Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King Henry VII

1457 – 1509 · Generation XXI · King of England (r. 1485–1509) · House of Tudor

Portrait of King Henry VII

Henry VII, the first Tudor king, was born at Pembroke Castle in Wales on 28 January 1457. His father Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, a half-brother of the Lancastrian king Henry VI, had died a few months earlier, and his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was thirteen years old. It was through her that he had a claim to the throne, and a thin one. She descended from John of Gaunt, a son of Edward III, through the Beauforts, a line that had been legitimised after the fact and then declared ineligible for the crown. His paternal grandfather, Owen Tudor, was a Welsh squire who is said to have secretly married Henry V’s widow.

He grew up in the Wars of the Roses. His uncle Jasper Tudor protected him at first, and after Edward IV took the throne in 1461 he was brought up in the household of the Yorkist William Herbert. When Edward recovered the throne in 1471, the fourteen-year-old fled with other Lancastrians to Brittany, where he spent most of the next fourteen years under the protection of Duke Francis II and was once nearly handed over to Edward’s envoys. By 1483 the deaths of Henry VI and his son had left him the leading Lancastrian claimant. At Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day that year he swore to marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, and so offered the opponents of Richard III a way to unite the two houses.

A first attempt at invasion failed. In August 1485 he tried again, landing near Milford Haven with a small force supplied by France and gathering support as he marched through Wales. On 22 August his army of perhaps five or six thousand met Richard’s larger one at Bosworth. Richard was killed after the Stanley family, Henry’s stepfather’s kin, changed sides or stood aside. No later English king won his crown on a battlefield. Henry was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 30 October and married Elizabeth in January 1486.

The throne had to be defended. In 1487 Yorkist lords put up a boy, Lambert Simnel, as a pretended nephew of Edward IV, and Henry defeated them at Stoke Field, the battle that brought the wars to an end. He gave Simnel a job in the royal kitchens. Another impostor, Perkin Warbeck, claimed through the 1490s to be the younger of the Princes in the Tower and found backers in Burgundy and Scotland before he was captured in 1497. In 1499 Henry executed the Earl of Warwick, the senior surviving male of the House of York.

He governed by method. He bound the nobility with financial bonds that would be forfeited for disloyalty, legislated against their private retinues, and relied on unpaid justices of the peace to enforce the law in the shires. He founded the Yeomen of the Guard in 1485 and summoned only seven Parliaments in twenty-four years. Above all he made the crown solvent. Royal income rose from about £52,000 a year to about £142,000, and he kept records of his own finances in minute detail. His collectors Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley were so hated that his son had both men executed.

Abroad he preferred treaties to war. He made peace with France at Étaples, restored trade with the Netherlands by an agreement of 1496, married his heir Arthur to Catherine of Aragon and betrothed his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland. That Scottish marriage brought the Stuarts to the English throne a century later. He also licensed John Cabot’s voyage across the Atlantic in 1496.

Arthur died in 1502 and Queen Elizabeth in childbirth the following year, losses that shattered the king. The foundation stone of his Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey was laid in January 1503. Henry VII died at Richmond Palace on 21 April 1509 and lies with Elizabeth beneath Pietro Torrigiano’s gilt-bronze effigies in that chapel. His surviving son succeeded him as Henry VIII.

Place in the family

  • King Henry VII was the father of King Henry VIII.
  • The archive records 117 of his descendants, across 19 generations.

Images

One of 11 people of House of Tudor (1485–1603) in this archive. Welsh in origin and only a handful of monarchs long — it broke with Rome and ended with Elizabeth I.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII.

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Life

  • 1457 — Born
  • 1485 — Henry becomes King after defeating Richard III of York at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The Wars of the Roses are ended.
  • 1486 — Married Elizabeth of York
  • 1486 — Henry marries Elizabeth of York, thereby uniting the houses of York and Lancaster.
  • 1487 — Henry crushes a revolt by the Earl of Lincoln on behalf of Lambert Simnel, a claimant to the throne, at Stoke.
  • 1491 — Henry invades France but at the Treaty of Etaples agrees to withdraw English forces in return for a large sum of money
  • 1492 — Perkin Warbeck an impersonator who claims he is Richard the younger of the Princes in the Tower attempts to overthrow Henry, but is defeated and put to death in 1499.
  • 1501 — Catherine of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, marries Prince Arthur, Henry’s eldest son.
  • 1502 — Prince Arthur dies, and Prince Henry (the future Henry VIII) becomes heir to the throne, later marrying Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.
  • 1503 — Margaret, Henry's daughter marries James IV of Scotland. The marriage gives James' descendants a claim to the English throne.
  • 1503 — Death of Elizabeth of York, Henry’s wife.
  • 1509 — Died
  • 1509 — Henry VII dies at Richmond Palace, at the age of 52.

Sources

  1. Henry VII of England · Wikipedia
  2. Henry VII and Elizabeth of York · Westminster Abbey
  3. Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)

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