Owen Tudor

1400 – 1461 · Generation XIX · House of Tudor

Owen Tudor (1400–1461). Married Catherine of Valois in 1429. A Welsh squire of the widowed queen’s household; beheaded after Mortimer’s Cross. He came of an Anglesey family descended from Ednyfed Fychan, steward to the princes of Gwynedd; his father and uncles fought in Owain Glyndŵr’s rising, and much of his early life has since dissolved into legend. His marriage to the dowager queen produced two sons, Edmund and Jasper, and possibly a third son and a daughter. After Catherine died in 1437, no longer shielded by the statute on a dowager queen’s remarriage, he was thrown into Newgate, escaping in 1438 only to be recaptured. Henry VI pardoned him in 1439 with a pension and a place at court, later raising the king’s half-brothers to the earldoms of Richmond and Pembroke; through Edmund, Owen was grandfather of Henry VII. Captured after the Lancastrian rout, he went to the block at Hereford having expected only prison, murmuring that a head once laid in Queen Catherine’s lap must now lie on the block.

Place in the family

Owen Tudor was a great-grandfather of King Henry VIII.
The archive records 119 of his descendants, across 21 generations.

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.

Partners

Married Catherine of Valois (1401 – 1437) in 1429 — one child together

Children

Edmund Tudor (1430 – 1456)

Life

1400 — Born
1429 — Married Catherine of Valois
1461 — Died