House of Tudor
Welsh royal house
The House of Tudor (, TEW-dər) was an English and Welsh dynasty that held the throne of England from 1485 to 1603. They descended ultimately from Ednyfed Fychan and the Penmynydd family, a Welsh noble family, and Catherine of Valois. The Tudor monarchs were also descended from the House of Lancaster. They ruled the Kingdom of England and the Lordship of Ireland (later the Kingdom of Ireland) for 118 years with five monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. The Tudors succeeded the House of Plantagenet as rulers of the Kingdom of England, and were succeeded by the Scottish House of Stuart. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, was descended through his mother from the House of Beaufort, a legitimised branch of the English royal House of Lancaster, a cadet house of the Plantagenets. The Penmynydd family came to power and started the Tudor period in the wake of the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), which had resulted in the main House of Lancaster (with which the Tudors were aligned) becoming extinct in the male line.
Henry VII (a descendant of Edward III, and the son of Edmund Tudor, a half-brother of Henry VI) succeeded in presenting himself as a candidate not only for traditional Lancastrian supporters, but also for discontented supporters of their rival Plantagenet cadet House of York, and he took the throne by right of conquest. Following his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field (22 August 1485), he reinforced his position in 1486 by fulfilling his 1483 vow to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward IV and the heiress of the Yorkist claim to the throne, thus symbolically uniting the former warring factions of Lancaster and York under the new dynasty (represented by the Tudor rose). The Tudors extended their power beyond the boundaries of 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 pressed the matter.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q101978. VIAF identifies the subject as 37712007. The Library of Congress control number is sh85138480. 4 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1485, 1603, 1455 and 1487.
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This entry incorporates text from “House of Tudor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.