Free The Jenny Wilson Show (featuring Henry VIII and his six wives) by Louise Birkett Page A

about yourself, Katherine, have you been married before?”
    She nodded. “Twice. Both times to men either older than me or in poor health so both times I’ve been widowed.”
    “And is it because you’ve only had old or sick husbands that a young, vigorous man appeals?”
    The audience laughed. I deliberately hadn’t pulled a suggestive face. Was Clare the floor manager holding up cue cards for them? I didn’t dare look. Neither of us had dried, the cameras were still running and there were still no voices in my ear. I suppose you could say that all was going well.
    She smiled before saying, “But I do know that I cannot marry Tom now that Henry’s asked me. Either I must marry Henry or I must stay a widow.”
    “Ahhh,” some of the audience members were doing the fake sympathy thing.
    “That’s great, Jenny,” Julian was back. “Keep ’em guessing.”
    “How can she keep them guessing,” Ruth thundered, “everyone knows the story.”
    “Now that’s where you might be surprised, research indicates…” the voices in my ear were switched off so I didn’t get to hear what Julian’s researchers had come up with.
    “Tell me about your first marriage, Katherine.”
    “It was when I was seventeen, to Edward Borough. He wasn’t well and died within four years.”
    “So, you were a widow by the age of twenty-one?”
    She nodded, the audience murmured. Real sympathy this time?
    “What happened next?”
    “Within months I’d married my second husband. John was twenty years older than me, I was his third wife.”
    “That was quick!”
    “Well, yes, but what alternative did I have? My first husband didn’t leave me well enough provided for to be a merry widow. My only future was to marry again.”
    “Did your second husband have children?”
    “Yes, a boy and a girl. Margaret and I became very fond of each other. Good friends in fact. Companions eventually. I continued to bring her up after she was orphaned.”
    “So what was life like in your second marriage?”
    “Well, I was in charge of my husband’s houses. We had one in Yorkshire and another in London. I was responsible for seeing that all ran smoothly, from the brewing to the spinning to the making of soap and the setting of bones. Things within the house went smoothly enough but events around us were, shall we say, turbulent. My husband was taken hostage before my very eyes by Robert Aske during the Pilgrimage of Grace. Aske used my husband as his mouthpiece, much to the fury of the king. Eventually my husband had to go south to explain things, leaving his children and me unprotected in the north. The rebels put us under house arrest to ensure my husband came back.”
    “So you were hostages?”
    “Well, yes. My husband never recovered from it. He was being accused of treason while his family was being threatened with death.”
    “Caught between a king and a rebel, then.”
    “Yes. He was later arrested and sent to the Tower for a time.”
    “How did he get out?”
    “Well, he bribed Cromwell, of course. What else would he do?”
    A couple of people in the audience laughed. Presumably mid-sixteenth century members of the audience who knew the difference between Thomas and Oliver or considered Oliver as irrelevant because he came after them – it can happen.
    “What did you do?”
    “We spent more and more time in our London house. It seemed safer there!”
    I couldn’t hear a peep from either the audience or the control room. I’d had no idea Katherine had had such a colourful past. That’s the thing with PL-TV, we didn’t know what we were going to get. The idea for this chat show had come from someone remembering the pre-post-life game of which historical character would you invite to a dinner party. Then it became a chat show where people talked about what they were remembered for, then it became The Jenny Wilson show where people with connections to each other would talk about their greatest dilemmas. Now you know how the