Henry VIII

Henry VIII ruled England from 1509 to 1547 and reshaped it more violently than any monarch before him, and his chart holds both the charm and the menace. His Sun sits in Cancer, the father placed in the sign of the mother: an emotional, guarded, all-or-nothing heart that loves fiercely and cannot let go of a slight, forever retreating into its shell. That Sun falls in the eleventh house of tribe and network, the lion-king who will not share a throne and founds his own club; fittingly he broke from Rome, made himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and dissolved its monasteries. His Aries Moon is the alpha warrior's psyche, driven and short-tempered, at peace only through action and command, and it lands in the eighth house of death and power, the harder ground where crisis and control run deep. This is the king of six marriages, of ministers raised and then executed, of treason charges answered without trial. A Virgo Ascendant lent the educated, accomplished mask his contemporaries admired. A natal signature describes temperament; it never excuses the executions or the tyranny of his later years. He grew paranoid and cruel, and the harm was his own choosing.