Henry VII of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry VII was born on the 28th of January 1457 at Pembroke Castle, the posthumous son of a father who had already been dead three months by the time he drew his first breath. That father, Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, died at 26 in Carmarthen Castle after being captured by Yorkist forces. The mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was just 13 years old at the time. Henry grew up as an orphan of war, shuffled between guardians on opposing sides of a vicious dynastic conflict. Yet this boy, raised without a father and passed between rival households, would one day seize the English crown on a battlefield and rule for nearly 24 years. He became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, a dynasty that would reshape England entirely. What was it about Henry's bloodline that made him both a target and a contender? How did a man who spent 14 years in foreign exile become the last king of England to win his throne on the field of battle? And what kind of ruler did he turn out to be once the fighting was done?

• 2. A Claim Built on Shaky Ground

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  Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry's mother, traced her lineage back to John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III. Gaunt's third wife, Katherine Swynford, had been his mistress for roughly 25 years before they married in 1396. By that point they already had four children, including John Beaufort, who was Henry's great-grandfather. Gaunt's nephew, Richard II, legitimised those children by letters patent in 1397. Then, in 1407, Henry IV issued new letters patent confirming their legitimacy but simultaneously declaring them ineligible for the throne. That ruling was of doubtful legal standing, because the Beauforts had originally been legitimised by a royal proclamation read in Parliament, which arguably carried greater authority. The tangle left Henry's dynastic claim weak on paper. By 1483, however, practical reality had thinned the competition. Henry VI, his son Edward of Westminster, and the other Beaufort line through Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset, had all been killed in battle, by murder, or by execution. Henry was the senior male Lancastrian claimant left standing, which counted for a great deal in a kingdom exhausted by civil war. He also pressed his Welsh ancestry, claiming descent from the legendary last ancient British king Cadwaladr, and his biographer Bernard Andre made much of that connection in building his public image.

• 3. Exile, Escape, and the Road to Bosworth

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  When Edward IV regained the throne in 1471, Henry fled with other Lancastrians to Brittany, where he spent most of the next 14 years under the protection of Francis II, Duke of Brittany. The exile was not always safe. In November 1476, Francis fell ill, and his principal advisers moved to negotiate Henry's return to England. Henry was handed over to English envoys and escorted to the Breton port of Saint-Malo. There, facing transfer to men who would have delivered him to his enemies, he feigned stomach cramps to delay his departure long enough to miss the tides. An ally arrived with news that Francis had recovered. In the resulting confusion, Henry slipped away to a monastery and claimed sanctuary until the envoys had to leave. By 1483, his mother was actively promoting him as an alternative to Richard III, even though she was herself married to the Yorkist Lord Stanley. On Christmas Day 1483, at Rennes Cathedral, Henry publicly pledged to marry Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV. A first attempt to land in England collapsed after the execution of his primary co-conspirator, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Henry escaped to France, where the French government supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion. He sailed with a small French and Scottish force, landed at Mill Bay near Dale in Pembrokeshire, and marched inland with his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Aided by his Welsh heritage and the Lancastrian loyalties of Wales, he assembled an army of roughly 5,000-6,000 soldiers before confronting Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 1485.

• 4. Securing the Crown

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  Richard III died at Bosworth Field, and several of his key allies, including Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, and both Lord Stanley and his brother William, switched sides or withdrew from the battle at critical moments. To protect himself legally, Henry declared his reign to have begun on the 21st of August 1485, the day before Bosworth, so that anyone who had fought for Richard could be charged with treason and their property confiscated. His coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on the 30th of October 1485, and he honoured his pledge by marrying Elizabeth of York in 1486. He was 29; she was 20. They were third cousins, both great-great-grandchildren of John of Gaunt. Henry had Parliament repeal Titulus Regius, the statute that had declared Edward IV's marriage invalid and his children illegitimate, thereby legitimising his wife. Some historians, including Alison Weir, have noted that the Rennes ceremony in 1483 was only plausible if Henry and his supporters were already certain that the Princes in the Tower were dead. Despite the marriage, a cloud of Plantagenet suspicion never fully lifted. Edward, Earl of Warwick, the ten-year-old son of Edward IV's brother George, Duke of Clarence, was arrested before Henry even left Leicester and taken to the Tower of London. Lambert Simnel, a boy presented by Yorkists as the true Warwick, led a rebellion in 1487 that began in Ireland under the patronage of Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare. That rebellion ended at the Battle of Stoke Field, killing Lincoln; Henry pardoned Kildare and set the boy Simnel to work in the royal kitchens, roasting meats on a spit. The pretender Perkin Warbeck, a young Fleming who claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger Prince in the Tower, caused years of further trouble before being captured and executed in 1497. In 1499, Henry finally had the Earl of Warwick executed as well.

