Makes me think of the story of EC Comics employees getting arrested for selling a comic that “desecrated Christmas”.
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Turkey has long been a black hole of press freedom.
The only new thing about this story is that the thin-skinned authoritarians in charge are now aligning themselves with a reborn Ottoman empire, which should sound alarm bells all over the region, presuming that those alarms weren’t already going off due to Turkey’s ongoing invasion and occupation of territory of two of its close neighbours.
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Going a bit off topic, but… There’s actually no contemporary painting of Henry VIII holding a turkey leg. This is a ‘Mandela effect’ collective false memory: https://mandelaeffect.com/henry-viii-portrait-turkey-leg/#more-324
The Hans Holbein portrait (and other portraits based on the same pose) most have in mind when thinking of the turkey leg depicts Henry VIII holding a glove, with his other hand on a scabbard. But what you say about the portrait attempting to depict Henry’s power is absolutely correct. The depiction of his “power” is just less subtle than what you’ve described. Aside from the exaggerated physique, his hands are posed to frame a large codpiece, and said codpiece is at the geometric center of the painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Henry_VIII
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I tried to figure out what the actual joke was. Cannot seem to find it. Anyone?
Which, as @SPC points out,doesn’t seem to exist. The idea probably came from Charles Laughton’s portrayal of Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII.
You’re right, though, that royal (and other) portraits of the time contained wagon loads of symbolism. See the Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I as an example.
In Henry’s case, though, it did. His doctors begged him to cut down on his eating. At the time of his death he weighed nearly 400 pounds.
My comment, of course, was merely to point out that most modern countries don’t jail people for criticizing historical figures. In Henry’s day, it was treason punishable by death to speculate about the King’s death and/or his possible successor.
To give Henry his due, he had a nice set of calves as a young man. And Catherine Howard was no better than she should have been. 
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