A prayer book with never-before-seen annotations by Tudor king Henry VIII has been discovered in a library near High Wycombe.

A copy of the book ‘Psalms and Prayers’ which dates to the 16th century and was published by Henry VIII’s sixth wife Katherine Parr in 1544 was found at Wormsley Library in Stokenchurch near High Wycombe.

The book contains annotations made by Henry VIII, discovered by visiting Canadian academic Professor Micheline White, that reveal a new side to his personality, often assumed to have been confident and authoritative.

A study published by Professor White in the journal Renaissance Quarterly details the annotation patterns used by the Tudor king, including manicule symbols and three-dot trefoil patterns.

One manicule was left next to passage that read: “Take away thy plagues from me, for thy punishment hath made me both feeble and faint.”

Another was drawn next to the words: “Turn away thine anger from me, that I may know that thou art more merciful unto me than my sins deserve.”

Professor White told CNN that she had stumbled upon the markings “totally unexpectedly” but recognised them from prior research work involving Henry VIII.

“He’s obviously really worried. Towards the end of his reign, he definitely had a lot to be worried about.”

She added that the markings specifically reveal the king’s concern that God was “punishing him with physical illness” and said notes had also been made beside passages focused on repentance and the destruction of enemies.

Henry VIII died in 1547, three years after the prayer book was published. He suffered with poor health towards the end of his life including from obesity, ulceration and gout.

Professor White wrote: “Henry may have been reticent about his medical woes in front of his subjects and military allies, but in the margins of Parr’s book he engaged head-on with some unpleasant facts: he was England’s divinely ordained monarch, yet his aging, sinful body was ‘feeble and faint’, and although he believed his actions were just, he also believed that God sent sickness as a punishment and might forsake him.”

Henry VIII is often remembered for his six wives and for infamously sending two of them, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to their deaths.

He was also responsible for England’s breakaway from the Catholic Church and for the dissolution of the country’s monasteries, decisions with consequences that have stretched many years beyond the end of his reign.