Mr Alfred N.Muggins : Time Travel to the Time of Good Old King Henry

     Alfred and his wife enter the Court of King Henry after meeting him on the side of the road and being invited to attend Court. Alfred wonders if the King has taken a shine to his wife, and wishes to bring them to court so he may get to know her better.

Eventually Alfred falls into disfavour with the King and is taken for execution for treason, even though he had no thought of treason whatsoever. Luckily for him at the point of his head being chopped off he was instantly returned to normal boring modern life with his wife too. Meanwhile he has eavesdropped over some of the King’s most famous activities.

      Auld England was a lovely place, very green. He actually heard Greensleeves being performed at Henry’s Court, and beautiful it was. But they could have done with some more professional modern doctors. Coffee had not even been invented back then, and not even tea, so they were a lot less cultured than they first appeared, and they suffered from not having the refreshments modern people are used to available.

     However the wine was quite good even in those days and the mead wasn’t half bad. There was no such thing as biscuits yet, probably as sugar had not yet been discovered in America yet (So the Bourbons had not yet started producing them in France). Sir Walter Raleigh is reputed to have brought back the first potato, but that was in Henry’s daughter Elizabeth’s reign, the third next! Having said all that they didn’t half know how to eat at the court of King Henry. Alfred and his wife had never seen so much food on one table. It even beat the modern day cruise ships! Henry himself had an expanding girth problem, and could have done with a bit of modern dietary advice.

     Of course Sir Thomas More took his religion a little too seriously, but he was a nice guy at heart. Some of Henry’s advisors were rather grasping, and they’d get you into trouble at the drop of a hat. (So you did have to make sure you held onto your hat at all times if you were male!)

     He did find that all of Henry’s wives who he met were quite lovely in their own ways! Not all were at court at the same time because of course Henry could only be married to one of them at the same time (much like our modern day real world!)

Nonetheless he wasn’t half as terrible as Ivan, who was around at the same time, (a precursor of Stalin, the last of the ‘real Tsars’, and by far the worst of the lot!)

P.S. This piece is a few ideas for a self written novel about Alfred Muggins and his wife, by himself, about their imaginary Time Travel to the time of King Henry. Not to be taken as real truth. As a fiction it remains a work in progress and Mr Muggins may  improve or extend it or write in more detail in the future. He has offered this for release just in case he never gets to finish this great idea for a science fiction meets Historical Tudor fiction novel (as he has other projects on the go, and often gets distracted and starts new projects before he has finished the old ones).