WHEN TUDOR WAS A NAME OF SHAME

Harri Fychan ap Harri Brenin ab Edmwnt ab Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur. It’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? But that’s exactly how King Henry VIII could have referred to himself if he was taking into account his Welsh ancestry – and it’s a name that his great-grandfather “Owen Tudor” would have recognised.

You probably won’t be shocked to learn that Henry’s contemporaries didn’t refer to him by this 13-word moniker. You may, however, be surprised to learn that neither, for the most part, did they call him a “Tudor”.

Before his victory at Bosworth, Henry VII was usually known as Henry of Richmond. When staking his claim to the throne, he downplayed the lineage of his grandfather – which is why Richard III and the pretender Perkin Warbeck did the opposite, labelling him “Harry Tydder”. As kings have no need of surnames, “Tudor” would have been largely absent once he was on the throne.

So why do we use the name “Tudor” now? The Welsh celebrated Henry VII’s Anglesey ancestry, but it was only late in Elizabeth I’s reign that the English shared this interest. This was with an eye to the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. There was now an incentive to trumpet the fact that the ancestors of Henry VII – James’ great-great-grandfather – helped to create a monarchy that embraced the British Isles. William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586) included a defence of the “British” ancestry of the current monarch. Samuel Daniel’s Collection of the History of England (1626) talks of “the succession of five Sovereign Princes of the line of Tewdor”.

But it was David Hume’s History of England Under the House of Tudor (1759) that cemented the name Tudor in the public consciousness – and it has well and truly stuck.