King Henry VIII

Henry VIII (1491–1547) was King of England from 1509 until his death, the second Tudor monarch and the one who broke the English Church from Rome in order to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. He married six times, had two of his wives executed and dissolved the monasteries. In his youth he was a scholar, musician and athlete, the author of a treatise against Luther and of songs still performed. The love letters he wrote to Anne Boleyn in the late 1520s, now in the Vatican Library, are the only private correspondence of this kind to survive from an English king.