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Keith Michell, the Australian-born actor and director who has died aged 89 88, was celebrated for his many imposing stage and screen performances as Henry VIII. Michell came to monopolise one of British history's favourite subjects for dramatisation. Such was the charm of this burly, sturdy, square-set, square-jawed, mellifluous upstart from the Antipodes that when he revived Shakespeare's King Henry VIII at the Chichester Festival in 1991 he could with justice claim to have made the part of the much-married monarch his own for a quarter of a century.

“Wolf Hall,” the Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — is now a TV series (presented on PBS). It is maddeningly good. Maddening because its history is tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly conceived and executed that you almost don’t care. Faced with an imaginative creation of such brooding, gripping, mordant intensity, you find yourself ready to pay for it in historical inaccuracy. And “Wolf Hall’s” revisionism is breathtaking. It inverts the conventional view of the saintly More being undone...

A female aid worker from Sierra Leone has become the first person to bring Ebola to the United Kingdom, BBC News reports Monday night, and is in isolation in a Glasgow hospital. The aid worker, whose identity is being kept under wraps, had arrived in Glasgow via Casablanca and London's Heathrow airport, and arrived in Scotland Sunday night close to midnight. Less than eight hours later, she was admitted to Glasgow's Gartnavel Hospital with symptoms. She will be transferred to a high-level isolation unit in London's Royal Free Hospital as soon as possible for further treatment, officials said. 71 passengers...

Choral music not heard since the time of Henry VIII has been brought to life for the first time in 500 years, as an academic unearths an untouched manuscript and shows it to a modern choir. The manuscript, a book of 34 religious songs, was given to Henry VIII as a lavish gift from a French diplomat in his early reign. Containing songs referencing Henry and his then-bride Catherine of Aragon, it is considered the most "luxurious" surviving diplomatic gift of its kind. It remained in the Royal Collection after the king's death, and was later given to the nation...

. . . . For centuries, the English have been taught that the late medieval Church was superstitious, corrupt, exploitative, and alien. Above all, we were told that King Henry VIII and the people of England despised its popish flummery and primitive rites. England was fed up to the back teeth with the ignorant mumbo-jumbo magicians of the foreign Church, and up and down the country Tudor people preferred plain-speaking, rational men like Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin. Henry VIII achieved what all sane English and Welsh people had long desired ­– an excuse to break away from an anachronistic subjugation...

The Tudor battleship has been stabilised and is now on display in a new museum. Jon Evans explores the chemistry stopping those timbers shivering To avoid potentially damaging shrinkage, the hull was sprayed with water for about 12 years, then with PEG for 19 years © Peter Phipp / Travelshots.com / Alamy In many ways, the sea has not been particularly kind to the Mary Rose, the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy when it faced an invading French fleet at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour in July 1545. For a start, it engulfed the ship, with the loss of over 350...

Queen Mary ascended the throne of England in 1553. In subsequent years, she had at least two hundred people put to death (often by fire) for their religious convictions. To history she became known as "Bloody Mary," although, in truth, she killed far fewer people per year than her brutal father. The godliness of many of her victims made them stand out. Mary's father, King Henry VIII had separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic church, but he had not reformed the church's practices or doctrines. On Henry's death, his young son Edward became King. Many of Edward's...

They spent nearly 500 years in a watery grave with no record of who they were, but now the crew of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s ill fated flagship, could finally be identified. Scientists have begun work to extract DNA from the bones that were found on board the Tudor warship when it was raised from the bottom of The Solent 30 years ago. They hope to use the genetic information to identify the men who perished on the vessel when it sank and perhaps even trace their living relatives. It comes as a new £23 million museum built around...

That which no equal has in Art or Fame, Britons deservedly do Nonesuch name', translates the comment of a German visitor to Nonsuch in 1568. Nonsuch Palace in Surrey was the greatest piece of dynastic propaganda erected by the English crown before the 19th century. Built by Henry VIII to rival the palaces of the French King, Francis I, Nonsuch no longer survives as it was demolished by a mistress of King Charles II in 1682-90. However, thanks to research carried out over decades by an Oxford professor, a huge model has been unveiled that provides an accurate recreation of...

Could blood group anomaly explain Tudor king's reproductive problems and tyrannical behavior?DALLAS (SMU) – Blood group incompatibility between Henry VIII and his wives could have driven the Tudor king's reproductive woes, and a genetic condition related to his suspected blood group could also explain Henry's dramatic mid-life transformation into a physically and mentally-impaired tyrant who executed two of his wives. Research conducted by bioarchaeologist Catrina Banks Whitley while she was a graduate student at SMU (Southern Methodist University) and anthropologist Kyra Kramer shows that the numerous miscarriages suffered by Henry's wives could be explained if the king's blood carried the...

