For the next two weeks, The Talking Mirror will be featuring a series of random articles focusing on our favorite holiday, which we so rarely are able to properly observe: Valentine’s Day (Boxing Day, St. Crispen’s Day, and Dia de los Muertos also fall into this category). Our first such piece was submitted by one of the founding fathers of unconditional love: King Henry the Eighth of England.  Enjoy.

That's right ladies. Come git you some.

I think you could say that I love too much.  I was in love for most of my life with a lot of women, and I guess you could say that I love to love.

Sir Thomas More once commented on my reign saying “What may we not expect from a king who has been nourished by philosophy and the nine muses?”  The answer of course was sanity.  Love makes you do crazy things.  Let me tell you about what I did for love.

I fell in love with a comely 19 year-old girl named Anne Boleyn when I was married to this old hag named Catherine who wasn’t very good at producing boys or at tickling my beard (which is a real shame because I have a kick-ass beard).

Now you are all probably saying, “Dude, maybe it was your problem?”  Totally not true.  See, I sired a boy with my mistress Elizabeth Blount eight years before, but she drowned on accident under someone’s horse in the Thames.  Sometimes these things just work out on their own.

Anyways, the Pope wouldn’t let me divorce the ice queen Catherine.  But I loved love too much.  So I left the Church and got excommunicated for love.  I also got the entire kingdom of England excommunicated.  A lot of people were pretty pissed.  The Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, Erasmus…there were a lot more.

Sir Thomas More wouldn’t go with the flow so we had to kill him for love, and to show people how serious I was about love I had his head put on a pike and displayed on London Bridge.

Pretty soon though Anne went completely insane and it was nothing but temper tantrums and stillborn infants.  I could not comprehend her refusal of love, so I started making loving advances on Jane Seymour (no relation to  certain female physician named Dr. Quinn).  Today you call this “sexual harassment.”

Pretty soon we found out that Anne was totally hooking up with the Earl of Northumberland, so we cut off her head for the sake of true love.  We found out later that she had been sleeping with her brother.  When I heard that I remember saying “What?” (This squiggly line with a dot, which my editors told me you people call a “question mark” completely lacks the emphasis I am looking for here.)

Needless to say, I was disgusted.  Finally, true love won out when Jane Seymour had our boy love-child.  That was my journey with love.  You could probably call me something of a romantic.

This delightful and uplifting tale of triumph and the human spirit was ghost written for a different publication by David McCloskey.  It is published here without his knowledge or permission.  Should it ever result in any financial gain, all proceeds will be pocketed by Conor and myself.

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