by Henry VIII
I'll have you beheaded in the morning.
***
In the firelight
She watches my gown fall away
And gives a scream
Of joy
Or it's - ? Maybe it’s - ?
No, it's joy.
It’s totally joy. I know things.
***
Lying by the fire
Wearing only cakes & pies
Just looking at me will give you diabetes.
***
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sometimes I have
Codpiece feelings for you.
Chapter 29
Awaken the Dazzling Poet-King Within (But Don’t Literally Aspire To My Throne As I Would Need to Have You Slain, Just Saying)
Write tip: It’s not plagiarism if you’ve had the original author boiled
People are often surprised when I Tudorsplain that there is a good deal more to my version of being a poet-king than simply knocking out world-class poetry. I wrote lots of catchy tunes as well including “Pastime With Good Company,” which totally rocked Eurovision 1519! I am of course credited with writing the hit single “Greensleeves.” And as it is widely believed, it is therefore true.
Before writing this book, I penned a brilliant little volume in 1521 titled “Assertio Septem Sacramentorum”, which is Latin for “How to Party Your Trousers Off Whilst the Wife is in Prison.” Haha. OK. The real title in English is “Defence of the Seven Sacraments” in which I called Martin Luther a total festival of wank, and Thomas More did not write it for me. I wrote it. Every word. All of it. And if you have any questions along that line feel free to ask More. His current email address is: [email protected].
I received a book award for that one. From the Pope – this is when we were still speaking. It was a “Defender of the Faith” trophy, which sits on my desk looking shiny and splendid. It is also a title, which I added to my long list of accomplishments and one which your Queen still claims among her many titles to this day. Because she’s a baller.
There is much I could tell you, sweet reader, about the writing of poetry, verse, and prose. No doubt I could write an entire book on the subject but I won’t because it’s the sort of book that only would-be writers purchase and as such would likely make as much money as I lose in a day down my toilet.
Even so, there are things you can learn from even the briefest glimpse at my writing process.
For this successful poet-king, producing compelling, engaging, enlightening, scintillating poetry and prose, the sort that makes your brain feel like it’s enjoying the best Olympic-level fornication of its life, is the result of a finely honed process.
Here is my daily writing process:
- bacon
- quiet contemplation (which involves shouting at people, mainly)
- nap
- more bacon
- more writing
- loads of pissing about on Twitter
- having some Papists burnt to clear the mind
- eating to avoid writing
- doing the crossword to avoid writing
- scouting Twitter for images of famous ladies’ sideboob
- trying to decide who wore it better
- having sex as a way of both avoiding writing and conducting research on love and relationships
All of which has resulted in this book.
What we have learnt in Chapter 29
- Poets and kings have a shared interest in not spending a lot of actual time actually writing poetry
- inspiration lies within the process
- sideboob
Chapter 30
When your beloved makes that dark, deflating journey from super hot to super not
Tudor Love Tip: When your love life gives you lemons, make that kind of lemonade that’s mostly alcohol
It happens. We all know it. We see it. And still something inside us withers when it actually does, some light in us goes out. Why is it so torturous to watch your beloved go from sizzling to pizzling? Because it’s a kind of death.
If you are fortunate enough, or young enough, to have never witnessed this and need to know what it’s like, here you go. Imagine being served a lovely 40-pound baked swan tricked out with bacon, meat sauces, and cheesy breadcrumbs. You take your first bite – glory! Your second bite – dreamy! You take your third through 17th bite – heavenly! But just before that 18th bite you watch with a mix of horror and more horror as your feast turns blue-green with mould and then black with putrefaction, collapsing greasily before your eyes in a cloud of morbid stench. Gone. Forever gone.
And for what good reason? None. None at all.
You groan, you weep, you hurl furniture, you smash your collection of tiny glass ponies (and then wish you hadn’t). You feel an exquisite emptiness, brutal betrayal, and inky injustice that are impossible to put into words except then you do.
It’s like that.
We’ve already seen a few versions in my own life of this heartbreaking switch from burning and fiery to cold and ashy.
This can take many forms. Catherine of A collapsed in the sexy department because her dry, shrunken womb sucked the life out of the rest of her body (like a little vampire lodged inside her – creepy!). Annie Bee collapsed because she said mean things about my poetry and I stopped liking her and her womb was dead and sad. Janey S actually died. And now I would find yet another version of the phenomenon.
I needed to seek out the next love of my life. The European Continent was of course oozing with the daughters of this or that house of some important-sounding lineage. There were any number of candidates but the right one had to be a very special lady.
One afternoon Cromwell and I each created a vision board of the top attributes of the lady I should woo.
Onto his board Cromwell pasted pictures of:
- A serious-looking lady holding a naked boy baby in each arm while holy angels looked on
- A lady’s shoe smashing a map of Europe (a bit weird, that – something about forming badass political alliances???)
