This Was the History of the Tudors | Part 1: The Rise (1485) | The King No One Expected

[00:00:00]In the year 1485, a man with almost no legitimate claim to the English throne landed on a beach in Wales with a small and borrowed army. Within a matter of weeks, he would kill a king in battle, seized the crown, and found the most famous royal dynasty in [music] English history. The family that would give the world Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and a century that changed England forever.

[00:00:28]Almost nobody believed he could do [music] it. He had been hunted across two countries and spent most of his life in exile. He had no kingdom, little money of his own, and a claim to the throne that his enemies openly laughed at. By every reasonable measure, he should have ended up as just one more failed pretender, a name lost in the bloody chaos of the age. Instead, he became king of England. And this is the story of how it happened. Not with a great conqueror or an obvious heir, but with an unlikely exile, a desperate gamble, a mother who never gave up, and a single afternoon on a muddy field that changed the course of history. This is the man history almost forgot. The king no one expected. To understand how astonishing his rise really was, you first have to understand the world he was born into. Because England in the middle of the 15th century was quietly tearing itself to pieces. The crown had become a prize fought over by two branches of the same royal family. On one side stood the House of Lancaster.

[00:01:41]On the other, the House of York. Both descended from the same king. Both believed the throne was theirs by right.

[00:01:49]And for three decades they slaughtered each other for it in a conflict later generations would call the Wars of the Roses. We call it that because of the badges each side was said to wear. A red rose for Lancaster, a white rose for York. The reality was messier than the name suggests. But the bloodshed was real. Kings were crowned and then dragged from their thrones. Noblemen changed sides, sometimes more than once.

[00:02:16]Battles were fought in the snow and the rain, and the great families of England buried their sons by the hundreds. A man could be the most powerful lord in the land one year [music] and a headless traitor the next into this world on a cold January day in 1457.

[00:02:34]A boy was born in a castle in Wales. His name was Henry Tuda. And from the very beginning, his life was shaped by loss.

[00:02:43]His father was already dead. Edmund Tuda had been captured by his enemies and had died of plague in captivity months before his son drew breath. His mother was a girl named Margaret Buffett and she was when she gave birth only 13 years old. The birth was so difficult that it was a wonder either of them survived. Margaret would never have another child, but she would spend the rest of her life utterly devoted [music] to this one, and her ambition for him would help reshape a kingdom. Now, here is the thing that makes Henry's eventual triumph so improbable.

[00:03:22]His claim to the throne was on paper almost an embarrassment. It came through his mother's family, the Bowforts. And the Bowforts had a problem.

[00:03:33]They descended from a royal prince, John of Gaunt, [music] one of the sons of King Edward III. But through a relationship that began outside [music] of marriage, the children were later formally legitimized, which mattered.

[00:03:48]Yet a later provision was widely understood to bar that particular line from ever inheriting the crown. Whether that exclusion was truly absolute in law [music] is something historians still debate. But the perception was what counted and the perception was clear.

[00:04:05]The Bowford claim was a backoor claim, a tainted one, and many people simply did not take it seriously. His father's side, the Tudtor, gave him no royal claim at all in the strict sense. That line came from a Welsh courtier named Owen Tuda who had done something extraordinary. He had secretly married the widow of a king. That widow was Catherine of Valwis, the French princess who had been married to Henry V, the great warrior king. After Henry's death, Catherine and Owen formed a relationship, and from it came Henry Tuda's father. It was a romantic, scandalous story, but [music] it put no crown within reach. It meant only that Henry was connected to royalty by marriage, not by blood. So picture the boy this made. In a country full of men with far stronger rights to the throne, Henry Tuda was at best an afterthought, and for most of his childhood that is how he was treated until the wars turned, and being an afterthought suddenly became dangerous. As the fighting swung back and forth, the House of York gained the upper hand. A confident, charismatic young Yorkist named Edward seized the throne and became King Edward IVth. The Lancastrians were crushed and anyone with even a drop of Lancastrian blood became a potential threat to the new regime. Henry was still just a boy, but a boy with royal connections on the losing side was a liability to himself and to everyone around him. And so when he was 14 years old, he was forced to flee the country. Spirited across the sea by his uncle, a fiercely loyal man named Jasper Tuda. They meant to sail to France. Storms drove them instead onto the coast of Britany, then an independent duche with its own duke and its own agenda. And there in Britany, Henry Tuda would remain for 14 long years. 14 years. Sit with that for a moment. He arrived as a teenager and would [music] not set foot in England again until he was a grown man of 28.

[00:06:17]Spending the defining years of his life as a guest who was really a prisoner, a bargaining chip passed between powerful men who saw him as useful or dangerous or both. Because Henry did not stop being a threat just because he had left.

