Alfred Muggins Ponders The Royal Wives (Again)

    Mr Muggins and his wife were in their (royal – he liked to think of it!) bed. It was not a four poster bed unfortunately, like Henry and his wives, but he imagined it was a lot more comfortable. (But they had done that, or spent a couple of nights together, in a real four poster bed some years before in Blackpool). Modern beds were surely a lot better than 16^th century ones!

     They had been watching ‘The Tudors’ again! (Yet another couple of episodes, far too late into the night, but they just couldn’t switch it off!)

     He actually thought Anne of Cleves looked quite attractive, even though she wasn’t supposed to be according to Henry, and Alfred would certainly have made space for her in his Royal Collection of wives if he had been King. But Henry had only been allowed one at a time, and that was why he had had to find ways to remove so many of them. Alfred felt sorry for Henry actually, although admittedly he had been a bit of a monster too. With a kinder and easier set of rules to live with he might well have been a much pleasanter and kinder individual

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     Anyway Henry saw young Catherine Howard and admired her, and instructed his ministers and lawyers to do everything they could to get rid of poor Anne of Cleves. Alfred could see what might motivate the King to want to pick her as his next wife, aside from the need to pick young and appropriate women who might enable him to have babies, to produce more males to safeguard the succession. It occurred to Alfred that Catherine Howard must have been pretty young when the King had set eyes upon her, as she was still only 18 or 19 when she was executed. She must have been slightly underage when the King first began to pursue her? He would have to ask his wife about that later. She would know. She was the expert!

c.4/12/20 (13/1/21)

Mr Muggins Goes Comic

    He had noticed that his own sense of humour was getting dryer as the years whizzed by. As a younger man he had not generally wanted to write comedy, but he found now that there was an everpresent and growing well of comic understanding and experience, which he could not deny. In fact even the most mundane things these days seemed to have a funny side, and even be worth writing about. He was finding his own warped sense of humour to be funnier than everyone else’s!