Mr A.Muggins Goes Back To The 20th Century To Kidnap Mrs Thatcher For Auld Henry VIII

     Muggins went back to the 20^th Century, more precisely 1990, on behalf of King Henry to kidnap the famous British Prime Minister (known as the Iron Lady!). He also kidnapped some of her most loyal economists and politicians, and took them all back to the Court of Henry to help the King, who has lost his favourite and most capable Ministers. (He has actually run out of them – as he has beheaded too many of them and there is now no one (of sufficient capability) he can turn to!)

    Mrs Thatcher, despite being a woman, is quite macho in some ways and impresses the King (who does not realise at the time just how like his daughter the future Queen Elizabeth the First she will be like). Anyway in desperation he takes her on as ‘Prime’ Minister, which is a new position and title she insists upon before she will do the job he wants her to do. Basically the position is to be his Chancellor (or Chief Minister), much like Thomas Cromwell was until recently (he was executed for being too much of a Protestant zealot and being too corrupt, and for failing to find the King a suitable wife. First he had found the far too plain Anne Of Cleves, and then had erred by giving the King Catherine Howard, who could, by all accounts, not be trusted to keep herself pure for the King, and was guilty (until proved innocent, which could never be allowed to happen!) of the crime of looking at men closer to her own age.) And also much like Cardinal Wolsey, before Cromwell, who had to be removed for his failure to persuade the Pope to let Henry divorce Catherine Of Aragon and replace her with Anne Boleyn, and also for his many various corruptions, and for basically being too big for his boots, and being disliked by quite a few of his other advisors. Henry had basically ‘thrown the book’ at these two privileged unfortunates, and was left with lesser men of lesser ability.

21/4/21

     Alfred had been whispering in Henry’s ear for some time about the efficiency and devotion to duty of Mrs Thatcher, and the fact she almost singlehandedly managed to inflict upon a half asleep Britain an economic Revolution which resulted in Yuppies and all sorts of hard work or ‘productivity improvements’. Henry actually liked the sound of a lot of these achievements, although may not have fully understood most of them, being very much a man of the 16^th Century. He decided she could be the Minister for him, to pull old England out of the doldrums and into the 20^th Century, so to speak, far ahead of all its erstwhile Neighbours (Australia hadn’t even been conceived at the time, but France, the Hapsburg Netherlands and Burgundy, Spain and lots of little German Principalities and Bishoprics were all there, much as today, although many of them were in the Holy Roman Empire, which as far as he understood was a bit like a 16^th and even 15^th Century version of the European Onion (sorry Union – oops!))

26/2/21

     The new ‘Prime’ Minister Margaret Thatcher set out at once to get England working, with her very likely to be useful future knowledge. She finished off the privatisation of the monasteries and everything else that could be sold off, making many a Tudor gentleman or Lord very rich, while some of the lowlier folk saw a marked reduction in the generosity of the ‘establishment’, and the end to the free handouts of the monasteries and religious orders. In this she was finishing off the work of Thomas Cromwell!

     When France reoccupied Boulogne and threatened to claw back Calais, audaciously attacking the Isle Of Wight at the same time, she dropped everything and launched the remaining parts of the nearly reprivatized fleet on a shoestring. They defended Calais and took Boulogne back easily by doing the unexpected, and appeared down the Seine River in Paris to demand the French paid England some reparations! She stood at Tilbury Docks 40 years before Henry’s daughter Elizabeth would do the same to defeat the Spanish Armada ( although Alfred did wonder whether that particular repetition of history would now happen thanks to his and Mrs Thatcher’s intervention in history). Prime Minister Thatcher provoked genuine fear and surprise in the complacent French (who later went on to sell some of their Exocet missiles and planes to the Argentinians – the precursors of whom are the Spaniards of Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon!)!

     The end result of Mrs Thatcher’s time travel to the Time of Good Old King Henry was not all good however. The number of vagabonds in the streets (and hedgerows) seemed to multiply in direct proportion to the number of biscuits consumed in the Privy Council, where a woman had had the audacity to take over as Chancellor/ Prime Minister for the first time in history (not including certain Queens such as Boadicea of the Iceni or Cleopatra of Egypt). The Thatcherite economists came up with a lot of theories about, both the money supply and the biscuit supply, and the relationships of every statistic to every other statistic, particularly in measure of unemployment and inflation, but were found by some commentators not to be very practical in their approach. All England, it seemed, became an economic (and inadvertently a social) experiment!

     Of course Mrs Margaret Thatcher had the King wrapped around her little finger for quite a time, she was so charming and insistent, and such a strong minded woman, he must have, in his own way been quite besotted with her to give her such leeway. But in the end he lost his patience and decided it was time to take back control of his own Kingdom once again.

     “Lady Margaret, not everything can be reduced to simple pounds, schillings, and pence!” exploded the exasperated King. “I mean, what are we going to do with all these vagabonds, and the super rich, friends, family and compatriots amongst them, are getting just a little bit too rich! The coal mines are closing, and the People are all trying to claim dole money, which doesn’t even exist in our Golden Age!”

     Alfred, who felt responsible for suggesting the idea of bringing the Iron Lady back from the 20^th Century, even though he had strongly warned the King against it, found he had an uphill task on to persuade the King not to chop Margaret’s head off, and some of her most loyal economists and politicians, who had come with her. There had not been a wet rag amongst them, but thankfully he was finally able to take them all safely back to the late twentieth century where he had found them. Let them continue their economic experimentations on the future Britain where they belonged, and leave the Tudor English, and Henry to sort out the greatly increased problems of the sixteenth century!