Jubilee by Alfred N.Muggins Part 2

2/6/22 (4/6/22)

     Alfred was a bit jealous. His brief stint as a caretaker King for Henry VIII had given him a slight thirst for power, particularly while he had been on the throne himself (it was just a bit like Frodo bearing the Ring of Power, the One Ring To Bind Them All in Lord of the Rings! The more he had it on his finger the more he wanted to keep it on and to wield that power, to see into minds and seek to control them.)

     It was the same with crowns! The longer you had the thing on your head the more attached to it you became, until sooner or later the only way anybody else had of taking it off you was often to chop your head off, with it still attached (in psychology if not in actual fact!) This had happened to many Kings, and even Queens over the years, notably Charles the First, who had come to believe that he had a divine right to Crown, Throne and Kingdom! (Charles probably got that view from auld Henry VIII himself, as Alfred well knew, and his erstwhile daughter Elizabeth the First, who certainly dressed as if she had a divine right to rule (or at least made sure that her subjects believed she knew that she had a divine right to rule!)

     But she, of course, had been, for a time, the cast aside daughter of the much sought after wife (Anne Boleyn), who had then fallen so foul of the King, and been so cruelly replaced by having her head chopped off! (So the daughter Elizabeth must have had some understanding of her own mortality, and of the grave personal danger, which ascending to the throne brought one. She had been so careful not to share power ever after, well aware that marriage is one of the greatest risks which an individual can invite, and particularly a woman, even if she be a Queen, with supposedly divine rights!

     (The recent private libel/defamation cases of ‘pirate’/ ‘Willie Wonka’ etc actor Johnny Depp and his ex wife Amber Heard appear, topically, to be a good example of the control and subjugation to another person’s will or influence a person who enters marriage may become, and that is without the question of politics and royal power even being part of the marriage! Think how much more complex it could become if real Royal Power was involved! (Alfred wishes to assure everyone that he did not actually spend hardly any time actually listening to these cases on the news, as he feels they were really a private matter and should not have been published to all and sundry, and there were far more important things going on in the world at the time, notably the horrible, unnecessary war in the Ukraine, caused by the upstart Putin, and maybe some of his advisors!))

     Anyway, quite sensibly Elizabeth the First chose not to share power with anyone (another man!), unless it was upon the odd occasion the Parliament, when she needed them to vote her money! (Typical woman! Note to the PC Brigade : this is merely a harmless joke for fun, and Alfred promises notionally to apologise to all women via an apology to Mrs Muggins for this slightly misogenystic aberration!)

    But Kings and Queens did not always get their heads chopped off (neither did Elizabeth the First, as I must make clear). Sometimes the Kings got arrows in their eyes, from the battlements of towns or castles they tried to conquer, or from invading Norman archers, or were dragged from their horses and butchered in the Wars of the Roses, or fell from their horses and their servants all ran away because they so scared of them!

     Louis XVI got his head chopped off by a nice new and very modern invention, the guillotine (which had become very popular in France, as they had an awful lot of counter revolutionaries, aristocrats, rival revolutionaries, and real extreme revolutionaries to get rid of (like Robespiere himself, and Danton!) (Napoleon had the right idea! Stick them all in the army and then send them off to conquer Europe (and Egypt!), including Russia! And get most of them killed off!) What is it about revolutionaries? Do they not care how many of their soldiers get killed?

(Official Muggins Apology! :

    I am sorry if Alfred’s humour is getting just a little too Black (or Red!) He shall try to be a little more tasteful in the future, and he is certainly going to promise this to Mrs Muggins, when she wakes up from sleeping off her 12 hour night shift! (She has missed the Platinum Jubilee Flypast completely! (and she’s a British citizen!)

     When Alfred saw all the different military aircraft in the Flypast over Buckingham Palace and the Mall, on TV, with all their different capabilities, and saw the Union Jacks waving along the Mall, and saw the people cheering, he realized that his own nation was not entirely without power and influence in the world.

    He turned to his wife’s son, at the other end of the settee, and said, quite firmly, “They should send these military planes to attack Russian military targets in Russia and Ukraine now! To end Putin’s bloody war once and for all!” It came to him that really we in Britain were actually more proud of Ukraine at the moment, for standing up to the ruthless dictator who would conquer them without asking their consent, than for our own nation of shopkeepers, speculators, TV watchers and rentiers. Perhaps it should be our turn to fight, or at least do something to help while democracy is ignored!

(To be continued)