King Henry VIII (manwhore...)

So, hello. Welcome to my blog and my very first post. My point in making this blog is to share with you my love of history, but do it in a more enjoyable way. I'm not going to sit here and just rattle off facts in a boring school like fashion, but rather share with you things that I find interesting about people/places/ etc in history. If you disagree that's fine, but at least share with me the things you are interested in so I can broaden my horizons. :)

SOOO, here we go. 

Today I am going to share some information about someone I have found to be quite... interesting. King Henry VIII. Now, you may know exactly who I am talking about, or you may still be using your fingers and elementary knowledge of roman numerals to figure out which number I just typed, but either way, you should know this guy was insane. When I say insane, I don't mean like wore a potato sack over his head and went after villagers with rusty axes, but that's pretty close. Not only did this king have 6 wives in his lifetime, but he was also the man who caused the separation between England and the Roman Catholic Church. Why did he do that you ask? Because he liked the big V, if you know what I'm talking about. (and if you don't, I'm trying to say that he liked sex.) He pushed England to separate from the Roman Catholic Church because they would not allow him to leave his first wife(Catherine of Aragon) and marry Anne Boleyn (he had already had an affair with Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne, and this was after Mary was already a married woman. What an upstanding guy huh?). So, instead of just keep her on as a lover, his solution? Oh, lets just make our own church for me to rule over so I can marry whomever I want. And he did exactly that. The funny thing about that? He ended up beheading Anne and most of her family anyway. Glad that whole separation from the church thing worked out for him. 

Along with Catherine and Anne, he had four additional wives. 

• Jane Seymour - The only of the king's wives to receive a queen's funeral and be buried beside him, she died from complications after the birth of their son Edward VI.
• Anne of Cleves - He never consummated this marriage (meaning he never had sex with her) and ended up getting a divorce. The reason? He thought she was ugly and hadn't actually met her before they decided to get married. Not all bad things came of this marriage though, because the two went on to be good friends. 
• Catherine Howard - A very young bride, she ended up having an affair with Thomas Culpepper, and for this she was beheaded. 
• Catherine Parr - Not too much of interest happened with this one.. she helped reconcile the relationship between the king and his two daughters. 

One last interesting thing about the King. His daughter with his first and true wife was named Mary. She went on to become Queen of England and I'll bet you have heard of her before. Ever play that game Bloody Mary as a child? Yeah, that game was about her. She got that nickname during her rule because of how many people she had executed. (for religious reasons of course)

***If you want to see an interesting representation of this mans life (although it isn't all historically accurate), The Tudors was a very good TV series about him***

So yeah, that's it for this post. Please give me some feed back, let me know what kinds of history you are interested in. I'll try to mix it up as much as possible.