Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jack Scarisbrick, born John Joseph Scarisbrick on the 6th of October 1928 in London, was a British historian at the University of Warwick who specialised in Tudor history. He is known for the critically acclaimed biography Henry VIII (1968), for his revisionist scholarship on the English Reformation, and for co-founding Life, a British anti-abortion charity, with his wife Nuala Scarisbrick in 1970.
Scarisbrick argued that English men and women did not want the Reformation and that most of them were slow to accept it when it came. This revisionist position placed him alongside historians such as Eamon Duffy and helped form the basis for the theory of the long reformation.
Henry VIII was first published in 1968. It became Scarisbrick's most critically acclaimed work and established him as a leading historian of Tudor England.
Zoe's Place is a hospice for children in Coventry, which Scarisbrick founded. In 2015 he was appointed MBE for services to vulnerable people in recognition of his role as its founder.
Scarisbrick was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1969, the year after his biography Henry VIII was published.
Jack Scarisbrick died on the 28th of February 2026 at the age of 97.