[00:06:34]Quite the opposite. As the House of York tightened its grip, this exiled young man slowly became the last real hope of everyone who had lost. King Edward wanted him handed over. He sent envoys, made offers, applied pressure on the Duke of Britany. More than once, Henry came terrifyingly close to being surrendered. On one occasion, he is said to have fallen genuinely ill from the strain, saved only by a lastminute delay from his protectors. He lived year after year knowing that a single political deal might send him home to almost certain death. Try to imagine those years from the inside. A young man far from home in a country whose language was not his own, dependent for his very life on the goodwill of a duke who might sell him at any moment. He could trust almost no one. Every friendly face might belong to an informer. Every ship from England might carry news of his supporters or the men sent to seize him.

[00:07:35]Most people living like that for over a decade would have broken or given up or faded quietly into obscurity. One more forgotten exile drinking away a lost cause.

[00:07:47]Henry did not fade. He watched and he learned and he waited. And the uncle at his side, Jasper Tuda, never wavered either. a hard battlecarred man who had shared every defeat and every flight and who kept the family's ambition alive through the darkest years. It is one of the great overlooked partnerships in English history. The patient nephew and the unbreakable uncle, keeping each other alive until their moment came. But exile alone would never have put a crown on his head. For that, Henry needed the House of York to destroy itself. And in the spring of 1483, that is precisely what it began to do. King Edward IVth, still a relatively young man, [music] died suddenly, leaving behind two sons.

[00:08:37]The elder, also named Edward, was just 12 years old and was immediately proclaimed king. A boy king meant that someone had to rule in his name until he came of age. And that role fell to the boy's uncle, the dead king's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. What happened next is one of the darkest and most debated episodes in all of English history. Richard took custody of the young king and his younger brother, lodging them in the Tower of London, which in that era was not only a prison, but a royal residence, where kings traditionally stayed before their coronation. And then [music] step by step, Richard dismantled his nephew's claim. The boys were declared illegitimate on the argument that their parents' marriage had been invalid. With the young princes swept aside, Richard took the throne himself and became King Richard III, and the two boys, the rightful young king and his brother, were never seen alive again.

[00:09:41]I want to be honest with you here because this is where the historical record runs into [music] genuine mystery. We do not know for certain what happened to the princes in the tower.

[00:09:52]The most widely accepted view then and now is that they were murdered and many historians believe the order came from the man who had the most to gain. But there is no surviving confession and no proof that has ever fully closed the case.

[00:10:10]People have argued about it for more than 500 years, and they argue about it [music] still. What we can say for certain is this. The boys vanished. The rumors spread like fire, and a great many people came to believe their new king had killed his own nephews to [music] steal a crown. And that belief was poison to Richard's reign, because watch what it did. It shattered the unity of the House of York. Men who had loyally served Edward IV now looked at Richard with horror. Families who would never in a thousand years have supported a Lancastrian [music] exile suddenly found that exile looking like the lesser evil. For the first time, the disaffected Yorkists and the surviving Lancastrians [music] wanted the same thing. Richard gone. And there was only one credible alternative left standing.

[00:11:01]a man across the sea who had spent his whole life waiting. But Henry was still missing one thing, a reason for England to choose him. Not merely to be rid of Richard, but to want Henry Tuda himself on the throne.

[00:11:17]And the person who found that reason was not a soldier or a lord. It was his mother.

[00:11:25]For years, Margaret Bowfoot had never stopped working quietly and relentlessly to advance her son. She had married one of the most powerful noblemen in England, and she used every connection she had. Now, in the aftermath of the prince's disappearance, she made a move of extraordinary daring. She reached out in secret to the mother of the vanished boys, Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IVth. Think about how remarkable that is. These two women came from opposite sides of a war that had killed so many, but both had lost. Both hated Richard, and both saw a way forward in a single idea. The idea was a marriage.

[00:12:11]Margaret's son Henry would marry Elizabeth Woodville's eldest daughter, a young woman named Elizabeth of York. He was the last hope of Lancaster. She was the eldest surviving child of York. If the two of them married, they would join the red rose and the white, [music] and their children would carry the blood of both houses, uniting the waring families in a single line at last. It was more than a wedding. It was a peace treaty disguised as a romance. And it gave Henry what he had never truly had, a reason for large numbers of Englishmen to want him specifically, not just as a weapon, but as the beginning of something new. Henry understood its power at once. On Christmas Day in the Cathedral at Ren, in front of his supporters, he swore a public oath that when he became king, he would marry Elizabeth of York. It was a promise, a policy, and a rallying cry all at once. And with it, the movement to put him on the throne stopped being a fantasy and started becoming a plan. Now he needed money, ships, and men. He gathered what he could, some support from France, a core of loyal English exiles, and a mixed force of soldiers, adventurers, and mercenaries willing to gamble on a long shot. It was not an overwhelming army. In truth, it was a fairly small one. But Henry was betting on something more important than numbers. That once he landed and showed that resistance to Richard was actually possible, others [music] would join him.

