The Tudors” and “the Tudor Age” are among the staples of English history. How can we do without them? Not only are the monarchs themselves referred to, individually and collectively – in books, articles, plays, films, television series and exhibitions – by their patronymic, but their subjects become “Tudor men and women”. In fifty years of studying sixteenth-century England, it did not occur to me to question the convention. Nor, apparently, did it occur to other historians. But how much was the “Tudor” word used at the time? Did the monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I think of themselves as a “Tudor dynasty”? Did their subjects think of themselves as “Tudor people” living in “Tudor England”?

In spite of “the linguistic turn”, historians cannot avoid some anachronistic use of terms. It is impossible to discuss, say, economic development meaningfully while only using language comprehensible to Shakespeare. But contemporary vocabulary imposed limitations on sixteenth-century people attempting to discuss economic affairs; their efforts to formulate even the straightforward connection between the quantity of money in circulation and price levels, for instance, were painfully slow. “Tudor” is a term too deeply entrenched to be banished from our vocabulary, but we should be aware that it, too, is an anachronism, creating a similar barrier to our understanding of contemporary thought.

The “Tudor” name made an unlikely journey from the fastnesses of Anglesey into English high political discourse. About 1430, Queen Catherine, the still young widow of Henry V (she was born in 1401), born a French princess, married a member of her household, Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur. (The “Tudors” could equally well have been the “Merediths”.) The marriage was an embarrassment to the council which ruled in the name of her young son, Henry VI, and it was kept quiet, but nobody seems to have queried its legitimacy. In 1452 Henry VI made his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor Earls of Richmond and Pembroke respectively, and arranged Edmund’s marriage to Lady Margaret Beaufort, only child and heiress to John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. Edmund died shortly after, leaving his thirteen-year-old bride to give birth to a son Henry, immediately styled Earl of Richmond from birth.

It is not necessary to trace here how after many vicissitudes the young Richmond became King Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. He did so as the “Lancastrian” claimant, tracing his descent, through his mother, from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (by way of his third wife), after the end of the main Lancastrian line with the deaths in 1471 of Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales. But Richmond had also won the support of those Yorkists who had refused to accept Richard III’s assumption of the throne at the expense of his young nephew and ward. Henry had promised to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, who was – assuming the deaths of her brothers, the “Princes in the Tower” – the most plausible “Yorkist” claimant. The subsequent marriage achieved the “union” of the two contending houses. In spite of attempts by various Yorkist princes, real and imaginary, to challenge Henry VII, he handed on the throne to his son Henry VIII, in his person the embodiment of the “union”.

Henry VII had been distinctly ambivalent about the “union”. He took care to have himself crowned in his own right before marrying Elizabeth. He postponed his wife’s coronation until she had produced a son. In a papal bull of 1486 enjoining obedience to Henry as King on pain of excommunication (presumably drafted by Henry’s ministers), the union was praised as a positive virtue of the new regime, but the bull goes on to emphasize that Henry’s claim stood in its own right, and that, should Elizabeth die, the rights of any children of his by a subsequent marriage were good.

The whole force here is on Henry’s membership of the English royal family as a Beaufort, through his mother. The connection to Queen Catherine was useful in enabling Henry to claim Henry VI as his uncle; but that relationship obviously had no relevance to the right of succession. The connection to Owen Tudor was of course of no significance at all in this context. Henry did not use his patronymic; he was, conveniently, before becoming King, “Richmond”, the title he had acquired at birth. “Tudor” was only used by opponents. Richard III issued a proclamation sneering at “Henry Tyddir, son of Edmund Tyddir, son of Owen Tyddir . . . . descended of bastard blood on both his father’s side and his mother’s side”. (The allegation was that Owen was a bastard, while the Beauforts had begun as bastards of John of Gaunt, subsequently legitimated after Gaunt had been able to marry his mistress, Katherine Swynford.) The pseudo-Yorkist prince, Perkin Warbeck, similarly denounced “Henry, son of Edmund Tydder . . . son of Owen Tydder, of low birth in the country of Wales” on his invasion in 1497.

The Catherine–Owen story was hardly an edifying one. The misnamed “Giles Chronicle” of the 1450s talks of Catherine’s “inability to restrain her carnal passions”. The various London chronicles and the “Tudor” histories from Polydore Vergil through Hall to Holinshed repeat the story and indeed the phraseology (in Hall, Catherine is “young and lusty, following more her own appetite than friendly counsel”). Ellis Gruffydd, a Welsh chronicler and member of the Calais garrison in Henry VIII’s reign, has the Queen disguising herself to spy on a naked Owen as he swam. A Colchester citizen, Nicholas Fox, got into trouble in 1541 for describing Queen Catherine as “baying like a very drunken whore” while making love to “Ewyn Tedder”. To add to his problems, Fox managed to confuse the marriages of Catherine with Owen Tudor, and of her daughter-in-law, the prim Margaret Beaufort, with Edmund Tudor. To their credit, the “Tudor” monarchs seem to have made no attempt to censor the account of their origins. Perhaps it was thought sufficiently distant to have acquired a piquant romantic attraction. But it was not something to which to draw attention.

