The greatest pretender

Henry VII is a king often overlooked, his legacy overshadowed by those whose reigns bookended his: the much-debated Richard III and the larger-than-life Henry VIII. The enduring image of the first Tudor monarch is of a tight-fisted miser – a dreary accountant king who presided over a dark and tedious regime until his powerhouse of a son took the reins and really shook things up. Yet the reign of Henry VII was replete with drama, intrigue and conspiracy, as a series of pretenders threatened to drive him from his hard-won throne before he could even settle in.

To appreciate the first Tudor king’s issues with pretenders, we must first understand his own unlikely rise to the throne. Henry was born in Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457, son of Margaret Beaufort, an English heiress of royal descent, and Edmund Tudor, a half-Welsh, half-French earl who had died three months earlier. Though his lineage included links with English, Welsh, French and Bavarian royalty, at the time of his birth Henry was just another noble mouth to feed, and certainly not a king in the making.

Despite being just a child during the early phases of the Wars of the Roses, Henry was closely associated with the House of Lancaster. His half-uncle on his father’s side was King Henry VI, whose most ardent followers included