Henry VII of England

Henry VII Tudor King of England; Lord of Ireland (more...) Portrait of Henry, holding a red Lancastrian rose, attributed to Michel Sittow King of England (more...) Reign 22 August 1485 – 21 April 1509 Coronation 30 October 1485 Predecessor Richard III Successor Henry VIII Earl of Richmond (more...) Predecessor Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl Consort Elizabeth of York Issue Arthur, Prince of Wales Margaret, Queen of Scots Henry VIII Mary, Queen of France Detail Titles and styles The King The Earl of Richmond Royal house House of Tudor Father Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond Mother Lady Margaret Beaufort Born 28 January 1457(1457-01-28) Pembroke Castle, Wales Died 21 April 1509 (aged 52) Richmond Palace, England Burial Westminster Abbey, London

English Royalty House of Tudor Royal Coat of Arms Henry VII    Arthur, Prince of Wales    Margaret, Queen of Scots    Henry VIII    Mary, Queen of France

The Tudor Rose: a combination of the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York

Henry VII (Henry Tudor; Welsh: Harri Tudur; 28 January 1457 – 21 April 1509) was the King of England and Lord of Ireland from his usurpation of the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death on 21 April 1509, as the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

Early life

Henry was born at Pembroke Castle, Wales in 1457, the only son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond and Lady Margaret Beaufort. His father died two months before he was born, meaning the young Henry spent much of his life with his uncle, Jasper Tudor. When the Yorkist Edward IV returned to the throne in 1471, Henry fled to Brittany, where he spent most of the next fourteen years.

By 1481, his mother, despite being married to pro-Yorkist Lord Stanley, was actively promoting Henry as an alternative to the unpopular Richard III. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Henry tried unsuccessfully to land in England but his conspiracy quickly unraveled, resulting in the execution of his primary co-conspirator the Duke of Buckingham. Richard III attempted to extradite Henry through an arrangement with the Breton authorities, but Henry managed to escape to France. He was welcomed by the French court, who readily supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion.

Rise to the throne

Having gained the support of the Woodvilles, in-laws to the late Edward IV, he landed with a French and Scottish force in Mill Bay, Pembrokeshire, and marched into England, accompanied by his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and the experienced John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Wales had traditionally been a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his ancestry, being directly descended, through his father, from the Lord Rhys. He amassed an army of around 5,000 soldiers and travelled north.

Henry was aware that his best chance to seize the throne would be to engage Richard quickly and defeat him immediately, since Richard had reinforcements in Nottingham and Leicester. So Richard only needed to avoid being killed in order to stay on the throne. Though outnumbered, Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively defeated Richard's Yorkist army at the Battle of Bosworth on 22nd August 1485. Several of Richard's key allies, such as the Earl of Northumberland and William and Thomas Stanley, crucially switched sides or left the battlefield. The death of Richard III on Bosworth Field effectively ended the Wars of the Roses between the two houses, although it was not the last battle Henry had to fight.

Henry VII's paternal grandfather, Owen Tudor, is said to have secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine de Valois. The result of their union was Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, father of Henry VII. Henry's claim to the throne, however, derived from his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. His claim was somewhat tenuous; it was based on a lineage of illegitimate succession, overlooking the fact that the Beauforts were disinherited by Letters Patent of King Henry IV. Henry's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, claimed royal blood as a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III, and Gaunt's third wife Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster. Katherine had been John's mistress for some 25 years and they had four illegitimate children, John, Henry, Thomas and Joan Beaufort, by the time they were married in 1396.

Nonetheless, John ensured that his and Katherine's children were legitimized. His nephew, King Richard II, issued Letters Patent, confirmed by an Act of Parliament in 1397, that legitimized John of Gaunt's Beaufort children. Richard's cousin and successor, Henry IV, son of John of Gaunt and his first wife Blanche of Lancaster, issued an order disinheriting his Beaufort half-siblings from the throne. Unfortunately the legality of Henry's order is doubtful, given the Beauforts were previously legitimized by an Act of Parliament. In any event, Henry VII was not the only monarch descended from the union of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. The Yorkist kings were as well, as Joan Beaufort, only daughter of the Gaunt-Swynford union, was the mother of Cecily Neville, wife of Richard Duke of York and mother of Edward IV and Richard III.

