Unleash Your Inner Tudor

by Henry VIII

  To complete the Romeo and Juliet comparison, from these two great, warring houses came my mum and dad, who got married against all odds – though in the Lord’s great mercy Phil Collins was not around at the time to sing about it – and instead of committing suicide they had quite a number of children.

  And, yes, Gran had planned their wedding. For that matter, Gran placed herself in it, the old sea monster.

  Lots of people accused dad of being a usurper and those people were killed. Dad was not the most creative person in the world but he was thorough. How he and Arthur used to love reviewing accounts and tax sheets and finding loop-holes in treaties. OMG. If my dad had a genius for anything it was for making monarchy as boring as shit.

  So now I was king. And dear old Gran was industriously and authoritatively planning my wedding. Without “checking in with her” I set about planning my wedding too.

  First obviously I did what dad could not do. I finalized things with Catherine’s dad. Announced that it had been my dad’s dying wish I would marry her and all the fight went out of him. The deal was done.

  Gran then presented me with plans for a big, public affair. So instead I ensured that Catherine and I were wed in a quiet, private ceremony in a pretty chapel.

  Gran gave me a list of what I must do for my coronation. In turn I then handed her list to my Groom of the Stool who used it to wipe my lovely royal arse.

  There was nothing that little package of explosives could do about it.

  I had an army, spies, and henchmen. She had force of personality.

  But unlike dad, I had force of personality too.

  Check and mate.

  The result was that everyone at court began to realise that indeed a new day had dawned and it was I, not Margaret Beaufort, who was large and in charge.

  Within a few days of my coronation, she died. Not saying I killed her.

  But I may have ignored her to death.

  What we have learnt in chapter 15

  - The path to leadership can be as simple as polishing your bum with strategically chosen documents

  - Often winning is simply shouting louder

  - Show your granny who’s boss

  Your Tudor Weekly Plan

  Wednesday:

  - Lazy day

  - Maybe insult Spain

  - Perhaps burn heretics

  - Probably traumatise Parliament

  - WILL make an heir

  - Nap

  Chapter 16

  You Know that Period of Gloating When You Get Married and Show The Rest of the World How It’s Done? Enjoy It Whilst You Can …

  Tudor Love Tip: God gave us marriage that we might more fully appreciate wine

  I was officially crowned 23 June at St. Paul’s, and enjoyed the day with my new bride. Catherine and I rode side by side through the streets that day with crowds cheering and tossing garlands of roses, wine flowing in fountains throughout London, the skies ablaze with light and when I looked over at her, this woman, this divinity, I so wanted to breathe but often found that I could not.

  My marriage would be different than other royal marriages. It would be perfect and special. It would be about love, not simply alliances. My court would be way better than my dad’s – filled with loads of scholars, poets, theologians, musicians, composers, thinkers and dreamers. It was 1509, the year all future generations would look back upon and say, “Ah yes, that’s when everything became and stayed fantastic.”

  Amongst my first acts as king was indeed to have Empson and Dudley, a couple of Dad’s friends, beheaded – good move. My idea. Everyone loved me for that. You have to remember that this was an era before the Internet, movies, the telly box, strip clubs, or the English Premier League. People were often bored shitless. When they could bring the kids to a public burning, hanging, disembowelment, or beheading it was like Christmas. And when it was two famous and widely disliked members of the nobility it was like Christmas and Britain’s Got Talent all rolled into one.

  The next thing I did was to turn all the boring bits of government – fishing treaties, administration of lands, diplomacy – to a fellow named Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who geeked-out on this sort of thing.

  The being-king-bits that I personally held onto were:

  - hunting

  - archery

  - jousting

  - developing a wide stance

  - booming laughter

  - learning to do cool, scary things with my eyebrows

  - growing a beard

  - sword fighting

  - mistresses

  - invading France

  In 1513 I did what any good king named Henry does, I personally led an invasion into France (looking at you V!). Whilst kicking arse at The Battle of the Spurs my brother-in-law James IV up in bloody Scotland thought it’d be good timing to lead an invasion into northern England. As I had buggered off across the English Channel, Catherine handled the Scots and at the Battle of Flodden James was killed and that was that. Beaten by a woman. Wow. How do you recover from that?

  When I came home Catherine presented me with James’s blood-soaked cloak and we high-fived. We were a winning team.

  After that we did what any couple would do after butchering a lot of people, we had sex.

  As one might imagine my superb marriage with Catherine went extremely well until it didn’t.

  What We Have Learnt in Chapter 16:

  - Love is a kind of upper respiratory condition

  - It’s always healthy for a relationship when you both share a passion for having the same people killed

  - Booming laughter

  Chapter 17

  For the Gentleman reader

  Marriage – Mind-crippling Happiness is on its Way!

