Kinship

How were Richard III and Henry VII related?

Second cousins once removed through John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, and third cousins once removed through Gaunt’s parents, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault.

Both lines begin with the Beauforts, the children John of Gaunt had with Katherine Swynford. Their daughter Joan married Ralph Neville, and Joan’s daughter Cecily Neville became the wife of Richard, Duke of York, and the mother of Richard III. Their son John Beaufort was the father of a second John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, whose daughter Margaret Beaufort gave birth to Henry Tudor when she was only thirteen. Richard therefore stood three generations below Gaunt and Henry four — second cousins, with the extra step on Henry’s side making them once removed. Joan’s birth year is known only approximately.

A second route reaches one generation higher, to Gaunt’s parents, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. In this archive Henry’s only way up is the Beaufort line through Gaunt, which puts him five generations below them. Richard reaches them twice, both times in four generations: on his mother’s side through Cecily Neville, Joan Beaufort and Gaunt, and on his father’s side through Richard of York, whose own father Richard of Conisburgh was a son of Edmund of Langley, another of Edward III’s sons. The split between Langley’s line and Gaunt’s makes the two men third cousins once removed as well.

The ancestry the two men shared was also the weak point of Henry’s title. The Beauforts had all been born while Katherine Swynford was still Gaunt’s mistress; he married her only in 1396. Richard II made the children legitimate a year later, but in 1407 Henry IV, their half-brother, reaffirmed that status while barring them from the succession — a move whose legal force has been doubted. Henry’s claim rested on this Beaufort descent through his mother. Richard’s did not: his right came through his father’s house of York, and the Beaufort link through Cecily Neville was a maternal connection rather than the basis of his kingship.

Henry took the crown at Bosworth in 1485, where Richard was defeated and killed. His father, Edmund Tudor, was a half-brother of the Lancastrian king Henry VI, but it was a Yorkist marriage that steadied the new reign: in 1486 Henry married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV and so Richard’s niece. She too descended from Gaunt and Swynford, as a great-granddaughter of Joan Beaufort through Cecily Neville and Edward IV — which is why Henry and his queen are described as third cousins, the same ancestry reaching her one generation below Richard.

Computed from every recorded line in The British Royal Line on Kinlight; written 29 September 2026.