It is also noteworthy that the Tudors were said to be descended from Edward I through his granddaughter Eleanor of Bar, the daughter of the Count of Bar, apparently without intending to create a connection to earlier Plantagenets. If forged, that pretension was, however, unnecessary since Catherine of Valois was twice a descendant of Henry II through the Kings of Castile. However, the Wars of the Roses had ensured that any other claimants were either dead or too weak to challenge him.

The first of Henry's concerns on attaining the throne was the question of establishing the strength and supremacy of his rule. His claim to the throne being as weak as it was, he was fortunate that the majority of claimants died in the dynastic wars or executed by his predecessors. Despite easily seeing off the Stafford and Lovell Rebellion of 1486, his main worry was "pretenders" including Perkin Warbeck, who, claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, and son of Edward IV, made attempts at the throne, backed by disaffected nobles and foreign enemies. Henry managed to secure his crown principally by dividing and undermining the power of the nobility, especially through the aggressive use of bonds and recognisances to secure loyalty, as well as by a legislative assault on retaining private armies.

He also honoured his pledge of December 1483 to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter and heir of King Edward IV. They were third cousins, as they were both descended from John of Gaunt and his third wife, Katherine Swynford. The marriage took place on 18 January 1486 at Westminster. The marriage unified the warring houses and gave his children a stronger claim to the throne. The unification of the houses of York and Lancaster by Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York is represented in the heraldic symbol of the Tudor rose, a combination of the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster.

In addition, Henry had the Titulus Regius, the document that declared Edward IV's children illegitimate by citing his marriage as invalid, repealed in his first parliament, thus legitimizing his wife. Several amateur historians, including Bertram Fields and most particularly Sir Clements Markham believe that he also may have been involved in the murder of the Princes in the Tower, as the repeal of the Titulus Regius would have given them a stronger claim to the throne than his own. However, this theory does not account for the apparent disappearance of the princes in the summer of 1483, two years before Henry seized the throne.

Reign

Henry's first action was to retroactively declare himself king from the day before the battle, thus ensuring that anyone who had fought against him would be guilty of treason. It is interesting to note, therefore, that he spared Richard's designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. He would have cause to regret his leniency two years later, when Lincoln rebelled and attempted to set a boy pretender of peasant stock, Lambert Simnel, on the throne in Henry's place. Lincoln was killed at the Battle of Stoke, but Henry, seeing Simnel as only a puppet of Lincoln, spared him and took him in as a kitchen servant.

Simnel had been put forward as "Edward VI", impersonating the young Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence. Edward was still imprisoned in the Tower: Henry had locked the boy up for safekeeping at the age of 10, and did not execute him until 1499. Edward's elder sister, Margaret Pole, who had the next best claim on the throne, inherited her father's earldom of Salisbury and survived well into the next century (until she fell victim to a bill of attainder for treason too, under Henry VIII).

Henry married Elizabeth of York with the hope of uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian sides of the Plantagenet dynastic disputes. In this he was largely successful. However, a level of paranoia continued, such that anyone with blood ties to the old Plantagenet family was suspected of coveting the throne.

Economic and diplomatic policies

Henry VII was a fiscally prudent monarch who restored the fortunes of an effectively bankrupt exchequer (Edward IV's treasury had been emptied by his wife's Woodville relations after his death and before the accession of Richard III) by introducing ruthlessly efficient mechanisms of taxation. In this he was supported by his chancellor, Archbishop John Morton, whose "Morton's Fork" was a catch-22 method of ensuring that nobles paid increased taxes. Royal government was also reformed with the introduction of the King's Council that kept the nobility in check.