  Alors. Gentlemen, it is my duty to report that God, who is completely brilliant in all ways, appears not to have devoted his full attention to the whole “making of ladies” business. Not saying there’s anything wrong with that – no, no. The Lord Jehovah is a powerful, mighty, awesome deity in every regard and we all think he’s fantastic. (I do hope he’s reading this.) And the truth is he had plenty on his mind during creation week working out lands and seas, the sun, where to hide emeralds and diamonds from peasants, the mammals – sorting out their various flavours – making man from clay and so forth. Afterwards the Lord went on holiday – well deserved – and a few weeks later after drinks one night he said, “Oh I’ll just throw in this last bit”. And as a complete after-thought, he tossed together another man except this one had breasts, internal babymaking parts and a breathtaking sense of moral superiority. Suddenly all the things a man loves to do – hunting, fighting, pissing from high places onto lower places, drinking, gluttony, fart contests, stabbing things, and so on – came under every kind of disapproving scrutiny.

  According to my sources, Adam complained about this “whoa-man” to God after our Lord and Maker had awoken the next day feeling unwell; Jehovah’s response was then to immediately implant in Adam’s mind the frenzied and unquenchable desire to have sex with Eve, thus rendering her bearable and making it look like this had been God’s idea all along.

  To be fair, the Lord gave Eve the desire for having a romp too, but with a catch – her sex drive came with an odd sort of expiration date: 18 months to two years after being in a relationship with a man she developed what I call SML -- Shagging Memory Loss. She could rather suddenly go full hours, full DAYS, even a WEEK OR LONGER, without the thought of sex crossing her mind and when it did it floated across the theatre stage of her thoughts in a rather lovely though neutral way akin to an interest in scrapbooking or doing the crossword.

  (Gentleman reader: It is important to note that I am not writing any of this from personal experience. SML is a complaint I have heard of numerous times from lesser men. This is simply me doing you a favour. My own sexual experience is quite naturally far different. Picture, if you can, a wine lover surrounded by wine barrels which he may tap whenever the mood strikes. Imagine a lover of mone
y who sleeps on a dragon hoard of gold. Think of a pizza enthusiast who lives on a planet that is nothing but pizza moors, pizza mountains, cities of crust and sauce and sausage, pizza trees and countrysides crisscrossed by rivers of melty cheese.)

  Back to SML.

  And so it was that after nearly two years of being together and near constant rogering, it appeared to Adam that Eve’s interest in shaggy-waggy had converted rather alarmingly and completely to a desire to engage in long, soul-crushingly detailed conversations about furniture and wall paint colour and what other people said at parties. Without any understanding of SML, Adam came to believe that to have any hope of having sex with Eve he had first pretend to be interested in home décor and mindless cocktail chatter. And with time this grim transaction betwixt man and woman became known as marriage.

  If you are to be married, male reader, then you must understand from the start that the sweet, incredible and adoration-inducing interest in making the beast with two backs she will display for the first 18 to 24 months will seem to vanish utterly and harshly and unalterably. Gone, it seems. Extinct, for all appearances. Like a star fallen from the heavens which leaves a dreary, smoking hole in the earth where it will remain buried and irretrievable for all time.

  Again, this deficit is how God made her, meaning, really, that this fault is no fault of her own. And one must be charitable. One must realise that a woman is essentially a man with brain damage.

  They don’t sprint down the gloomy, deeply unsexy path of SML with intent or any sort of self-awareness. In fact being just the tiniest bit self-centred they are extraordinarily surprised that at the moment they lose shagging memory you do not do the same. It comes as a shock that you, dear gentleman, have not changed along with them. It’s as though you are two trees of the same species and when it turns autumn she loses her leaves and you do not and how strange is that?

  This all might be cute except that it’s demoralising.

  The Shagging Memory Loss hack guaranteed to get the constant humpy-strumpy you deserve is to take the following specific step, which you will only read of IN THIS GLORIOUS BOOK WHICH I HAVE WRITTEN AND YOU NOW HAVE THE GREAT FORTUNE OF READING.

  Essentially you are dealing with a flaw in her construction. Nothing more. What I am proposing is an elegant work-around, which will remind her of how amazing sex with you was, is, and will ever be. (Mind you, because you are not me, and therefore never quite the man of her dreams, there will always be an element of disappointment but we must lay that aside. Try not to think of it. It will only make you sad.)

  Overcoming SML will take some preparation and a steadfastness of purpose, but next time you are in mid-bonk and her face is flushed and her lips are parted and swollen and she’s gasping wantonly– timing is everything – compel her to sign a written statement declaring that yes in fact having a lively shag with you is incredible and that there are few things in the world that she wants more. She will almost certainly do this if you have left her stranded at the very moment before the Angel Choir in her undercarriage is about to thunder its Hallelujah chorus.

  Then post that document by her side of the bed. Having it nicely framed is always a good idea.

  If possible, hire a portraitist to come in and dash off a quick painting of the two of you enjoying that particular jump-and-thump. Post this as a set with the contract – even better. Some ladies are more “visual”.

  The painting of the two of you in mid-congress along with her signature at the bottom of the contract should work some magic.

  Otherwise she will forget. She can’t help it. This is how God made her. (Sometimes at random I DM God and just say, “WTF Lord?!?!?” I do this on your behalf, obviously.)

