Tudor England the house of tudor

Among the Lancastrian nobility was Henry, Earl of Richmond, son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and of Margaret Beaufort. His grandfather was a Welshman from a prominent Anglesey family, Owen Tudor, who had come to London and eventually obtained the post of wardrobe master in the household of Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois. Later he secretly married the dowager queen, and they had two sons, whom Henry VI accepted as members of the nobility. Henry Tudor's was not the strongest of claims, but no Lancastrian had a better one. After an abortive attempt to invade England in December 1483, he landed at Milford Haven, in Wales, in 1485. In Wales his Tudor ancestry helped him to increase his army, and in the battle of Bosworth, 22 August 1485, he defeated Richard 111, who was killed. With Henry VII, the House of Tudor assumed the monarchy of England.

Provident, generous in spirit though careful with the royal funds, Henry VII did much to foster a sense of national renewal after the fractured decades that had gone before. His personal style was domestic rather than grandiose and he did not greatly impress his subjects. The rule of law was gradually reimposed on a country which had grown used to the retinues of great men fighting out their disputes, and where brigandage was rife. Gaps in the system remained; corruption and bribery of officials were still common.

The great Seal of henry VII Henry VII

Henry's eldest son, Arthur, died before him and it was his second son who succeeded, uncontested, as Henry VIII in 1509. At the start of his reign he married Catherine, daughter of the King of Aragon, the widow of his brother Arthur. Only one child of the union survived the future Queen Mary.

Renaissance in england

In the course of Henry's thirty-eight-year reign, England was to experience profound changes. In previous generations, revolutionary change had meant little more than a change of person at the very top, and a consequent redistribution of power among the magnates. The nature of the institutions of the country – the royal household, parliament, church, law – were not greatly affected by such changes. They followed their own paths of progress or decline. The nature of the kingship itself had altered little from feudal times. It took more than the abounding self-confidence, undoubted intelligence, and ruthless ambition of one man to achieve radical changes within one generation. But imperceptibly, through the later decades of the fifteenth century, there had grown a change of attitude within the educated community of Europe and of England. If a date could be assigned to it, it might be the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, after which a flood of refugee scholars and clerics streamed into western Europe, bringing in their luggage a host of manuscripts and commentaries which generated not only a revival of interest in the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome but also a new wave of interest in mysticism, magic and the occult.

The Great Seal of Henry VIII Henry VIII

For a time, until the conquest of Moorish Granada in 1492, European Christendom was hemmed in by Islam to east and west. Crusades were proposed, but the papacy, by this time a territorial power as well as a religious one, was embroiled in the power politics of Italy and Europe and had lost the spiritual authority of the great medieval popes.

Erasmus, the leading scholar of the Renaissance