[00:13:54]If he was wrong, he and everyone with him would die. In August of 1485, he set sail. He landed not in England but in Wales at Milford Haven in the far southwest. A deliberate shrewd choice because the Tudtor were a Welsh family.

[00:14:13]The name carried weight in that country.

[00:14:16]As he marched inland, Henry presented himself not only as a claimant to the English crown, but as a son of Wales come home, a figure out of old prophecy returning to reclaim what was his. And it worked. Welsh captains brought their followers. The small invading force began slowly to grow, but he was still [music] marching toward the heart of England, badly outnumbered. King Richard was no fool and no coward. He was an experienced soldier. He commanded a larger army, and he had the full authority of the crown behind him. When he learned Henry had landed, he gathered his forces to crush the invasion once and for all. Everything Henry had waited 14 years for was about to be decided in a single morning. The two armies came together near a place in the Midlands called Bosworth on the 22nd of August 1485.

[00:15:15]And here is what makes that battle one of the most extraordinary in English history. Its outcome did not really hang on Henry's army or on Richards. It hung on a third force standing off to the side, refusing to commit. That force belonged to the Stanley family, powerful, wealthy noblemen, who had brought a large army of their own to the field. And the head of that family, Thomas Stanley, happened to be married to Margaret Bowfort, which made him Henry Tuda's stepfather. You would think that would settle the matter. It did not. The Stanley's were the ultimate survivors of the Wars of the Roses. Men who had lived so long precisely because they never committed to a losing side.

[00:16:01]And Richard could not simply ignore them. Their army was large enough to decide the battle on its own. And both sides knew it. So Richard had taken Thomas Stanley's own son hostage with a brutally simple threat. Fight for me or your boy dies. So, as the battle began, the Stanleys did the most dangerous thing of all, nothing. They sat on the sidelines with their army intact, watching, waiting to see which way the fighting would turn before deciding whose side they were actually on. The fate of two wouldbe kings was in their hands, and they would not show their cards. The battle was brutal and confused, as these things always were.

[00:16:43]And at some point in the chaos, Richard saw something that changed everything.

[00:16:48]He caught sight of Henry Tuda himself, separated slightly from the main body of his troops, guarded by only a small group of men. And Richard made a decision that tells you a great deal about the kind of man he was. He did not wait. He did not play it safe. He gathered his best mounted knights around him and launched a headlong all or nothing charge straight at Henry, trying to end the war in a single stroke by killing his rival with his own hands. It very nearly worked. Richard's charge smashed into Henry's guard. Henry was no warrior. He had never fought a battle in his life, and for a few terrible moments, the entire TUDA cause hung by a thread. According to the accounts that survive, Henry's standard bearer was cut down right beside him, and Richard came close enough that the crown itself was almost within his reach. And that was the moment the Stanley's finally chose.

[00:17:47]It was Sir William Stanley, Thomas's brother, who moved first, throwing his fresh, uncommitted troops into the fight on Henry's side, while Thomas himself held back to the last. Richard, deep in the enemy ranks and now surrounded, was overwhelmed. He refused to flee. He was pulled down and killed, fighting to the very end, the last king of England to die in battle. And with that, it was over. There is a famous story, and I will flag it honestly as a story, one we cannot fully verify, that after the battle, Richard's crown was found on the field and placed on Henry Tuda's head right there [music] in the mud and the blood. Whether or not it happened exactly like that, the meaning of the image is true enough. An exile [music] who had owned nothing was now the king of England. Henry Tuda was King Henry VIIIth. The Tuda dynasty had begun. But winning the crown, as Henry knew better than almost anyone alive, was not the same as keeping it. He had just proven the most dangerous lesson of the age, that a determined man with a small army and a bit of luck could take the throne of England by force. If he could do it, so could the next ambitious [music] claimment. And Henry spent the rest of his reign haunted by that. knowledge.

[00:19:12]His first moves [music] were coldly clever. He had himself crowned quickly and then did something [music] breathtaking in its nerve. He declared that his reign had legally begun the day before the battle, which meant every man who had fought for Richard [music] at Bosworth had technically taken up arms against their lawful king and could be treated as a traitor.

[00:19:34]It was a legal fiction, and everyone knew it. But it handed Henry enormous power over the men who had opposed him.

