Was Henry V111 a Psychopath?
He had good points as well, but as an absolute monarch he could do as he pleased – and did. Like any king at the time he was desperate for a son to succeed him and was ready to do almost anything to get one but his first two wives were unable to produce healthy offspring of the right sex. The two wives that were executed were executed legally. Basically Henry wanted rid of them. In the case of Anne Boleyn the charges of treason were almost certainly fictitious, and in the case of Catherine Howard, Parliament passed a Bill that made her adultery into an act of treason, (her lovers were executed before hand as it was already an act of high treason to commit adultery with the queen under the Treason Act 1351 – incidentally the oldest piece of legislation that is still in force in the UK today) but they were executed after due process of law. At that time nobody dared argue with the king. But that was beginning to change and when, a century later, Charles I tried to run the country his own
