Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

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12. The death of Henry VII. Drawing by Garter king-of-arms Thomas Wriothesley. (By permission of the British Library)

13. From Thomas More’s coronation verses, on the rainstorm that disrupted Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London, 23 June 1509. (By permission of the British Library)

14. Henry VII’s accounts. (The National Archives)

Map 1

England c. 1500

Map 2

Western Europe c. 1500

Houses of Lancaster and York, and the House of Tudor

Introduction

Henry VII ruled England for almost a quarter-century, from 1485 to 1509. During his reign, the civil wars that had convulsed the country for much of the fifteenth century burned themselves out. By its end, he had laid the foundations for the dynasty that bore his name: Tudor. He was a man with a highly dubious claim to the throne, who seized power and passed it on in the first untroubled succession in almost a century. Yet, wedged between two of the most notorious monarchs in English history – the arch-villain Richard III and the massive figure of Henry VIII – Henry VII remains mysterious, or as his first biographer, the seventeenth-century political thinker Francis Bacon put it, ‘a dark prince’.

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