A 13-year-old girl labours in a sealed chamber at Pembroke Castle as the plague circles them. Miraculously, Margaret Beaufort survives. Her son does, too. His name is Henry Tudor.

This birth doesn’t register in the minds of many nobles, as they’re focused on England’s first Yorkist King, Edward IV. After his decisive victory at the Battle of Towton, his mission as king is to do what Henry VI couldn’t: rebuild a broken kingdom.

He solidifies power in concert with his ally, the Earl of Warwick, who fancies himself as a kingmaker. Warwick grows rich on titles, ports, and power, until some say he rules as much as the king. They stamp out a few threats to Edward’s rule, but ultimately their mission is to stamp order over the kingdom.

The best way to do that is to find England a new Queen.

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al discuss the Earl of Warwick’s lust for power, and why the role of matchmaker has been thrust upon him. Plus, Dan gives you a close insight into the social discord of England early on in Edward IV’s reign thanks to the Paston Letters — the largest surviving collection of 15th-century private correspondence, written in English between 1422 and 1509.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

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––

Presented by Dan Jones

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Executive Producer - Louisa Field

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of Content - Chris Skinner

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Hello from Dan! Don’t fret. There’s nothing happening to This Is History! I thought I’d give you a little treat ahead of Season 11 of A Dynasty to Die For. The excellent Dr Harini Bhat has kindly given you a special preview of her new podcast, Hidden History. 

She’s a clinical pharmacist and storyteller obsessed with the moments in history that still can't be fully explained. Every week she investigates real events that defy easy explanation. Mass hysterias. Vanished civilizations. Medical oddities. Strange signals. Unexplained phenomena that keep repeating across centuries, as if history is trying to tell you something. 

Hidden History doesn't dismiss ancient events as myth or superstition. It treats them as open case files, shaped by the limits of knowledge, technology, and record-keeping. Because the unknown isn't a failure of explanation. It's a constant in human experience, one that evolves, repeats, and sometimes deepens the more we learn. 

Get new episodes every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube @hiddenhistorypod. Listen here: https://play.megaphone.fm/65qgwrg-sq-mmvg7tpqgfa

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Three brothers. One crown. And no ounce of loyalty between them.

In the final Plantagenet season of A Dynasty to Die For, Dan Jones traces the spectacular implosion of a dynasty that defined medieval England.

You will meet King Edward IV, who marries for love and splits his court in half. His former champion, the Earl of Warwick, becomes a mortal enemy. Edward’s heirs mysteriously vanish in the Tower of London… just before their uncle becomes England’s last Plantagenet monarch — Richard III.

As the Plantagenet dynasty crumbles,, across the sea, a boy nobody wanted is about to upend English history forever. His name is Henry Tudor.

It took centuries to forge this dynasty. It will take one battle to bury them.

Listen to the debut episode of Season 10 of This Is History — A Dynasty to Die For, premiering on Tuesday May 26. Subscribers can listen to episode two straight away on the same day — become one of Dan’s Royal Favourites to get early ad-free access: patreon.com/thisishistory.

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A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

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–

Presented by Dan Jones

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Executive Producer - Louisa Field

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of Content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elizabeth Day grew up in Belfast and would as a child walk past the most bombed hotel in Europe. Dan Jones recalls a Croatian widow whose husband went out for bread and never returned.

In this final episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan and Elizabeth name war as history's ultimate failure and reflect on the changes that follow societal collapse.

Together, they draw on conflicts that have changed the course of world history, such as the Hundred Years' War, the World Wars, the Troubles, and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Plus, Elizabeth delves into a special area of interest: How societies choose to remember war and how that has influenced the evolution of art, literature, and architecture.

So what can we learn from history’s ultimate failure?

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they attempt to answer why invading Russia is never a good idea, and the futility of France’s Maginot line amid the 20th-Century’s rapid technological change.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

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––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce

Executive Producer - Louisa Field

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of Content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’re an artist, when would you like recognition to strike? Do you want it to be in your lifetime, only to be forgotten decades after your death? Or do you want to remain undiscovered, with your story potentially echoing for centuries after you’ve been discovered posthumously?

