The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59423   Message #946927
Posted By: IanC
06-May-03 - 09:30 AM
Thread Name: Quiz - Henry VIII
Subject: RE: Quiz - Henry VIII
OK ... I'm catching up slowly. Here's 1, 8, 13 and 19.

1. Henry was a second son and, as such, was intended for the priesthood. Until the age of 11, he was trained with this in mind and, for the first ten years of his life, Henry was a student of theology and was also taught classics (Greek and Latin), music and musical composition.   As a boy, he was regarded as precociously intelligent and the liberal scope of the studies which he was made to pursue from his earliest years provided him with a uniquely broad education for a monarch of his time.

8. In 1521, Henry was given the title Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) by Pope Leo X for a treatise, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, written against Martin Luther and in vindication of the Church's dogmatic teaching regarding the sacraments and the sacrifice of the mass. Henry, in fact, remained orthodox in his personal doctrinal views throughout his reign.

13. Henry's strongest motivation for wanting a divorce from Catherine of Aragon was what he felt to be the need to provide a male heir to succeed him. The history of the previous century had been one of complete turmoil due in great part to the lack of a clear succession and even his father, Henry VII, had not been safe on his throne (despite having almost all of his possible rivals killed) until he had provided himself with a successor. Women were allowed to rule England but the previous history of women reigning was not significantly better than the mess which had developed during the Wars of the Roses. He wasn't to know that one of his daughters was to show that it could be done. Henry had explored the possibility of a divorce for some time before finally deciding on it as a course of action (by the time of his divorce, Catherine was unable to give him any more children) and had had a generally favourable reception from The Pope, who had at one point effectively said "Just do it, and it'll be accepted". It was very much Henry's bad luck that The Pope was, at the time, essentially a prisoner of Catherine's relatives. Her family were also, for political reasons, not very friendly with Henry at the time and so there was really no chance that he would get an annulment. Strangely enough, The Pope kept the door open for Henry by granting him a dispensation to marry Ann Boleyn provided he could get a divorce!

19. Henry most probably died of old age (he was 56, a considerable age in those days) exacerbated by being overweight and the associated lack of exercise. He had to be carried around for the last 3 years of his life, and his weight increased enormously at that time, following a serious accident. He also had leg ulcers which may have become gangrenous. Until some inaccurate 20th Century speculation, there was never any suggestion that he had syphilis or any other venereal disease. The speculation seems to be based on a combination of his leg ulcers and a reputation for having a bad temper in the last few years of his life. His physicians were among the best in Europe and had good knowledge of the use of mercury and other specifics as palliatives for VD, but none of these were ever used.


Some of the other answers may not be accurate ... keep trying!

:-)