Henry VII Tudor (1457-1509), king of England 1485-1509
After the dead of Edward prince of Wales and his father king Henry VI in 1471 “there was … no respectable Lancastrian claimant to the English throne left alive if we exclude King John II of Portugal, who descended from [Philippa, daughter of] John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, by his first wife Blanche. … One remotely potential claimant survived in the person of Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, an obscure and penniless refugee living in Brittany in the care of his faithful uncle, Jasper Tudor, the Lancastrian Earl of Pembroke. His claim was, in any case, extremely weak, since it came through his mother, Margaret Beaufort. The Beauforts were originally the bastard children of John of Gaunt by his mistress, later his third wife, Catherine Swynford. They had been legitimated by an Act of Parliament in Richard II’s reign, but the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, had added a rider to a repeat of this legitimization, excluding them from succession to the throne. … Henry VII himself was conspicuously careful in 1485 not to make any claim to the throne based upon a Lancastrian descent. He claimed, in effect, by right of conquest. His victory at Bosworth, he was to say, expressed the ’true judgment of God’ and so gave him a kind of divine right.” (Ch. Ross, The Wars of the Roses. A concise history. [London 1976], p. 93)