- The Pope having wet his dress
My vision board was a collage of:
- A pretty lady and a king in a very attractive cape riding on a horse in a meadow and the king is shooting a stag and the lady loves him and the kingdom is cheering
- Bacon
- A turd lying on a map of Spain
- Hearts enwreathing a throne of pies sitting atop France
- A lady on her back firing babies from her womb at an England-shaped archery target
- A pretty lady and a fat king having sex on a rainbow
- The Pope exploding
Based on all this, Cromwell promised to find the lady of my dreams and political aspirations. But mostly dreams.
He reached out to Christina of Denmark, who it turns out was a bit too busy being a complete shit to be bothered. He then directed a search in the Low Countries and the German kingdoms and principalities, where they’d told the Pope to piss actually off. Cromwell became rather frantically fixated on a lady called Anne of Cleves, talking a lot of breathless bollocks about statecraft and stratagems and I finally thundered, “BUT IS SHE HOT?!?!?”
“Yes of course, your majesty,” he said giving me his imitation of a smile, which I wished to strike right off his face.
“SHE HAD BETTER BE HOTTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS!”
I used my caps-lock voice thinking this might have an effect. But when Cromwell didn’t in the slightest seem affected by it I began to wonder if the magic of shouting had finally worn off. This can happen even to the most effective/brain-damaged leader. One must be on constant alert and ready to change tactics on a whim.
We sent my court artist Hans Holbein off to Germany to produce a portrait of this potential bride, which he did, returning with an image of a demure lady with virtuous downturned eyes though with every possibility of going after it HAMMER AND TONGS in the bedchamber. You know the sort. Frankly there
was something about her youthful, soft-figured coquettishness that reminded me of a young, sex-kitten Catherine of Aragon and I felt myself stir. Yes, stir. With a very large spoon in my very large kettle.
I’ll skip a lot of the logistical goings on and flyings about. But at long last her ship landed on the English coast and I was so eager to see this sprite of Europe, this dream of Cleves, this Teutonic orchid. To the surprise of all I impulsively hopped on a rather alarmed horse and splashed and thundered my way to the gloomy old castle where she was staying that first night.
I bolted into the room where she was standing stunned and Germanic and I beheld Anne of Cleves for the first time. With her beefy red nose, weak chin, and blubbery neck made of yeasty dough on the rise. Her eyes wide and protuberant, nostrils flaring. Like a rescue horse. And she had a weird odour as in cases where one kind of food has been stored too long next to another kind of food. Like duck that smelled distressingly of cod.
What did I do? If I had read a fantastic book called Unleash Your Inner Tudor I would have bloody well been focused (in a healthy way, obvs) on my needs, my goals, and my dreams and told her to pack herself within her own bum and get back on that bleeding ship.
But the book you are now reading was not, sorrowfully, available on local bookshelves and so I was destined to fart on and flail about. (Although to be fair there was a sort of audio version of the book available to me in my head.)
And so this was the new version of the hot-to-not phenomenon I mentioned at the start of this chapter. Thanks to Holbein’s portrait the image in my mind was of a lovely, youthful, attractive, sexually available, completely serviceable and alluring thing, who would be eager to present to me her basket of yummy body parts for my pleasure-y pleasure.
The moment my eyes struck her actual form the image in my mind shattered like a mirror struck by a hammer.
YOU HAD ONE JOB ANNE OF CLEVES!
Everyone knows that a woman’s only true job is to be sexy. And when they’re not one senses that they’re doing it on purpose, almost with pride and defiance, as though by their very resolute unsexiness telling you to piss off.
Be wary of the tenaciously non-sexy woman, sweet reader. Something about her has clearly come unhinged. She’s not playing the game. She’s like the weird, deranged actor who’s gone off script.
I complained a good deal about Anne of C and frequently shouted out of windows, “I like her not!”
Privately I wept and smashed things.
Because Cromwell was no longer reacting to my tantrums, screams, and massive strops – what did I have to do to get a bitch to grovel? – to get his attention I ripped his vision board apart and had him hauled away to The Tower and hurled into a cell for the crime of not finding my dream lady.
Against all the voices inside my head that demanded justice, a firm hand, and hotness, I married Anne anyway (OMG I can only barely write these words!!) but I did not give her any pet names unless you count “Horse Lady” or “Man of Cleves”, did NOT play slap-and-wangle with my heir-maker AT ALL, complained more frequently, and then commanded Archbishop Cranmer to have the marriage annulled.
Finally, to really get his attention, I had Cromwell beheaded.
(I’ve realised that some people are auditory learners, others are visual, whilst some only learn by being publicly executed.)
I thought about having Holbein beheaded as well for his atrocious and misleading portrait of Anne. I had the quill in my hand, I had the death warrant before me. But alas, I sighed, he’s an artist, which means he’s a complete idiot. It’d be like killing a squirrel for not knowing how to build London Bridge.
