Unleash Your Inner Tudor

by Henry VIII

  As you’ve probably already guessed, sweet book-buying person, I am in love with love. Yes, I’ve been married six times and have enjoyed many a sweet afternoon (evening, mid-morning, pre- and post-breakfast, etc.) with sundry mistresses. This is well known. But please also recall that ‘twas I who popularised St. Valentine’s Day as a celebration of hearts, flowers, cuddles, and kisses.

  My very soul is supercharged with the lightning crackle of amour. I spend my day positively splashing about in the poetry of romance. When not violently putting down a rebellion in the North, plundering bits of France, or having heretics burnt at Smithfield, I am likely sighing at my window thinking of a lady beloved. Or perhaps I’m doing all of the above. I do multitask, you know. (Not long ago I noticed that your BBC4 was showing a film called Henry VIII: Patron or Plunderer? Srsly? I am beyond capable of managing both and then some simultaneously. The more accurate title would be Henry VIII: Patron And Plunderer And Padded Poet And Pale Painstaking Paramour and Pilfering Pedantic Polyglot And Passionate Alliteration Appreciator.)

  Let me be perfectly clear, and this gets to the very purpose of this book, I know what a healthy, balanced, mindful life is – and especially know what love is – in spite of all the chatter to the contrary just now (more on this later). Look, if I didn’t know love down to its lacy bits, please explain how I could write sensuous and meaningful verse such as:

  There once was a girl named Boleyn,

  Whose knickers I wisht to be in,

  But after we wed

  She cheated my bed

  And I divorced her neck from her chin.

  That’s a really good one. Here’s another, its equal or better:

  I’m Henricus Rex

  And have regular sex

  As I’m in want of an heir.

  I’m sexy & cute

  When I play my lute

  And dance without clothes or care.

  Every time I read that one I hear the sounds of cheering and applause in my head.

  So, yes, I have seen love from one side to the other; I have measured its depths; I know love from its luscious lips to its squeeze-y bum. And through this book I intend to fully prove this to the satisfaction of all those who shall eventually be named. (Be patient, more on this later. It involves sex and the after-life; you’ll like it.)

  What we have learned in Chapter 6

  - Hard to believe this is Chapter 6 already, where does the time go?

  - Poems make love happen especially when you’re naked

  - There’s nothing wrong and everything right with cheering and applause in your head

  Chapter 7

  Shall We Dance?

  Tudor Love Tip: Strum your lute sexily whilst performing an alluring galliard in your underpants, then join her in bed with a shout of “IT’S GO TIME!”

  It’s tempting to envy a dog. All he is given to do is eat, sleep, run a tongue about his rude bits, play sniffy-the-arse with other canines, slink about devouring lumps of crunchy cat shit and so on. To make dog-heirs, he has a quick, ridiculous hump out in the street at midday. With no more ceremony than a yawn he’s completed his dynastic obligations – pups on the way and a new generation gamboling in to replace the previous.

  For men and women, however, in our calamitous semi-divine state, located somewhere on the Great Chain of Being between angels’ wings and monkeys’ bums, we require something golden and fantastical to go along with our rumpity-pumpity.

  Love.

  Love the trickster.

  Love the complicator.

  Love the battlefield.

  We cannot simply shag on a whim outside the wheelwright’s shop. No, no. We must write verse. We must learn to arrange our hair, remember how to hold our elbows at table, wear proper shoes, adjust hats at an ain’t-I-something-special angle, learn the names of French wine regions, feign gaiety, and smile and/or scowl when we think it will be of benefit to our careers in romance. We yearn without admitting it, long whilst concealing our longing, and burn inwardly to run whilst we place one foot in front of the other with the speed of January ice melting. Oh, and many of you dance quite badly whilst believing otherwise.

  Such a mystery it is. I remember as a boy my mum and I were once on a boat gliding along the Thames on one of those spring afternoons when the season is preparing to give itself away to summer. Her eyes were closed and her long white Plantagenet fingers were trailing languorously in the water. And I asked her, “Mummy, what is love exactly? Is it a feeling in your heart?”

  She didn’t answer right away and so I pressed my question.

  “Is love a feeling one has in one’s heart, Mummy?”

  “Yes,” she answered gently without opening her eyes. “Naturally.”

  “Is it from God?” I asked. “Bishop Fisher says all good things are from God and so I was wondering if you thought that was so too. Granny Beaufort puts ever so much stock in every word from Fisher’s mouth, you know. So. Is love from God? Is it from God, Mummy? Is it, do you suppose?”

  “Oh yes, Henry. Yes, yes. Why not?”

  “Is it a kiss?”

  “Quite.”

  “Is it that moment when you can’t decide which of two men you shall be married to and then one man, we’ll call him Henry VII, mercilessly slaughters the other, we’ll give him the name Richard III, at Bosworth Field and then buries him in a car park?”

  She smiled serenely. “I should think so.”

  “How can love be so many things, Mummy?”

  Then she opened one eye. “Be a dear and see about one of the boatmen getting your darling Mum some more wine.”

  “Erm. Yes but we were talking about love.”