It was among Henry VIII's grandest undertakings: a castle to outshine the castle of his rival, King Francois I of France. And so it was named "Nonsuch," as in no other palace could ever equal its magnificence. But, after taking eight years to construct, the Nonsuch Palace would end up standing for less than 150 years. In the 1680s, the grand estate fell into disrepair and was lost to history. This is why this 1572 watercolor by the Flemish painter Joris Hoefnagel, the earliest known image of the palace, is estimated to fetch around $1.9 million. According to Christie's auction...

The Vatican has opened its secret archives, the repository of centuries worth of documents pertaining to the Holy See, to let the world get a closer look at a document presaging England’s split from the Church of Rome. Dated July 13, 1530, and addressed to Pope Clement VII, the letter, right, asks for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and includes the seals of dozens of peers of England who concurred with the request.

A prayer roll once belonging to Henry and inscribed with his own handwriting, has been brought to light ahead of a major new exhibition on his life. It will be shown in public for the first time at the British Library's exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, which opens later this month and marks the 500th anniversary of Henry's accession to the throne. The roll, which is around 13 feet long and 5 inches wide, is made of narrow strips of parchment stitched together. It bears Henry's official badge of arms and the Tudor rose, and is decorated with a...

A Brief History of the Cause of the English and Welsh MartyrsThe BeginningsThe first official movement for the canonization of the 'great cloud of witnesses' (cf. Hebrews 12:1) who gave their lives in defence of the Catholic religion, from the time of the schism under Henry VIII (1534) until the end of the seventeenth century, began during the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623-44). In 1643, at the request of the English Benedictines in exile, the Pope appointed the Archbishop of Cambrai in northern France (in default of the existence of Catholic Bishops in England and Wales) to set up an...

The economy's growth has never before been so driven by real estate. Now that engine is sputtering. Jiany Massad isn't quite ready to throw in the towel on his fledgling career as a Miami real-estate tycoon. But if the local housing market continues to head south, the 30-year-old real-estate broker is already making alternate plans. "I might restart my old business," he says of a home decorating company that specialized in high-end window treatments. "At least it's real-estate-related." With home sales down by nearly a third in Florida last quarter, thousands of those who hoped to cash in on the...

(JHR) The Bible talks about a great apostasy that will occur in the last days before the anti-christ is revealed. In the second book of Thessalonians it states: "Don't be fooled by what they say. For the coming of the Lord will not occur until there is a great rebellion against God and the man of lawlessness is revealed -- the one who brings destruction." (2 Thessalonians 2:3) One major Christian organization is now demonstrating that the great falling away, known in most Christian churches as the great apostasy, is well underway. Traditional Values Coalition (http://www.traditionalvalues.org/about.php) claims as its organizational...

Traditional Mass Propers For The Feast Day ofSaint Bernard of Clairvaux( Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost ) 20 August 2006 A.D. Missa Deus In Loco Santo Suo "....Ephpheta, that is, Be thou opened...." "Nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Mass forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words; it is a great action. The greatest action that can be on earth. It is. . .the vocation of the Eternal." -- John Henry Cardinal Newman

Defensor Matrimonii - St. John Fisher On 22 June 1535, St. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, England, who had been just made Cardinal Priest of Saint Vitalis by Pope Paul III, was beheaded on Tower Hill in London. Officially, he had been convicted of treason for refusing to recognize King Henry VIII as the new head of the Church of England. This was, however, a culmination of an eight year battle that St. John fought with the king over his marriage with Queen Catherine of Aragon. In the summer of 1527, Bishop Fisher was summoned to Westminster Palace for an...

As muddy holes go, they don't get much more romantic. Beneath four feet of heavy south London clay, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of Henry VII's lost chapel at Greenwich. The site is where he and a host of his Tudor successors - Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I - worshipped.   Click to enlarge The existence of the chapel, part of the Royal Palace of Placentia, a Tudor favourite but pulled down in the 17th century to be replaced by Greenwich Hospital - now the Old Naval College - has long been known from paintings and records.But until...

All right, Now It is my turn... Jesu H. Christ, for God's sake!     I AM AN ONION, a damned vegetable, and   EVEN I   know enough European and U.S. history to know what this is about...! This is not about keeping any religion away from the common folk, government or its officials declaring or taking oaths with any words referencing God or a God, regardless of origin. The origination of this part of the Constitution either has been lost by the Congress and the Courts or is being prostituted by them for their own political benefit. This...