These are some of the thorny questions Dan and Elizabeth consider in this episode about artistic failure. Together, they trace the stories of artists whose lives don’t neatly match up with the reputations their works have gathered: French writer George Sand, and the painters Vincent Van Gogh, and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Each artist presents a differing experience of the kaleidoscope that is artistic failure: Van Gogh and Gentileschi suffered great personal anguish yet have given the world canonical paintings, while Sand was one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century – only to be cast out of the canon in the next century.

So what would you rather: Acclaim now, or acclaim posthumously?

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they discuss a potential research fail about Battle of Hastings, what happens when failure is lost in translation, and what American Reconstruction can teach us about historical failure.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices.

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce

Executive Producer - Louisa Field

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you judge him by his own elaborate metrics, Leonardo da Vinci was a failure.

Long before the Mona Lisa became shorthand for genius, Leonardo imagined himself as something else entirely: a military engineer, a designer of bridges and armoured vehicles, a master of siegecraft and architecture.

In 1482, he wrote a breathless letter to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, itemising these talents with bravado and noting, quickly, that oh, he could paint, too. Many of his boldest designs never left the page, or arrived centuries too early to be built. By his own standards, the future-facing polymath fell short.

In this episode, Elizabeth Day and Dan Jones roam through history’s workshops, laboratories, monasteries, and battlefields to ask what failure really looks like.

From Leonardo’s unrealised machines to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s accidental discovery of microbiology, from champagne’s explosive beginnings to gunpowder’s grim transformation, they trace how curiosity, misjudgement, and wrong turns can quietly reshape the world. What emerges is a gentler, stranger truth: failure is often just invention, waiting for the world to catch up.

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they discuss history’s colossal maritime failures, from the White Ship disaster to the Titanic.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices.

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce

Executive Producer - Simon Poole

Executive Producer - Louisa Field

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production Coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would you do if your life was omitted, reduced to an overlooked footnote, or filed away as an anomaly?

In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth turn a lens on the practice of history itself, interrogating the choices and power structures that have traditionally left women out of the history books.

They retrace the lives of three women who once stood firmly in their moment: Hatshepsut, a pharaoh who consolidated power in Ancient Egypt; Joanna Ferrour, a peasant whose voice briefly direct the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; and Ada Lovelace, a Victorian thinker whose ideas arrived well before the world was ready for them.

Each was successful in their time. And yet each of their world-changing contributions were quietly edited out, only to be rediscovered generations — or even millennia later.

So what does it mean when the practice of history fails to record the world as it was? And what happens when history’s failures reveal themselves, much later, as triumphs to a new generation?

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they discuss Catherine Parr’s failed arrest, and what the Crusades reveal about success and failure.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices.

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce

Executive Producer - Simon Poole

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To love is to risk heartbreak.

And while for some, breakups result in renewal, maybe some therapy (or a few months’ spent wallowing), for the historical figures of this episode… a relationship’s end has broken many more things than hearts.

In this episode, Dan and Elizabeth discover the lessons of history’s epic failed romances through three world-changing unions: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; Mark Antony and Cleopatra; and Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

Each couple burned bright and fast, and with their downfall came the end to the worlds from which they came: Catholic England, the Roman Republic, and (in the case of Edward) a grand near-miss.

So what can epic historical breakups teach us about our world today? And why are we compelled to come back to grand romantic epics?

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. In this episode, they discuss the failures of royals over various centuries to deliver the one thing they need - heirs.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices.

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce

Executive Producer - Simon Poole

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. And we haven’t been able to stop talking about him since.

Yes, it’s time to consider the story of England’s last Plantagenet king, Richard III — a centuries-old tangle involving alleged murder, Shakespeare, vanquish and one mighty rediscovery.