Henry VII's policy was both to maintain peace and to create economic prosperity. Up to a point, he succeeded in both. He was not a military man, and had no interest in trying to regain the French territories lost during the reigns of his predecessors; he was therefore only too ready to conclude a treaty with France at Etaples that both directly and indirectly brought money into the coffers of England, and ensured that the French would not support pretenders to the English throne, such as Perkin Warbeck. However, this treaty came at a slight price, as Henry mounted a minor invasion of Brittany in November 1492. This act of war was a bluff by Henry as he had no intention of fighting over the winter periods. However, as France was becoming more distracted with the Italian Wars, it was more than happy to agree to the Treaty of Etaples.

Henry had been under the financial and physical protection of the French throne or its vassals for most of his career prior to his ascending to the throne of England. To strengthen his position, however, he subsidized shipbuilding, so strengthening the navy (he commissioned Europe's first ever — and the world's oldest surviving — dry dock at Portsmouth in 1495) and improving trading opportunities. By the time of his death, he had amassed a personal fortune of 1.5 million pounds; it did not take his son as long to fritter it away as it had taken the father to acquire it.

Henry VII was one of the first European monarchs to recognise the importance of the newly-united Spanish kingdom and thus concluded the Treaty of Medina Del Campo in 1489, by which his son, Arthur Tudor, was married to Catherine of Aragon. Similarly, the first treaty between England and Scotland for almost two centuries betrothed his daughter Margaret to King James IV of Scotland, a move which would ultimately see the English and Scottish crowns united under one of Margaret's descendants, James I. He also formed an alliance with the Holy Roman Empire, under the emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519) and persuaded Pope Innocent VIII to issue a Bull of Excommunication against all pretenders to Henry's throne.

Henry's most successful economic related diplomacy came through the Magnus Intercursus (1496). In 1494, Henry had a trade embargo (mainly the trade of wool) with The Netherlands (ultimately, Margaret of Burgundy and Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire), as he wanted to stop their support of the Pretender Perkin Warbeck. This paid off for Henry as the Magnus Intercursus was agreed in 1496 which helped to remove taxation for English merchants and significantly increase the wealth of England.

However, towards the end of Henry's reign, it can be argued that he became greedy. In 1506 he agreed the Treaty of Windsor with Philip of Netherlands which also resulted in the Malus Intercursus (the evil agreement). Again, from this treaty, Henry aimed to make English trade more profitable. However, France, Burgundy, The Holy Roman Empire, Spain and the Hanseatic League became particularly annoyed with this and significantly reduced their trade with Henry. Philip also died shortly after the Treaty, which left Henry quite vulnerable and with debts of up to £30,000.

Later years

In 1502 fate dealt Henry VII a blow from which he never fully recovered: his heir, the recently-married Arthur, died in an epidemic at Ludlow Castle. This made Prince Henry the new heir to the throne. In 1503 Henry VII's Queen, Elizabeth of York, died in childbirth. Not wishing the negotiations that had led to the marriage of his elder son to Catherine of Aragon to go to waste, he arranged a Papal dispensation for his younger son to marry his brother's widow — normally a degree of relationship that precluded marriage in the Roman Catholic Church. Also included in the dispensation was a provison that would allow Henry VII himself to marry his widowed daughter-in-law. Henry VII obtained the dispensation from Pope Julius II (1503–13) but had second thoughts about the value of the marriage and did not allow it to take place during his lifetime. Although he made half-hearted plans to re-marry and beget more heirs, these never came to anything. On his death in 1509, he was succeeded by his second son, Henry VIII (1509–47). He is buried at Westminster Abbey. Popular lore suggests that Henry died of a broken heart following the deaths of his son and his wife.

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles and styles

• 28 January 1457–22 August 1485: The Earl of Richmond (disputed)
• 22 August 1485–21 April 1509: His Highness The King of England and France, Lord of Ireland

Henry's full style as king was: His Highness Henry VII, by the Grace of God, of England and France, King, Lord of Ireland

Arms

Upon his succession as king, Henry became entitled to bear the arms of his kingdom. After his union with his Yorkist wife, he used the red-and-white rose as his emblem — this continued to be his dynasty's emblem, known as the Tudor rose.

