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Last week, I enjoyed the theatrical production of Frozen, filmed at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Marg celebrated the release day of The Storytellers by Sue Heath, a novel that features characters who frequent a small-town library — such a good premise for book lovers.

I’m re-reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain because I’ll be leading a discussion of James by Percival Everett later this month. James is a novel that reimagines Twain’s story from the point of view of Jim. Percival Everett’s novel won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I came across a funny passage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XXIII, where Huck Finn attempts to tell Jim all about King Henry VIII, except he gets lots of things wrong and confused. I wasn’t sure that I was getting all of the humor, so I thought I would see if I could investigate a little deeper to understand where the references come from in British history.

My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. ‘Fetch up Nell Gwynn,’ he says. The fetch her up. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head!’ And they chop it off. ‘Fetch up Jane Shore,’ he says and up she comes, Next morning, ‘Chop off her head’–and they chop it off. ‘Ring up Fair Rosamun.’ Fair Rosamun answers the bell. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head.’

Nell Gwyn was an English actress, born a hundred years after Henry VIII died. Samuel Pepys praised her skills, but she is probably most remembered as a mistress of King Charles II. She kept her head her whole life and died, probably from complications of syphilis, at age 37.

Jane Shore was at least alive at the same time as Henry VIII, but she turned 46 the year that he was born. She was a mistress of King Edward IV (Henry VIII’s maternal grandfather) and, after an adventurous life, died in relative respectability at age 82.

Rosamund Clifford lived centuries before King Henry VIII. She was a mistress of King Henry II in the 1100s. She died before age 40, but her relationship with the king had ended and she was in retirement with the nuns at Godstow Abbey.

Fair Rosamund in Her Bower, by William Bell Scott, 1854

Huck did, at least, manage to name three mistresses of British kings which is more than I could do before I did this research.

King Henry VIII, of course, is famous for having two of his six wives beheaded, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

And he made every one of them tell him a tale every night; and he kept that up till he had hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and called it Domesday Book–which was a good name and stated the case.

Huck confused things with Scheherazade, the main character and narrator of the Middle Eastern story collection, One Thousand and One Nights. The Domesday Book is English, but it’s a survey of landholdings from 1086.

Well, Henry he takes a notion that he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it–give notice?–give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on. That was his style–he never give anybody a chance.

I’m not sure how Huck manages to give Henry VIII credit for the independence of the United States, but here’s the illustration of what he was apparently thinking.

He had suspicions of his father, the Duke of Wellington. Well, what did he do? Ask him to show up? No–drownded him in a butt of mamsey, like a cat.

Henry VIII’s father, quite straightforwardly as these things go, was Henry VII.

The Duke of Wellington came along much later to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

I had to look up the reference to ‘butt of mamsey.’ ‘Butt’ is a size of wine cask.

By Grolltech – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

‘Malmsey’ (note that Huck missed the ‘l’) is a type of wine.

There is an apocryphal story about someone’s execution by drowning in a butt of malmsey that is kept alive because Shakespeare relayed the tale in Richard III. This was, allegedly, how George, Duke of Clarence (brother to King Edward IV) died in 1478, before Henry VIII was born.

Would you have had to do some research to understand all of these references?