by The resurrected king opens at the Frog and Bucket with an hour on ghosting, annulment paperwork, and why Hans Holbein was the first Instagram filter
Henry VIII took the stage at the Frog and Bucket on Oldham Street the way he takes every stage, which is to say sideways, because the doors of the Northern Quarter were not built for a man who once required his armour let out by a team of four. He surveyed Manchester’s finest, pint in hand, rain hammering the windows, and opened with the observation that he had waited four hundred and seventy-nine years to play this room and it had been double-booked anyway.
The city suits him. Manchester understands reinvention, having been a Roman fort, a cotton empire, and a music scene, and Henry has been a prince, a theologian, and a cautionary tale, so the two of them got along immediately. He complimented the worker bee on the bins and said it was the first coat of arms he had seen in centuries that actually did any work.
Swiping Right in 1509
The first stretch was about the apps. Henry does not understand the apps and he wants everyone to know it. In my day, he told the room, you did not swipe left. You dispatched an ambassador. The ambassador rode for three weeks, examined the lady, examined her dowry, examined her uncle’s army, and rode three weeks back to report that she had a pleasant manner and eight thousand troops. That is a dating profile. That is due diligence.
Your generation, he continued, matches with a stranger, exchanges four messages about dogs, and then simply stops replying. You call this ghosting. I find the term offensive. I am a ghost. I have standards. When I ended a correspondence there was paperwork, there was a papal appeal, there was in several cases a small war. You people just leave a woman on read. Barbarians.
He read out his own dating profile to the room. Six foot two, because apparently that matters more now than the throne of England. Owns several castles, currently disputed with the National Trust. Enjoys long walks, jousting, and doctrinal supremacy. Looking for someone who can produce an heir or at minimum split the bill at Nando’s. Red flags, he admitted, yes, several, most of them literal banners.
The Anne of Cleves Filter
The middle section belonged to Hans Holbein, whom Henry described as the first Instagram filter in European history. I asked for a portrait of Anne of Cleves, he said, and Holbein sent me a masterpiece. Soft lighting. Flattering angle. Golden hour, before we had the phrase. I arrived at the docks expecting the portrait and the portrait had been standing in very good light. You call it catfishing. I called it a diplomatic incident.
And here is the thing, Henry said, warming up, Anne of Cleves was the clever one. She took the settlement, kept her head, kept two houses, and outlived the lot of us. She was the first person in England to understand that the best relationship with me was a finalised one. She got the divorce package your lawyers would weep over, and she got it in 1540 without a single group chat.
Catherine of Aragon, on the other hand, lasted twenty-four years, and Henry pointed out that at twenty-four years it is no longer a relationship, it is a mortgage, and like most mortgages of the period it ended with the Church repossessing everything and everyone blaming the man who signed the documents.
Six Drafts
The closing run reframed the entire marital record. People say six wives like it is a scandal, Henry said. Writers understand me. The first draft had structural problems. The second draft I cut too aggressively, and I accept the notes. The third draft was perfect and died on me, which every writer in this room has experienced. Drafts four through six were me refusing to accept that the project was the problem.
He finished on modern breakups. Your divorces have apps now too, he marvelled. You divide the record collection and block each other on three platforms and call it closure. When I broke up with someone, the entire country had to change religion. Every single subject of England was in my breakup. You had to attend my breakup weekly. It had a liturgy.
Bohiney Magazine’s reviewer, seated near the back with a notebook and a nervous expression, was singled out from the stage and warned that the last publication to give Henry a mixed notice was dissolved and its assets transferred to the Crown, so the review should be considered accordingly. The room roared. The reviewer wrote faster.
He encored with a short ballad on the lute, dedicated to everyone in Manchester currently seeing someone they met online, which he described as the bravest form of diplomacy since the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and considerably worse catered.
He devoted a passage to the situationship, a word he made the room define for him twice. So it is a marriage, he summarised, without the marriage, the treaty, or the dignity, and both parties pretend the ambassadors were never sent. We had this, he said. We called it France. Fifteen years of meaningful glances across the Channel, one spectacular weekend at the Field of the Cloth of Gold where everyone wore their best and nothing was agreed, and then straight back to raiding each other’s coastlines. If you are currently in a situationship, Henry told the front row, you are in a Franco-English alliance, and history says one of you is already talking to Spain.
The roster concept also required explanation, and once he had it, he refused to give it back. You keep several courtships warm at once and call it a roster, he said. I did this. Mine was called the line of succession, and the difference between your roster and mine is that mine was published, annotated, and legally binding, and when I reshuffled it, Parliament had to sit. Your situationships end with a text. Mine ended with an Act. At least an Act has a date on it.
The Henry Is Back tour is sponsored by The London Prat, the capital’s fastest-growing newspaper among readers who have recently returned from the dead. The Prat covers London the way Henry covered Europe: confidently, expensively, and with no plans to apologise.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