Issue

Henry and Elizabeth's children were:

An illegitimate son has also been attributed to Henry by "a Breton Lady":

Further descendants

Henry VII's elder daughter Margaret was married first to James IV of Scotland (1488–1513), and their son became James V of Scotland (1513–42), whose daughter became Mary, Queen of Scots. By means of this marriage, Henry VII hoped to break the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France. Margaret Tudor's second marriage was to Archibald Douglas; their grandson, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley married Mary, Queen of Scots. Their son, James VI of Scotland (1567–1625), inherited the throne of England as James I (1603–25) after the death of Elizabeth I. Henry VII's other surviving daughter, Mary, first married King Louis XII of France (1498–1515) and then, when he died after only about 3 months of marriage, she married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk without her brother's (now King Henry VIII) permission. Their daughter Frances married Henry Grey, and her children included Lady Jane Grey, in whose name her parents and in-laws tried to seize the throne after Edward VI of England (1537–53) died.

Ancestry

See also

• Cultural depictions of Henry VII of England
• Cestui que

Notes

1. ↑ About Henry VII TUDOR (King of England)

References

• Henry VII by S. B. Chrimes & George Bernard (1972)
• Henry VII by Jocelyn Hunt & Carolyn Towle (1998)
• Henry VII by Roger Turvey & Caroline Steinsberg (2000)
• The Son of Prophecy: Henry Tudor's Road to Bosworth (1985) by David Rees (ISBN 0-85159-005-5) is a discussion of how Henry's return to Wales was regarded by some as the fulfilment of a Messianic prophecy.
• Ashley, Mike (2002). British Kings & Queens. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1104-3. 

External links

• Henry VII Chronology World History Database
• Illustrated history of Henry VII
• Wars of the Roses Information on Henry and Bosworth
• Tudor Place page on Henry VII
• Dictionary of National Biography excerpt

English Monarchs Monarchs Pre-Conquest Alfred the Great · Edward the Elder · Ælfweard · Athelstan the Glorious¶ · Edmund the Magnificent¶ · Eadred¶ · Eadwig the Fair¶ · Edgar the Peaceable¶ · Edward the Martyr · Ethelred the Unready · Sweyn Forkbeard · Edmund Ironside · Canute the Great¶ · Harold Harefoot · Harthacanute · Edward the Confessor · Harold Godwinson · Edgar the Atheling Monarchs Post-Conquest William I · William II · Henry I · Stephen · Matilda (disputed) · Henry II with Henry the Young King  · Richard I · John† · Henry III† · Edward I† · Edward II† · Edward III† · Richard II† · Henry IV† · Henry V† · Henry VI† · Edward IV† · Edward V† · Richard III† · Henry VII† · Henry VIII† · Edward VI† · Jane† · Mary I† · Elizabeth I† · James I‡ · Charles I‡ · Commonwealth · Charles II‡ · James II‡ · William III‡ with Mary II‡ · William III‡ · Anne‡ ¶Also Overlord of Britain. †Also Lord/Monarch of Ireland. ‡Also Monarch of Scotland and Ireland.

Wars of the Roses Red Rose of Lancaster · White Rose of York Key figures Monarchs of England Henry VI · Edward IV · Edward V · Richard III · Henry VII Lancastrian Margaret of Anjou · Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland · Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland · Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick · Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset · Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset · Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset · George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence Yorkist Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York · Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick · Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury · John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu · William Neville, 1st Earl of Kent · Thomas Neville Battles Lancastrian victories Battle of Ludford Bridge · Battle of Wakefield · Second Battle of St Albans · Battle of Ferrybridge (Indecisive) · Battle of Edgecote Moor · Battle of Bosworth Field · Battle of Stoke Field Yorkist victories First Battle of St Albans · Battle of Blore Heath · Battle of Sandwich · Battle of Northampton · Battle of Mortimer's Cross · Battle of Ferrybridge (Indecisive) · Battle of Towton · Battle of Hedgeley Moor · Battle of Hexham · Battle of Lose-coat Field · Battle of Barnet · Battle of Tewkesbury See also Act of Accord · Percy-Neville feud · Readeption of Henry VI · Issue of Edward III of England