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Henry VII

© Wendy J. Dunn

"This truly, this is he unto whom both we and adversaries must yield and give over the dominion," (1) so uttered Henry VI on his first meeting with his young nephew Henry Tudor. But Henry's birth came with no loud fanfares, nor lighting of fires, heralding the birth of an English prince. Rather, on Saint Agnes Day, in 1457, Henry was born to a thirteen-year-old girl, recently widowed of her husband Edmund Tudor, at the Welsh castle of her baby's uncle, the capable and very loyal to his own Jasper Tudor.

Growing up taller than the average Welsh man, very little in Henry's early years predicted his greater destiny lay as the first King of a new Royal family. Very little except a very determined mother, who placed all her hopes in him, and the backing of his father's family. But, after years of uncertainty and exile, King of England he did become, gaining the crown in one of the most ancient ways imaginable: battling it out with the man who already sat on England's throne and taking up the crown after that man's bloody death. He consolidated his victory by marrying the person who really had greater right to the crown than him- Elizabeth of York, a twenty-year-old girl, niece to one, newly slain, York King, and daughter to another. Her father's early death through illness - when his two sons were both only children - had opened the door wider to further savage struggles for the crown.

It would be interesting to know what Elizabeth of York felt about marriage to her Lancastrian cousin. Considering that she came of a line of strong women and grew-up at Court watching her mother's example that never shied from welding power behind the throne, Elizabeth is a surprisingly meek 'English' Queen. But I am always suspicious of 'meek' women, and have sometimes wondered if this 'face' she represented to the world hid what in fact was her true power. I think it possible that Elizabeth may have had enough of the bloodshed marring her early years, and decided to do all that she could to provide a proper 'helpmeet' for her husband- so peace could have a chance to take root again in English soil. If this indeed was her magnate, Elizabeth was very successful in achieving it. By the time of her death, in childbirth at thirty-eight, the kingdom was well on its way leaving 'The Wars of the Roses' where it belonged: in the realm of English history.

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