The House of Tudor held the English throne for just five monarchs across 118 years, yet no dynasty in English history is more studied. It began in 1485 when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and, as Henry VII, married Elizabeth of York — deliberately uniting the warring houses of Lancaster and York and drawing a line under the Wars of the Roses. Their second son became Henry VIII, the axis around which the whole family drama turns.
Henry VIII's marital record is the most consequential genogram in English history: six wives, produced by his desperation for a male heir. Catherine of Aragon — herself the aunt-by-marriage of the Habsburg emperor and mother of the future Mary I — was set aside for Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I, a break Rome would not sanction and which drove Henry to found the Church of England. Jane Seymour finally bore the longed-for son, Edward VI, before dying days later; three further marriages, to Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr, produced no more children.
The succession that followed is genealogically remarkable for running through all three of Henry's surviving children in turn: the boy-king Edward VI, then his Catholic half-sister Mary I, then his Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I — half-siblings by three different mothers, each crowned, each ruling England in sequence. Their overlapping and severed family ties turned dynastic biology into a national confessional struggle.
For all Henry's efforts, the line ended in barrenness. Elizabeth I, the 'Virgin Queen,' never married and died childless in 1603, extinguishing the Tudor male and female lines alike — and the crown passed to her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland, whose Stuart descent traced back to Henry VII's daughter Margaret, the very marriage the founder had made to secure peace on his northern border.
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