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man with absolute power to do so, but maybe rather than being at odds, the fact that he was both hostile and cruel, surrounded with pleasures but also plagued with physical ills and character flaws, were intricately related. It may actually be exactly because of the immense stress he was under from personal reasons (his weight only being one of them) that caused him to be more and more outwardly hostile. It is common for historians to point out that both of these traits increased in his later reign, and it was probably because of just this relationship between them. He did, in his younger years, have at least have the goal of virtue and benevolence as a ruler, but later gave in to the tendency to display more and more unpredictable and extreme ways to lash out, particularly at those who were once close to him but betrayed him in some sense, such as Cardinal Wolsey who is probably the one to be credited with establishing the rules of both he and his father on rather tenuous ground.

His those who offended his conflicted sense of religiosity was a particular source of his outrage. Some tribute him as the first Protestant king, but it wasn't really the case. In his heart he remained devoutly Catholic, though he all but banned any ability for others in his realm to do so. So because Catholics offended his belief that he had the right to be head of the church, and Protestants offended his truer doctrinal convictions, in his last few years he actively purged his country of both Protestants AND Catholics-basically whoever got his goat in the slightest met a cruel end. Unbelievably he had an elderly woman and another royal cousin, the Countess of Salisbury, hacked up with an ax merely because her son opposed him.

The thing that enabled him to be so much more unrestrained in his tyranny as he aged, unlike some of us who might also have this tendency to lash out at those around us (it isn't ALL THAT strange, after all, to blame others for our own faults), was his power to enact what might be quite common emotions. Few of us have the ability, though, to dodge any culpability for our own problems or enact such baffling consequences for those that provoke our resentment. More and more for Henry as things got worse and worse, causing others' suffering seemed to provide some opiate-like diversion from the very real pains he suffered as a powerful king, and a very troubled man.

Learn more about this author, Carol H. Morgan.
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