by Henry VIII
Tudor Love Tip: When it comes to romance, an optimist is a pessimist in need of memory care
At my very core I am a sunny, optimistic sort with a bent toward seeing the possibilities and poetic potentialities of all persons. Because of this character flaw, Catherine of Aragon and I were man and wife for more than 20 years before it finally occurred to me that it had all turned into a lemon cake left in the road overnight during a weasel stampede.
I had hoped – in my upbeat, womb-is-half-full way – that Catherine would give England the brace of boys it required. In my darkest imaginings I could not envision a person so bereft of empathy and honour as to deny the most glorious nation in history the one thing it really couldn’t live without.
Mind you, some lovely things had indeed been ticked off that list Dad had given me lo those many years ago back in Chapter 11. There had been a bit of the French invasion business. Very nice. Not Agincourt-nice but suitable. We’d been quite rude to Spain as the occasion required, though I had to tread carefully here – the wife’s family and what-what. We had burnt bits of Scotland. Fantastic. The Pope had given me a “Defender of the Faith” award, which sat on my desk looking shiny and terrific.
But some keenly important dynasty propagation bits were still left undone. Not for lack of trying, mind you. At least on my part.
What it came down to is that Catherine’s womb was Spanish. It looked Spanish. It only truly responded to commands delivered in Spanish. And I swear if you put your ear to it you could hear street music of Barcelona. Given its political and cultural leanings, her vagina refused steadfastly to give England the one and really the only thing England absolutely required.
Male heirs.
Oh, it managed to cough up a girl, of course. Mary. (OMG!!)
Meaning that not only was her womb a traitor, it was being derisive as well.
Dark clouds. Very dark clouds.
Catherine became fanatically defensive of her unyielding paella pan. There were words. Rash and rude. She began spending more time in her chapel with God and I began spending more time in the bedchamber with my mistress, Bessie Blount.
By noticeable contrast to Catherine, Bessie’s uterus displayed moving patriotism by producing a lovely, healthy bastard son whom I named Henry Fitzroy.
As I held the damp, squishy boy child, I realised little Fitzroy was more than a son. He was a message. Probably from my departed parents up in heaven waving their shimmering, semi-transparent arms, trying to tell me that the problem was obviously not with my Tudor heir-making prowess but that of my wife’s.
I’d spent 20 years planting English seed in a disinterested and increasingly gloomy Spanish orchard. The sort of thing from which we derive the terms “fruitless venture”. Might as well try to burn coal to make steam to operate an engine that could transport people and goods by rail. Ridiculous.
It was at this time the little, rasping voice in the back of my mind reminded me that the Holy Bible exhorts one not to lay with your brother’s wife – that the result of doing so would be a childless union.
I suppose from the modern perspective it was not a childless marriage, because of Mary, but from the perspective of a 16th-century English monarch – which is the correct perspective – it was pretty freaking childless.
Having an only-daughter as my heir would be the equivalent of needing a warhorse on the day of battle and being presented with a unicycle.
And where, I tried to remember, had I received this idea that the Godly exhortation about wedding a brother’s wife didn’t apply to me???
My sweet and lovely mum?
The privy council?
Any of the hoards of unwashed peasants who cheered and praised me constantly?
Jesus up in heaven?
My own fantastic brain?
Oh that’s right, it was the Pope. The Pope in bleeding Rome.
It was pretty clear to me now that the Pope had given me some bad information.
Wow. What now?
Here are the five stages of grief when your 40-year-old immigrant wife refuses to give you the right sort of baby:
1. denial
2. anger
3. alcohol/binge eating
4. new mistress
5. annulment
Have you noticed what one of the stages was not? If you said “eating a pony” you are probably six-year-old Edward VI. The answer I am looking for is “fall in love”. If that was your response, you are correct and should award yourself something nice.
That’s right. Falling in love when your heart has just been bicycle-kicked into Life’s gawping football net of sadness is not the thing.
At all.
Write this down on a card and keep it with you always.
I did not and it bit me in the codpiece.
What we have learnt in Chapter 19
- Beware the sarcastic uterus
- Even after they’re dead, parents still have things they wish to say and will say them in awkward and oddly inappropriate ways
- Someone seriously needs to create a dating app that rates ladies on their womb’s likelihood of disgorging boys
Expand Your Vocabulary, Enlarge Your World
Vagican:
When the Vatican gets all up in one’s lady business
Chapter 20
It is better to have loved and lost than to have dated Anne Boleyn
Tudor Relationship Tip: If she’s not doing rumpity pumpity in your bed, believe me, she’s doing rumpity pumpity to your head
One evening in the Great Hall at Hampton Court fires were ablaze, a thousand candles lit and wine flowed like most liquids do when poured and in pranced the second daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn fresh from the French court – and believe me most ladies do not return from the French court looking anything less than ridden very hard and put away with their damp saddles still upon them.
Anne B was a slim, fit, raven-haired young thing with eyes that promised everything. And when I say everything I specifically mean sex. The sort of sex that includes snacks afterward and then more sex.
We danced. She flirted relentlessly. I had to have her.
