In 1407, Henry IV, Gaunt's son by his first wife, issued new letters patent confirming the legitimacy of his half-siblings but also declaring them ineligible for the throne.

[citation needed] Henry also made some political capital out of his Welsh ancestry in attracting military support and safeguarding his army's passage through Wales on its way to the Battle of Bosworth.

His younger brother, Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, undertook to protect Edmund's widow Margaret, who was 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry.

[citation needed] Henry gained the support of the Woodvilles, in-laws of the late Edward IV, and sailed with a small French and Scottish force, landing at Mill Bay near Dale, Pembrokeshire.

Wales was historically a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his Welsh birth and ancestry, being agnatically descended from Rhys ap Gruffydd.

Several of Richard's key allies, such as Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, and also Lord Stanley and his brother William, crucially switched sides or left the battlefield.

[citation needed] To secure his hold on the throne, Henry declared himself king by right of conquest retroactively from 21 August 1485, the day before Bosworth Field.

Henry spared Richard's nephew and designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and made the Yorkist heiress Margaret Plantagenet Countess of Salisbury suo jure.

However, such a level of paranoia persisted that anyone (John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, for example)[28] with blood ties to the Plantagenets was suspected of coveting the throne.

[29] Henry had Parliament repeal Titulus Regius, the statute that declared Edward IV's marriage invalid and his children illegitimate, thus legitimising his wife.

The rebellion began in Ireland, where the historically Yorkist nobility, headed by the powerful Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, proclaimed Simnel king and provided troops for his invasion of England.

Henry showed remarkable clemency to the surviving rebels: he pardoned Kildare and the other Irish nobles, and he made the boy, Simnel, a servant in the royal kitchen where he was in charge of roasting meats on a spit.

[34] When the King's agents searched the property of William Stanley (Chamberlain of the Household, with direct access to Henry VII) they found a bag of coins amounting to around £10,000 and a collar of livery with Yorkist garnishings.

[42] The capriciousness and lack of due process that indebted many would tarnish his legacy and were soon ended upon Henry VII's death, after a commission revealed widespread abuses.

[43] According to the contemporary historian Polydore Vergil, simple "greed" underscored the means by which royal control was over-asserted in Henry's final years.

[48] Henry later concluded a treaty with France at Etaples that brought money into the coffers of England, and ensured the French would not support pretenders to the English throne, such as Perkin Warbeck.

Having secured financial backing from Florentine bankers in London, Cabot was granted carefully phrased letters patent from Henry in March 1496, permitting him to embark on an exploratory voyage westerly.

[51] Henry VII was one of the first European monarchs to recognise the importance of the newly united Spanish kingdom; he concluded the Treaty of Medina del Campo, by which his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, was married to Catherine of Aragon.

[53] Later on, Henry had exchanged letters with Pope Julius II in 1507, in which he encouraged him to establish peace among Christian realms, and to organise an expedition against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

In turn, Antwerp became an extremely important trade entrepôt (transhipment port), through which, for example, goods from the Baltic, spices from the east and Italian silks were exchanged for English cloth.

There were too many powerful noblemen and, as a consequence of the system of so-called bastard feudalism, each had what amounted to private armies of indentured retainers (mercenaries masquerading as servants).

This revived an earlier practice of using a small (and trusted) group of the Privy Council as a personal or Prerogative Court, able to cut through the cumbersome legal system and act swiftly.

His first son and heir apparent, Arthur, Prince of Wales, died suddenly at Ludlow Castle, very likely from a viral respiratory illness known at the time as the "English sweating sickness".

The King, normally a reserved man who rarely showed much emotion in public unless angry, surprised his courtiers with his intense grief and sobbing at his son's death.

Accordingly, he arranged a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II for Prince Henry to marry his brother's widow Catherine, a relationship that would have otherwise precluded marriage in the Church.

During Henry VII's lifetime the nobility often criticised him for re-centralising power in London and, later, the 16th-century historian Francis Bacon was ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law.

"[75] Further compounding Henry's distress, within months of her mother's death, his older daughter Margaret, who had previously been betrothed to King James IV of Scotland, had to be escorted to the border by her father: he would never see her again.

[76] Margaret Tudor wrote letters to her father declaring her homesickness, but Henry could do nothing but mourn the loss of his family and honour the terms of the peace treaty he had agreed to with the King of Scotland.

[77] Henry VII died of tuberculosis at Richmond Palace on 21 April 1509 and was buried in the chapel he commissioned in Westminster Abbey next to his wife, Elizabeth.

His biographer, Professor Stanley Chrimes, credits him – even before he had become king – with "a high degree of personal magnetism, ability to inspire confidence, and a growing reputation for shrewd decisiveness".