An interview with King Henry VIII

“Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you your majesty, you must keep a very busy schedule, so it’s kind of you to give up your valuable time.”

“Quite alright young fellah! As a matter of fact it’s nice for me to get away from my duties occasionally. It gives me time to think about where I’m going.”

“So where exactly are you going, sir. Being married as many times as you have, I should have thought you’d got there by now!”

“Don’t be cheeky. Those marriages were experiments in expanding the gene pool of the royal family. The fact that the experiment failed only goes to show that there is little one can do to improve upon a perfect family line. Anyway, my daughters, Mary and Elizabeth are going to make the world hop! They were the two successes we did have and they’re coming along nicely.”

“Alright so your marriages were just experiments, but if that’s the case, why did you execute some of your wives? Surely they had done no harm to you, even if they did fail to produce the result you wanted?”

“Ah yes, but the ones we had to use those ‘extreme measures’ with, (I don’t like the word ‘execute’!). They had tried to prove that the fault for the failure was mine, not theirs.”

“But how would they do that? No one really knows anything about genetics yet, so how were they planning to prove the fault was yours?”

“Silly boy! You’re not thinking are you! The simplest thing in the world! All they had to do was shack up with some bloke and get pregnant, or better still, get pregnant and give birth to a boy! A right idiot I’d look then wouldn’t I. Can you just imagine the press I’d have if it got out? It would be nothing but ‘King can’t cut it’, or ‘King’s cuties can cook a bun, but with another oven!’ I couldn’t let that happen could I?”

“Then there was the church! They weren’t at all happy about the divorces, so I had to kick them out and start my own didn’t I. I’m calling it the ‘Church of England’! Sounds pretty good, don’t you think…and patriotic too!”

“So how are you proposing to structure this new church?”

“Oh, that’s easy! It will be exactly the same as the old one! But it will have rules built into it allowing me to do pretty well anything I like, provided I always say it’s in the name of God. What an opportunity that presents. I can declare divorce to be legal, I can get rid of all those trouble-making monasteries and, best of all I can put my own people in to run it for me. It’s a better scam than selling plots on the moon!”

“Well, your majesty, you seem to have got your marital problems sorted out, from your point of view at least, and you seem to have developed the church to sing to your tune, but what about yourself? There’s no denying you are a little over weight and rumour has it that you sit down to lunch at about eleven thirty in the morning and don’t stop eating until gone three in the afternoon. You must consume vast quantities of food in that time, so don’t you worry about your general health sometimes? Perhaps that’s why you’ve had problems siring children.”

“WHAT!! – Careful young fellah! I’ve already explained to you that the problem with having kids is because of my wives’ inability to perform … not mine! Anyway there’s no proof that a bit of food ever did any harm. The thing is, I may take a long time to finish a meal, but that’s because I’m a slow eater. All I have for an average lunch is perhaps a couple of dozen blackbirds, then a salmon to get the gastric juices running and I usually follow that with a haunch of beef. Then I like to finish up with a sweetmeat of some sort, half a dozen mince pies or a plate of peacocks tongues in honey … you know, anything simple like that. Wash it down with a couple of flagons of ale and there you have it. A nice light lunch any peasant in the country would be happy to put away.”

“As for being fat, I don’t think you understand the clothes I wear. They are specially designed to make me look bigger than I actually am. I’m really quite skinny underneath all this clobber. Even my cod-piece isn’t actually filled with … well, you know what, though it’s not far off, I can tell you! But I have to make all these things appear more than they actually are, so that I seem different to other ordinary people.”

“I see! Well, thank you your majesty. This has been an interesting chat and I’m sure my readers will be delighted to hear what you say. Can you tell me which way I have to go to get out of here please?”

“Yes certainly young man. Just go through that door on the left where you can hear the sounds of axes chopping up things. There’s a sort of club that meets there, but they won’t mind you going through, just so long as you join in one of their group rituals. All you have to do is kneel down at one of the large wooden blocks you’ll see in there and someone will very soon come along and see to you. It’s all very traditional and nothing for you to worry about at all. It’s just a little ceremony you’ll need to go through to be allowed to pass on to the door. You’ll find it will only take a few seconds, and they do say you don’t feel a thing!”