1bigpresent.com Blog

So your hubby’s bought you a toaster. Again. It’s a terrible present frankly, and almost certainly wasn’t on your gift list (Jimmy Choos, a holiday in the Bahamas, George Clooney’s address). But hey! It could be worse, right? Just to help you put it in perspective here’s three horrible husbands from history…

Henry VIII

Why he’s bad

• You’ll end the marriage a foot shorter than when you started

Redeeming features?

• Hey – he’s a king… you’ll never want for shoes!

Being married to Henry VIII was one of the worst gigs in marital history. England in the 16th century was still under the religious control of Catholicism, and divorces could only be granted by decree of the pope.  Despite this, Henry was so keen to get rid of his first wife that he invented an entire new religion of which he was the head, giving him the ability to annul his own damn marriage. That the side effect was 3 hundred years of religious schism and bloody external and internal warfare was neither here nor there to Henry, who went on to marry a further 5 times.

As he got older, and his desire to have a male heir to take over his throne increased, his wives found their time curtailed in various ways – both Anne of Cleves and Catharine Parr winding up in custody battles for Henry’s Lute collection when they were unable to give him the son he craved. Bored of divorce courts – or possibly too skint to front-up the lawyer’s fees - Henry just had Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard executed. But even if you survived the executioner’s axe or the courts, you could die in childbirth  like Jane Seymour.

So if a fat, bearded ginger man claiming to be King gets down on his knee to you in a busy restaurant, take advantage of his position to steal his crown, knee him in the face and hightail out of there. Don’t worry – he can afford to foot the bill.

George Joseph Smith

Why he’s bad

• You’re not his only wife
• You’ll always have to remember to lock the bathroom door

Redeeming features?

Err…

If you were hanging round in singles bars in the Edwardian era, you were statistically seven times more likely to end up marrying George Smith than anyone else. With, perhaps, a flagrant disregard for his own health, he was a dedicated bigamist who eventually ended up with 7 wives around the country. Maybe motivated to cut down on the tedious business of remembering all their birthdays, anniversaries and shopping lists, he thinned them out the only logical way – murder. That he was able to claim insurance payouts on their deaths only added to the appeal. Three deaths under similar, unusual circumstances in various parts of the country aroused suspicion and a clear pattern emerged. Before he knew it, Smith was hauled up blinking before the beak to explain how three of his wives had come to die in the bathtub and why he had so many goddamn wives in the first place.

It was shown in court that as his unsuspecting wives lay in the bath he would grab their feet and slide them suddenly downward. Whilst a seemingly unlikely way to commit murder the suddenness and surprise was enough to cause his victims to reflexively choke and drown within seconds. A doctor testing the theory very nearly killed his subject. Smith had his comeuppance at Maidstone Prison, where he was hung for his crimes.

Homer Simpson

Why he’s bad

Channel 4, 6pm every night to find out

Redeeming features?

He loves you just enough to not murder you

As if being yellow wasn’t enough, few husbands have proved as disastrous as Ma Simpson’s boy, Homer. Over the course of a decade and a half, he’s inficted more misery on his long-suffering wife than most of us would stand for. We can only assume he makes up for it in some other, unspecified, area!

Some brief highlights. He enjoyed brief flirtations with various females down the years - from unknown country singer Lurlene to a coworker at a nuclear industry conference. That seems like small beer when you consider that whilst on holiday with do-gooding next door neighbour Ned Flanders, Homer bigamously married a Vegas stripper! Away from the routine ups and downs of maintaining a long-term relationship, Homer once binge-ate his way up to 400lb in order to claim invalidity benefit and be able to work from home. Naturally, this ended with him bringing the nuclear plant to near meltdown and wearing a dress.

A change of career saw him doling out marriage advice to struggling newlyweds, during which his indiscretion let Marge’s most intimate secrets spill out all over town. Mind you it isn’t all one way traffic: Marge herself was prepared to spend a weekend with her childhood sweetheart Artie Ziff for a cool million dollars…