I’m kinda nuts about British historian Lucy Worsley; she is a hoot.

I first discovered her, while teaching European history, when she went to a modern grocery store to go shopping for Henry VIII.

The students were kinda nuts about her too: she’s a small person and the shopping cart was bulging at the seams, so she was huffing and puffing as she pushed it through the aisles. It was loaded mostly with meat (beef, pork, fowl, eels).

Turns out it’s no wonder Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds at the time of his death.

Sadly, on the tour to his final resting place at Windsor Castle, while Henry lay in repose in a church, his coffin exploded. Pent-up Royal Gas.

Gastly.

Anyway, if you get a chance, Worsley appears pretty regularly on PBS. She’s now the Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces.

Not a bad job, that.

She did a show that ran Sunday on three palaces:

1. The Tower of London. The oldest part, the White Tower, was intended to impress the local Saxons, whom the Normans considered imbeciles. To their horror, they’d built the privies in full view of London so that the beautiful stonework soon became, er, corrupted. Ah, who were the imbeciles NOW? So moved all the Royal Eliminatories to the back.

Worsley then played the first prisoner to escape from the tower–it became a prison, of course, as well as a palace– an obnoxious Norman bishop. She went clattering away down the cobblestones clutching her crozier. Oh, she also helped the Yeoman Warder, a Beefeater, feed the ravens, who are Mouseaters.

2. Hampton Court, once Cardinal Wolsey’s palace, was appropriated by Henry VIII once the Cardinal fell out of favor (couldn’t get the king his divorce.)

Wolsey took her show up to a nondescript room on an upper floor–desks and computers, used for training. But that was the bedroom of, in succession, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Henry’s favorite, Jane Seymour, who died in the room soon after giving birth to Edward, the king’s long-awaited and ultimately worthless royal heir.

But Henry was once smitten (besmitten? besmot?) by Anne, so the royal dining hall was framed by gilt and woodwork with the interlocking initials “H” and “A.” But Henry married Jane only 11 days after Anne’s head and her body went in separate directions, so workmen were in a hurry. Worsley spotted a corner where they’d missed, in the woodwork, one set of interlocked initials.

This palace was added onto, on the cheap, by the Stuarts, so it has a Tudor front, seen in the photograph, and a Palladian add-on (Queen Anne, played by the Oscar-winning Olivia Colman in “The Favourite,” would’ve lived here. With her rabbits.) It includes sharp spiky rails in some of the corners, to discourage the courtiers from relieving themselves thereupon.

Royal palaces–even Versailles–were notoriously smelly.

3. Kensington Palace was where Princess Victoria lived. Worsley–playing both roles, stood atop the staircase landing where Victoria first set eyes on Albert, at the bottom of the stairs. She was besmot and wrote at length in her diary about his eyes, his nose, his mouth and his limbs (“legs” was a dirty word in those days).

Albert thought she was okay.

That’s Worsley, as Albert, trying to look casual, at the bottom of the staircase.

But once the two were married, they were a lusty pair. They must’ve worn out a host of royal bedsprings. Victoria adored Albert and adored sex. The end result–children–she was less than enthusiastic about. Especially her eldest son. Poor Bertie.

(Bertie, too, adored sex, especially with married women to whom he was not married. And he adored food. I guess he was a bit of a Henry VIII throwback. To this day, the custom of men leaving the bottom button on their sports coats or suit-coats unbuttoned was one that began with Bertie–Edward VII–who needed a little more room for the royal tummy.)

Kensington also features a big collection of court dress going back 300 years, and among them–what a prize!–is the dress Princess Diana wore when she danced with John Travolta at the White House. It’s a deep, deep blue and it’s stunning; all it lacks is, of course, Diana.