A subsequent proclamation by John of Gaunt's son by his first wife Blanche of Lancaster, King Henry IV, also recognised the Beauforts' legitimacy but declared the line ineligible for the throne.

As she had no surviving brothers, Elizabeth had the strongest claim to the crown as de facto heiress of the House of York, but while she became queen consort, she did not rule as queen regnant; for the last attempt a female made at ruling in her own right had resulted in disaster when Henry II's mother, Empress Matilda, and her cousin, Stephen of Blois, fought bitterly for the throne in the 12th century.

He had an army which defeated the last Yorkist king, Richard III, in the field of battle and the support of powerful nobles to take the crown by right of conquest.

Capitalizing on the growing unpopularity of Richard III (King of England from 1483), she was able to forge an alliance with discontented Yorkists in support of her son.

On 18 January 1486 at Westminster Abbey, he honoured a pledge made three years earlier and married Elizabeth of York,[12] daughter of King Edward IV.

Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had seven children, four of whom survived early childhood: Henry VII's foreign policy had an objective of dynastic security: he formed an alliance with Scotland with the marriage in 1503 of his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, and with Spain through the marriage of his son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, cementing an alliance with the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

Catherine had previously been the wife of Henry's older brother Arthur (died 1502); this fact made the course of their marriage a rocky one from the start.

When it became clear to Henry that the Tudor line was at risk, he consulted his chief minister Cardinal Wolsey about the possibility of annulling his marriage to Catherine.

Wolsey fell from favour in 1529 as a result of his failure to procure the annulment, and Henry appointed Thomas Cromwell in his place as chief minister c. 1532.

It is unclear how far Wolsey was actually responsible for the English Reformation, but it is very clear that Henry's desire to marry Anne Boleyn precipitated the schism with Rome.

Thomas Cromwell, Anne's former ally, stepped in again, claiming that she had taken lovers during her marriage to Henry, including her own brother, George Boleyn, and she was tried for high treason and incest.

Although the historian Gilbert Burnet claimed that Henry called her a Flanders Mare, there is no evidence that he said this; in truth, court ambassadors negotiating the marriage praised her beauty.

Whatever the circumstances were, the marriage failed, and Anne agreed to a peaceful annulment, assumed the title My Lady, the King's Sister, and received a large settlement, which included Richmond Palace, Hever Castle, and numerous other estates across the country.

[24] By the time Henry conducted another marriage with his final wife Catherine Parr in July 1543, the old Roman Catholic advisers, including the Duke of Norfolk, had lost all their power and influence.

Norfolk himself was still a committed Catholic, and he was nearly persuaded to arrest Catherine for preaching Lutheran doctrines to Henry while she attended his ill health.

Elizabeth was interviewed by one of Edward's advisers, and she was eventually found not to be guilty, despite forced confessions from her servants Kat Ashley and Sir Thomas Parry.

Popular discontent grew; a Protestant courtier, Thomas Wyatt the younger, led a rebellion against Mary aiming to depose and replace her with her half-sister Elizabeth.

[29] Mary's dream of a new, Catholic Habsburg line was finished, and her popularity further declined when she lost Calais — the last English territory on French soil — to Francis, Duke of Guise, in January 1558.

She explored the commercial potential of Russian, African, and Baltic markets, revised the customs system, worked to counter the currency debasements of her predecessors, amalgamated several revenue courts, and strengthened the governing authority of the middling and larger towns.

At her coronation in January 1559, many of the bishops – Catholic, appointed by Mary, who had expelled many of the Protestant clergymen when she became queen in 1553 – refused to perform the service in English.

Recalling her father's disdain for Anne of Cleves, Elizabeth also refused to enter into a foreign match with a man that she had never seen before, so that also eliminated a large number of suitors.

Elizabeth bowed to public feeling against the marriage, learning from the mistake her sister, Mary I, made when she married Philip II of Spain, and sent the Duke of Anjou away.

In response to famine across England due to bad harvests in the 1590s, Elizabeth introduced the poor law, allowing peasants who were too ill to work a certain amount of money from the state.

Elizabeth was strong and hard-headed and kept her primary goal in sight: providing the best for her people and proving those wrong who doubted her while maintaining a straight composure.

Public interference regarding the Roses dynasties was always a threat until the 17th century Stuart/Bourbon re-alignment occasioned by a series of events such as the execution of Lady Jane Grey, despite her brother-in-law, Leicester's reputation in Holland, the Rising of the North (in which the old Percy-Neville feud and even anti-Scottish sentiment was discarded on account of religion; Northern England shared the same Avignonese bias as the Scottish court, on par with Valois France and Castile, which became the backbone of the Counter-Reformation, with Protestants being solidly anti-Avignonese) and death of Elizabeth I of England without children.

The Tudors otherwise rejected or suppressed other religious notions, whether for the Pope's award of Fidei Defensor or to prevent them from being in the hands of the common laity, who might be swayed by cells of foreign Protestants, with whom they had conversation as Marian exiles, pursuing a strategy of containment which the Lancastrians had done (after being vilified by Wat Tyler), even though the phenomenon of "Lollard knights" (like John Oldcastle) had become almost a national sensation all on its own.

Henry VIII tried to extend his father's balancing act between the dynasties for opportunistic interventionism in the Italian Wars, which had unfortunate consequences for his own marriages and the Papal States; the King furthermore tried to use similar tactics for the "via media" concept of Anglicanism.

The progress to Northern/Roses government would thenceforth pass across the border into Scotland, in 1603, due not only to the civil warring, but also because the Tudors' own line was fragile and insecure, trying to reconcile the mortal enemies who had weakened England to the point of having to bow to new pressures, rather than dictate diplomacy on English terms.

Monarchs were not anxious to publicise their descent in the paternal line from a Welsh adventurer, stressing instead continuity with the historic English and French royal families.

According to Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell, images of Elizabeth I move: "fast-forward across film history, unforgettable, iconic images: the stately bearing; the red wigs; the high forehead; the long, aristocratic nose; the alabaster makeup; the pearl-drop earrings; the stiff, ornate ruffs; the fingers dripping with jewels; and the gowns, with yards and yards of white satin, purple velvet, gold, and silver ornamented and sparkling with rubies, diamonds, and more pearls.