1. It was Richard III who got the Tudors started, by losing the Battle of Britain. The poor sod never stood a chance against the House of Lancaster once it had invented the four-engine bomber. Also, his Scandinavian allies let him down fatally by staying neutral so’s they could make ball bearings for both sides. His last words were: “A Norse! A Norse! My kingdom for a Norse!”

2. The thing Henry VII was most worried about at the beginning of his reign was the Scots. To get James IV of Scotland on side, he sent his illegitimate daughter to marry him. She was a fit-looking woman, though barmy, called Margaret Hess.

3. The person who created the Royal Navy was Henry VIII. One of his really top ideas was the submarine. He made loads of these which hunted in packs under the English Channel and sank all sorts of foreign boats and took jewels and spices and silks off them, but their best result was against the German Armada. Henry’s victory was to put Adolf Hitler off the idea of invading England for good. The last Tudor submarine to surface was the Mary Rose. My theory about why it didn’t come up for 400 years is that nobody had remembered to tell the captain the war was over.

4. The book Tudor Cornwall was written by A. L. Rowse. My teacher, Mr Foskett, who has just done a civil partnership with the headmaster and is in a bit of a frisky mood, told our class that after A. L. Rowse had finished with Tudor Cornwall he went on to do Stuart Hampshire. Mr Foskett couldn’t stop laughing at this, but none of us could see the joke.

5. In the reign of Henry VIII, the second most important man in England was Cardinal Wolseley. He not only invented the police car, he also designed the engine for the Churchill tank. This was to play a major part in the Battle of the Bulge, so called because Henry VIII, who had originally planned to lead the English armoured brigade into battle, made the mistake of having lunch first, and was unable to squeeze himself through the hatch.

6. They are the six wives of Henry VIII. After the fall of London, he took them all up on the roof of his Hampton Court bunker and shot them, to stop the Russians giving them a seeing-to.

7. The Dam Busters raid was led by Wing Commander Sir Francis Drake, who got the idea for a bouncing bomb during a game of bowls at Plymouth Argyll. The bombs were built by Wallis Simpson, aided by Gromit, but one went off accidently before the raid and killed Drake’s dog. I know the dog’s name, and would like to get an extra mark for writing it down, but I am not allowed. Can I get an extra mark for saying that Sir David Frost is remaking the film of the raid? I do not know much about the new script, except that when the Lancasters arrive over the Ruhr Drake chucks open his cockpit window and shouts at the Germans: “Hallo, good evening, and welcome!”

8. The reasons for her remaining the Virgin Queen were that the only two blokes to get anywhere near her were Essex and Raleigh. She turned the first one down because it was better to be called the Virgin Queen than the Essex Queen. She turned the second one down because, although he got rich after inventing the bicycle, he was stingy, and only ever gave her fags or chips, neither of which she could get the hang of. Chips made her cough.

9. The reason that the theatre flourished under Elizabeth I was because it always does when there is a war on. It keeps people’s spirits up. The top playwriter was William Shakespeare, the Earl of Bacon, and his theatre was called The Windmill, which never closed. Hamlet and Cleopatra was far and away the most popular play put on there, even though Cleopatra had to stand dead still after Hamlet tore all her clothes off. Its best song was Whale Meat Again, due to food rationing.

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