Dear Henry VIII,
I SO don't like you right now. Perhaps I should take the advice of an online friend and write in my essay that you were a peckerhead. I've checked Urban Dictionary. It has eight definitions. I'm sure you qualify for at least one of the definitions.
I don't like you because, unlike many of the other Reformations of the time, yours doesn't entirely make sense to me. OK, so Cat couldn't give you a living son and you were chasing tail and threw a tanty when Clement VII couldn't give you the annulment you wanted. But then you do very, very strange things. You follow Erasmian humanism, and you hate Luther but some of your ideas are downright Lutheran. Some are Calvinist. Some defy any real description. Some say you allowed The Thoms (Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell) to guide you like religious Jonas Brothers, but then we now have G.W. Bernard saying, "oh no, Harry knew what he was doing!" and other history stalwarts like Christopher Haigh going "boo! hiss! can't be true!"
I despair, Harry. I am unable to use my favorite female historians to prove my points in this essay because apparently they are too romantic and regurgitate facts. But at least they are readable! Some of the books I have had to scour from 1963 clearly plagiarise from one another! At least the new breed acknowledge their sources instead of sitting back in their comfy tweet jackets with the leather patches like the cat that ate the cream.
So I don't like you right now. In fact, I'd rather write about Anne's influence on reform than about your reformation. But I can't. I have to write about why your Reformation succeeded while France's failed.
I don't think i'll like you again until after I hand in this essay.
4 comments:
I'm guessing that you will continue to not like Hank much even AFTER you turn in your essay. Bit of a wanker, really.
I've tended to have a love-hate relationship with him on the whole. Interesting guy but pretty deplorable at the same time. I have a great sympathy for his wives, especially poor Catherine Parr who survived him. Imagine having to care for that obese, cantankerous man moaning about his inability to secure more male heirs with his gross old jousting injury being all smelly and weepy all the time.
I agree with rainbowgirl about the love hate thing. I did not realize how horrendous this king was until I started watching the Tudors. I did study in history many many moons ago. Since watching the series, I have researched more actual historical information only to find that the Tudor show is actually pretty accurate. I only wish they would have cast a much less handsome hunk other than Jonathan
Rhys Meyers. I think it would have made the show more believable. Also some of his queens were not the beauties they portrayed in the show. Anyway agree that King Henry XIII was a monster, especially to his own wives and children.
I never liked the Fat Bastard - but that's how I roll.
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