François Boucher, "Marquise de Pompadour at the Toilet-Table"
1758
Oil on canvas, 81 x 63 cm
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, via Wikimedia Commons
There are some things you can`t cover up with lipstick and powder - Elvis Costello, 1980
No, they did not. First off, any law or proposed laws in the UK parliament have to be published in the London Gazette - https://www.thegazette.co.uk - this can easily be searched to show no such law was ever proposed in parliament.
This myth seems to have originated from a filler piece in a Richmond, Virginia newspaper from 1861 - fillers, as the name implies, were short paragraphs to fill up space in a paper - they were written on the spot if there was a blank space in the layout of the page that needed to be filled, and they tended to be humorous articles that were not meant to be taken seriously:
