Henry the VIII---gals, he's single!!

I just finished watching The Private Life of Henry the Eighth , which told the story of one of the true monsters to ever strut and fret his hour upon history’s stage. (No, not "W"!)
About a man of enormous appetites (and pants!--there was no Weight Watchers yet), both gastronomic and anatomic. His influence on England was like anatomic bomb (I will pause for groans to die down…thank you).
He ruled England with an iron hand---which caused his right shoulder to droop noticeably.
He married six times and had a novel way of avoiding paying alimony. He’d just often request that the Queen’s crown be removed---from below the chin.
Actually, he did that to only (only?)three wives who were messing around on him---the other three were determined to keep a good head on their shoulders.
The Private Life of Henry the Eighth tells the story of his fifth wife, Catherine Howard , who, if the way she’s portrayed is accurate, must have been one of the dumbest females in history--- I mean, she’s married to a man who’s a demonstrable paranoid psychopath who’s already had tens of thousands of people beheaded---and half of those for just looking at him the wrong way!
I guess what I’m saying is, he could sometimes be a hothead!
So what does Catherine do? She has constant trysts with her lover, Thomas Culpepper (whose family later went on to found a cattle ranch in the Ol’ west) within---not miles, mind you---but practically within hearing distance of King Charles Laughton--Seriously, the scene where the King’s toady tells him the names of the witnesses who knew of the Queen’s "indiscretions" took 15 minutes!
I think she had a death wish.
I mean, what woman wouldn’t who had to satisfy the lust of a morbidly obese man, of whom when it was said he had hundreds of political servants in his orbit, they were talking literally?
I mean, his wives were treated for what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after each intimate interlude, not to mention several fractured vertabrae.
Ladies of the court joked discreetly that they’d rather go to the Rack---however, many weren’t quite discreet enough and they did—unless they had rack of their own that Henry favored---but that’s another time for another story.
All in all, though despite the fact that he was a cold-blooded mass murderer and a dysfunctional husband, hey---there’s always the compensatory factors:

That cute song my Herman’s Hermits,

He wrote “Green Sleeves” (and later in his life the much less popular “Red Bodices”),

And if it were not for him, Paul Scofield would not have won an Oscar in 1966, and Steven Spielberg would have been at a loss for a name for his production company, Anne Boleyn!