There are Five Stages of Grief When A Lady Goes Completely Non-Sexy:
1. Rage
2. Rage alternating with tears and moodiness and rage
3. Look for someone to blame/behead
4. Throw her off
5. Track her down and give her the gift of smoking-hot intercourse
I know, that last one is always a surprise. After Cromwell’s execution I rode out to Hever Castle, (which I’d taken from Anne of B’s remaining family and given to Anne of C) and maybe it was the country air, maybe it was the esprit of the springtime in my veins, maybe it was the garland of roses she hung lovingly on my codpiece – as though crowning me the King of May – when she met me at the gate. We shagged. We shagged in the gallery. We shagged on the stairs. In the kitchen. In the garden. In various antechambers. The serving women were weeping, the footmen appalled, the members of a local lute trio all showed signs of trauma. Four words:
- Could.
- Not.
- Be.
- Helped.
After Cleves had been publicly humiliated by my tantrums, had humbly and dutifully borne a great deal of scorn and ridicule and had accepted the Cranmer-engineered annulment with grace and dignity, I totally wanted her. I wanted her in the worst way. Which is, of course, the best way.
I didn’t want her enough to marry her. I was 1000% fine to be Friends With B’s for I already had my eye on my next smoking hot bit of buttock/wife.
What We Have Learnt in Chapter 30
- Don’t let your friends pick who you shag/marry
- Artists are dumb as rocks
- When rogered in secret, ugly ladies are amazeballs
Chapter 31
Food Loves You Back
Tudor Life Tip: That sad empty place inside of you is where meat, cheese, and alcohol are meant to go.
Feelings. I spent decades confused as to why God would give us feelings when we already had so many prickly and incoherent things to deal with such as wives and daughters. Why layer upon life’s great steaming heap of challenges these diaphanous, invisible bits that float about in our minds turning a perfectly lovely moment sour?
Rage I can understand. Rage gets things done. Fear is good too so long as it’s inside other people and I have inspired it. A very effective leadership tool. Confidence – the perfect feeling really. The king of feelings. The only one worth having. Other than aggression, obviously.
But wistfulness? What’s the bloody point of wistfulness? Or desolation? Desperation? Boredom? Resignation? Or confusion? OMG, that one’s the worst.
I do count myself fortunate to be physically incapable of experiencing the following:
- regret
- shame
- embarrassment
- remorse
These are weak feels felt only by weak people and serve no purpose AT ALL – other than to get in the way of glory, greatness, and feeling good about your accomplishments. Do you think Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, or anyone else whose last name was Great EVER felt bad about ANYTHING? (The only possible answer to that rhetorical question is no, btw. Don’t make me write another quiz!)
Out of his immeasurable love, God took these from me with my blessed jousting injury/brain repair. If I felt them in the past, I have absolutely no memory of them now. (I doubt that I did but my editor keeps telling me that I need to be more “relatable” especially if we hope to get a Netflix deal.) They are mere words as disconnected from my interior emotional life as is most of Portugal.
Indeed that last great jousting injury was the shower of gifts that kept on giving. In addition to everything else, it forced upon me a period of rest, during which I was once again able to hear the voice of the Holy Heavenly Completely Amazing Lord God Jehovah showing me the way forward.
There I was one afternoon in my bedchamber ensconced in a pillow fort on my bed in an utter state – simultaneously outraged with (pre-beheaded) Cromwell, shouting at the Papal Envoy, annoyed by daughter Elizabeth, scandalized by Scotland, and vexed by a host of other problems – when, behold, @Tudor_Cook sent up a cake from the kitchen to my bedchamber. It was a thing that was fully unasked for and a completely lovely gesture; A shaft of afternoon sunlight struck it just as it was being ferried through the door.
The serving men thought to place the cake on a table near the window but as I was clearly unable to ri
se they very hesitantly brought it to my bed.
Which is when four words came floating across the skies of my mind as though made of rainbows and unicorn parts:
A cake in bed.
I was about to enjoy – a cake – in bed.
An entire cake.
All to myself.
In my bed.
The very idea – its simplicity and perfection – sent a frisson of jubilation through me.
Once it rested on my lap, I ordered every person from the room. Somehow I knew this moment – the purity of this moment – could only be fully appreciated alone. Just me and the family of mes inside of me. And once it was just my majesty, my cake, and my sunny English late afternoon, I tucked in and felt, within seconds of the first wave of sugar and simple carbs hitting my mouth, my mood transform and lift into one of total elation. All troubles gone. All turmoil vanished. For the eight minute that it took to consume the entire cake, the inside of my being felt like it had floated on a pillow to a pretty cloud where lived joyful, uncomplicated, undemanding, 18-to-27 year old single ladies.
As I lay back against my pillows following this gorge-y orgy, I experienced that kind of swept-away pleasure and gratification one only senses after a job well done. A thing accomplished. A battle won. A neighbouring country invaded. An heir properly made.
As there is no word for this feeling in the English language I’ve come to call it simply “That moment when it’s like you’re the Loch Ness Monster astride a flying lion whilst painting the Mona Lisa, shooting lightning from your eyes, and sexily strumming a lute.” (I’ll bet the Germans have a 27-letter word for this emotion with 42 consonants, three different choking noises, and an umlaut.)
It was then, in that very moment of cake-y afterglow, that I heard the words of the Lord whispered gently into my ear saying, “This is what love is supposed to feel like but so often doesn’t.”