Henry VIII's reputation as 'bloated' bed-hopping bad boy is 'fake news', says historian
If there's any of the Kings and Queens of England you learned about at school then it's probably going to be Henry VIII, and you probably know him as a big fat guy who was not very nice to his wives.
Both of those things are technically true, but they don't paint the full picture of what he was like during the 37 year period when his royal buttocks were planted upon the throne.
A historian who has written plenty about Henry VIII has said that much of his reputation stems from a 1933 movie The Private Life of Henry VIII which has ended up creating a lot of 'fake news' about him.
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Alison Weir, author of such history books as The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII and Henry VIII: King and Court said the Tudor monarch was far more of a prude and a stickler for etiquette than his reputation would suggest.
According to the Daily Star, Weir told the Hay Literary Festival that Henry was seen by many as a 'bloated monster who changed wives and chopped off heads with alacrity' and this was not quite true.
"He was a most fastidious man and for his time unusually obsessed with hygiene. Henry was far more discreet and prudish than we might think," was Weir's description of him.
She said the 1933 movie, in which Catherine of Aragon doesn't appear, Henry marries Jane Seymour on the same day that Anne Boleyn's execution and several other people are portrayed inaccurately had informed a false idea of Henry.
Then again, he really did end up getting married six times and turning into quite the heckin' chonker as he was depicted in portraits of the time.
It was also not a good idea to get on his bad side, as people who did tended to end up being executed in painful and nasty ways.
Of course, we all know the rhyme 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived' and that is pretty much what happened to the six successive Mrs King Henry VIII's.
During his 37-year reign, about 24 of those were spent hitched to first wife Catherine of Aragon, during which time Henry was the young, handsome and athletic guy Weir describes him as against the traditional image of the big bloke with a relationship history packed with red flags.
Catherine was a few years older than Henry and was actually supposed to marry his brother Arthur, who ended the relationship when he came down with a bad case of dead.
Henry and Catherine were one of Europe's hottest young power couples in their day, but after more than 20 years of marriage they only had one surviving child, Mary, with none of their three sons more than a couple of months after birth.
This seems to be where things go off the rails for Henry in his pursuit of a living male heir as he went through a succession of wives to fill out the rhyme and did end up getting chonky, but it turns out there was so much more to him than that.
Joe Harker