Henry VIII: Maybe Not A Unrepentant Monarch After All

People often remember King Henry VIII as the short-fused, unforgiving, bloodthirsty tyrant. Catholics remember the fact that he split the English Church from the Vatican in order to end his marriage to Queen Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Catholics remember the fact that King Henry had Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher executed.

But the Tudor King's own prayer books, filled with his own annotations, shed some new light on a side of him that we almost never hear about. The monarch drew hands with the index finger extended in the margins next to passages from Scripture about punishment. Despite the confidence King Henry exuded, the annotations don't reveal a narcissist who thought he could do nothing wrong or didn't do anything wrong. On the contrary, they reveal a man unsure of his place as an anointed ruler, anxious about his own sinfulness, and pleading for God's mercy in uncertainty.