Henry VIII...fearless ruler or bratty punk?

Question

Henry VIII...fearless ruler or bratty punk?

Answer 1

Probably a little bit of both.  None of us are 2 dimensional and we all have different sides to ourselves.  Certainly, he was probably the world's worst husband, but he was also probably a pretty good ruler.   And definitely a brat.

Answer 2

Henry VIII...A bratty punk

Henry VIII broke away from the Holy See because he wanted to divorce his wife and marry his mistress?

         Declared himself sovereign of church and state. Executed Catholics who would not give up their faith and swear him loyalty. Stole church money and church lands. Murdered several wives. Burned religious at the stake. You might want to check out the history of Tyburn Tree to find out how everyone was denied religious freedom in England.

Henry murdered many people who disagreed with him. Henry called it treason. Same as when Elizabeth I executed Edmund Campion for saying mass.

Answer 3

Both, in turn.

As a child, he was secluded, refused very little, and educated to be a cardinal, but the death of his elder brother made him his father's heir.He was musically skilled, a brilliant athlete and a talented writer.

When he took over from Wolsey as actual ruler he administered England quite well, if in spendthrift fashion.

A sports injury in his early 30s may have led to blood poisoning, probably led to mood swings and certainly led to rapid weight gain. It was after this that he married his five later wives and became the hideous monster of legend.

In old age he was maddened by pain and a number of illnesses, although he was only in the early 50s, and very definitely a bratty punk.

Answer 4

I learnt in history class that he had some sort of disease like huntington's or bipolar (can't remember the name of it) which made him fly into rages, so technically the bratty punk thing wasn't his fault

Answer 5

Henry VIII-a sexist, egotistical murderer

Answer 6

I'm not a fan myself. I quite like the assessment of G.R. Elton, who called Henry "a bit of a booby and a bit of a baby." Like a lot of tyrants, he doesn't seem to have had much of what we would consider emotional maturity.

That said, he was also a great scholar and a pretty decent musician by the standards of his day: a true Renaissance prince. His career was an odd mix of genuinely bold and far-sighted reforms - like the split with Rome in 1534 - and appalling acts of vandalism and self-interested greed, like the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. He was a patron of learning who founded huge colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, but he oversaw the destruction of the greatest religious, artistic, and scholarly institutions of his day. He was a man of deep and genuine faith, but his dynastic ambitions ultimately overruled every scruple. Because of his ambitions, he made England go it alone among powerful enemies, but he also paved the way for future greatness in Europe. And there is a deep debate about how much Henry was himself responsible for the massive changes which his reign saw, and to what extent he was a pawn in the hands of skillful manipulators.

Ultimately, he was a man of his age, and it is hard for us to judge him at this distance. To quote Hamlet, speaking about another macho king: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

Answer 7

Henry VIII - a self-absorbed narcassist writ large.