Walter Raleigh called Henry VIII a “merciless prince.” He was a “disgrace to human nature and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England” according to Charles Dickens, and clergyman Edward Lewis declared him “a sincere Christian and a patriot king.” Tudor scholar Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger examines why the real Henry VIII was all these men, a complex king who fascinates us more than 450 years after his tumultuous reign.