Admittedly, Henry VII made a good deal of his Welsh connections to rally support in his march from Milford Haven to Shrewsbury in 1485. Much was made of his alleged descent from Cadwaladr, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the last “King of Britain” in the seventh century, and of Merlin’s prophecies that his descendants would one day reunite the realm. (That they would do so by “driving out the Saxon” was discreetly ignored.) Henry’s naming his eldest son “Arthur” was a sop to these “British” roots. But the “British” propaganda was very much secondary to Henry’s main claims, that of his being the senior representative of the Lancastrian house, and of his reuniting the English royal house, and rapidly faded from prominence as the reign proceeded.

Outside Wales, the “Tudor” name was not used by Henry. The red dragon badge was certainly Welsh, but not specifically “Tudor”. Descent from Cadwaladr could equally well be claimed by Elizabeth of York; a Mortimer ancestor had married into a Welsh princely house, and Welsh bards had been as enthusiastic for Edward IV as they were for Henry VII. Henry is said to have commissioned an investigation into his Welsh genealogy; it may be too cynical to see this as pre-emptive action against those who would deny Owen Tudor even his gentry origins. Henry did provide a new tomb for his father at the Franciscan house at Carmarthen (moved to St David’s Cathedral when Henry VIII suppressed the house), and, as Leland reported, commemorated his own birth at Pembroke Castle. But Owen Tudor’s tomb at the Franciscan house at Hereford was provided by his bastard David Owen, and nothing was done to preserve it at the Dissolution. Certainly, no ancestral Tudors were allowed to sully the dignity of the Henry VII chapel at Westminster, although Lady Margaret Beaufort was given a place of honour.

Polydore Vergil, the first historian to provide a full account of 1485, at royal instigation, was also notable for his demolition job on the whole “British history” tradition, from Brutus to Cadwaladr. If Henry VII was less keen than is sometimes thought about his Welsh origins, Henry VIII apparently showed no interest in them at all. (Family piety seems to have been conspicuously lacking in his case.) After 1485 no “Tudor monarch” seems to have crossed the border into Wales, although Prince Arthur and, later, Princess Mary, were sent to Ludlow and Bewdley respectively to provide a nominal headship to what became the “Council of Wales and the Marches”.

Was the Tudor name in general use? How, after all, were subjects supposed to know the surname of their king or queen? Royal families have little occasion to use their patronymic. The royal coat of arms (itself unchanged since Henry V), was supplemented by a variety of supporters and badges. Henry VII’s supporters were in essence Tudor; the red dragon and the greyhound, the latter granted to Edmund Tudor by Henry VI. Henry VIII replaced the greyhound with the more regal lion. The red dragon was paraded at St Paul’s in 1485, and famously shines out directly above the crucifixion in the east window of King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The Beaufort portcullis was also commonly used. Skelton’s “rose both red and white” was the best-known royal badge. Its theme, of course, was the reunion of the English royal family. It was certainly resonant. But I have come across no contemporary example of its being described specifically as a “Tudor” rose, and although a useful symbol of loyalty to the reigning family, would do nothing to remind observers of that family’s name.

Coins, the most widely diffused representation of the royal image, give no indication of a family name. Nor do royal proclamations, read aloud in marketplaces. Lawyers and Justices of the Peace scanned statutes; they would not come across the “Tudor” word there. Most revealing are chronicles and histories, the various London chronicles, or the great sequence of Vergil, Hall, Grafton, Holinshed, to those who had access to them. If one searches accounts of 1485, of 1509, of the succession crisis of 1553 (the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen), of the accessions of Mary and Elizabeth, even of accounts of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 – occasions on which any historian today could hardly but allude to “Tudor” – the word and concept is conspicuously absent. Mary and Elizabeth are “daughters of Henry VIII”, not “Mary Tudor” or “Elizabeth Tudor”. Henry VII is always described before Bosworth as “Richmond”; as indeed he features in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and in his fleeting appearance in Henry VI Part III. Where might one more naturally expect the Tudor word than in Cranmer’s prophetic speech over Princess Elizabeth in Henry VIII? It is not there. Nor does Foxe in Actes and Monuments make a dynastic point. More promising might be ballads and almanacs. Again to the best of my knowledge, the result is negative. It was obviously possible to work out from the chronicles what the royal surname was, or should be, as our Colchester citizen of 1541 had evidently done. But for the most part there was no call to do so.

