I subscribe to a service called “SiteMeter” which allows me to see a limited amount of information about my visitors. One thing that I can see is if someone finds my site via a Google search. Recently, I’ve had a number of hits from people looking to find out about living descendants of King Henry VIII. My site isn’t really about that, but I thought I’d provide an answer anyway, as a public service.

There are no living descendants of King Henry VIII.

Henry’s father, King Henry VII, had four offspring who lived past childhood: Arthur, Margaret, Henry, and Mary. Arthur was always expected to be the next king, but he died in 1502. When Henry VII died in 1509, the kingdom was passed to his younger son, crowned Henry VIII.

Henry VIII had four known living offspring from four different women. His first wife, Catherine of Arragon, gave him a daughter, Mary (born 1516). He had an illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy (born 1519), with his mistress Elizabeth Blount. His second wife, Ann Boleyn, had a daughter Elizabeth (born 1533). His third wife, Jane Seymour, had a son, Edward (born 1537). Henry VIII would have three more wives, but no more children to carry on his line. And as we shall see, none of his four branches would bear fruit.

Henry FitzRoy died in 1536, while his father was still alive.

When Henry VIII died in 1547, young Edward became King Edward VI, but died in 1553 with no heir. He was 15 years old. That was the end of Henry’s Y chromosome. But what about the daughters?

There was a brief reign by Lady Jane Grey (not a descendant of Henry VIII, but a granddaughter of his sister Mary) and then Henry VIII’s daughter Mary took the throne as Queen Mary I of England. You may know her as Bloody Mary.

(Don’t confuse either Mary with Mary Queen of Scots, who was yet a third Mary. She is a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. We’ll come back to her in a bit.)

Mary I of England died in 1558 with no offspring, leaving the country in the capable hands of her sister Elizabeth. During the 45-year-long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, we saw a new Golden Age which included the rise of Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon. But alas, we saw no heir. Elizabeth died in 1603, ending her father’s biological legacy forever.

The crown then passed to the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who was James VI of Scotland at the time. He became King James I of England. And Shakespeare quickly began work on Macbeth. Note that the British monarchy even today can be traced back to King Henry VII, the father of King Henry VIII.

But King Henry VIII himself has no known living descendants.

I hope this was helpful for at least some of you. For the rest of you, expect a new Conundrum tomorrow.

UPDATE: An anagram version of the answer!

The tenth episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that after all of the turmoil surrounding the Tudor succession, Queen Elizabeth ruled for 45 years, presiding over a new Golden Age that produced both William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon?  That’s hot.

In a Venn Diagram puzzle, there are three overlapping circles, marked A, B, and C. Each circle has a different rule about who or what can go inside. The challenge is to guess the rule for each circle. You can find a more detailed explanation of Venn Diagram puzzles, along with an example, here.

Since The Tudors wasn’t on this week, I offer you this Tudor-related puzzle to hold you over until Sunday. Each of the eight people below was a member of the court of King Henry VIII.

Have you figured out one of the rules? Two? All three? Feel free to post whatever you’ve got in the comments below. Just tell us which circle you’re solving, and what the rule is.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Circles A and B solved by Annalisa. See comments for all answers.

The ninth episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that after all of Henry’s attempts to bar Mary from succession, he returned her place in the succession in his will, and she later became Queen?  That’s hot.

The eighth episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that after Edward VI’s death, Lady Jane Grey was the uncrowned Queen of England for nine days? She was the granddaughter of Princess Mary and Charles Brandon. That’s hot.

The seventh episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that King Henry VIII was ultimately succeeded to the throne by a legitimate son, the nine-year-old King Edward VI? That’s hot.

The sixth episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that Henry VIII agreed to marry his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, without meeting her, based only on a portrait he had had painted by Hans Holbein the Younger. That’s hot.

The fifth episode of The Tudors airs tonight on Showtime and will be replayed throughout the week. You can also view the episode On Demand.

Use the comments section of this post to discuss the episode. Any comments I may have will be posted in the comments section as well.

WARNING: Comments may contain further discussion of the show, including potential spoilers. Click through only after viewing the episode. Commenters may discuss this episode as freely as they like, but are asked not to spoil future episodes.

By the way, did you know that the Showtime story of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor and the aging King of Portugal is based on the real story of Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor and the aging King of France? The real Margaret Tudor married the King of Scotland, and spawned a line of Scottish monarchs that would ultimately inhabit the English throne as well. That’s hot.

Below is a graph of the hits to Shakespeare Teacher for each day of the past month. This reflects the number of unique visitors, not how many pages they viewed.

Visually savvy readers may notice a bit of a spike in yesterday’s readership. Was it the new design? Was it the Conundrum, asking for words that end in -ly? Is the world finally starting to take an interest in Shakespeare lists, Venn Diagram puzzles, and Animaniacs cartoons? Or was it the link from Showtime?

We could sit around all day debating the different theories. The point is that I just got my 2,000th hit while writing this, and over six percent of those hits came in yesterday. Now I think I’ll post a video clip from Sesame Street.

So thanks to a link from the Showtime page on The Tudors, this blog got over 100 unique hits today, and the day is not even over yet. I think the previous record was around 30, and that was a day when I e-mailed all my friends and some of them e-mailed all of their friends.

And it occurs to me that I’ve been kind of hard on the media lately. Now that my readership has widened somewhat, I am concerned that some may have been disturbed by last week’s Question of the Week which involved my putting legitimate news sources alongside more questionable ones and asking my readers to rank them in order of reliability.

Please know that I meant no disrespect to Fox News. Or to CNN. Or to network television. Or to the New York Times editorial page. I’m simply raising questions.

The sources we have always been told we can trust may not be as reliable as we’d like them to be. But does this mark a decline in mainstream news reporting, or have these sources always been somewhat unreliable and it’s only through the more democratic medium of the Internet that we’re able to stay on top of it?

The reason I bring it up is that this study suggests that the shifts in the last twenty years have not resulted in a more informed electorate.

That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Howard Dean turned himself from being a dead-end candidate into the front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2004 by raising money through a grassroots movement over the Internet. It was a groundbreaking use of the new medium. But then it was the traditional media who ruined him by playing that one clip, taken out of context, over and over. And it seems that the winners are the ones who know how to play the system. So the democratic process is still controlled by slick marketing experts. Perhaps nothing has changed since the days of Parson Weems.

Parson Weems, a supporter of Thomas Jefferson, wanted to emphasize strong values in young America. So he wrote a fictional story about the late George Washington to illustrate his point. Perhaps you’ve heard it – it involves a hatchet and a cherry tree.

Today’s version of the mythmaker, Karl Rove, has access to 24-hour information networks, both on cable and over the Internet. But so do we. Lies spread faster than they used to, but corrections are immediate. It’s harder to get away with things now, at least with those of us who are paying attention. In the days of Parson Weems, you couldn’t just go to Snopes.com to see if that cherry tree thing was true. And you certainly couldn’t just stumble upon some guy’s blog through a link from the Showtime website and get a rambling media literacy diatribe.

But it’s today, and you just did. Welcome! This blog is often about Shakespeare, but as you can tell, it’s about other things too. I hope you enjoy yourself while you’re here, and please feel free to leave a comment behind on any of the posts, either current or in the archives.