Henry VIII, according to Sellar and Yeatman, had VIII wives, memorable among whom were Katherine the Arrogant, Anne of Cloves (the fat mare with glanders) and Lady Jane Austen. According to TV historian, David Starkey, he is also "the only king whose shape you remember". Simon Heffer has some further thoughts on Henry VIII - without him, England would never have been Top Nation, as it certainly was until, horribile dictu, America took over and history came to a . Napoleon, who stood with his arms like that, would not have been roundly trounced by Nelson, who stood with his arm like that. From The Telegraph:  

Every half-millennium or so an event occurs in our history that changes the basis of society. The Romans come, the Romans go. The Normans come; and between their arrival in 1066 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 there is one seismic event after which society sets off (after a false start or two) on an entirely new course: the Reformation in England. When the Convocation of Canterbury of the Church in England agreed in March 1531 to accede to Henry's demands about church governance that included the clergy's recognition of him as head of the English church, it also triggered a process of such profound economic and political change that even today there is still dispute about the extent of the consequences. Let me add my three ha'porth: without the Reformation we would not have had what Seeley called "the expansion of England", we would not have had a middle class educated and powerful enough to initiate the industrial revolution, we would not have had the empire we did, and would not have had the land and sea power that kept us free from invasion and foreign influence: not to mention the theological consequences.

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Henry's subsequent association with Protestantism was a marriage of convenience rather than offspring of the sort of earthquake of conscience that had inspired Luther. He sought to remove Rome's authority in England so he could secure his annulment (which he had previously sought on the grounds that he had married his dead brother's wife). The dissolution of the monasteries, which Thomas Cromwell effected for him between 1536 and 1540, broke up the main cells of the Catholic clergy in Henry's realm: it also initiated the greatest change of land ownership in England since the Conquest. Perhaps a quarter of land changed hands, bought by the aristocracy and by a newly emergent gentry and with the revenues going to the Crown. This would be the basis of the Crown's wealth, and of its security. It also began a social and economic mobility unseen in England before; it sowed the seeds for the expansion of the middle class, broke feudalism and, slowly, developed freedom of thought. The intellectual growth of post-Reformation England was marked and led directly to the civil wars of the 1640s. In his short reign, the devoutly Protestant boy King Edward VI founded grammar schools all over England to help educate the emerging middle class; it was the start of an attempt at enlightenment that would take centuries to complete, but which would incidentally equip England and then Britain for wealth creation and imperial endeavour.

As scholars have pointed out, the economic growth of most Catholic countries in the preceding millennium had been minimal. The Church had taken much of the wealth and used it for its own aggrandisement: one of the principal provocations to Luther in framing his 95 theses was the order from Leo X, a venal and corrupt Medici, for the sale of indulgences to pay for the building of St Peter's in Rome. There was no trickle-down effect for the contributing nations, who found that doing works for the glory of God did not necessarily stimulate wider prosperity. The Tudors are often mocked for their materialism, but the absence of a peasantry trapped in their feudal position for generations on end was a tremendous stimulus to wealth creation and the expansion of English power. Is it any coincidence that the European power who followed England most closely in the industrial revolution, Prussia (subsequently Germany) was also Protestant?

 Without the Reformation there would have been no civil war and no establishment of the constitutional monarchy. Who is to say that what happened in France in 1789, or across Europe in 1848, or in Russia in 1917 would not eventually have happened here? Of course the Catholic countries of Europe were not held back indefinitely by the dominance of the Roman clergy in their lands. But it was not until 1905 that France passed a law separating Church and state, much of Spain remained primitive until after the civil war, Italy still has such areas of backwardness that many in the north wish to be separate from the south, and Ireland (troubled now for other reasons) only exploited the talents of its people when it broke free of being a clerical state and looked outwards. That, in the resonant phrase of the 37th Article, "the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England", may have come about by accident. But even if he did not intend it, it remains Henry VIII's most conspicuous achievement and greatest legacy.