  And if that doesn’t work and you are the despotic monarch of island nation in the 16th century, you can threaten her with imprisonment and/or grisly public execution. If however you’re a peasant in any other time period, which, statistically speaking, is extremely likely, you’ll simply have to drink a lot to kill the grinding sense of loss. Oh, or continue reading a book written by a certain sexy king called Unleash Your Inner Tudor – which will put you back on the pathway of massively gorgeous fornication, even if it’s with your wife.

  What We Have Learnt in Chapter 17:

  - Ladies are crippled by SML and it is up to you, male person, to help her overcome this defect of the body and soul

  - Bedside contract!

  - Alcohol

  Chapter 18

  For the Woman Reader

  Marriage – Strap in Ladies, Here Comes Glory!

  Ladies, here’s the truth – marriage is God’s way of saying that whilst he may love you, he doesn’t always like you. After six or so marriages of my own, as well as a glut of glorious mistresses and scores of super hot one-offs, I believe I have a profound and thoroughgoing understanding of the female perspective.

  Six thousand years ago (more or less) when God created the world, he set out with admirable clarity of purpose, first, separating the land and the sky, oceans from the continents; he created England with all the best land and chalky-cliff bits and used all the second-rate leftover rubbish for most of Europe. When he’d truly run short of anything useful, he made Spain. On the whole, all was balance and glory.

  Things took a funny little turn when it came to the business of creating man. Whilst Jehovah made all the creatures as husband/wife teams, he created man, that is Adam, on his own. Which means that like many lads, Adam enjoyed a period of being “a single man in paradise”. One pictures him enjoying wrestling matches with lions, pissing contests with wolves, and getting goggle-eyed drunk with a gang of dodgy zebras. Then God interrupted all that one day by creating Eve to be his wife, who immediately began pressuring him to abandon all previous pursuits and to focus on her and her lady needs. God is thus responsible for the plotline, which goes, “youthful male happiness crushed by the tedium of marriage”, which still exists even to this day. Amen.

  What I’m leading up to is the following startling revelation: Your husband, has been engineered by God so that at the moment you succumb to the ravages of SML (see previous chapter), he will yearn for a time in which he was free, sex happened for him in all sort of magical and unconventional ways, and everything was shinier, better and more fantastic.

  In an early draft of this book I had called this this condition A Perfectly Reasonable Response to Marriage (APRRM). However, after endless emails, and increasingly rude notes from my (worthless modern) editor, I have re-decided to call it Male Mythology Syndrome (MMS). For a “narcissistic, megalomaniacal psychopath” (not my words, obvs), I’m pretty good at compromise – WHEN I CHOOSE TO BE.

  Whether or not it was true, thanks to MMS, your husband will dream of an era (pre-you) in which he was a lord of the earth, he had the strength of 10 oxen, the sexiness of a colossus, and when the bulge in his underpants was worshipped throughout the land like a holy relic whose merest touch cured disease, caused crops to grow, and the sun to emerge from behind clouds.

  What can you do?

  Can there possibly be a response to this?

  Does anyone have an answer?

  Of course, I know, and only inserted those questions for the sake of building suspense.

  There are two things you can do.

  First, it is important not to listen to advice from your family. Your mother or grandmother probably told you that the surest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and they said this to ensure your misery. That’s how families work. The fondest wish of your parents is to make you as unhappy as they were. If not more so. That’s how they win.

  The surest way to a man’s heart – as can be deduced through keen observation – is through his codpiece.

  This is what your family did not, and will not, tell you.

  You secure a man’s affection by unsecuring his trousers. And then you keep, maintain and enhance his affections by:

  - Dazzling at court functions

  - Rendering from your stunning lady womb
an abundance of male heirs

  - Unleashing smoking-hot dance moves

  - Pretending to disagree with your lord and husband for a bit of fun but actually wholeheartedly looking to him for all of your thoughts, ideas, emotional responses, and opinions

  - Knowing how to wear hats

  - Displaying courtesy to his mistress(es) – and not that icy, passive-aggressive sort of courtesy (looking at you Catherine, Anne, Jane, Anne, Kathryn and Catherine!)

  - Mouth sex

  The second step you can take in the face of MMS is that next time you are working diligently with your man on your next heir, at the moment you facilitate his fiery up-swoop into heaven, you, sweet lady, must produce and then make him sign a document that says:

  - he loves & adores you

  - you are the most radiant creature in all the universe

  - he is devoted solely to you

  - HIS ENTIRE BLOODY LIFE has been completely sodding improved by your very proximity

  He will sign this. Why? Because these are secretly the very thoughts chasing about within his mind at the moment. It will seem as thought God himself has placed this document before him.

  Finally, you will post it next to the telly box, so he will see it.

  Next stop: constant joy.

  What We Have Learnt in Chapter 18:

  - Your family secretly wishes you to drink deep the darkness of life

  - Psychopaths can compromise when it suits them

  - Delusion is the source of all contentment

  - Your man loves you desperately at the moment of le petite mort, but he is too bloody lazy to mention it

  Chapter 19

  When Love Goes Horribly Wrong As It Always Does Like Bloody Clockwork