The Real Reason Henry VII Is Blamed For Henry VIII's Tyranny
"Who do you blame," a tribe of small, musically inclined chocolatiers once asked, "when your kid is a brat?" The responsibility, they went on to posit, must lie with the kid's parents, which is a strange conclusion to come to when you consider that they then spent the day watching children live through a Cronenberg-esque body-horror nightmare while their parents generally shuffled around and waited for their spawn to get shot through a pneumatic tube system or explode in a shower of blueberry juice.
Still, the point remains. Someone has to be held responsible for the actions of a terrible kid, and their parents are as good a place to start as any. Case in point: Henry VIII, who people forget was necessarily preceded by a Henry VII. Hank Ocho spent the bulk of his reign divorcing, beheading, and philandering his way through half a dozen marriages while simultaneously eating enough on the daily to nourish, at a rough estimate, Guam. According to The History Press, there's an argument to be made that his grim-reboot-of-Van-Wilder lifestyle all came down to his relationship with his old man.
Give royalty an inch and they take a mile
Fun fact: Henry VIII wasn't his dad's first choice of successor. Henry VII had an older son, Prince Arthur, pictured above, who was schooled in the business of royalty until his untimely passing at the age of 15. Future-Henry VIII, meanwhile, probably spent most of his time growing up hanging out with his sisters. We're not sure — since he was "the spare" and not supposed to be king, nobody really kept track of his day-to-day.
After Arthur's death, Henry VII apparently got a bad case of the nervous Nellys about his last male heir's well-being. For his seven remaining years, he made sure that Prince Henry was chaperoned at all times. Upon the king's death, the now-Henry VIII – who it's important to remember had just spent his entire adolescence with someone staring over his shoulder — went on a royal Rumspringa and never came back, blowing his old man's money and generally seeing how long his one-man Spring Break could last.
It's also entirely possible that he went crazy after falling off a horse. Tudor fan theories are pretty scattershot.