💣?

there’s a lot of pop psych. theories behind why henry ocho had six wives. a lot of ‘he was marriage cuh-RAZY’ or ‘he was looking for the perfect woman that didn’t exist’, or even ‘he was looking for a wife that was most like his mom’ (like…hello??) and…

on one hand i get where this is coming from. to a certain extent, he did seem to have unrealistic expectations of romance/romantic love for a monarch. 

on the other hand, i don’t really think it’s like…that deep, necessarily.

i think what this ignores is that, of course six is a lot of marriages in one lifetime, but the more interesting aspect of it is that four of those took place in ten years. 

and also that some (definitely not all, but some) of the aspects of the whole six-wives thing were circumstantial. 

for instance, had koa had a son that survived childhood, he likely would have only had one– or two, perhaps, if she ended up dying in 1536, anyways. 

had jane seymour survived, he probably would have had three wives. 

i’ve read a lot of ‘he would’ve just tried to get rid of her, i know it’ and like a) … how do you ‘know’ that, really? how could you possibly? and b) i’m aware he didn’t treat her well, but the idea that he would’ve tried to somehow annul the only marriage that had yielded him a legitimate, surviving son, or like…poison her or smth is pretty OTT. we have no evidence of henry poisoning anyone; that catchy ‘where a borgia used poison, a tudor used the law’ is a bit generalized, but stands up pretty well against historic record (for the latter, anyway– not well-versed in the former).