• 5. Money, Taxation, and a Ruthless Exchequer

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  Henry came to the throne without personal experience in estate management or financial administration, yet he became the ruler who rescued an effectively bankrupt exchequer. He kept the same financial advisers throughout his reign; aside from the first few months, the only Lord High Treasurers were Baron Dynham and the Earl of Surrey. His chancellor, Archbishop John Morton, devised the fiscal trap known as Morton's Fork: nobles who spent little must have saved much and could afford higher taxes, while those who spent lavishly clearly had the means to pay. Either way, the Crown extracted more. Henry also increased his wealth through the act of resumption of 1486, which allowed him to reclaim lands that had been improperly alienated from the Crown. He established the pound avoirdupois as a standard unit of weight, which later became part of the Imperial system. In 1506 he resumed construction of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, a project begun under Henry VI, and guaranteed finances for the work to continue after his own death. The later years of his reign, however, saw tax collection descend into abuse. The contemporary historian Polydore Vergil attributed this to plain greed. After Henry's death, a commission confirmed widespread abuses in how taxes had been collected, and Henry VIII executed the two most hated tax collectors, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, on trumped-up charges of treason.

• 6. Trade, Diplomacy, and an Expanding World

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  Henry's foreign policy rested on maintaining peace and generating commercial prosperity. The Treaty of Redon, signed in February 1489, committed him to sending 6,000 troops to defend Brittany against French annexation, with Brittany bearing the costs. When that effort ultimately failed after three sizeable expeditions costing £24,000, Henry pivoted. He pressured France by laying siege to Boulogne in October 1492, and France, increasingly absorbed in the Italian Wars, agreed to the Peace of Etaples. That treaty brought money into England and extracted a French pledge not to support pretenders such as Perkin Warbeck. Henry's most commercially successful agreement was the Magnus Intercursus of 1496, the great agreement that ended a trade embargo he had imposed on the Burgundian Netherlands in 1494 after Margaret of Burgundy backed Warbeck. The Merchant Adventurers had relocated from Antwerp to Calais during the standoff, and Flemish merchants had been expelled from England. The Magnus Intercursus restored trade while removing taxation for English merchants, turning Antwerp into a major entrepot where Baltic goods, eastern spices, and Italian silks moved against English cloth. Henry also recognised the united Spanish kingdom early and concluded the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which arranged the marriage of his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, to Catherine of Aragon. A separate Treaty of Perpetual Peace with Scotland, the first such agreement between the two kingdoms for almost two centuries, betrothed his daughter Margaret Tudor to King James IV. That marriage eventually led to the union of the English and Scottish crowns under Margaret's great-grandson, James VI and I, after the death of Henry's granddaughter Elizabeth I. Henry also sponsored John Cabot, originally from Genoa and Venice, granting him letters patent in March 1496 for a westward exploratory voyage after Cabot secured financial backing from Florentine bankers in London. Cabot was eventually rewarded with a royal pension, though he is presumed to have perished at sea after a later unsuccessful voyage. In 1495, Henry commissioned what is recorded as Europe's first dry dock, built at Portsmouth, to support a stronger navy.

• 7. Loss, Family, and the Final Years

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  In 1502, Arthur, Prince of Wales, died suddenly at Ludlow Castle, very likely from the viral illness then known as the English sweating sickness. Arthur was 15 years old. Henry VII, normally so reserved that he rarely showed emotion in public unless angered, broke down before his courtiers in unconcealed grief. His response to Elizabeth of York's death the following year was even more extreme: he shut himself away for several days, refusing to speak to anyone. A man who kept records down to the last halfpenny, whose personal account books survive in the British National Archives alongside many of his own letters, appears in those private documents as a devoted father and husband whose outward austerity concealed genuine warmth. Entries show him spending generously on his wife and children, and his letters to his mother Margaret have an affectionate tone that his official correspondence never captured. After Elizabeth died, such indulgences stopped. Henry grew ill and retreated from court, allowing only his mother Margaret Beaufort near him. His older daughter Margaret, previously betrothed to James IV of Scotland, was escorted to the border by her father, who would never see her again. She wrote him letters declaring her homesickness, and he could only mourn. Henry VII died of tuberculosis at Richmond Palace on the 21st of April 1509 and was buried in the chapel he had commissioned at Westminster Abbey, beside Elizabeth. His mother died two months later, on the 29th of June. His surviving son Henry VIII succeeded him and would go on to initiate the Protestant Reformation in England, a transformation that Henry VII, the careful architect of Tudor stability, neither sought nor anticipated.