During Elizabeth’s reign there was a good deal of discussion of the eventual succession. Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) refers to the “Line of Henry VII” and “The Race and Line of King Henry”, but not to “Tudor”. Robert Parsons, in A Conference about the Next Succession (1594), discusses the claims of the various descendants of Edward III in enormous detail, complete with elaborate diagrams. His purpose is to argue the case for the Spanish Infanta who can stake a “Lancastrian” claim from John of Gaunt, senior to Henry VII’s, through both the Portuguese and the Spanish royal families. Again, there is no “Tudor” designation, in a context where the word makes it seem natural, and indeed, for the Catholic Parsons, a useful reminder of the dubious origins of the royal line. The only conclusion must be that the word was not in common use. Elizabeth, indeed, went further, not only ignoring “Tudor” but emphasizing her Yorkist descent above the dubious Lancastrianism of the Beauforts. In the frontispiece to Richard Grafton’s A Chronicle at large (1569), the Brutus myth is paraded, but Elizabeth herself is supported by William the Conqueror and Henry VIII. As Sydney Anglo has pointed out, at her funeral procession her descent from Henry II was traced through the Yorkist line. Her epitaph at Westminster proclaimed her “daughter to Henry VIII, granddaughter to Henry VII, great-granddaughter to Edward IV”. The Beaufort-Lancastrian side of her ancestry has been cut out, let alone the far more dubious “Tudor” one.

Only in Wales was anything made of the Tudor name. Bards featured Tudor genealogy in their “praise poems”. This tradition broke surface in English in 1547 when Arthur Ketton, a Welshman and a citizen of Shrewsbury, published A Chronycle with a Genealogie. This traced the descent of Edward VI from Osiris, first King of Egypt, through Brutus, Arthur, Cadwaladr (“the hundredth King of Britain and the last”), and “Tewdr Mawre” who “chased the Saxons, Danes, and Picts from the borders of Wales”. Edmund, Earl of Richmond was, he claimed, of “lineal descent” from Tewdr Mawre and Cadwaladr, by eleven and twenty-one generations respectively. Ketton’s purpose was to praise Henry VIII, whose “gentleness” was especially demonstrated in his freeing the Welsh from bondage by giving them, through the Acts of Union, the status of Englishmen; an argument which would surprise modern nationalists. The theme was taken up by the Welsh humanists, the circle of William Salesbury and Humphrey Llwyd, who were responsible for translating the Bible into Welsh. As the historian Steven Gunn reminds me, George Owen of Henllys, in his Description of Pembrokeshire (1603), talks of “her Majesty whose name is Tyder”.

This Welsh tradition had little resonance in England until the later years of Elizabeth, when there was some revival of interest in Cadwaladr. William Warner in his verse-history Albion’s England, first published in 1586, defended the “British History” tradition against the modern sceptics. In 1589 he added a sixth book which provided a romantic account of Queen Catherine’s and Owen Tudor’s courtship, which “Began that royal line that did, doth, and may still succeed / In happy Empire of our Throne a famous line indeed”. In 1592 he further added a lengthy account of Richard III’s reign and of Henry VII’s marriage, “The factious Families vnite, the Tyrant was subdew’de / And thence the surname Tuder doth Plantaganet include”. Was it Warner who originated the modern convention of referring to Henry VII’s descendants in this way?

The succession of James VI to the English throne gave an impetus to this new trend. John Speed in The History of Great Britaine (1611) talks of the Duke of Clarence’s son Edward Earl of Warwick, put to death by Henry VII in 1499, as “the last heir male of the blood and surname of the Plantaganets” and of the civil wars “letting in thereby the surname Tydder being but two descents English, which now after three descents and five princes is also vanished”. Samuel Daniel in the “Epistle-Dedicatory” to The Collection of the History of England (1617/8) talks of “the succession of five Sovereign Princes of the Line of Tewdor”. Speed and Daniel were supporters of James I’s (unsuccessful) attempts to unite England and Scotland as “Great Britain”. The Cadwaladr prophecy, and James’s multiple descents from that shadowy figure (through intermarriage between Welsh and Scottish princely families, as well as through Henry VII) were useful to this cause.

James’s accession would seem a natural occasion for the concept of a “Tudor period” to establish itself. The more so in that the “Stuart” designation seems to have been already well established, no doubt because of the antiquity of that family and the existence of its cadet branches within the Scottish nobility. (Had Henry VII’s uncle Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke and Duke of Bedford, produced legitimate children, their use of the Tudor name might have had a similar effect in England.) Holinshed talks of the “house of the Stewards”, descended from Banquo. Even so, it is surprising how little the “Tudor” term was used, even in the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon’s Henry VII, for instance, while eloquent on Henry’s re-establishment of order after civil war, does not refer to him in the familiar modern terms as “establishing a dynasty” or use the term “Tudor”. Seventeenth-century writers generally, even when, like Harrington or Hobbes, they are analysing long-term trends in English history, do not refer to Tudor monarchs as such. Broadly speaking, it looks as if it was David Hume who made the term an indispensable part of the historian’s vocabulary when, in 1757, he published his History of England under the House of Tudor. It was Hume, too, who seems to have established the modern spelling.

