House of Tudor

Henry Tudor was a Welsh-born exile of the Lancastrian line, raised in Brittany on a French pension, the holder of a tenuous claim to the English throne through his mother Margaret Beaufort. By the summer of 1485 Richard III's two-year reign was visibly thinning at the top: the boy princes were dead in the Tower, the great Yorkist magnates were drifting. On the seventh of August 1485 Henry landed at Mill Bay near Dale in Pembrokeshire with two thousand French and Welsh exiles. He marched up through Wales under the red dragon standard of Cadwaladr, picking up men. On the twenty-second of August he met Richard on the field at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Within four hours of first light he was crowned King of England on a low rise above the field with a battle-circlet taken from his enemy's helmet.

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On the third of November 1534, in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster, the Act of Supremacy passed its third reading and received Royal Assent the same day. The fourteen-clause Act, drafted by Thomas Cromwell on the direct political commission of Henry VIII (the second Tudor monarch, then forty-three years old, in his twenty-sixth year on the throne), declared Henry to be the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England, dissolved the jurisdictional connection between the English Church and the Roman See that had stood since the Augustine mission of 597 (nine hundred and thirty-seven years), and gave the Crown the direct legal authority over the doctrine, the ecclesiastical discipline, and the monastic properties of the English Church. The Act was the political-legal end-point of the six-year king's-divorce-case of Henry from Catherine of Aragon (1528–34); the 1531 Convocation Submission of the Clergy; the 1532 Submission of the Clergy Act; the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals; and the 1534 Act of Succession. The political-religious consequence ran through the Tudor century: the Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536–41 (the largest single transfer of land-ownership in English history before the 1845 Irish-Land-Act-and-Famine settlements); the execution of Sir Thomas More (1535) and Bishop John Fisher (1535); the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536; the 1547 Edwardian Reformation; the 1553–58 Marian Counter-Reformation; the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement. The break with Rome is, by every careful judgment of the Reformation historians (G. R. Elton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy), the foundational political-religious event of the modern English state.

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