QUESTION: Why was Henry VIII such a bad husband?
ANSWER: As far as piggish, misogynistic, paranoid, bloodthirsty tyrants go, he wasn't so bad, really. Henry's story is one of spectacular dissipation. He was the Orson Welles of his day, only meaner. In his younger, trimmer days, before he exploded, he was a dashing, brilliant, popular king, a prime mover behind the English Renaissance. For a long time he was even a decent husband, by the standards of his day. His first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, lasted 23 years. Pretty good!Then things got weird, and Henry's marital difficulties inadvertently triggered the English schism with Rome, which resulted in the Protestant Reformation, without which the Pilgrims might never have sailed to America in search of the right to be religious fanatics, etc.
See, the king needed a male heir, but his babies by Catherine kept dying at birth or soon after, and his only surviving child was a girl. He figured that this was God's way of punishing him for violating a biblical injunction against marrying your brother's widow, which Catherine happened to be. Sure, it's a lame-brained idea, but then again Henry lived in a relentlessly stupid era, except for the great frescoes. We should recall that Henry reigned a hundred years before William Harvey realized that the blood circulates through the body, 250 years before the discovery that we need oxygen to live and 450 years before the invention of the 24-hour bank teller. Medicine was so backward in the early 1500s that the curative powers of the leech had not yet been discovered.
Meanwhile, Henry started packing on the poundage. He was the classic wave-a-big-drumstick-in-the-air kind of eater. His sloppy manners should be excused, though, according to Retha Warnicke, an Arizona State University historian who has studied Henry VIII. "Those were the eating habits of everyone in 16th century England. There were no forks. Forks didn't come into fashion until the 17th century."
So anyway, Henry asked the pope to annul his marriage. The pope refused for all sorts of political and religious reasons too complex to detail here. What could Henry do? He had always been devoted to the pope. But he had to dump Catherine! He finally decided to break with Rome altogether, and he started the independent Church of England. He got his divorce and married Anne Boleyn, his 20-year-old mistress. She gave him another daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth, but then something happened that set him against her. There is circumstantial evidence, according to the historian Warnicke, that Anne had a miscarriage and that the fetus was deformed. It is known that Henry accused her of witchcraft and adultery, and this may have been an attempt to deny his own paternity of some demon offspring, Warnicke says. Anne Boleyn was tried, convicted and sent to the block. As you can see, Henry was now deeply into his Husband from Hell phase.
On to wife number three, Jane Seymour. She died in childbirth. Not his fault, OK?
Then came an arranged, politically motivated marriage to some northern European whom Henry loathed from the start and quickly dispatched with a simple divorce. Wife the Fifth was another young Anne Boleyn-type, and she really did fool around behind his back, and so he chopped her head off, too. He didn't have a chance to kill the last wife because he died first.
The final tally: six wives, two divorces, one natural death, two decapitations. That's not the worst record in history.
QUESTION: Why did the passenger pigeon become extinct, but not the kind of pigeons that poop on statues in front of the courthouse?
ANSWER: You know the basic story of the passenger pigeon: Man killed them all. What makes this extinction all the more monstrous and baffling is that there were once more passenger pigeons than any other type of bird on the planet. It is commonly estimated that two of every five birds in North America in the early 1800s - 40 percent - were passenger pigeons.
Incredible? Not so incredible when you read descriptions of what a "flock" of these pigeons looked like: Something similar to an angry storm front rolling in from one side of the horizon to another. Where they nested, the forest floor looked like it was blanketed in snow. Disgusting! In 1813, ornithologist James Audubon once saw a column of migrating pigeons so thick that the "light of the noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse." They kept flying overhead for hours, and Audubon guessed that he had seen at least a billion birds. Another ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, visited a pigeon breeding ground in Kentucky in 1806 and guessed that it held 2,230,272,000 birds - how he got that number seems a little suspicious, but let's just assume there were a lot of them.
They were edible. Their feathers made good pillows. They were so densely packed that killing them was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Naturally you couldn't gun down thousands of birds at once: It would take too long and cost too much. So the professional hunters used large nets. To get the birds into the net, they used a "stool pigeon," which was a live pigeon with its eyes sewn shut and feet attached to a post, or stool. The pigeon would act agitated - understandably - and attract all the other birds.
The last great nesting group was tracked down in 1896 near Bowling Green, Ohio. Of the 250,000 birds, only about 5,000 escaped. (The ones that were harvested went to waste: The train carrying the carcasses derailed, and the entire load putrefied in the heat.)
So why didn't the 5,000 seek refuge somewhere? Couldn't they have lived on top of government buildings?
The problem was multifold: A female passenger pigeon lays only one egg at a time, so they don't reproduce quickly. Rather, the huge numbers of birds was largely a testament to how long each bird lives, up to 25 years in some cases. Another problem was that the birds tended to congregate in a central spot, making them easy to track, particularly once the telegraph and locomotive made communication and travel throughout the United States possible. Deforestation destroyed their habitat. And finally - the real problem - they didn't reproduce in pairs. They showed no interest. They were not sexually programmed to mate and bear offspring like a bird version of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. To get their juices going they needed the incessant thunderous backbeat of a million flapping wings. Like New York's Studio 54 crowd of the 1970s, they needed a critical mass to survive.
The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. (How they knew it was named Martha remains one of the great mysteries of ornithology.)
The Mailbag:
We have a policy here of never correcting errors, on grounds that it would be deleterious to the omniscient tone of the column, but we should point out that recently we said Saccharin was invented "way back in 1979." This is off by a century. Not an error, just imprecise.