Henry VIII was greedy, paranoid, and had a thing for murdering wives. So why do people have such
a fascination with the guy? Did he have redeeming qualities? Or do people just really like bad boys?
Regardless, we’re taking an in-depth look at the messed up truth of Henry VIII.
Henry VIII inherited a wealthy
kingdom from his dad, the late Henry VII who no one remembers because he was overshadowed
by all of the really awful things that his son did. When Henry VII left this world,
he had the equivalent of 375 million Pounds or 494 million Dollars, which went to his son,
who seemed determined to waste it all on lavish parties and crap he didn't need.
According to History, the court of Henry VIII was one of history's most opulent.
Evidently, no one taught Henry the value of money when he was a child,
because just one year after inheriting the throne at the age of 18, he blew most of
the kingdom's annual revenue on Christmas parties. Yes, everyone loves an epic party,
but imagine spending 13.5 million Pounds – the equivalent of 18 million Dollars – in
a single year. Henry's holiday expenses included food, entertainment, and gifts.
That kind of excess continued throughout Henry's reign. In fact, he was so into parties that he
expanded the kitchens of Hampton Court Palace so they filled 55 rooms. Banquets frequently
served up to 14 courses to as many as 600 people and included extravagant dishes.
So you could say Henry ate his kingdom's fortune, and that would actually be close to accurate.
Henry VIII had a pretty well-known legacy of being at odds with the Catholic Church.
It wasn't always like that, though. Henry was once a staunch defender of Catholicism.
According to History, he even held the title "Defender of the Faith," given to him by a
grateful pope when he personally argued against Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther.
So that was all well and good until the pope started doing stuff that he didn't like.
By 1527, it became clear that Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, wasn't going to give the
king a son and heir. To Henry, the solution to that problem was pretty simple — he would just
divorce her and marry someone else. Oh, and there was that one court lady, Anne Boleyn,
that he was into. So you know, it was pretty cut and dried as far as the king was concerned.
The pope saw it differently, though. Henry argued that because Catherine had been briefly married to
his brother, Arthur, the marriage was against the will of God, hence the absence of male children.
"I married my brother's wife and God has punished me!"
But the pope wasn't on the same page, so Henry took matters into his own hands,
inventing a new religion called the Church of England, and became the Supreme Head
of this new religion, all to grant himself his own divorce. It's good to be the king.
Henry's contemporaries liked to remember the king's body count being somewhere in
the neighborhood of 57,000 to 72,000 executions. Those numbers are almost
definitely exaggerated, but it is true that Henry executed a lot of people.
You couldn't even criticize Henry's marriage without being considered guilty of treason.
Ironically, the Act of Succession required everyone to take an oath recognizing Anne
Boleyn as the rightful queen and all their children as legitimate heirs to the throne,
though evidently Henry himself never took that oath since he had Anne executed and
their daughter declared illegitimate after Anne failed to give him the son he wanted.
But that's not all. Henry also executed heretics,
potential rivals to the throne, the associates of both his doomed wives,
the leaders of the uprising called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Thomas Cromwell.
The real number of dead probably never reached 1,000, though that's still an awful lot of heads.
Among Henry's many victims was a woman named Elizabeth Barton. Now,
it's not shocking that he had a woman killed, since he was just that kinda guy,
but the fact that Barton was a nun seemed like a shocking new level of excess.
According to The Anne Boleyn Files, Barton was sort of a minor celebrity because she'd
become a nun not long after she began having visions loosely pertaining to the divorce of
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Barton predicted that the divorce would be Henry's
downfall. If he married Anne Boleyn, she said, Henry would lose his kingdom and
"Die a villain's death."
This was obviously a threat to Henry's long tradition of doing whatever the heck he wanted,
so he had Barton arrested. He then made up a bunch of stuff about her improper
relationships with priests, and coerced her into saying she'd just made up all
of her prophecies. Then he executed her and gave her the dubious and horrifying honor
of becoming the only woman to ever have her head put on a spike on London Bridge.
Believe it or not, there are perks to inventing a religion and declaring yourself it's Supreme Head.
Once you abolish the old religion, you can basically just go around demolishing everything
that had anything to do with it, and then you can keep everything that's valuable. Nice.
According to Historic UK, after Henry's Act of Supremacy in 1534 where he declared himself the
leader of the newly formed Church of England, he started eyeballing the monasteries, which
were not only symbols of the Catholic Church but also symbols that the Church had a lot of money.
And let's not forget how much Henry liked to spend money. With his own coffers mostly drained from
all of his lavish parties, Henry decided to seize the property of all the monasteries in England.
"Meanwhile majesty, your own treasury is much depleted. Is it not a thing to marvel at,
the richness of those who ought by right to be your subjects?"
In lands alone, this amounted to roughly a quarter of all of England's farmland.
So first, Henry had the small monasteries shut down, sort of as a test to see how much he could
get away with. That seemed cool, so he started dissolving the bigger monasteries, and then
selling the land off to his supporters. Any monks, friars, or nuns who complained got executed.
"Atrocities committed not by evil barbarians from some distant land, but by our king!"
The total take for Henry was about £1.5 million,
which was basically enough to fund about 1/10th of the year's Christmas parties,
but whatever. All's fair in love and the destruction of religious institutions.
If your funds are limited,
you usually don't enjoy squandering them on things that can only bring embarrassment.
Henry had no such qualms. He liked war, even though he was bad at it. Granted, he probably
only liked war because he thought there would be financial gain or power at the end of it, but
he never seemed to figure out that war never did anything for him except cost him a lot of money.
According to History, during Henry's reign, he attempted to conquer Scotland,
which ticked off the Scots and encouraged them to ally with France.