Her sister, Mary, a sweet, kind, and widely beloved slut had been my mistress (as her mother had been lo those many years prior) giving up her fleshly gifts cheerfully and substantially.
Naturally I expected Anne would have the same leisurely, languorous, wantonness as Mary’s though perhaps without Mary’s run-of-the-mill ignorance and addiction to puns.
Late into the night as we danced. Our eyes locked and hers seemed to say that I should unharness that big royal codpiece of mine and see what dreamy, dreamy wonders would come to pass.
Hardly able to breathe, I drew Anne into an antechamber and began to disassemble my codpiece as her eyes had so clearly instructed, when she stopped me.
She insisted, with her mouth nearly on mine, that I could have her only when she was my wife. Wait, what? I drew back and looked into at her eyes, which were indeed clearly still demanding an immediate appointment with my man bits.
In total bewilderment I looked from her eyes and back to her mouth, which just at that moment whispered, “Wife.”
Eyes and mouth only inches apart and yet in such total dispute.
I preferred the eyes, obvs. Yet they remained the mute, pleading, second-in-command to the lips.
Well, and, I was pretty sure the mouth was in complete command of the reality that I had a wife – who was even at that moment in her private chapel fingering her rosary beads, ignoring her baby making duties, growing rotund, and starting to smell like old people.
“Erm,” I stammered. “Well perhaps I could finish taking off my codpiece and just see what happens.”
Her thin white hand grasped my shoulder.
“I hear you like to hunt,” she said in that alto voice that made my heart get hot and oozy like a tuna melt.
“I do like the hunt,” I said, being exceedingly clever. See what I did there?
“Then tomorro
w, we hunt.”
Her eyes now seemed to again promise everything, only tomorrow, whilst hunting. So changeable, yet so fiery, so alluring, so other-adjectives-that-also-meant-alluring.
I could have invented internal combustion right there.
Thus it began. A long period, a very, very long period of my life in which I did not, for I could not, shag the one person I truly, madly, deeply wished to. And the longer I did not lead an invasionary force into her knickers the more desperate I became. So desperate I actually kept a daily journal devoted solely to this “great matter”.
Here are excerpts:
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Day 1
"Feeling good. Anne & I went hunting. By Christ how she rides a horse. Clenching her strong thighs about its thickness. A gleam of sweat on her mouth, her brow reddening and tightening with the exertion. The wind catching her French hood, flinging it off. Crikey. She says we must wait until we are wed. Of course she's right. I shall have sex later with her sister Mary and think on Anne's beauty & virtue."
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Day 2
"Went with A. for a perambulation about the pond. My hand brushed the front of her dress. Felt the heat and the outer contour of her warm, womanly mound. Or thought I did. No, I did. I'm king, I know things. The ‘No Shagging Rule’ still in place. As it should be. Ouch, my undercrackers."
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Day 3
Bloody hell.
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Week 2
Feast. Pageant. God’s wounds, I swear her lady parts have a voice, the sweet, musical call of a dove. "I'm here your Majesty. Right here. Separated from you by a stretch of cloth, the thickness of a feather."
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Week 3
Going into dinner A. let me touch her neck. Frisson. Stepped outside for a mo and rogered a pile of leaves. Emergency.
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Month 3
Sent Bessie Blount an emerald ring with the word Jericho inscribed within the band. She knew what to do. Met me at my so-named hunting lodge where ladies' knickers, like the Biblical town walls, come tumbling down.
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Month 6
Massive ball ache. Had to return to my wife’s bedchamber. Closed eyes and thought of England. A. not happy but Aragon IS MY SODDING WIFE! She still sits beside me at state functions. She still prays for my soul & mends my shirts. She still performs her bedchamber duties even if she does so with the frozen look of someone watching a church burn.
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Year 2, Month 8, Day 27
Can’t take this. She lets me undress her. Kiss her. Touch her. But the best part of me cannot come in contact with the best part of her. Torture. Agony. Dark angels every where. Who must I behead to clear my mind? Who must I burn? Hang? Disembowel? All is warped by misery. I suppose years from now they’ll say I had personality disorder or that I was psychotic. Hopefully someone will have the kindness to realise that not shagging Anne Boleyn MADE ME MENTAL! It’s her fault! AAAAAAHHHHH Sweet Jesus up a Banana Tree, I CANNOT GO ON!
- Journal of Not Shagging Anne Boleyn, Year 4, Month 6, Day 15
Numb. Completely numb. Can’t think. Can’t feel sensation of any sort. Today at the joust I left the visor on my helmet up so the Duke of Suffolk’s lance could smash me in the face. Just to let me feel something.
Six agonising years this horrible, brittle, crippling, virtuous behaviour went on and on, driving me into deeper and more appalling circles of hell. It was poisoning me, toxic to those around me, yea, the kingdom itself seemed struck with a gargantuan case of inflamed scrotum.
And whilst keeping my ship out of her lady harbour for six years, Anne always coyly and confidently insinuated that the hardship of the journey would be more than rewarded by the destination.
Six years of kisses and arse grabs and codpiece wiggles all coming with the promise of more riches than could be imagined on its way. Much more. Whatever I could picture in my royal mind, sex with Anne Boleyn was going to exceed THAT.
Once I lay with my head in her lap and asked, “Will it be better than eating cheese?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Much better.”
“Will it be better than eating cheese whilst drinking wine?”
“Oh indeed my love,” Anne whispered, “It will be better than that.”
“Will it be more fantastic than hurling Spaniards from the Tower whilst eating cheese and drinking wine and shagging your sister?”
She made a funny gurgly noise in her throat just then but managed, “Verily, far finer.”
And so it went. One promise heaped upon another each more golden than the last.
Now, let us pause a moment to reflect on this. Ladies – if you keep a king waiting half a dozen years to take an amble through your Hanging Gardens of Babylon, you had better be concealing all the glories of a Roman orgy, the beauty of 1,000 sunsets, and the wonders of freaking Narnia down there. If you do, that’s how fairytales are made. But if you do not – and this is the more likely of the two outcomes – you might as well just shoot an email to the Swordsman of Calais yourself.
What We Have Learnt in Chapter 20
- Six years in the friend zone is like being a human GIF of an exploding scrotum, blowing up every 4 seconds
- Over-promising in the vagina department does not typically end well
- Gurgly noise
Your Tudor Weekly Plan
Thursday:
- Roar
- Swagger
- Thrust your chin
- Strike impressive poses
- Suddenly sweep things off desk
- Shout “THIS MEANS WAR!”
- Cake
- More shouting
- More cake
- Crossword
Chapter 21
My Sexity Brexity
Tudor Leadership Tip: Make your Brexit about a quest for love. And money and power, obvs. But keep the focus on love, it’ll make it easier to sell to television.
In 2016 UK voters broke with the powers of the European Union in Brussels, escaping a vast, ugly scheme in which dodgy foreigners took British money and told the good people of England how to live their lives.
While this Brexit was obviously the right thing to do, it was of course entirely unoriginal.
Because I did it first.
Nearly 500 years prior, our version of the European Union was the Catholic Church of Rome. The Pope took money from all the nations of Europe – literally collected taxes, occupied buildings (churches, monasteries, etc.) on their land, and told everyone what to do. And I don’t just mean peasants and merchants, as you might expect, I mean actual people, such as rich people and monarchs.
If a king – a sexy, ginger sociopath, we’ll say – wanted a divorce from a wholly unsuitable Spanish wife, he had to beg the Pope in Rome for permission. Beg. Demand. Negotiate. Bribe. Scheme. Hold councils. Work behind the schemes to drum up support.
And after all that the Pope might – or might not – say ‘yes’ depending on the whim of the moment.
Madness.
Even so, this is the way the world had worked for literally 1,000 years. The Church of Rome had essentially picked up where ancient Rome had left off. One empire exchanged for another. It had its abbeys, monasteries, priories, nunneries, schools, and chapels and churches spread throughout the whole of Europe like a web of organised crime. And in my 16th century the church was in expansion mode, setting up shop in unsuspecting bits of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
The church had its hoary, aeons-old talons sunk deep into the hearts, souls, and coin purses of everyone in Christendom.
Now, it takes a shrewd and original mind to eyeball a thing that is assumed by absolutely everyone to be proper and traditional and say to oneself, “What if this thing were not a thing?” Then to add, “And how could unmaking this thing get me the lady benefits I need whilst at the same time make me gobsmackingly
rich?”
When it first became clear that to have Anne I should have to break off my 20-year marriage with Catherine, I began by instructing my chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to make discreet inquiries in Rome about arranging a tidy little divorce with the Pope – based on the idea that I had slept with my brother’s wife and according to the Bible had no business marrying her in the first place. (I also stepped up my relationship game by checking in with the Pope on one other Old Testament-related item about marriage but you’ll have to wait until Chapter 24 to fully comprehend just how amazingly I had finally begun to unleash my own inner Tudor! It’s brilliant – very exciting!! Can’t wait to tell you!!). Anyway, this was in 1527. I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with Catherine flapping about the palace screaming like a seagull so hoped to keep all this on the down-low.
Eventually – and I mean after years of tiresome and tedious back and forth – Wolsey couldn’t do the deal with the Pope and in a frenzied rage I drove him from court and he died because he could not stop shitting himself. True story.
Catherine of course refused to cooperate. There’s much she could have done to make this whole thing easier on me (which is to say, easier on England!!). Could have whisked herself off to a nunnery to be as religious and non-sexual as she pleased. Could have interceded with the Pope to grant my annulment. She might have died. But no. Instead she declared herself my one true wife and England’s one true queen, grew very wide in the bottom, and refused to budge. The most passive-aggressive act in all of history.
By 1531 I couldn’t take the sight of her any longer, and with the help of my new chief minister Thomas Cromwell and numerous henchmen and to the ear-splitting sounds of her protestations, Catherine was pried off her throne and banished from court. I had her carted away to a drafty, disease-y, old castle somewhere north, where, fingers crossed, I truly hoped she’d slurp into a swamp never to be see again.