How a Canadian professor found King Henry VIII’s doodles after 500 years

Henry VIII beheaded two of his six wives: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. The doodles likely speak to private inner turmoil, an Ottawa professor says.

In the life of Britain’s most notorious king, it seemed everything had already been written.

But part of King Henry VIII’s story remained untold — until a professor from Ottawa stumbled upon a series of doodles that had evaded royal historians for five centuries.

“I think I was the first person to look at it really carefully,” said Micheline White, who teaches English literature at Carleton University.

White uncovered annotations King Henry VIII had written in the margins of a prayer book from the 1500s. They reveal new details about the infamous monarch’s inner thoughts toward the end of his reign.

“It’s clear that Henry is anxious and thinking about his physical suffering,” White said. “He’s worried that God is punishing him for his sins.”

Henry VIII beheaded two of his six wives: his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. He divorced two others: his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and his fourth, Anne of Cleves. His third wife, Jane Seymour, died shortly after childbirth, while his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, outlived him.

He also executed advisers who questioned him and monks who refused to convert from Catholicism to the Church of England after he split with the Roman Catholic Church in order to marry Boleyn.

White discovered his doodles by accident while doing research in Buckinghamshire, England. She was studying the religious writings of Parr at the Wormsley Library.