Enrico VIII e le sei mogli

Concordo anche con la Parr... senza di lei Elizabeth non sarebbe diventata regina, è stata in grado di farla legittimare e solo per questo le è dovuto tutto il rispetto che merita. Onore a te Catherine!

Henry VIII's evidence to support break with Rome turns up in Cornish library


Book of legal and philosophical advice on king’s efforts to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled helped change the course of English history


A book which helped changed the course of English history, part of the evidence Henry VIII and his lawyers gathered in the 1530s to help win an annulment from Catherine of Aragon and ultimately to break with Rome, has turned up on the shelves of the magnificent library at Lanhydrock, a National Trust mansion in Cornwall.

The book, a summary of the theories of the medieval philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, has been newly identified by a US scholar and expert on the history of Henry’s library. The book was damaged but escaped destruction in a disastrous fire at the house in 1881, and crucially the fly-leaf survived. It still carries the number 282, written in black ink in the top right-hand corner, which Prof James Carley identified as corresponding with an inventory taken in 1542 of the most important of Henry’s books, five years before the king’s death.

Paul Holden, the house and collections manager at Lanhydrock, said: “It was an amazing moment. The old long gallery here is about the length of a football pitch, and the professor lapped it about six times when we found the book.”

There is nothing of Henry’s handwriting in the book, but Carley is certain it was consulted during the years when the king was desperately seeking a way, with the aid of Thomas Cromwell, of getting rid of his first wife Catherine, and marrying and conceiving a male heir with Anne Boleyn – the drama chronicled in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

In 1533 Katherine Willoughby married Charles Brandon, Henry VIII's closest friend. She would go on to serve at the court of every Tudor monarch bar Henry VII and Mary Tudor. Duchess of Suffolk at the age of fourteen, she became a powerful woman ruling over her houses at Grimsthorpe and Tattershall in Lincolnshire and wielding subtle influence through her proximity to the king. She grew to know Henry well and in 1538, only three months after Jane Seymour's death, it was reported that they had been 'masking and visiting' together. In 1543 she became a lady-in-waiting to his sixth wife Catherine Parr. Henry had a reputation for tiring of his wives once the excitement of the pursuit was over, and in February 1546, only six months after Charles Brandon's death, it was rumoured that Henry intended to wed Katherine himself if he could end his present marriage. This is the remarkable story of a life of privilege, tragedy and danger, of a woman who so nearly became the seventh wife of Henry VIII.

A proclamation of 1533 prohibiting criticism of the marriage of Henry VIII to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after he divorced Catherine of Aragon, is one of almost 6,000 obsolete laws in Ireland that have finally been repealed.

Henry VIII voted worst monarch in history


‘Self-indulgent wife murderer and tyrant’ tops poll of historical writers, ahead of Edward VIII and Charles I


King John I may forever be known as a Bad King following that seminal history textbook 1066 and All That, but according to history authors, it is Henry VIII who should bear the title of the worst monarch in history.

More than 60 writers were surveyed by the Historical Writers Association (HWA), with Henry VIII taking 20% of the vote to find the worst monarch and criticised for a wide range of crimes: he was “obsessive”, “syphilitic” and a “self-indulgent wife murderer and tyrant”, according to respondents.

Robert Wilton, the author of The Spider of Sarajevo, called the Tudor king “a gross man-child, wilfully and capriciously dangerous to everything around him including the country”, adding that psychologically, Henry “barely made it out of infancy, let alone adolescence, and ruled with little more policy than petulant self-gratification”.

And you thought Henry VIII was a tyrant


The Tudor king has been voted worst monarch in history, but he was a pussycat compared to Rome’s emperors


Being dead – even for centuries – is no way to avoid a harsh critique. And poor Henry VIII has had a terrible week. As serial wife-murderers go, he’s always seemed like one of the better ones to me: without him, we’d have fewer Holbein paintings, no Hampton Court, and Hilary Mantel would be short of a major character. Nonetheless, the Historical Writers Association has just named him the worst monarch in history. Not just British monarch, either: of all the rulers who ever lived all over the world (at least one of whom boasted the surname “The Impaler”), he has been declared the absolute pits.

Had the historical novelists forgotten the great monsters of ancient Rome?