History Cafe Podcast By Jon Rosebank Penelope Middelboe cover art

History Cafe

History Cafe

By: Jon Rosebank Penelope Middelboe
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True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building...

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Episodes
  • #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 8 2026

    Nothing is what it seems? We, poor Londoners, paying our penny to stand at the Globe in 1606 would agree with that. With Robert Cecil’s government relentlessly pumping out fake news around the Gunpowder Plot, it’s not at all clear who the real criminals are. As Macbeth, murderer of a Scottish king, is overtaken by the evil of ambition we begin to see that our Scottish king James is also in danger. Doesn’t the ambitious scheming of his Principal Secretary threaten to reduce him to an irrelevance? Didn’t Cecil’s father, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, kill our own king’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots?


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    36 mins
  • #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?

    #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?
    Apr 1 2026
    Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had fatally damaged the status of the nobility and caused the rise of the small independent farmer. Feudalism in England and Wales was over… or at least we thought it was, until now. (R)

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    29 mins
  • #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

    #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 25 2026
    One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales. (R)

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    30 mins
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