Two Henry VIII exhibitions opening soon in London

The most English of kings is about to undergo a battle of exhibitions, 500 years after his coronation, a respect he would have no doubt have thought deserved. Henry VIII treated a succession of wives with regal cruelty - divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived - and his courtiers no more gently. Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell both died under his axe. He has swaggered through the centuries in Hans Holbein's portraits, successively larger and more brutal - England's Stalin, careless of life, tradition and property. The Royal Armouries has gathered a collection of his armour for an exhibition at the Tower of London beginning in April, which proves his bulk, with a 52-inch waist by the end, as if his size alone was the source of the terror. But there was a subtler side to the man, revealed in a second exhibition at the British Library, also opening in April, five centuries on from the year he was crowned. Documents there will show that he was more than a beef-eating, wife-slaughtering barbarian: he was the king who created England in its independent form...