Great British cookery shows are all the rage but historian Lucy Worsley nearly killed off the genre with a glimpse of the Royal Recipe Book — and a taste of what Henry VIII ate when he was feeling a bit limp.
Forget the lusty, athletic monarch portrayed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the bonkbuster series The Tudors. The real Henry, said Dr Worsley on Fit To Rule, was fat and feeble in bed. To give his love life more vigour, his physicians prescribed goat’s testicles mashed up with marjoram and moulded into the shape of an apple.
Small wonder that Henry had difficulty producing a male heir. An aphrodisiac like that would put anyone off sex.
Worsley makes history feel like a hen night with lots of frank and saucy detail about ‘sexually inadequate kings and infertile queens’, as she cheerfully declared. And at least one of the kings turned out to be an outrageous old queen. James I, though he had three children, made no secret of his affection for his favourite Gentleman of the Bedchamber, a lad called George with shapely legs.James was so besotted with George that he became jealous to see him even talking to another man. The sight of him dancing with a woman at a ball was too much for the sovereign to bear, and he bellowed: ‘By God, George, I love you dearly!’
Worsley, who is chief curator of the Royal Palaces, uncovered some entertaining and indiscreet letters from George to James describing their antics in the bedchamber and signing himself ‘Your Majesty’s slave and dog’.
But there were also moments of touching innocence. When James’s elder son, 18-year-old Prince Henry, lay dying of typhoid fever, his younger son Prince Charles brought his favourite toy, a metal horse, to comfort his brother on his death-bed.
Later, as king, Charles was desperately short of self-confidence. As a boy he had suffered from rickets: Worsley produced the boots with metal supports that Charles needed to help him stand straight. And she even discovered one of the two shirts that he wore on the scaffold in 1649, on the January day when Oliver Cromwell had the king beheaded. Charles insisted on two shirts, to keep him warm, so the crowd would not see him shivering and think him afraid.
Worsley’s psychological analysis seemed spot-on: all his life, the king was over-compensating for his childhood weaknesses.
Worsley, who is chief curator of the Royal Palaces, uncovered some entertaining and indiscreet letters from George to James describing their antics in the bedchamber and signing himself ‘Your Majesty’s slave and dog’.
But there were also moments of touching innocence. When James’s elder son, 18-year-old Prince Henry, lay dying of typhoid fever, his younger son Prince Charles brought his favourite toy, a metal horse, to comfort his brother on his death-bed.
Later, as king, Charles was desperately short of self-confidence. As a boy he had suffered from rickets: Worsley produced the boots with metal supports that Charles needed to help him stand straight. And she even discovered one of the two shirts that he wore on the scaffold in 1649, on the January day when Oliver Cromwell had the king beheaded. Charles insisted on two shirts, to keep him warm, so the crowd would not see him shivering and think him afraid.
Worsley’s psychological analysis seemed spot-on: all his life, the king was over-compensating for his childhood weaknesses.
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