HOT weather makes Britons behave unusually, and so it was when 17-year-old Catherine Howard stripped out of her lady-in-waiting outfit to wash a gun carriage.
The niece of the Duke of Norfolk, covering her modesty only with strategic triangles of cloth, began soaping soot and horse manure off the vehicle in a manner described by onlookers as ‘sultry’. And one of those onlookers was none other than the King of England.
Thomas Cromwell wrote: “Henry’s eyes, so dimmed by the flat, unimpressive bosomry presented by Anne of Cleves, were out as though on cornstalks.
“While the shapely beauty put on a busty display, showcasing her curves and letting the girls breathe, I must admit that the whole Royal court was agog. Especially when she cooled off by squeezing the sponge over her thruppennies.
“Cries of ‘she’s left nothing to the imagination’ and ‘if you’ve got a toned figure like that, flaunt it’ did not go unheard by the King, who has recently been disappointed in his relationships and, I fear, blames me.
“I reminded him Anne of Cleves was an important match for her Lutheran family beliefs, from which he was distracted by scribbling signatures on two pieces of vellum. One was the annulment of his marriage and the other my death warrant.
“It seems this soapy siren has sent me off to my doom and will marry His Majesty thereafter. In retrospect, I would have been wiser to say ‘va-va-voom’.”
And so Thomas Cromwell was executed on the same day as the Royal wedding, missing all the street parties, and Henry VIII’s new relationship lasted six months before he discovered his new wife had little conversation and had her beheaded.
Next week, to 1773, when poet William Cowper decides ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ would be a pretty useful arse-covering sentiment for the Church.
