Manly physique Robert Hutchinson, a biographer; Catherine Hood, a doctor; and the historian Lucy Worsley, who is chief curator of Britain's Historic Royal Palaces, offer a picture of a sovereign eventually overwhelmed by health problems by the time of his death. His doctors recorded that he had badly ulcerated legs, was unable to walk, his eyesight was fading, and he was plagued by paranoia and melancholy.
However, Henry had started out with excellent health as a young man, being universally admired for his manly physique. The experts speculate that his medical problems began at the age of 30 when he appears to have contracted malaria, which is thought to have returned throughout his life. They were intensified by two factors: open sores on his legs and sporting injuries. The sores - varicose ulcers, which began on his left leg when he was 36, and later affected his right -may have been caused by the restrictive garters he wore to show off his calves. They never healed, and increasingly restricted his mobility. Henry also suffered various injuries because of his well-known love of sports - he excelled at pursuits such as archery, wrestling and real tennis, and, playing the latter game he seriously injured his foot. But it was jousting - two armoured horsemen charging at each other with wooden lances - which proved the most dangerous. His first serious accident occurred in 1524 when he failed to lower the visor on his helmet and was hit by his opponent's lance just above the right eye, after which he constantly suffered from migraines.
Changing wives 12 years later, the fall at Greenwich left him "speechless" for two hours, and Anne Boleyn, the woman for whom he had divorced his original queen, Katherine of Aragon, was told that he would die - and the shock, she said, caused her to miscarry the child she was expecting. The miscarried baby was male, and it was immediately after this that Henry told Anne they would clearly never have male children together, and turned against her. Less than six months later Anne had been executed and Henry had married the third of his six wives, Jane Seymour.
But the jousting accident may have affected his whole personality, the experts suggest. "We posit that his jousting accident of 1536 provides the explanation for his personality change from sporty, promising, generous young prince, to cruel, paranoid and vicious tyrant," Worsley says. "From that date the turnover of the wives really speeds up, and people begin to talk about him in a negative way. After the accident he was unconscious for two hours; even five minutes of unconsciousness is considered to be a major trauma today."
What is beyond doubt is that the end of his jousting combined with his leg ulcers to restrict his movement and Henry, who had a large appetite anyway, began to put on weight rapidly. The programme reconstructs his diet, suggesting he may have eaten up to 13 dishes a day and he may have drunk 10 pints of ale a day as well as wine, as water was unsafe. Henry, the programme says, "became a comforteating paranoid recluse - a 28 stone man-mountain."
The Independent
O autorovi| Stránku připravila Marta Pelechová
