Henry VII., founder of the Tudor dynasty; was born at Pembroke Castle, the seat of his uncle, the Earl of Pembroke, on January 28, 1457. His father, Edmund Tudor, was the son of Owen Tudor, a knight of Wales, and of his wife, Queen Catharine, the widow of Henry V.; he had been created Earl of Richmond by his half-brother, Henry VI., and died before his son's birth. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was the lineal representative of the House of Lancaster, being descended from John of Gaunt and Catharine Swinford, whose children were legitimated after their marriage. The young Earl of Richmond was thus the nearest heir, after Richard III. had murdered his nephews, the sons of Edward IV., except their sisters and Richard himself. After Tewkesbury he found asylum in Brittany, until he was invited to invade England and rescue it from the usurper. The first attempt (1483) ended in failure, and cost the Duke of Buckingham his head; but in August 1485 Richmond landed at Milford Haven, and marched across the country to Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where Richard was defeated and slain. Henry now ascended the throne; and his marriage with Elizabeth of York, Edward IV.'s eldest daughter, by which the White Rose and the Red were united, was celebrated in the following January. His reign was troubled by several impostors claiming the crown: first, Lambert Sissel, an Oxford joiner's son, who professed to be the Earl of Warwick, Clarence's son, and was proclaimed king in Ireland, but was defeated at Stoke in 1487, taken prisoner, and turned into a menial in the king's kitchen; next, Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be the boy Duke of York, who had not been murdered in the Tower by Richard III., and was patronised by the Duchess of Burgundy and supported by the Emperor Maximilian and James IV. of Scotland, but was finally captured in 1497; and finally, Ralph Wilford, who also pretended to be the Earl of Warwick, but did not succeed in carrying his enterprise far, being almost at once taken and hanged in 1499. In this year Henry, to end his troubles from pretenders, had Warbeck, whom he had pardoned, and the true Earl of Warwick, a youth who had known only captivity all his days, convicted of a plot to recover their liberty, and executed. The execution of the latter is the chief blot on Henry's memory; for the execution of Sir William Stanley, deeply though the king had been indebted to him, there appears to have been ample justification.
In 1492 Henry invaded France, but was bought off with a promise of 745,000 crowns; and this was the only foreign war in which he engaged, although his successful diplomacy gave him an influence in continental politics greater than had been attained by any king of England before him. Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter, Catharine of Aragon, was married to his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, a boy of fifteen, just before he died; and Henry's policy, added to an objection to return part of her dowry, ultimately led him to betroth her to his next son, who became Henry VIII. A marriage from which flowed most important consequences was that of his eldest daughter, Margaret, to James IV. of Scotland, which a century later brought about the union of the crowns. In February 1503 Henry's queen died, and in his active endeavours to obtain a second wife, with a sufficiently large dowry, he proposed a few months later to marry his own daughter-in-law, Catharine, who had been left a widow by Arthur the year before; and in 1506 he even offered to wed her sister Juana, the insane heiress of Castile. With similar projects he was still engaged when he died on April 22, 1509, leaving behind him £1,800,000, worth £18,000,000 in our currency. He was a lover of peace, the friend of the church, the patron of scholarship and architecture, as well as of commerce and adventure. Bacon calls him 'a wonder for wise men,' and 'this English Solomon, for Solomon also was too heavy upon his people in exactions.' But Henry's avarice has been exaggerated. Chiefly he was a financier, yet his legislation was wise and just. He not only ruled, but governed England, and under him the country prospered and the trading-class became more powerful; the taxation was probably not so excessive as has been assumed, and the notorious extortions of the king's lawyers, Dudley and Empson (q.v.), did not touch the great mass of the people. Nor was the king greedy of gold for its own sake; 'to him,' says Gairdner, 'a large reserve was a great guarantee for peace and security.' As a politician Henry was pitted against such cunning opponents as Ferdinand of Spain, and at least matched them all in subtlety and in foresight; and the throne which he had won he left to his son stable and secure.
See Bacon's History of Henry VII.; Gairdner's Henry the Seventh ('English Statesmen' series, 1889); and Busch's England under the Tudors (vol. i. trans. 1895).