Hello!
I'm really late to this - I kept seeing the thread pop up but not wanting to post until I'd caught up with it. I am enjoying it, though with some reservations too. I do enjoy Stephen Gardner.
I'm really interested in the Henry VIII discussion.
I don't at all buy that Henry wasn't intelligent. Nor do I think he was terribly interested in women - if you look at the history of his early years, he was married (apparently happily) to Katharine and had a couple of official mistresses, with one acknowledged bastard son. That's really not very much for the time. He only started going through strings of women as he got desperate - and, apart from Anne, I don't think there's much evidence he was all that sexually passionate with them. With Anne, as well, there's the story that when he came to want to get rid of her, he suddenly 'remembered' how she'd known all of these sexy French ways. Which rather suggests he was a bit sexually repressed/sheltered, if anything.
I think trying to figure out whether the treatise was Henry's 'own work' or not is to misunderstand how authorship functions in this period. It's quite normal to do what we'd see as collaboration, plagiarism or similar, and pass it off as your 'own'.
I'm really loving how DL manages to be quite scary - I've not seen a properly scary-seeming Henry in anything for ages. And he surely would have been. BL, possibly because of the Homeland link, does convincingly look as if he could have you killed if he chose and it wouldn't especially bother his conscience.