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Henry VII of England

Henry VII (January 28, 1457 – April 21, 1509), King of England, Lord of Ireland (August 22, 1485 – April 21, 1509), was the founder and first patriarch of the Tudor dynasty.

Early life

Known greatly as the king of hearts, or the man of ruthless wonder, Henry was born in Pembroke Castle, Wales, in 1457, Henry VII was the only son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort. His father died two months before he was born, which meant that the young Henry spent much of his early life with his uncle, Jasper Tudor. With the return of Edward IV to the throne in 1471, Henry VII was forced to flee to Brittany, where he was to spend most of the next fourteen years. After the failure of the revolt of his second cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, in 1483, Henry VII became the leading Lancastrian contender for the throne of England. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Henry made an unsuccessful attempt to land in England but turned back after encountering Richard III's (1483–85) forces on the Dorset coast. Richard III attempted to ensure his return through a treaty with the Breton authorities, but Henry VII was alerted and escaped 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 in-laws of the late Yorkist King Edward IV, he landed with a largely 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 Yorkist 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 5000 soldiers and travelled north. Though outnumbered, Henry was aware that this was his only chance to seize the throne. Using reinforcements that waited in Nottingham and Leicester Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively defeated the Yorkists under the King at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 when several of Richard's key allies, such as the Earl of Northumberland and William and Thomas Stanley, crucially switched sides or deserted the field of battle. This effectively ended the long-running Wars of the Roses between the two houses, though it wasn't the final battle. Henry's claim to the throne was tenuous: it was based upon a lineage of illegitimate succession, and overlooked the fact that he had been disqualified by an earlier act of attainder. However this proved to be no barrier to the throne. Following the battle all other claimants were either dead or too weak challenge him. In the end Henry dealt with the act of attainder by claiming that it could not apply to a king. The first of Henry's concerns on attaining the monarchy was the question of establishing the strength and supremacy of his rule. His own claim to the throne was limited, but he was fortunate in that there were few other claimants to the throne left alive after the long civil war. His main worry was pretenders such as Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower. These pretenders were backed by disaffected nobles. Henry triumphed in securing his crown by a number of means but principally by dividing and undermining the power of the nobility, especially through bonds and recognizances, as well as forcing them to disband their private armies. He also honoured his pledge of December 1483 to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter and heir of King Edward IV. The marriage took place on January 18, 1486 at Westminster. This unified the warring houses, gave him a greater claim to the throne due to Elizabeth's line of descent and ensured that his children would be of royal blood (athough there is evidence that Edward was born illegitimate).

Henry's first action was to retrospectively declare himself king as of 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, Lambert Simnel, on the throne in Henry's place. Lincoln was killed at the Battle of Stoke, but Simnel's life was spared and he became a royal servant. Simnel had been put forward as "Edward VI", impersonating the young Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence, who was still imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry had shown uncharacteristic leniency in dealing with Edward and did not find a pretext for executing him until he had grown into adulthood, in 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.

List of children

Henry and Elizabeth's children are:

• Arthur, Prince of Wales (September 20, 1486 – April 2, 1502).

• Margaret Tudor (November 28, 1489 – October 18, 1541).

• Henry VIII of England (June 28, 1491 – January 28, 1547).

• Elizabeth Tudor (July 2, 1492 – September 14, 1495).

• Mary Tudor (March 18, 1496 – June 25, 1533).

• Edmund Tudor, Duke of Somerset (February 21, 1499 – June 19, 1500).

• Edward Tudor. He may not have actually existed. Unknown dates of birth and death. Suspected to be a mistaken name for Edmund Tudor, Duke of Somerset. However, this name is listed in official records as a child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Edward is also mentioned in Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy by Alison Weir as having died young. She assumes the child to have been buried with his family in Westminster Abbey.

• Katherine Tudor (February 2, 1503 – February 2, 1503); Elizabeth died giving birth to Katherine.

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 efficiently ruthless mechanisms of taxation. In this he was supported by his chancellor, Archbishop John Morton, whose "Morton's Fork" (the two "tines" of which being: "If the subject is seen to live frugally, tell him because he is clearly a money saver of great ability he can afford to give generously to the King. If, however, the subject lives a life of great extravagance, tell him he, too, can afford to give largely, the proof of his opulence being evident in his expenditure.") 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 that both directly and indirectly brought money into the coffers of England. He had been under the financial and physical protection of the French throne or its vassals for most of his career as a pretender 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 a million and a half pounds; it did not take his son as long to fritter it away as it had taken the father to acquire it. As well as coming to terms with the French, Henry VII forged alliances with Spain — by marrying his son, Arthur Tudor, to Catherine of Aragon; with Scotland — by marrying his daughter, Margaret, to King James IV of Scotland; and with the Holy Roman Empire, under

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