“Tudor monarchs”, then, did not think of themselves as such; still less did “Tudor subjects”. This is not to say that the monarchs positively repudiated Henry VII’s paternal ancestry. Rather, they had no occasion to flaunt it. It was more important to stress their membership of the medieval English royal line, and the successful reunification of its warring parts. The intrusive use of the “Tudor” term by historians creates a false impression of ubiquitous use at the time. For instance, John Rowlands in his Holbein (1985) prints the inscription on the famous vanished Whitehall mural showing Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. The inscription asks whether father or son will be accounted the greater. The author glosses this as “verses in praise of the Tudor dynasty”. John N. King in Tudor Royal Iconography (1989) labels Eworth’s portrait of Henry VIII with Queen Mary and her husband King Philip on one side, and Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth on the other, as “Allegory of the Tudor Protestant Succession”; a double distortion in this case since there seems nothing “Protestant” about it.

Queen Mary I is routinely referred to as “Mary Tudor”. This is a historian’s convenience to distinguish her from her cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; the contemporary terms were “the Princess Mary”, “the Lady Mary”, or “Mary of England”. The “Tudor arms”, it is said, were put up in churches; they were, of course, the royal arms. Sir Geoffrey Elton famously wrote about The Tudor Revolution in Government; yet the whole “revolution” was, he claimed, accomplished in some ten years of Henry VIII’s reign. Indeed, historians of the period seem incapable of mentioning kingship, monarchical government, or state without adding the epithet “Tudor” in a sort of reflex action; as if there was necessarily something both special and uniform about the period, ignoring the very different policies, attitudes and approaches of the monarchs concerned.

Does any of this matter? After all, “The Tudors” seems a reasonable synonym for “race and line of King Henry”. And it would be quixotic to hope for the reversal of 250 years of established usage. Nevertheless, unreflecting use of the term gives a quite misleading impression of sixteenth-century reality. To use the cant term, it is “Whiggish” in implying a spurious unity, a sense of outcomes implicit in origins.

As far as the monarchs are concerned, it is salutary to remind ourselves that their own image of themselves was as the undoubted representatives of the traditional English royal house, rather than as a family of Welsh adventurers. Or, in the case of Queens Mary and Elizabeth, that their reference point in their assertion of their royal right was to their father, rather than to their grandfather as “founder of the dynasty”. Indeed, the word “dynasty” is itself anachronistic. It was used at the time only in the Egyptian or Chinese context. The more natural usage in English terms is “house” or “lineage”. The concept of a “Tudor dynasty” is therefore misleading in implying something much more self-contained, much more hard-edged than was apparent at the time.

As for their subjects, the “Tudor” term again implies a degree of self-consciousness, of self-identification, which is excessive. It elevates 1485 as a fundamental break. Nobody would deny the importance of 1485 in contemporary thought as signifying the end of the civil wars. But concepts of time, of historical periodicity, were far more fluid than the phrase “Tudor era” would suggest. There was little sense of a break with what we, again anachronistically, call the “Middle Ages”. Or rather, the significant break was seen to be Henry VIII’s repudiation of papal authority in 1532.

A fairly typical almanac, for instance, published in 1628 – conveniently illustrated in Bernard Capp’s English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (1979) – lists the invention of guns, the invention of print, Luther’s stand in 1517, Henry VIII and the Supremacy, and the accession of Elizabeth; curiously there is no mention of either 1485 or of 1603. It is significant that through the reigns of both Elizabeth and James I, November 17, Elizabeth’s accession day, was popularly celebrated. The concept of “Elizabethans”, though also anachronistic, would at least have been comprehensible to contemporaries.

The monarchs whom we call “Tudor” did have a sense of family (Henry VIII perhaps less so than Henry VII or Elizabeth), and Bosworth was thought to be important. But such appreciations were less all-prevailing than they often appear to be to modern readers (let alone modern viewers), battered with historians’ obsession with the name. Historians have become much more sensitive to language and its implications, to the need to think inside the boxes in which the people they study were imprisoned. But it will take time to assimilate fully the implications of the fact that one of the most familiar of English historical terms had little purchase in its own era. We must learn to do without the Tudors.

Clifford S. L. Davies is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and the author of Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558, first published in 1976.

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