"Was Henry VIII a good-natured buffoon or an ..." Topic

…egotistical tyrant?.

"Gore Vidal suggested that books have had their day: that we should ‘concede the inevitable, scrap the existing educational system, and introduce the young to the past through film'.

This is going too far, but it is true that films are the main source of historical knowledge for the majority of people. Film is a powerful medium which brings historical subjects to a vast audience. It carries the tantalising possibility of making us eyewitnesses to history, the lens of the camera our window onto past events. Film flattens out the strangeness of the past, reanimates a lost world and makes us care about the fates of the long dead. Before our eyes, the past seems to come back to life.

Film's eyewitness dimension is the medium's great strength and, simultaneously, its great weakness. An eyewitness can only see one side of external events. Films tend to follow, therefore, a single linear narrative, locking history into a series of filmic conventions with no space for ambiguity or multiple viewpoints. In addition, the field of vision must be filled, which may depend on a series of best guesses about the appearance of the past. Historical interpretation lies not only in the narrative and character depiction, but in every frame: the visual language of the film carries its own meaning. In short, as films cannot carry a critical apparatus, they create illusions about the past that are not easily criticised or refuted…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Which Henry VIII – pre or post accident?

Buffoon is a term I've never heard associated with Henry VIII

As Prince Hal running around with Falstaff, would fit by association.

Henry VIII was an important figure in the revival of English nationalism and the expansion the Protestant Reformation. Not a buffoon but not a pleasant ruler either.

He did nothing for his country but for his own ego!

Garrison Miniatures is spot on! The Henry after his catastrophic injuries was a much different man than before. It is often remarked upon in the diaries of his counsellors.

He did nothing for his country but for his own ego!

Sounds like a politician to me!

he cared not a fig for his country folk!

The prince Hal who 'ran around' with Falstaff in Shakespeare was the future Henry V. Henry VIII was no buffoon, but a vicious, scheming, egotistical, psychopath. And after his injuries, a pain driven, vicious, scheming, egotistical psychopath. I may get off the fence about this one of these days!

Mollinary

Whoops – getting my Henrys mixed up.

I suspect Henry was wonderful company (pre-accident at least) if you were his friend and/or he was in a good mood. Witty, generous, quick to laugh, etc. No buffoon, either; he was an intelligent chap, although he may have played the buffoon at times for his own ends. But this was also an all-but absolute monarch and such people don't stay in power by being consistently nice. Undoubtedly he had a dark side, and while some elements of that like a desire for military glory were common enough back in the day, there was certainly a streak of cruelty running through him too.

Especially as time wore on I suspect he suffered from a dearth of people willing and able to tell him "no". He took the throne at eighteen, fawned over by everyone, and both his parents were already dead by that time; his siblings either dead or out of the country. He kicked the Pope and Catherine to the kerb in the 1530s, fell out with Wolsey (who soon died anyway), and he executed More. By that time his remaining advisors for the most part had either grown up under his rule or were now terrified of him. Cromwell seems to have been the only remaining person capable of handling Henry and once he bit the dust (precisely why is still a bit of a mystery) that was the last straw. Soon after he broke with Rome he suffered his accident which seemed to leave him in constant pain. He hadn't exactly been a saint beforehand, but it's not surprising he went completely off the rails thereafter.

Paranoia is another factor, and perhaps not an entirely fictitious one. For much (most?) of his reign there were people either actively claiming his throne or trying to build up the support to do so. He and his father both made a point of butchering Plantagenet heirs at the slightest provocation. That sort of thinking can spread dangerously to almost anyone in a position of influence.

Friends!! He had some stitched up and beheaded for supposedly having it away with his wife!