National Trust latest: Good King Henry got his Hampton Court again

FINGERS on buzzers. Here’s your starter for ten. What can you tell me about Henry VIII? n Six wives. n Founded the Royal Navy and the Church of England.

■ Executed anyone who got in his way.

■ Father of Elizabeth I.

■ May or may not have written Greensleeves, the traditional English folk song.

■ Immortalised on screen by everyone from Charles Laughton to Richard Burton.

■ And in song by the Carry On crowd, in The Day That Good King Harry Got His Hampton Court.

Most people would come up with one or more of these answers off the top of their head. But until now, I can’t think of anyone who would reply: Disabled.

Yet that is how we are now being encouraged to think of Henry by no less an authority than the National Trust.

Despite the King’s legendary prowess as a swordsman and on the jousting field, the Trust would like us to look upon him as an invalid.

That’s because later in life his legs were crushed when an armoured horse fell on top of him.

His weight ballooned to 28 st and, according to a new video put out by the Trust, his injuries left him reliant on ‘mobility aids’.

I have visions of him riding round Hampton Court on one of those modern electric scooters with a wire basket on the front, provided by supermarkets for their more rotund customers.

Certainly he piled on the pounds as he got older, but we’d better not mention that lest we get accused of ‘fat shaming’.

BACKin the 16th century, any courtier who was overheard making a disparaging remark about Henry’s weight would have been hanged, drawn and quartered as a basis for negotiation.

Yet the National Trust, in association with Leicester University, has included him in a video about historical figures whose ‘stories of disability are widespread but rarely presented’.

I doubt ‘disabled’ is how Henry would like to be remembered. But revisionism is the Trust’s stock in trade these days.

Everything is now viewed through the prism of the modern obsession with diversity, identity and, lately, slavery.

Henry is simply the most recent prominent person from the past to be given a ‘woke’ makeover. Even though he married six times and was a notorious womaniser, it won’t be long before we’re told that, actually, he was gay.

The LGBTQWERTY+ lobby claims everybody else, from Shakespeare to Florence Nightingale. The National Trust is signed up for all that, too, forcing volunteers to wear rainbow lanyards to celebrate Pride month.

Given the number of black Africans around in Britain in Tudor times, it’s probably only a matter of time before Henry is denounced as a racist and the BLM gang start pulling down his statues and vandalising his portraits and various tapestries.

Only last week, the BBC was describing Sir Francis Drake as a ‘slave trader’, rather than the man who circumnavigated the globe and defeated the Spanish Armada.

The new National Trust video is entitled ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’ — which I initially thought was a tribute to guitarist Jeff Beck, who died recently. Among others featured is Sir Jeffrey Hudson, aka The Queen’s Dwarf, a royalist soldier once captured by pirates, and a favoured entertainer of Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria.

Sorry, but calling him disabled sounds a bit ‘dwarfist’ to me. I’m not sure being short counts as a disability any more.

I could have sworn that dwarf-tossing had been outlawed not so long ago, as a crime against diversity, or something, even though it denied a significant number of dwarfs a welcome source of gainful employment.

Surely Hudson would rather have been remembered for posterity as a fearless soldier, not chronically ‘disabled’. So, I’m certain, would the mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who lost a leg in action during World War I but still managed to hobble 16 miles to avoid being taken prisoner. Yet he, too, finds himself included in this patronising parade of newly discovered ‘disabled’ individuals.

This obsession with rewriting history to fit modern sensibilities used to be the stuff of comedy.

Some of us are old enough to remember the famous Monty Python skit, in which prominent philosophers down the ages were dismissed as hopeless alcoholics.

For instance, Aristotle was a ‘ bugger for the bottle’, René Descartes was a ‘ drunken fart’ and Socrates was permanently, er, Brahms and Liszt, to put it politely.

These days, it’s gone way beyond a joke.

Come to think of it, Henry VIII liked a drink, too. But that wasn’t what defined him.

Yet the wokerati who run the National Trust — whose only job should be keeping historical houses in good repair and open to the public — have decided that, despite his many achievements, he should be added to the modern roll-call of victimhood.

You can just imagine how Henry would have reacted were he around today and some self-appointed, moralising oaf had called him disabled to his face.