Henry Tudor was born on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle in southwestern Wales, three months after his thirteen-year-old father Edmund Tudor had died of plague in a Yorkist prison. His mother Margaret Beaufort was fourteen years old at the birth. The Beaufort family belonged to the senior illegitimate-but-legitimized branch of the Plantagenet line descended from John of Gaunt; the Tudors were a Welsh-Norman gentry family of recent royal connections through Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois.
The combination gave Henry a claim to the English throne — barely. The Beaufort line had been specifically excluded from the royal succession by a 1407 statute of Henry IV; the Tudors had no royal blood at all. In the political-genealogical accounting of the Wars of the Roses, Henry was approximately the fourteenth-most-eligible Lancastrian claimant. His political position depended substantially on the violent elimination of all the better claimants.
The flight
By spring 1471 the violent elimination was nearly complete. The Yorkist king Edward IV had returned from exile in March, defeated the senior Lancastrian leadership at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April (killing the kingmaker Earl of Warwick), and destroyed the Lancastrian army at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May. Edward of Westminster — the only son of the Lancastrian king Henry VI — was killed at Tewkesbury at age 17. Henry VI himself, held in the Tower of London, was murdered three weeks later. The senior Lancastrian male line was extinct.
Henry Tudor, who had been raised in Pembrokeshire under the protection of his uncle Jasper Tudor, was suddenly the senior surviving Lancastrian claimant by default. He was fourteen years old.
Jasper Tudor took the boy from Pembroke Castle to the small Welsh port of Tenby in early September 1471 and chartered a ship for France. The ship sailed on 9 September. A storm in the Bristol Channel diverted it east; the party landed instead at Le Conquet at the western tip of Brittany. Jasper requested asylum from Francis II, Duke of Brittany. Francis granted it. The young Tudor’s exile had begun.
Brittany
The Duchy of Brittany in the late 15th century was a substantial semi-independent French principality. It had its own duke, its own military forces, its own coinage, its own diplomatic relations with the major European powers, and a sustained political project of maintaining functional independence against the centralizing pressures of the French Crown. Francis II had no special loyalty to either side of the English Wars of the Roses. His political interest in Henry Tudor was the value of a Lancastrian pretender as a diplomatic counter against potential Yorkist-French combinations.
Henry and Jasper were initially treated as honoured political guests. They were housed at the ducal residences at Vannes, Nantes, and (briefly) at the small port of Suscinio. Their daily expenses were paid from the Breton treasury. They had restricted freedom of movement but no formal restraint on their persons.
The Yorkist government attempted three separate extraditions during the exile.
1476: Edward IV sent an embassy to Vannes with a substantial offer — money, English marriage alliances — for the surrender of the two Tudors. Francis initially agreed and had Henry brought to the coast for transfer. Henry feigned illness; he reportedly persuaded the senior English ambassador’s groom to let him slip into a small chapel where he could not be removed without violating sanctuary. Francis reconsidered and refused the transfer.
1483: After Edward IV’s death and the accession of Richard III, the Yorkist court attempted a second extradition. Richard offered Francis a substantial annual subsidy and the surrender of the disputed Norman territory of Channel Islands shipping. Francis’s chief minister Pierre Landais — who had built his career partly on the use of Breton court intrigues against political rivals — accepted the deal on Francis’s behalf while Francis was incapacitated by illness. Henry was warned by the Bishop of Ely about the impending transfer and fled across the Norman border in disguise on 8 October 1483, with approximately a hundred yards’ head start over Landais’s pursuing officers. He reached the safety of the French court three days later.
1484: Charles VIII of France — also fifteen, also under a regency in his case headed by his sister Anne of Beaujeu — provided Henry with the political support and financial means for a return to England. The French regency had its own reasons for backing an English Lancastrian pretender, primarily to keep the recent strong Yorkist-Breton-Burgundian diplomatic alignment off balance.
The return
Henry sailed from Honfleur on 1 August 1485 with approximately 2,000 men — a force of about 500 English and Welsh exiles, supplemented by approximately 1,500 French and Scottish mercenaries financed by the French regency. He landed at Mill Bay near Milford Haven in southwestern Wales on 7 August 1485 — about ten miles from the Pembroke Castle where he had been born twenty-eight years earlier.
The march across Wales and into England was the conventional medieval recruitment campaign. Henry’s mother Margaret Beaufort had spent the previous decade building the political-military network of supporters that would meet Henry as he advanced. The most important single defection was that of the Stanley family — Margaret Beaufort’s third husband Thomas Stanley and his brother William Stanley — whose decision to bring their substantial forces to Henry’s side at the decisive battle was the proximate cause of Richard III’s defeat.
The Battle of Bosworth Field was fought on the morning of 22 August 1485 in central Leicestershire. Richard III’s army was approximately twice the size of Henry’s. The Stanley forces remained uncommitted through most of the fighting. Richard, recognizing that the Stanleys would not engage until the battle was decided, attempted to end it with a direct cavalry charge against Henry Tudor’s position. He was killed within yards of Henry himself, by an unidentified Welsh foot soldier (probably Rhys ap Thomas) wielding a halberd. The Stanley forces immediately joined Henry’s. The battle was over within two hours.
Henry was crowned on the battlefield with Richard’s recovered circlet by Lord Stanley. He had been twenty-eight years old. He had been an exile for fourteen years. He had been in England for fifteen days.
The reign
Henry VII reigned for the next twenty-three and a half years. The major political achievements — the consolidation of the Tudor dynasty, the systematic reform of royal finance through the Court of Star Chamber, the suppression of the surviving Yorkist pretenders Lambert Simnel (1487) and Perkin Warbeck (1497), the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland (the union that would eventually bring the Stuart succession to the English throne in 1603), and the early Atlantic-exploratory commission of John Cabot (1497) — were the work of a substantially anxious king who had spent his formative adolescence and early adulthood under the immediate political threat of extradition and execution. The political-administrative personality of the early Tudor monarchy — secretive, financially conservative, suspicious of the senior English noble families, dependent on a small circle of personally selected administrators — was substantially formed by Henry’s fourteen years in Breton exile.
He died at Richmond Palace on 21 April 1509, aged 52. His son Henry VIII inherited a substantially solvent and politically stabilized realm. The two political-cultural achievements that posterity associates with the Tudor dynasty — the English Reformation and the Elizabethan flowering of the late 16th century — both depended on the foundational political consolidation that Henry VII had spent his entire reign quietly producing.
The Welsh boy
The historical figure of Henry Tudor in 1471 — fourteen years old, fleeing a Bristol Channel storm into a Breton port he had not chosen and could not pronounce — is one of the more improbable starting points of any successful royal dynasty. He spoke Welsh as a child, Breton-French as an adolescent, and probably learned English fluently only in his early twenties. He had been in England for approximately six weeks of his life when he killed Richard III at Bosworth. The dynasty he founded would rule England for the next 117 years and would substantially transform every major institution of the English state.