  “We were? Oh yes. Lovely that. Just lovely, dear. So now you know. Sorted. Ah, here comes that wine.”

  Later I asked her, growing suspicious, if love was a sack of boiled hedgehogs and she replied that she was sleepy and couldn’t be arsed.

  All of which is to say that I have done you the favour – by writing this book – that my own mother could not, or would not, do for me: reveal for all time the secrets of relationships, love, and romance. For you see all of the other bits – leadership, learning to manage your moods, parenting, marriage, divorce, embracing obesity, making history, managing your death and afterlife – unleashing your inner Tudor – all of it begins with love in its many forms and disguises and radiates outward.

  So whether you’re a girl of 14 about to be married to a duke five times your age, a young turk striding through court like a colossus wondering why your codpiece isn’t attracting the attention it deserves, a dowager in her 70s hoping to spark the fancy of the shy gardener taking a casual piss in your climbing roses, this business of attraction and ardor is filled with heaps and heaps of bollocks. And yet, it is the centre. It is tricky, treacherous, and slippy-slide-y. The realm of love is a place where the kindest act, the purest moment, the most innocent motive can have galling ripple effects and ill winds.

  In Chapter 8 I shall give you the best possible example of what I mean.

  What We Have Learnt in Chapter 7:

  - Whilst dogs are hairy imbeciles, they may not be wrong

  - Love is what you’re stuck with when you finally get round to reading the contract you signed with Lust

  - Bad dancing

  - Wine is the engine of motherhood

  Your Tudor Weekly Plan

  To Unleash Your Inner Tudor one really has got to master the complex balance between violent spontaneity and the careful planned manoeuvre, or more simply put, finding the sweet spot between screaming and scheming. Throughout this book I shall give you the tools for both. Here is the planned-out bit. You absolutely must begin each day with a to-do list. This will keep you on task whilst at the same time allowing you to riff as sociopathically as needed.

  Sunday: (For those who have started their own church)

  - Prayers

  - Holy bread

  - Holy wine

  - Affix holy expression to face


  - Wholly impregnate a lady

  - Feel the glory/be the glory

  - More holy wine

  - Beef

  Chapter 8

  When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Fornication Pie

  Tudor Love Tip: When a lady hurls her under-things to the floor and leaps upon your person, save all discussion of favourite hobbies for another time.

  Greenwich Palace, 1506. When I was 15 years old, an older lady (late 20s, I think) appeared one afternoon in my rooms letting me know that she’d been sent round by England’s Privy Council to “show me the ropes”. (The Privy Council was made of my dad’s glowering, furry-eyebrowed, dodgy friends who ran the country.) Apparently these were to be girly, coquettish ropes because she flounced about me like a colt with large, insinuating eyes. This pleased me for I had made a study of knots, loops, and coils and was delighted to show this goodly, Christian lady all that I knew and was eager to learn all that I could of her.

  I was a fan especial of the savoy knot, also called the Flemish knot or the figure-eight and was readying myself to show this to her when I came in for a shock. Without preamble her fantastic lady pomegranates sprang from her bodice and the next thing I knew, with a frantic untying of laces and stays, my world became all armpits and elbows and a thatch of dark pubic hair (hers) against an egg-shell coloured torso, a wobbly tum with an odd inny-outy navel all of which was flummoxing away atop me like a canoe filled with badgers in a bouncy castle.

  Next thing I knew something like an angel choir began to sing rather alarmingly and then exploded in my heir-making bits. A moment of panic – for I felt exactly as if important parts of me were flying off and soaring at tremendous speed across the room. Indeed some kind of ballast was torn away and I felt myself swirling up, up, upward out of a dark ocean that I did not know I had lived in all this time and was borne into the heavens where I was transformed into a glorious white cloud on a summer’s day. And in that instant, the instant in which I wished to curl up in the puffy goodness of the universe and feel the immensity of love that had welled up inside of me, all the elbows and lovely white thighs and the glorious wobbly squishy bits were gone and my dad, Henry VII, stepped into the room and looking vapid, sallow, and awkward announced, “Henry VIII, my boy, this is what England requires of you.”

  “You’re joking,” I said, still trying to get my breath. “This –? Wait – with ladies?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said importantly.

  “A lot?”

  He gave me a firm nod meaning yes, loads.

  OMG. I began to see my future as a very, very, very, very bright thing.

  If the story ended there, it would be enchanting and uncomplicated – except for the Dad-appearing-unexpectedly part, which was weird and unsexy – but of course romantic episodes like this do not end where they ought because this is where people, sex, desire, and political necessity all intersect at a traffic circle called the Now You’re Completely Fucked Memorial Roundabout.

  The lady, whom I later enjoyed a few more all-nude-and-bonks with, turned out to be Elizabeth Boleyn, wife of courtier and ambassador Thomas Boleyn, a generous soul who minded not one whit that I was besmirching his wife in new and exhilarating ways, which made the Boleyns, in my mind, the apotheosis of all things stylish. This sophisticated power couple went on to produce three children, George, Mary, and Anne. And it is well known that I fathered none of them. And because it is well known, it is fact. Thus making what happened later betwixt Mary, Anne, and I not in the least bit pervy. Also, the whole thing was officially hushed up (to the point that historians get stroppy at the mention of it and will unfollow you on Twitter if you ever bring it up), so this is just between us.

  What We Have Learnt in Chapter 8:

  - Dads can be super weird

  - If you can work it out to become king, or even the next in line, absolutely do it because ladies will fly out at you from all directions, rude bits aquiver and it’s your job to bring your kingdom happiness in this way

  - There’s an angel choir in your underpants ready to sing, RIGHT NOW

  Chapter 9

  The Art of Wooing a Lady

  Tudor Love Tip: Tell her that her smile makes your codpiece suddenly far too small.

  Whilst my experience with Elizabeth Boleyn primed things for my heir-making duties – which part goes where and in which order, etc. – they did not prepare me in the least for the quixotic mysteries that would come next – the wooing of a lady.

  Not that I needed to, really. As royals we have our marriages fully arranged. The only action required of us in the love and slapping-our-bacon-together department are elective bits such as the acquiring of mistresses. The getting of a wife is like breakfast. It is handed to us and we enjoy it. I had no more need of wooing a wife than I had of writing sensual poetry to a boiled egg.

  I, however, was unlike every royal who’d come before. I was a new era. I was the pure, glorious sunlight of the dawn of the Renaissance; I was not a smelly, stringy-haired Mediaeval person content with salted meat, mystery plays, hair shirts, and no forks. Nay. I was a new man of red blood and raw bone with the soul of a poet and a warrior.

  To give romantic chase is as necessary as a joust, a hunt, or the composition of verse.

  To woo is the first step in the scintillating journey that is love.

  It’s the first cha in the cha-cha-cha of madness that is the mating dance. Birds do it, bees do it, even Kathryn Howards on their knees do it. (VILE TART!)

  Winning the heart and other sporting bits of a lady is, of course, a subtle, skilled art, which begins by making sure she notices your codpiece.

  I recommend selecting one with versatility. It bulges hugely at the base of your doublet, yes, but in a manner that says, “I’m as big as a horse but I’m not emotionally needy like a horse.” You know how horses are – always wishing to be trotted about gently and spoken to in a just-so sort of voice calibrated not to spook and fed an apple every time they aren’t crushed under your weight.

  When you’ve got the size right with the proper mix of jewels, velvet, cloth of gold and silver tassels – and this can take any number of fittings – then you want a codpiece that can work with the mood of the moment. Sometimes I attach googly eyes on the end of mine and give it a wiggle pretending as though there’s a little Jonah with a high falsetto voice inside who’s been swallowed whole by a great whale. At other times I want it to shoot a fountain of sparkly flames. When the moment is right. Like at an intimate supper just before the cheese course.

  Once she sees that you are serious about the housing and advertising of your brilliant dynasty-making wares, she will see you as a gentleman of consequence. And as Pepin the Short once wrote, “Confidence is sexy.”

  Next – and I hope you’re taking good notes – it is time for poetry. Ladies love to tart things up with verse, especially the sort that celebrates ladies in all their glorious ladyness. Here’s a good example in which I praise my sweet beloved for her many fine qualities and invite her to become part of English history:

  I like your hair,

  I like your pair,

  Let's make an heir.

  You see, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s one that Anne Boleyn quite liked.

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  I should like to make

  Hot, sweet love to you.

  (Or your sister. I could go either way.)

  In retrospect I’m not positive she liked it-liked it. She was constantly scowling about one thing or another so it wasn’t always easy to tell.

  Oftimes a lady revels in you making reference to your feelings about other ladies in your life, specifically, those who came before her. Catherine Parr quite liked this one about various exes:

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  I'm still glad

  I beheaded you.

  Here’s one about Kathryn Howard:

  There once was a girl with a rump,
<
br />   That liked to go humpity-bump,

  But after we wed

  She cheated my bed

  And now her nice neck is a stump.

  And anytime you can intertwine food and love, it’s always going to be a big hit, like this one:

  She's achin' for my bacon

  Begs for my eggs

  Makes a hostage

  Of my saustage

  Sex breakfast!

  Of course Rule One in the art of erotic poetry is “never be predictable,” always the first step toward mediocrity. As such I have written quite a lot of modern, sexy, non-rhyming verse. Here’s a miscellany:

  Are you quite ready,

  I whisper,

  to have greatness thrust upon you?

  ***

  The fire crackles,

  I strum my lute sexily

  With my shirt open,

  Whilst your lips part,

  I eat a mallard.

  ***

  Reds are red

  Violets are blue

  Have you noticed my codpiece?

  Boobs.

  ***

  That's not a unicorn

  In my pocket

  Greensleeves!

  What comes next is obvious. You need smoking-hot dance moves. If I can ever get one of these bloody time travelers who plagues my court to bring a video camera, I shall be pleased to demonstrate some of my more seductive dance-floor-destroying manoeuvres. Until then, you’ll just have to remember:

  A) Start slow making her think you’re all gravitas and stateliness

  B) Work to a sharper rhythm