House of Lancaster - Tudor Inheritance

Tudor Inheritance

Amongst the most ardent supporters of the House of Lancaster were the Beaufort family, descended from John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford. When Gaunt and Swynford married in 1396 (some 25 years after the birth of their first child), the church rewarded them by legitimising their offspring through a papal bull. This was enshrined in an act of parliament the following year, but were barred from inheriting the English throne.

With the House of Lancaster extinct, the relatively unknown Henry Tudor proclaimed himself the Lancastrian heir from his exile in Brittany; he claimed descent from John of Gaunt through his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. In 1485, Tudor was able to use the unpopularity of the final Yorkist Richard III to take the crown as Henry VII of England. This was not to be a revival of the House of Lancaster, since Henry was not an agnatic descendant of John of Gaunt. To strengthen the claim of his future descendants to the throne, Henry married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, who was officially the senior living heir of Edward III by cognatic primogeniture. Thus, a dynasty of dual Lancastrian and Yorkist descent, the House of Tudor, was founded.