House of Tudor

The House of Tudor was an English and Welsh dynasty that ruled England from 1485 to 1603, spanning 118 years under five monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. They succeeded the House of Plantagenet and were followed by the Scottish House of Stuart. The Tudors traced their ancestry to Ednyfed Fychan and the Tudors of Penmynydd, a Welsh noble family, as well as Catherine of Valois.

They also descended from the House of Lancaster. Henry VII, the first Tudor king, came from his mother’s side through the House of Beaufort, a legitimised branch of the Lancastrian line, itself a cadet house of the Plantagenets. The family rose to power after the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), which left the main Lancastrian line—aligned with the Tudors—extinct in the male line.

Family connections and the Wars of the Roses

Henry VII, a descendant of Edward III and son of Edmund Tudor (half-brother of Henry VI), positioned himself as a candidate for both traditional Lancastrian supporters and discontented Yorkists, taking the throne by right of conquest after his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. He strengthened his position in 1486 by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV and heiress to the Yorkist claim, fulfilling a vow from 1483. This union symbolically merged the warring factions of Lancaster and York, represented by the Tudor rose.

The Tudors expanded their authority beyond England, uniting England and the Principality of Wales through the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, and asserting English control over the Kingdom of Ireland via the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. They maintained a nominal claim to the Kingdom of France, though none pressed it; Henry VIII fought wars against France mainly due to international alliances. After his death, his daughter Mary I permanently lost all French territory when Calais fell in 1558.

Tudor badges

Henry VIII, the only son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York to reach adulthood, proved a dominant ruler. Issues of royal succession—including marriage and women’s rights to the throne—along with the English Reformation, became major political themes during the Tudor era, shaping the Crown’s future. Elizabeth I reigned for 44 years, the longest of the Tudor monarchs, and her Elizabethan era brought stability after the short, troubled reigns of her siblings.

Henry VII

When she died childless on 24 March 1603, her cousin from the Scottish House of Stuart succeeded her in the Union of the Crowns. The first Stuart king of England, James VI and I, was a great-grandson of Henry VII’s daughter Margaret Tudor, who married James IV of Scotland in 1503 under the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace. A connection persists to the present: Charles III is a ninth-generation descendant of George I, who was James VI and I’s great-grandson.

Ascent to the throne

The Tudors’ ascent to the throne stemmed from Henry VII’s maternal descent from Edward III through John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, an illegitimate son of John of Gaunt (Edward III’s third surviving son) and his long-term mistress Katherine Swynford. Though Gaunt and Swynford married in 1396, when Beaufort was 25, the church retroactively legitimised the Beauforts via a papal bull that year, confirmed by a parliamentary proclamation in 1397. However, a later proclamation by Henry IV—Gaunt’s son by his first wife—recognised the Beauforts’ legitimacy but barred them from the throne. Despite this, the Beauforts remained allied with the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses.

Henry Tudor’s descent from the Beauforts did not make him heir, nor did his paternal grandmother Catherine of Valois being queen consort of Henry V (making him a nephew of Henry VI). The legitimate claim belonged to his wife, Elizabeth of York, as daughter of Edward IV and descendant of Edward III’s second son, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, and his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. With no surviving brothers, she had the strongest Yorkist claim, but she became queen consort, not queen regnant, as the last female attempt to rule in her own right—Empress Matilda’s conflict with Stephen of Blois in the 12th century—had ended in disaster.

Henry Tudor succeeded where others did not because he had an army that defeated the last Yorkist king, Richard III, in battle, and the support of powerful nobles to take the crown by right of conquest. Richard III’s own accession had been controversial, even among Yorkists. Henry VII, along with his son Henry VIII, eliminated other claimants to the throne.