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“The third quality that dazzled contemporaries was personality. In the desperate crisis of the summer of 1549, Henry’s erstwhile secretary implored Protector Somerset to act on behalf of the young King Edward:

Sir, for a king, do like a king. Go no further than to him who died last of noble memory, Henry VIII. Kept he not his subjects from highest to lowest in due obedience? And how? By the only maintenance of justice in due course.

Mary I faced with male counsellors ready to treat her orders as an invitation to debate, burst out on one occasion that ‘she only wished her father might come to life for a month’. Early in James I’s reign, the theatrical company ‘Prince Henry’s Men’ had a huge success at the Fortune Theatre with a play with the significant title When you see me you know me. Indeed, so successful were they that His Majesty’s Players, their rivals at the Globe, had to get Shakespeare and John Fletcher to write Henry VIII. Each play assumes that Henry’s personal foibles and mannerisms would be immediately recognized by a London audience despite the years since the King’s death. Henry was remembered as a proper king.

There is a chasm between the ways historians see Henry VIII and the way his subjects saw him. But it would be wrong to reject the latter because today we are so much better informed. Both characterizations have to be held in tension. Fallible though Henry was, modern criticism cannot destroy the reality that to his people he was a great king. A ballad written soon after his death summed him up in these words.

For if wisdom or manhood by any   means could

Have saved a man’s life to ensure for   ever,

The King Henry the 8th so noble and  so bold

Out of this wide world he would have   passed never.

Not even Henry could manage that, but it is no little achievement that 450 years after his death it remains true that ‘When you see me, you know me’.” 

–“Will the Real Henry VIII Please Stand Up?” – Eric Ives | Published in History Today, Volume 56: Issue 2, February 2006