|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
| Background | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Henry was born at Pembroke Castle, Wales in 1457, the only son of Edmund Tudor and Lady Margaret Beaufort. His father died two months before he was born, which meant that the young Henry spent much of his life with his uncle, Jasper Tudor, 1st Duke of Bedford. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| When the Yorkist Edward IV returned to the throne in 1471, Henry was forced to flee to Brittany, where he was to spend most of the next fourteen years. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| By 1483 his mother, despite being the wife of pro-Yorkist Lord Stanley, was actively promoting Henry as an alternative to the unpopular Richard III. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Henry made an unsuccessful attempt to land in England but his conspiracy quickly unraveled, resulting in the execution of primary co-conspirator the Duke of Buckingham. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Richard III attempted to extradite Henry through an arrangement with the Breton authorities, but the future King managed to escape to France. He was welcomed by the French court, who readily supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion. By 1485, he felt that conditions were ripe for such an undertaking. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Having gained the support of the in-laws of the late Yorkist King Edward IV, he landed with a largely French and Scottish force in Mill Bay, Pembrokeshire, and marched into England, accompanied by his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and the experienced John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Wales had traditionally been a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his ancestry, being directly descended, through his father, from the Lord Rhys. He amassed an army of around 5,000 soldiers and travelled north. |
|||||||||||||||||||||
| Though outnumbered, Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively defeated the Yorkist army under Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 when several of Richard's key allies, such as the Earl of Northumberland and William and Thomas Stanley, crucially switched sides or deserted the field of battle. The death of Richard III on Bosworth Field effectively ended the long-running Wars of the Roses between the two houses. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| In 1502, fate dealt Henry VII a blow from which he never fully recovered: his heir, the recently married Arthur, died in an epidemic at Ludlow Castle which made Henry VIII the new heir to the throne. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| He died in 1509. | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
| Most Evil Crimes | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © One-Evil.org 2011. All Rights Reserved |
|||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|