Meanwhile, Henry alienated the Holy Roman Emperor, who was his first wife's nephew -
"You have not answered my nephew's letters."
"Just because your nephew's the King of Spain, does he think I have nothing better to do?"
And when you alienate your allies, they generally don't want to help you fight your dumb wars.
Henry went to war with France three times, though the third time he was so overweight
he couldn't ride a horse anymore and had to be carried to the battle lines on a litter.
By the end of the war, he'd gained the port of Boulogne, but he was practically bankrupt
so it wasn't even worth it. Then, as if to double down on the wasted campaign,
Henry's son Edward sold the port back to France after Henry was dead.
Today's Secret Service agents have to accompany
the president to the bathroom and other not so glamorous duties. But if you're a Secret Service
agent who happens to be watching, we'd like to promise you that it could be worse. A lot worse.
According to History Extra, Henry VIII had a -
"Groom of the stool,"
and although it's possible stool might've referred to the piece of furniture,
it may also have had another very literal meaning — wiping the
king's butt and changing his underwear. Which, if that's the case then... Eww.
You might think that such a position would be degrading and humiliating,
but it actually came with a ton of power. The groom of the stool not only had to possibly
deal with the King's bathroom duties but he also managed the king's personal finances,
which means he was pretty much in charge of England's wealth. Hashtag... worth it?
It probably won't surprise you to hear that Henry VIII was homophobic, but in Henry VIII's time,
homophobia wasn't exactly considered to be a stain on a person's personality, so when
the king passed England's first law criminalizing gay people, there wasn't a whole lot of backlash.
According to the British Library, Henry's shiny new law, which he passed in 1533,
was called "the Buggery Act," and it decreed that sex between men would heretofore be
punishable by death. Henry found the act super handy for his dissolution of the monasteries,
as he often cited it as the reason for executing monks and taking all of a monastery's property.
The Buggery Act persisted well into the 19th century.
The last two men executed for the crime died in 1835, so you could say that Henry VIII continued
to be responsible for unjust executions for hundreds of years after his death.
Sure, Henry ordered an expert swordsman from France to come kill his second wife,
Anne Boleyn, before she'd actually been tried and convicted. And sure,
he hired him in the hope that the death itself would be mostly painless,
but he also made the days before her death as emotionally traumatic as possible.
According to History Revealed, Anne was accused of a set of elaborate, invented crimes — including
adultery, incest, witchcraft, and conspiracy against the king. Anne was convicted and sentenced
to death, but before her execution, while stuck in her room in the Tower of London, her brother,
uncle, and former fiancé were all beheaded on Tower Hill. Her own execution was delayed twice,
which must have been awful for her, as evidenced by her reportedly telling the constable -
"I hear say I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore,
for I thought then to be dead and past my pain."
Henry, of course, refused to see Anne in the weeks leading up to her execution, and within 24 hours
of her death, he was betrothed to his third wife, Anne's own lady in waiting Jane Seymour.
Kings can't go unmarried, even when
they have their own wives murdered. So after the death of Anne Boleyn, Henry married Jane Seymour,
but then Jane Seymour died in childbirth, and Henry found himself on the dating market once
again. Unfortunately for Henry, there was no such thing as Royal Tinder in those days,
so he couldn't just swipe past Anne of Cleves' picture when he encountered it. Instead, he had
to depend on an artist's rendering, and artists don't necessarily have to be totally honest.
To be fair, The Anne Boleyn Files notes that Henry seems to have been the only one who
thought Anne of Cleves was ugly, but whatever the reason, he REALLY did not like her -
"I like her not! Do you understand me? I like her NOT!"
At any rate, their brief marriage was never consummated, and Henry had it annulled not
long after their wedding. But hey, she got a consolation prize — the title 'Right dear
and entirely beloved sister,' which came with a palace, a manor, and a steady annual income.
Also, she got to keep her head. Not bad for one of Henry's wives.
There might've been some truth to the accusations that Henry's fifth wife, Catherine Howard,
had been unfaithful. Let's face it, at the time of their union the poor girl was maybe 19,
with some historians thinking 17, and she'd been coerced into a marriage with a grotesque
man more than twice her age. Mostly, though, Henry got fodder for her execution from her past. He
learned that his new bride had once been friendly with a couple of random dudes, but it was her
relationship with Thomas Culpepper that really did her in. It's certainly possible that she committed
adultery with Culpepper, since the pair had been betrothed prior to her marriage to the king.
In light of his newfound suspicion, Henry decided to retroactively make it a crime for an unchaste
woman to marry the king. Henry had Catherine charged with treason, but before her execution,
Catherine broke free from her guards and made a mad dash down a Hampton Court Palace hallway.
She hoped to reach Henry in the chapel and make the case for her innocence. Instead, her guards
dragged her screaming back to her room. Today, that hallway is called "the Haunted Gallery"
because it's said that her ghost sometimes still runs down the hallway, screaming for mercy.
Henry VIII was certainly
never brought to official justice for all of the people he murdered and atrocities he committed.
Unofficially, though - he kind of got what was coming to him. He weighed nearly 400 pounds
when he died, and as a result, he suffered from a myriad of health problems including
ulcers on his legs that were constantly open, often infected, and really smelly.
According to the Tudor Society, he couldn't walk, which contributed to his weight gain. Plus,
he binge-ate, and suffered from migraines related to a head injury he'd gotten while jousting.
Without exhuming the dude, it's impossible to know the extent of his health problems,
but it's likely he also had high blood pressure and type two diabetes. He probably died from
renal and liver failure, leaving his sixth wife almost certainly breathing a sigh of relief.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Grunge videos about your favorite crazy kings are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.