RADIO: In search of the real Henry the eighth

He’s probably Britain’s most recognisable monarch, Holbein’s image of the broad-shouldered and bearded king sticking in all our minds.

However, there was more to Henry than meets the eye and this week’s Essay (Radio 3, Monday to Friday) had five historians examining five aspects of his personality.

On Monday Lucy Wooding of King’s College, London, explored Henry as a renaissance prince.

He was our first monarch to be called “Your Majesty”, he redrafted the coronation oath and expanded the number of royal palaces from a handful to 55.

He let nothing stand in his way yet Wooding argued that that was because the Tudors came from a separate blood line to the medieval kings. Henry’s aggression and love of the grandiose was an attempt to legitimise his rule.

At the end of the week Suzannah Lipscomb, research curator at Hampton Court Palace, provided a different explanation for Henry’s more unpleasant qualities. By all accounts he was a delightful young man: charming, generous and, almost unbelievably, handsome.

All that changed in 1536 when Henry suffered a fall while jousting. He was unconscious for two hours and the fall also burst an ulcer on his leg which would never heal, leaving him in pain for the rest of his life.

He was only 45 but within five years Henry’s waistline went from 37 inches to 54.

Days after the accident Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn miscarried a son. This was soon followed by news of the Queen’s alleged adultery. Was everything that Henry did afterwards just an attempt to prove his impugned manliness?

Elsewhere on Radio 3 we got Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (Sunday). It was especially interesting for the rather favourable gloss that the Bard put on Henry’s attempts to divorce Catherine of Aragon.

Although did you know that Henry didn’t in fact have six wives? He considered himself only to have been married twice (to Jane Seymour, who died and to Catherine Parr, who survived him) as the other four were all annulled.