From a reader:

Henry VIII is regarded almost universally as a tyrant, but Stuttaford has a serious ally in Showtime’s The Tudors. The curator of Henry’s recent exhibition say he was tyrant. And his most recent and copious biographer, Alison Weir, concludes her biography with the same condemnation. She even says that Henry was, “an imperious and dangerous autocrat who became mesmerised by his own legend.”
While one might critique the ruminations of Simon Heffer as committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, it may be simpler to mention a happier effect of Henry’s reign than those mentioned by Heffer and Stuttaford: King Henry’s reign forced many brave Englishmen to seek out this, our great continent, in order to free themselves from the religious persecution initiated by Henry Tudor and continued by his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. Without their cruelty, our great nation, with its robust tradition of religious liberty, may not have come into being. For that, we can all be thankful.

And:

“Difficult to be married to?” Hmm. Murdered two of his wives. Makes O.J. look like a relatively decent guy for only beheading one wife. The young Henry is an attractive figure—vigorous, athletic, charismatic, likely a musical genius—but he became the poster boy for Acton’s “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and in his pursuit of unfettered power ended up ushering in an era of religious terror and persecution (and counter-persecution and counter-counter-persecution) the likes of which the British Isles had never seen. To argue that absent him, Britain would have remained sunk in some sort of “Catholic” “Mediterranean” torpor is nonsense, ignoring a whole panoply of social and economic forces in favor of a narrow religious determinism. Something happened in Northern Europe, and most of northern Europe became Protestant; correlation is not causation, however, and to assert that the culture of Northern Europe would not have become equally or more dynamic is to argue in the absence of data. Would, for example, the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire been ultimately better or worse off, not having been devastated in the Hundred Years War? Would the development of a non-devastated, Catholic HRE have led to a Germany more culturally integrated with its western neighbors, less antagonistic to “the West,” and less likely to have wreaked havoc on Europe from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century? Who knows? Would the great geniuses of Britain from Shakespeare to Newton to Smith have been crushed under the soul- and mind-destroying stultification of assent to the Roman creed? As an historian, I can confidently say we have no fricking idea.
A substantial argument against the “rise of Protestantism as rise of liberty” narrative is in David Hart’s (excellent) book featured in the last Between the Covers. His point is that most Protestant ascendancies—especially in Germany and England—had little to do with theology and everything to do with freeing the prince—the state—from the legal restrictions of conscience from which they had increasingly become bound by a millennium or more of expanding Christian convention. You couldn’t wage war most days of the year, you couldn’t claim authority over your subjects’ consciences, you couldn’t confiscate wealth freely, etc. While Protestantism may have ultimately increased the space and idea of individual liberty*, throughout the sixteenth century (and afterward) Henry and various other lords used it as a rationale for the liberation of the state.
*I think it’s likely it did in some places (e.g., the Netherlands), but it’s not as clear cut a case as traditional (rather triumphalist) Anglo-American historiography has it, and it involved a lot more trade-offs than are generally acknowledged.

UPDATE:

One final e-mail on the first:

Surely your reader is thinking of Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s first daughter, the famous ‘Bloody Mary’ persecutor of Protestants, among whom were later the first settlers in this country. But between her persecution and their emigration were several decades and the accession of Elizabeth, the second daughter, and James I (a cousin). Elizabeth was as famously receptive to Protestants as Mary was hostile to them, and sought a settlement the whole country could live with (which, if far from perfect, was still preferable to the Catholic-hating of her younger brother, Edward VI). And we should not forget James I (James VI of Scotland) who was also highly pro-Protestant and anti-Catholic (especially after the Gunpowder Plot against him and Parliament). Obviously non-conformists had a hard time of it, but the Catholics had it harder for much longer in the relevant period, yet it was the Protestants that came here.