The most charitable thing one could say about Henry VIII is that he might have been bonkers. Like, he might have had a genuine mental illness. That fact, if true, might not excuse the things he did, but it could explain them. Again, if true. If Henry didn’t have a case of the crazies, then he was just a pure, old-fashioned bastard of the lowest sort. A bloated sociopath with a god complex.
Henry’s most famous victim is Anne Boleyn, his second bride, whom he had beheaded on trumped-up charges including adultery, witchcraft, and incest. (Threw the whole kitchen sink at her, he did.) Queen Anne, who had six fingers on each hand, incidentally, was buried in an unmarked grave, treated as a pariah in death, but she is still reportedly seen on occasion at the Tower of London, the site of her execution. However, it seems that she, like so many people, returns home at Christmastime. Home for her is Hever Castle in Kent, today a popular tourist attraction, where her ghost is sighted during the holidays. In 1976, a man named C. W Bamford, who claimed to be a descendant of Queen Anne, claimed to experience a psychic connection to her at the castle: “I received impressions generated by considerable force. These impressions were of a young woman, some 25 or 26 years of age in some distress…fists beating on the window sill…scrabbling of finger nails on the surrounding walls…”. It doesn’t make sense, though, why Anne’s spirit, if present, would feel imprisoned in her childhood home instead of the Tower where she was held.
