressure. It's what happens when institutions define truth, when fear becomes policy, when suffering becomes entertainment, when difference becomes a sentence, and it's also the counterpoint. I always wanna leave room for the tenderness between people, the humor that survives anyway. The strange, stubborn beauty of minds that refuse to fit the mold. So that's why I write the Tudors. That's why I write bedlam, because history isn't just dates and monarchs history is what it felt like to live under a sky that kept changing its rules. And if you're here with me listening to this, I suspect you like that kind of weather too. Until next time, keep your curiosity sharp and your rough, sharper.