[00:19:42]Then he kept his promise.

[00:19:45]In January of the following year, he married Elizabeth of York, joining the two houses at last. Their union gave England a powerful new symbol, the Tuda rose, [music] red and white combined. It is carved into buildings all over England to this day. A piece of brilliant political marketing that told the whole country the wars were finally over. But symbols do not stop rebellions. And rebellions came. Twice in the early years, men rose behind imposters. Young men put forward by Henry's enemies who claimed to be Yorkist princes with a better right to the throne. The first, a boy coached to impersonate a genuine Yorkist heir, was defeated in a real and bloody battle.

[00:20:31]And here, Henry revealed a strange cold mercy. Rather than execute the boy who had been used as a figurehead, he put him to work in the royal kitchens.

[00:20:42]Nothing punctures a wouldbe king like turning him into a servant who turns the roasting spit. The second impostor was far more dangerous. a charming, plausible young man who appeared on the European stage, claiming to be the younger of the two princes in the tower, claiming, in other words, to have survived. For years, he was a thorn in Henry's side, backed at times by foreign rulers, happy to make trouble for England. He haunted Henry precisely because of that lingering uncertainty about the prince's fate. Eventually, he was captured and after further plotting, executed. But the very fact that people were willing to believe him shows how fragile Henry's grip still felt years into his reign. And this is the key to the King Henry VIIth became.

[00:21:35]He was not a warrior king who loved glory. He was something rarer and in its way more effective. A survivor who understood that the real threats to a crown were money and loyalty and who set about controlling both with relentless, unglamorous discipline. He was careful with money to the point of obsession.

[00:21:56]Some would say greed. He built the royal treasury until the crown was genuinely wealthy, and a wealthy king did not have to beg his nobles for funds, which meant he did not have to depend on them. He used a web of fines, bonds, and legal obligations to keep the great families in permanent financial anxiety. Always owing something, always vulnerable, never quite strong enough to challenge him. His agents became feared and hated for the ruthlessness with which they squeezed every penny the crown was owed.

[00:22:28]It did not make him beloved, but it made him secure. He strengthened the machinery of royal justice, using the king's own council to reach powerful men that ordinary courts could not touch. He avoided expensive wars, preferring the patient work of treaties and marriages to the glory of the battlefield. Where earlier kings had spent England's strength, Henry hoarded it. And slowly, year by watchful year, it [music] worked. The rebellions faded. The pretenders ran out. The nobles, exhausted by decades of war and boxed in by Henry's grip, stopped reaching for the crown. The country, so long torn apart, settled into an unfamiliar and precious thing, stability. But there was a private cost, and in his last years, [music] it caught up with him. Henry and Elizabeth of York, whatever their marriage had started as, seemed to have grown into genuine partners, and they built a family. They had sons and daughters, and above all, an heir, an elder son named Arthur, on whom Henry pinned the entire future of the dynasty.

[00:23:38]The name itself was a statement. Arthur, the legendary once [music] and future king of Britain, reborn in the TUDA line, Henry arranged for the boy a magnificent marriage to a Spanish princess, tying his new dynasty to one of the great royal houses of Europe. And then Arthur died.

[00:23:59]Suddenly, still a teenager, only months after his wedding, the air on whom everything depended was simply gone, and the blow fell twice. Not long after losing her son, Elizabeth of York, died as well following the birth of another child on her own birthday.

[00:24:19]Henry, the guarded and unscentimental king, is said to have been broken by it, retreating into a grief that let almost no one near. The man who had spent his life controlling everything could control none of this. But the dynasty did not die with Arthur because there was a second son, a big, boisterous, athletic boy once destined for a lesser role, now suddenly heir to everything.

[00:24:48]The old king turned all his caution toward guarding this new heir and the fortune he would inherit. And when Henry VIIIth finally died in the spring of 1509, he left behind something England had not known for generations. [music] A full treasury, a peaceful kingdom, and an undisputed heir who could take the throne without a single sword being drawn.

[00:25:13]Think about how astonishing that is. The man with the laughable claim, the hunted exile, the king no one expected. He had not only seized the crown against all odds, he had done the far harder thing, [music] he had made it last and handed his son a throne so secure that the transfer of power for the first time in living memory happened in peace. The king no one expected, [music] the founder of the Tudas, he had spent his entire life fighting to win a crown. His son [music] would inherit one of the richest, most secure kingdoms in Europe and then spend the [music] next decades tearing it apart, defying the Pope, breaking England away from the Church of Rome, burning through the fortune [music] his father had so painstakingly saved, and marrying and discarding one wife after another in a hunt for a son of his own. His name was Henry VIII.