c. 2005 Religion News Service

LONDON _ “It would be derogatory to the monarchy.”

I could hardly believe my ears. We were standing an ax handle’s length away from the very spot where members of the British royal family had their heads chopped off in the era of King Henry VIII. Yet the nice lady from the Tower of London staff was explaining to me that the public relations people weren’t giving interviews to the news media this week. With a royal wedding coming up, she said, they didn’t want newspapers to dwell on the bloody manner in which two prior royal marriages had ended.

Fair enough _ except for the fact that the whole purpose of the staff at the Tower of London is to separate tourists from their money by describing how royals’ heads were separated from their bodies. I walked over to where one of the Beefeater guards was giving a lecture to a group of tourists. The subject was the beheading of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.

“Henry VIII couldn’t get a divorce from the Catholic Church, so he declared himself head of his own church and split from Rome,” the Beefeater roared out to the mob, explaining how the king had contrived to dump his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, for Boleyn. But not long into their marriage, Henry accused Boleyn of adultery and ordered her to the Tower, where the executioner took off her head.

“As he bent down and picked up her head, there were gasps from the crowd,” said the Beefeater. “Her lips were still moving!”

Good stuff. I heard several versions of that story as I walked around the Tower, which is actually an old fort with 20 towers. At the Bloody Tower, I stood on a passageway with a view of the Thames that’s called “Ralegh’s Walk” after Sir Walter Ralegh _ or Raleigh, as we spell it. Sir Walter was another guest at the Tower who lost his head there.

I asked a Beefeater why there were two spellings of his name.

“There were actually five spellings,” he said. “Sir Walter drank a lot, and depending how drunk he was he signed his name differently.”

Funny, but I’ve heard the exact same story about Keith Richards. Rock stars are the new royalty of England, of course, and that member of the Rolling Stones sometimes calls himself Keith Richard when he’s had a few too many.

That brings to mind the Beatles. In their classic film, “A Hard Day’s Night,” much fun is made of the fact that the character playing Paul’s grandfather is an Irish Republican Army sympathizer. That sort of thing was hilarious in 1964, when the IRA seemed a distant memory from the 1920s. But five years later the IRA was back in business, due largely to London’s ham-handed handling of Protestant-Catholic relations in the province of Ulster.

Ever since Henry’s time, the British government has had a tough time handling questions of religion. As recently as 1985, when Prince Charles paid a visit to the pope, the queen advised him to cancel his plans to attend Mass for fear of sparking riots among the Protestants back home.

The tabloids are suggesting that the pope got his revenge for that sort of thing by dying just in time to upstage Chuck’s wedding. The tabloids have been playing the whole thing for laughs. My favorite tab story was one stitched together solely for the purpose of justifying the headline “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Meanwhile, the broadsheet newspapers offer serious analysis of the religious issue. “It’s as if the Reformation never happened” was the headline on a column in the Guardian by Martin Kettle. Kettle noted that the last time a pope died, in 1978, the royal family didn’t even think of sending an emissary to the funeral.

“Until very recently the idea that the prime minister or the head of the Anglican church might have any kind of a dialogue with Rome _ never mind rearrange the next Protestant king’s wedding to suit the cardinals in Rome _ would have been regarded as treason,” Kettle wrote.

Meanwhile back at the Tower, the tourists were sipping from a fountain fashioned from a chopping block.

I don’t know if Camilla Parker Bowles ever goes to the Tower of London. But I’ll bet the future wife of the future king of England doesn’t laugh as readily at such jokey touches as the rest of us do.

MO/RB/PH END MULSHINE

(Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)