House of Tudor

The House of Tudor was an English royal house of Welsh origin, descended in the female line from the Tudors of Penmynydd. Tudor monarchs ruled the Kingdom of England and it's realms, including their ancestral Wales and the Lordship of Ireland (later the Kingdom of Ireland) from 1485 until 1603, with five monarchs in that period: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. (Lady Jane Grey, arguably queen for 9 days in 1553, descended from the House of Tudor in the female line.) The Tudors succeeded the House of Plantagenet as rulers of the Kingdom of England, and were succeeded by the House of Stuart. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII of England, descended through his mother from a legitimized branch of the English royal House of Lancaster. The Tudor family rose to power in the wake of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), which left the House of Lancaster, to which the Tudors were aligned, extinct in the male line.

Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, succeeded in presenting himself as a candidate not only for traditional Lancastrian supporters, but also for discontented supporters of their rival House of York, and he took the throne by right of conquest. Following his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field (August 22, 1485), he reinforced his position in 1486 by fulfilling his 1483 vow to marry the English princess Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, thus symbolically uniting the former warring factions under the new dynasty. The Tudors extended their power beyond modern England, achieving the full union of England and the Principality of Wales in 1542 (Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542), and successfully asserting English authority over the Kingdom of Ireland (proclaimed by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542). They also maintained the nominal English claim to the Kingdom of France; although none of them made substance of it, Henry VIII fought wars with France trying to reclaim that title. After him, his daughter Mary I lost control of all territory in France permanently with the fall of Calais in 1558.

In total, the Tudor monarchs ruled their domains for just over a century. Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) was the only son of Henry VII to live to the age of maturity. Issues around royal succession (including marriage and the succession rights of women) became major political themes during the Tudor era. When Elizabeth I died without an heir, the Scottish House of Stuart supplanted the Tudors as England's royal family through the Union of the Crowns of March 24, 1603. The first Stuart to become King of England (r. 1603–1625), James VI and I, descended from Henry VII's daughter Margaret Tudor, who in 1503 had married King James IV of Scotland in accordance with the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace.