Okay gang, let's talk about Henry VIII, actually. A few thoughts:

(1) "Henry VIII founded Anglicanism!!!" Not really. No one involved thought they were founding a new religion, but restoring a properly primitive catholicism (although they disagreed about what that should look like).

What's more, Henry was only one moment in a complex period of reform which didn't really achieve any sort of settlement till Elizabeth.

(2) "Anglicanism was just about politics, just a thin religious excuse for a power-grab." Here is where we need to be honest about how religious change did and didn't happen throughout Europe at the Reformation.

Magistrates generally made the decisions to throw in with the Reformers, support reformers within Roman Catholicism, or support the existing RC structure, for a variety of reasons, some more pious than others. Sometimes there was more popular support than not.

We know that in England, as in much of Europe, there was both genuine popular support for the Reformation, especially in urban areas, and genuine popular resistance. Neither the Protestants nor the Catholics can claim to be obviously represent "the masses" here.

And, it's worth noting that the choice to stay Catholic, or revert to Catholicism, was often just as political as the choice to go Protestant! "Paris is worth a mass", after all.

In the English Reformation, as in all the Reformations and Counter-Reformations, there was a complex combination of apparently genuine religious conviction and power politics. This should not surprise us, given the relationship between the church and the magistrate at the time.

(3) "Henry VIII was just horny!" Frankly, Henry was an inveterate adulterer, and if it was just sex he was after he wouldn't have had much trouble getting it.

It seems, as far as we can tell, that Henry really was convinced that his marriage offended God. Now, this was clearly motivated reasoning, as the lack of a male heir was a political problem for him, but it wasn't just about sex.

None of this is, of course, to defend Henry. He was, in many respects, a scoundrel, although hardly uniquely so. I find Edward and Latimer and Ridley and Cranmer and Parker and Elizabeth far more compelling than he.

But the particular mythmaking around the unique evil of sex-mad, scheming Henry and his villainous destruction of the English church is just that, mythmaking.