In this debut episode of History’s Greatest Fails, Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day argue that the story of Richard’s rise and fall (and rise again) is much more modern that you’d first believe. Not least because of the reality-TV-style discovery of his remains under a Leicester council car park in 2022.

In many ways, Richard’s alleged ‘failures’ — which include allegedly killing the Princes in the Tower and overseeing the demise of Plantagenet rule — overshadow Richard III as the reformer that also existed. He introduced trial by jury and translated many laws into English. But those facts are not often what’s associated with him. He’s more likely to be seen as the villainous caricature of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

So in this episode, we’ll discover:

What Richard's story tells us about failure in the present.

How Tudor propaganda codified his ‘failure’, and how

How those failures have been revised over over the centuries

And the chain of events that propelled the search for his bones

–

As always, Dan’s royal favourites can chime in anytime on the royal court on Patreon at patreon.com/thisishistory. And don’t forget to listen to this season’s accompanying bonus episodes for this miniseries, where Dan and Producer Al are dissecting the biggest historical failures as submitted by the royal favourites. This episode, they discuss Wat Tyler’s failed Peasants Rebellion, Tulip Mania, and the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production.

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices.

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

––

Presented by Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day

Producer - Alan Weedon

Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Researcher - Phoebe Joyce 

Executive Producer - Simon Poole

Executive Producer - Dan Jones

Executive Producer for Daylight Productions - Elizabeth Day  

Production Manager - Jen Mistri

Production coordinator - Eric Ryan

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Special thanks to Alex Lawless, Hannah Talbot, and Selina Ream

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To learn more about the last time an English king was usurped, listen to Season 7, Bonus Episode 12, where Dan tells the story of Henry VI’s grandfather, Henry Bolingbroke. In 1399, he toppled Richard II to become King Henry IV. 

By 1460, England has emerged into a polycrisis. 

King Henry VI has been relegated to a pawn. His son and wife have been disinherited, with Richard, Duke of York, now heir presumptive. Violence pulses through the countryside. 

In this pivotal chapter of the Wars of the Roses, it appears that Yorkist forces have finally overwhelmed the Lancastrians in the battle for the crown.  

But then, Richard, Duke of York is killed in an ambush. It throws everything into disarray, and Queen Margaret of Anjou makes one last attempt at violent restoration. 

It appears the clock has run out for the Yorkists. That is, until the eleventh hour, when Richard's son, Edward Earl of March, is propelled into the decisive moment. 

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts 

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] 

Learn more about your ad choices. 

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 

–

Written and presented by Dan Jones

Producer - Alan Weedon Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Executive Producer - Simon Poole 

Production Manager - Jen Mistri 

Production coordinator - Eric Ryan 

Mixing - Amber Devereux

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Royal favourites, we want your voice notes in our new miniseries on historical failures. Look out for Producer Al’s callout post on patreon.com/thisishistory. 

It’s there where you can listen to this week’s bonus episode, where Dan gives an explainer on Warwick's piracy, the value of Calais, and the risks of another royal usurpation. Plus, hear more about Dan’s meltdown over a parking ticket. 

All is not well in a simmering kingdom. 

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick — a key ally of Richard Duke of York — is holding the last skerrick of English territory in France: Calais. He’s the top military boss over there, but in recent months he’s been behaving like a high‑born pirate king. 

Queen Margaret of Anjou decides enough is enough. She summons him back to England for a crackdown, but in the process, she sends Warwick, York — and his towering heir Edward, Earl of March — into open revolt. England erupts into a series of battles between Lancastrians and Yorkists at Blore Heath, Ludford Bridge, and Northampton. 

What emerges is a full blown succession crisis. 

–

A Sony Music Entertainment production. 

Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts 

To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] 

Learn more about your ad choices. 

Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 

–

Written and presented by Dan Jones

Producer - Alan Weedon Senior Producer - Dominic Tyerman

Executive Producer - Simon Poole 

Production Manager - Jen Mistri 

Production coordinator - Eric Ryan 

Mixing - Amber Devereux

Head of content - Chris Skinner

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices