For all his personal ugliness, matrimonial homicides, and institutionalized religious persecution, Henry VIII was actually a pretty competent head of state. He accomplished a lot as far as improving the middle class and merchant class influence in national policy and economic development, built up the country's naval defenses, chose a lot of highly competent (if nasty) advisors and ministers of State, improved the national finance and accounting system, and much more.
He actually left the *government* of England in very good shape. And with the exception of the religious persecutions and eliminations made "necessary" in the wake of his various matrimonial adventures (which had their root less in his personal concupiscience than in his obsessive drive to secure the dynastic line that began with his father's usurpation of the Plantagenet throne) he showed great restraint in using the vicious tools his father had created to crush the opposition that faced him after the invasion.
Let me be clear, I'm not an apologist for Henry VIII and certainly the last 15 years of his reign were as bad a shitshow as any Masterpiece Theater soap opera, between the tertiary syphilis symptoms and the increasing internal and external security threats.
But he was by NO means the childish incompetent surrounded by peurile, bumbling kleptocrats we are suffering under today.
historically,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
