“Henry VIII was a golden and gifted boy who grew up to become a forceful, energetic and ambitious ruler — he was a majestic and ruthless monarch who created an ‘imperial’ monarchy by asserting English independence, defying Rome, breaking up the monasteries, promoting his realm’s military and naval power and his own autocracy, all ultimately enabling the triumph of Protestantism. Yet he became a bloated, thin-skinned tyrant who ordered the killing — on faked evidence — of many, including two of his wives, because of his own wounded pride. Both hero and monster, he was, in his paranoid cruelty, the English Stalin.”
